Midnight Records: The Watchman's Drum
Old Fan keeps the night watch for forty years; on snowing nights a second drum keeps the third watch for him — from a red lacquered coffin in the Bai family yard.
Midnight Records: The Watchman's Drum
Old Fan had beaten the night watch for forty years. No one in town remembered when he started; they only knew that when his clapper fell silent, even the dogs refused to sleep.
He owned a hide drum said to be left by his master, its face gone a deep old yellow. Every night at the third watch he struck it three times. The sound did not pass through walls, yet it settled into every household's window and brought them peace.
That twelfth month a family named Bai moved in at the east end, in the funeral trade. Bai's wife was sickly, coughing through the nights like a broken bellows. When Fan passed on his rounds he softened his step.
One heavy-snow night, Fan reached the Bai lane and heard a drum — not his own, but from the Bai courtyard, keeping his exact rhythm, only a half-beat slow.
He pressed to the wall. The yard was empty; no footprints on the snow. Yet the drum sounded, beat by beat, as if someone kept the watch for him.
The next night he heard it again. This time he pushed the gate — the yard was empty but for a lacquered-red coffin under the eaves, its lid ajar. The drum came from inside.
Fan was not afraid. He crouched and said to the coffin, "Old brother, were you a watchman too?"
The drum inside stopped. After a long moment it sounded once, very soft, like an answer.
From then on, on every snowing night, a drum in the Bai yard struck the third watch in Fan's place. The townsfolk thought only that Fan was especially diligent; no one knew.
In his last year Fan passed the drum to his apprentice. Asked its history, he said only, "It was never my drum alone."
The apprentice grew old too. Drunk once, he told how his master's drum always carried the tail of another drum within it, a half-beat slow, as if someone walked the snow beside him.