The Path-Guide

The back mountain stands at the northwest corner of the village. It is not tall, but it runs deep — dense woods, many stones, and on overcast days a vapor rises from it as if a pot boiled beneath the earth. The old folk say the mountain's belly opens to some other place; on nights a lantern would sway out from the deep woods and sway back in, and no one followed, and no one dared. Old Cheng's house was the first at the mountain's foot; open his door and you could see that black stretch of forest.

Folks in the mountains fear two things when they walk at night: the fog, and a lantern that springs alight for no reason. When the fog comes, the ridge path underfoot turns to river; when a light appears ahead, the one holding it may not be living.

And so it happened that at the foot of the back mountain there lived an old man who made a trade of guiding the way.

His surname was Cheng. The village never once troubled itself with his given name; they called him only the path-guide. Whenever a family must carry a coffin through the night, whenever a daughter-in-law in town fell into difficult labor and a physician must be fetched before dawn, whenever an old mother breathed her last and must be borne to the ancestral grave before first light — a child need only come knock at his door, and he would take up a paper lantern and step out. The lantern was wrought of split bamboo and papered with spirit-money yellow; inside burned half a candle. Its light was weak, reaching no farther than three paces, yet strange to tell, wherever he walked ahead with that lamp, the one who followed would not miss a step.

The old man was dark and spare, a little stooped; his forefinger and middle finger bore a thick callus from the lantern-rod, rough as old bark. He spoke little, his lips always pressed shut as if holding something he would not say. Yet the moment he took up the lamp and stepped out, a stillness came over him — he walked ahead, shoulders steady, strides unhurried, as if every road in the hills knew his feet. In earlier years he had led a laboring wife to town through snow to the knees and somehow cut a path and brought her through; returning at full dawn with his shoes flooded with snow, he sat on the threshold half a day before the warmth came back. That was the straightest he ever led, and the one he spoke of most.

In earlier years, whenever the village had urgent night business, the first thought was Uncle Cheng. He was a living signpost, set at the mountain's foot; whoever was lost or afraid went and knocked at his door. No one asked if he was tired, and no one imagined that one day this signpost too might be lost. Mountain folk simply felt that one who guides is born knowing every road.

The old man himself could not say what year he began the trade. In his youth he was a hunter. Once, lost in the hills, he wandered the fog until dawn; when they carried him out of the ravine, his soles were worn through and he had thinned by a full turn. After that he knew every fork in the mountain — which led to the paddies, which wound past the scattered graves — and could walk them blind without error. When age took the hunt from him, he guided instead. All year he lost count of the parties he led, remembering only that the candle in his lamp was changed again and again.

The trade had its rules. He never asked the family the fortune of their errand, only whither they meant to go. East, and he went east; the ancestral grave, and he led them over dew-wet ground. He never turned to look upon the face behind him — that was the great taboo: look back, and the lamp goes out, and the follower is truly lost. He listened only to the footsteps. Steady steps, and his heart was easy; steps gone ragged, and he slowed, waiting for the one behind to find his footing before the next stride.

The village honored him, and feared him. They honored that he would go out by night; they feared the nameless cool about him. Once the second aunt at the east end hired him to fetch a midwife, and at a fork midway he paused — the aunt saw fine sweat on his brow and his lips gone violet, yet without a word he took the right turning. Afterward she told folk that Uncle Cheng that night seemed to have two parties contesting a road inside his head, and was lucky to have held the right one down. The old man only shook his head: no such thing, only the fog was thick and his eyes swam.

Yet from some year on, he felt his memory failing. At first it was small things: he would leave without barring the door, or boil the broth in his pot to a burned crust. Then it grew worse. Once, returning from leading a party, he stood at his own gate and could not, for the life of him, recognize it as his. The couplet on the door he had pasted himself that new year was still clear in its ink; he stared a long while, and his heart went hollow, as if looking at another's house, or a house that had never held him.

He began to suspect that he had guided too many roads, and crowded his own way home clean out. He dared not say it aloud — mountain folk are superstitious, and to speak it is to invite the taboo. He only slipped three copper coins beneath his pillow and burned a stick of incense at the earth-god's shrine, to still his heart. Yet halfway through the incense he forgot what vow he had come to make.

At night he often dreamed the same dream: he stood in a white blank, lamps before and behind, yet not one of them his. He tried to call out, but his throat made no sound; tried to walk, but his feet had taken root. In the dream the mud climbed from his soles, cool and threading, up past his ankles, up past his shins, and the more he struggled the tighter it held. Waking, he would stretch a foot past the bed's edge to press the floor, confirm it was hard and the mud was not, before he dared sleep again. Yet once he woke to find a damp patch on the quilt, and bending close, smelled that fishy grave-earth — he could not tell whether the dream's mud had climbed up, or his own feet had gone out in the night.

The fog has a smell. An ordinary fog smells of damp earth, of the sweetness where dead leaves rot at the root. But the fog on the back mountain these years smelled of fish and grave — like freshly turned burial soil, like rain striking cold iron. Walking his guide through it, the old man felt the smell bore straight into his nose and throb behind his temples. At first he took it for an old man's keener sense; later he knew it was wrong — the smell lived only in the mist, and once he left it, not a trace clung to his clothes.

Those years, the fog on the back mountain grew heavier year by year. Fog that once rose only with autumn now spilled down by the beginning of summer, swaddling the whole mountain white, so even the dogs dared not bark. The old man guiding, his lantern held into the mist, the light became a ball of yellow haze, as if steeped in water, that would not scatter. Stranger still, sometimes he carried but one lamp, yet the fog mirrored several halos, yellow glimmers swaying before and behind and to either side, as if a file of lantern-bearers walked him round. He dared not turn to look — the taboo, the fear the lamp would die — but with the corner of his eye he saw those halos move, drifting slow, keeping pace with his steps.

The footsteps went wrong too. In earlier days the follower's tread fell half a step behind his own, sure. But by degrees he heard his own steps come from ahead, and from behind, crossed and tangled, as if two of him walked. Once he went out alone, no family in tow, and yet heard behind him a soft wet tap-tap-tap, a string of damp footfalls. He cocked his ear: those steps knew the way better than he, and pressed ahead to lead him round a bend he had never known. Cold sweat broke over him; he stood rooted, not daring to move, until the sky paled at the rim and the sound was gone.

Later still, he found the mud on his own soles was wrong. He was a man of the back-mountain foot; his soles should hold red clay, or in rain the black gum of the field ridges, whitening to alkali when dry. Yet once, pulling off his shoe, he scraped from the tread a layer of blue-gray, fishy-smelling mud, clinging and slick, like river-flat muck he had never seen. He turned the shoe over and over, unable to recall any such place he had been. Yet there it was, and would not scrape clean when dry, as if it had grown into the sole, and into the bone beneath.

His hands changed too. A lifetime bearing the lamp, his palms should have been warm; but those years his hands were cold as well water, the knuckles gone stiff, and the bamboo of the lantern bit deep grooves into his grip he no longer felt. Village folk who had shaken his hand shrank back quietly, saying Uncle Cheng's hands felt like a dead man's. He only laughed and said he was old, his blood running thin. But he knew the cold rose from that layer of mud at his soles — wherever the mud walked, the cold walked too.

He went to the village's oldest blind man to have his fortune told. The blind man felt his hand and was long silent, and at last said only this: you have guided too many. A road is made by walking, and kept by remembering. You remembered a lifetime of roads for others; your own was trodden away by their feet. The old man asked: is there a way to find it back? The blind man shook his head: that mud on your sole is the earth of the dead. Those you misled, those you lost — the ground they trod has clung to your shoe. Each time you delivered them where they ought not be, their road wound round your foot, tighter and tighter, until you yourself could no longer tell which was the way home.

Only then did the old man recall that he had, in truth, guided men wrong. One snow-heavy night a traveling merchant begged him lead the way to town; midway the fog rose, and he mistook a fork and brought the man into a field of scattered graves. When they found the merchant the next day he was frozen among the mounds, still clutching the half-burned stick of incense. Another time a household came at midnight saying the old mother was failing and a physician must be brought; he led the physician through the dark, but arrived to find she was already gone, and the family wept that he had taken the wrong road and lost the hour. He could not say whether he had truly erred or the family misremembered their bearing; he only remembered that returning that night, his sole bore one more layer of mud he could not name.

Besides that merchant, that traveler, that household, there were smaller wrongs scattered through the years that the families themselves scarce recalled. Once he led a youth visiting kin and, when wind rose midway, took him half a li astray; the youth knew it was wrong, cursed, and doubled back, and came to no harm. Yet the old man kept it all his life — he remembered the yellow clay on the youth's shoes, and that returning that night his own sole bore one more layer of blue-gray. Another time he led a funeral party and, miscounting in the fog, found at the grave one article short; going back for it, the article lay where it was, as if the fog had played him a joke. The more he thought, the more he feared; often he dreamed the mud at his sole creeping up layer by layer, over ankle, over knee, to the heart, and woke in a cold sweat.

Such misguidings came, in a year, one or two. The old man was an upright man and each time stole to the graves to burn paper in atonement, yet he knew some roads, once misled, can never be set right. Those he lost or led astray, their souls never reaching where they ought, drifted in the hills and waited — like children scattered and still hoping someone would come to fetch them.

By the seventh year the old man had begun to lose even the hearth of his own house. Returning from a guide, he would circle the village mouth several times before recognizing the crooked old locust — the mark of his home. Once he wandered into a neighboring village's fields and was driven out as a thief. He laughed sheepishly and said, old, old. But he knew in his heart it was not age — it was being lost. Those roads wound round his feet were erasing his own home, bit by bit, from his mind.

That autumn the fog came early, and thicker than ever. By the eighth month the back mountain was white through and through; when the wind passed, fine broken voices rose in the mist, as of many speaking low, indistinct, yet all trailing the same cadence: path-guide, this way. Path-guide, this way. Children who heard dared not cry; the grown shut their doors, saying the back mountain's fog had stirred its malice again.

One year on the fifteenth of the seventh month, A Niu at the west end drank deep and walked home only past midnight; the fog rose sudden and he lost his bearing, and far off heard a voice ahead call 'path-guide, this way.' Wild with joy he followed, and had gone half a li before he found the voice came from behind him — behind, nothing but fog. A Niu sobered half at once and crawled back to the village, and after that walked wide of any fog. He told it and none believed, taking it for drink-talk. But the old man, hearing, went pale a moment and was long silent.

Later the fog no longer waited for cold. In the heat of summer the back mountain would shed a layer of white for no cause, creeping along the ground like something crawling. Fowl would not enter their coops at the smell, stock would not come down the slope. The old man guiding, lantern raised, the white gathered to his feet along the halo, as if it knew him. Villagers said privately that Uncle Cheng had brought the fog upon himself and would be taken by it sooner or later. The words reached his ears and he took no offense, only smiled: it cannot take me; this old bones of mine, the fog would find too heavy.

The old man heard that call, and in his heart felt a strange ease. He could not say why, only that those voices were calling him. As if after walking half a lifetime, for the first time someone knew plainly where he was, and meant to take him there.

On the night of the Double Ninth he took no family. Yet when dark fell he took up his lantern and went out all the same. He told himself he meant only to look at the fog on the back mountain. But the blue-gray mud on his sole, as if it knew the road, led him step by step into the deepest heart of the mist. He did not look back — not for fear, but because he had forgotten to. The lantern in the fog became a ball of yellow haze that would not move; within its glow he saw other halos rise before and behind and to either side, flickering, like countless lamps waiting for him to join them.

He heard footsteps then. Not tangled front and back this time, but footfalls from every quarter, wet, squelching in the muck, keeping his beat. And he heard voices, near, just beyond the lantern's reach in the mist: path-guide, you have come. Path-guide, come this way, we have waited long. The voices were familiar, though he could not recall whose; only they were kind, like neighbors parted years who called him home to a hot meal.

He stopped sharp and thought: whom did I come to guide? But he could not remember any soul he was to lead that night. He remembered only that he must walk, must follow the lamp, must go into the fog. He looked down at his shoes; the blue mud had crept to his ankles, cool and soaking, as if someone beneath upheld his feet, lest he be lost, and planted every step firm for him.

At last he turned. This time the lamp did not die. Yet what he saw was neither the road he came by nor his own village. He saw in the mist a row upon row of people, faces unclear, all with hands fallen, and at each foot a lamp guttering toward death. He knew those lamps — one the merchant he misled had clutched; one the traveler frozen beneath the bridge had carried; one the family that missed its hour had lit. They watched him in silence and only held their lamps toward him, as one passes a bowl of warmed wine.

He edged a step nearer. The lantern's light could not reach so far, yet he made them out: the lamps at those feet, some gone out, some a bean of light still, swaying when the wind passed. They stood in neat rows, as if queued, or as if someone had counted them and set them there. At the fore he knew the traveler frozen beneath the bridge — that snow-heavy year he had heard a man beg at the bridge and feigned sleep, and the man froze below, and he had carried it thirty years. Now the traveler stood in the mist, carrying that old lamp, and in its light no face showed, only a slight nod toward him, like thanks, or like blame.

He counted them: the people in the mist, no fewer than several dozen. Old and young, men and women, all with eyes cast down, faces unclear, yet each with a lamp at the foot, and in each lamp a wrong he had once guided. He thought of the blind man's words — those you misled, those you lost, the ground they trod has clung to your shoe. The mud on his sole now was the ground those dozens of feet had trod, gathered into one, and it had led him here. He saw suddenly that it was not he come to guide them, but they come to guide him; not that he was lost, but that these decades, he had long been meant to come.

There was no wind in the mist, yet he was cold through, not with frost but with a cold seeping from the bones, of the same stock as the cold in his hands. The breath he exhaled turned white before the lamp and was dyed yellow by its halo, as if he spat out something other. He suddenly wanted badly to sit, there among the lamps, and hear how each had been lost — yet he dared not sit, for fear that once seated he would not rise, and would truly become one of them.

The old man understood it all at once. This fog existed in no place of the living world. It was where those he had misled and lost, gathered over the years, waited for him to come. They did not blame him. They too were lost, and too wished for a guide to lead them out. And he, who had walked others' roads a lifetime, had in the end guided himself into this fog as well.

He raised his lantern and would have turned back. But looking back, the road he came by was already gone. The blue mud at his feet knew him and drew him toward the heart of the mist; the lamps all round knew him and gathered him to the middle. He heard the call rise again — this time from his own throat, soft, as if loath to startle anyone: path-guide, this way. He could not tell whether the mist's people called him, or he called them — or whether, long since, there was any difference.

The fog thickened; the yellow halos drew in ring by ring and wrapped him at the center. He heard the lamps all round light, one by one, as if they knew the guide and drew near. The footsteps now were steady, steady enough to ease his heart, as if back in the early years of guiding — someone behind, a road ahead, the lamp undead, and nothing to fear. He forgot who he was, and where he was to return, and remembered only one thing: follow the lamp, do not stop. So he stepped, into the heart of the mist; the blue mud upheld his feet, each step lighter than the last.

The next day the village found the old man's door unopened. The lantern lay just inside the threshold, its candle long out, yet on the paper a ring of yellow remained, not yet scattered. His shoes sat by the door, their soles clean — the blue-gray mud, sometime in the night, wholly gone. Some said he had gone to look at the fog and was lost, frozen in the woods. Others said he had been a man of the mist all along, and this time had simply gone home.

That lantern was later taken by the village head into the ancestral hall and set beneath the offering table, to quiet the malice, they said. Yet each deep autumn when the fog rose, the lantern's paper would faintly show a ring of yellow, as if someone had come in the night to light it. The villagers dared not touch it, and let it lie. An old man said Uncle Cheng had gone to lead that party home, and having led them, stayed there to guide in their stead. None answered, and none contradicted.

Each year since, when deep autumn brings the fog upon the back mountain, the village bars its doors and none dares walk by night. Yet always some bold youth claims to hear, in the small hours, a voice from the mist calling: path-guide, this way. The voice is not cruel, nor far, as if afraid none would hear, yet afraid too that someone might hear and follow. The old folk, hearing it, only sigh: another lamp lit.

One deep autumn the fog was especially heavy, and the village head's grandson fell feverish at midnight; the physician summoned said he must ride to the next county for medicine before dawn. The village sought a guide and found none — Uncle Cheng was gone, and the young had not learned the trade, and none dared raise a lamp into that fog. The physician shook his head and said the road could not be taken; the fog's road was wrong. What became of the child, none spoke in full. Only it was known that after, in the deep of night, the back mountain's fog often showed one more lamp, flaring once and dying, as if someone held it, waiting for one who would answer. The old folk, hearing, barred their doors the tighter, only praying the lamp at their own home would not go out.

From the Midnight Record: the old mountain custom holds that he who walks by night must carry a lamp, and when the lamp dies, he must stop, and not force on. The guide above all must beware of remembering roads for others and forgetting his own door. The old man in this tale is not alone — all who lead others' ways a lifetime and grow too old to know their own road home are counted among them. Those lamps in the mist, one by one, are those who never returned. If you walk by night and hear "path-guide, this way," remember this: do not answer, do not turn, and above all do not follow the lamp. You return home because someone, at home, keeps a lamp lit for you.