The Sluice

Old He had watched the reservoir's sluice house for ten years.

The house sat at the dam's base, its stone walls weeping, damp all year. On New Year's Eve his colleague Fan offered the day shift: "Your girl's home, go up and spend it." He waved him off. "She's in the south, not coming." Truth was, she had married and not called in three years. He stayed out of habit.

Past midnight a dull thud rose from beneath the sluice, like someone hammering steel plate underwater. He pulled on his coat and went down. The lamp swept the chamber—empty, only water breathing. He listened again; the sound returned, at his ear, calling what sounded like his name—"He—"

He leaned over the rail and looked down. Black water, still, nothing there. Yet the gauge read an inch lower than at dusk, and the chamber floor was wet in a ring, as if someone had just climbed out of the water and stepped back in.

He retreated and bolted the door. He remembered ten years before, also Eve, the former keeper Old Zhou had drunk and gone down to clear silt, and never come up. They fished three days; the body was wedged in rebar at the sluice bottom. Since then the house had always made some noise at night, and no one took it seriously.

At dawn Fan came to relieve him. He told him what he heard. Fan laughed: "You're alone too long, hearing things." Yet Fan himself never set foot on the dam on Eve.

After that, every Eve, Old He sat alone in the house with a jug of sorghum liquor. At midnight he opened the drain and poured in half: "Brother Zhou, a drink with you." The water answered with a rush.

Behind his back they said he was mad. He did not argue. He only knew that since that night the house had never leaked, and the dam had never failed.

Some men do not keep a sluice. They keep the one below, who never came back up.