The Inn

Qingshi Town sits at the foot of Yanling, where an old official road cuts through the middle. Beside the road stands an old inn. The red paint on its wooden gate has long faded to a dark brown, and beneath the eaves hang two chipped oil-paper lanterns that click dully against each other whenever the wind stirs.

Cui Fuquan took over the inn at twenty; now most of his hair is white. On his deathbed, his father handed him the key to the bottom drawer of the counter and said a key inside locked a back room that must never be opened. For forty years Cui kept that vow.

On the third night after First Frost, the rain came mixed with ice that rattled the tiles. Near midnight, a mud-splattered van stopped at the steps. Out stepped a man in a grey wool coat, thin-faced, high-browed, maybe thirty-five, a worn gold ring on the ring finger of his left hand. He asked only for a plain room upstairs, paid in cash, gave no name but the surname Zhou.

Zhou spoke little. At dinner he carried his bowl to the window, turned his back to the hall, and finished half a bowl of coarse rice without looking up. Later, when Cui crossed the corridor to tend the charcoal, he saw Zhou standing in the yard, hand on the wooden frame of the locked room's door, head tilted as if listening. The room had stood empty nearly twenty years; even the rats avoided it.

Before dawn Zhou was gone, frost dusting his coat's shoulders. On the counter lay the room fee, weighted by a folded paper. Cui unfolded a pencil sketch: the locked back room, a circle at the corner of the wall, and a line in small script. "East wing, wall crack. My late father Zhou Wenqi left something here. I beg the keeper's kindness."

Cui's fingertips went cold. He had never told anyone that room's old story. His father had said only this: a collapse, long ago, that crushed a passing peddler, whose body was never wholly found.

He dug out the old ledger from the bottom of the chest. On a yellowed page, winter of the thirty-seventh year of the Republic, an entry stood: lodger Zhou Wenqi, peddler, come from the north, room in the east wing. Nothing after, no record of Zhou ever leaving.

He took his umbrella to the east end of town and found Old Granny He, still selling tofu. She remembered the heavy snow, the peddler frozen dead in the yard, missing a foot, no family to claim him, buried hurriedly in the scattered graves on the ridge. Before he left, she said, the peddler had asked someone to pass a word: when spring came, send his son, something was left for the child in the east wing's wall.

Cui returned to the inn and sat behind the counter until dark. The rain fell again, dripping from the eaves onto the stone step, one beat at a time. He took the old key from the drawer and held it in his palm a long while, then put it back.

He did not open that room.

The next day he folded Zhou's sketch and pressed it into the drawer, beside the old key. Since that night the inn has opened as usual to travelers, and the back room's door stays locked. Only when Cui passes the yard tending charcoal, his step slows, as if afraid of disturbing something.

Some doors, left unopened, are also a way of keeping watch for the dead.