The Temple

The temple at the foot of the mountain, the villagers called it the Half-Hill Temple, though it still stood three li from the foot. Old Ke had driven his truck along this road for twelve years, and in the old days he would turn in once a month to burn incense for his mother. After she died, he never went back.

That winter the snow was heavy. His truck stalled on the slope, and his phone had no signal. The wind hurled snow against the windshield. He checked the time: eleven-forty. The town ahead was twenty li away, and going back was no better. He thought for a moment, grabbed his flashlight, and waded through knee-deep snow toward the temple.

The temple gate stood ajar, unbarred. He pushed it open, stepped into the courtyard, then into the hall. The hall was dark. The incense on the offering table had long gone cold, three sticks stuck in grey ash. His flashlight swept the room: a clay Buddha with lowered eyes, its gilt flaking, half its face drowned in shadow. To the left of the table sat the wooden fish, the size of a palm, split by a crack — the very one he had touched as a boy.

He rubbed his hands, took a cigarette from his pocket, then thought better of lighting it before the Buddha, and crouched just inside the threshold to light it out of the wind. The smoke mixed with the temple's stale, damp smell, like an old quilt kept too long. Wind came through the broken window and lifted the ash on the table.

Eleven-fifty-eight. He heard a sound.

Not the wind. The wooden fish. A single soft tap, as if someone had rapped it with a knuckle. He looked up sharply; the light swung across the Buddha, and something dark flickered in the crack. He stood and stepped toward the table. The fish lay still, dust in its seam. He reached out; his fingertip came away cold.

He did not believe in such things. He crouched and shone the light on the floor. From the table to the Buddha's feet, the blue bricks bore a thin layer of dust, and in the dust ran a line of footprints — small, bare, leading from beneath the Buddha to the table, then turning back. As if someone had knelt there all night, back and forth.

The hair on his neck rose. He looked up at the Buddha. Half the face was in shadow, and suddenly it did not seem to lower its eyes but to turn its head to watch him.

He retreated to the courtyard; the snow still fell. He did not want to stay inside, but the truck was stalled below the slope, and going back meant dying out there. He returned to the hall, closed the heavy wooden door, and sat on the threshold through the night, cigarette after cigarette. The wooden fish never sounded again. Now and then the wind carried a distant sound, like chanting, or like wind threading the stone clefts of the hollow.

Near dawn he dozed. When he woke, the flashlight was dead and the hall held a grey light. He went to the table — those three sticks of incense; he was certain he had lit only a cigarette, yet all the ash had collapsed, and all three sticks were burned to the butt, the stubs lying neat in the ash as if someone had set them one by one and burned them one by one. The line of footprints was gone; the bricks were clean, as if no one had ever come.

Driving down the mountain he looked back once. The temple gate stood ajar again, and on the snow, apart from his own tire tracks, there was no other mark.

His mother used to say the Buddha in that temple was efficacious. He had laughed at her superstition. Now, gripping the wheel, it came to him that perhaps the Buddha was not efficacious at all — what was, were the ones who could neither leave nor return.