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The Dry Well
In a village-in-the-city rental, a dry well sounds at midnight as if someone is rinsing rice; the landlord says it dried up twenty years ago.
Stuck at Six
Achang has fixed elevators for ten years. One old mixed-use building keeps calling him at midnight — the car jams at the sixth floor, yet the sixth-floor tenant never calls up.
Keeping the Bedside
Xiao Lin works nights as a hospital aide. In the ward at the end of the corridor, an old woman in a blue cloth shirt is always there at night, tucking in the blanket and giving water to a dying stranger. The nurse says that ward was emptied long ago — there is no such person.
The Red Lantern on the Mountain Road
Lao Han hauls freight at night over an old mountain. At one hairpin bend, an old man in a raincoat always stands waving a red lantern, slow — and in the seconds after, the road beyond is either a rockslide or a stalled truck. He later learns a road-mender once died on that bend.
The Sluice
The man who has kept the sluice for ten years hears his name called from the black water below on New Year's Eve.
The Sealed Stove
On a heating-less winter night, tiny footprints appear in the coal ash beside a stove that was sealed shut.
The One the Kiln Kept
An old kiln master in a mountain hollow fires small burial figurines for the surrounding villages. Each dawn the stacked clay figures have shifted in the night, and one unfired figurine appears that he never made — as if the kiln is keeping count of the living.
The Death Shoes
In a riverside town, an old sandal-maker who knows people by their feet is asked to braid death shoes for three drowned strangers. The sizes the mourners give match their own living feet--and the corpses'. Old Zhou reads what the feet confess, and chooses silence.