On our wedding night, the bed creaked all night long. Everyone outside thought we were consummating the marriage. Only Lin Wan and I knew the truth: the bed was rocking by itself.
By morning, a small, wet fingerprint had appeared on the bedside table, about a ring finger's width smaller than mine. That night, my wife sat up in the dead of night and called out a name in a voice that wasn't hers: Shen Yanqing.
That wasn't my name. Following those three characters, I dug up a secret buried for eighty years: In the Republican era, an apprentice at the local tailor shop got engaged to a girl from the photography studio. In the twelfth lunar month, the girl drowned herself in a pond at the age of nineteen.
From that day on, strange things never stopped happening. Seven photographic negatives were bricked up inside the old house's walls. The first page of the account book read, “Qingming. I'll come back to settle the accounts.” A half-plum-blossom mark appeared in my palm. The pond was waiting for me. It didn't recognize my face, but the name I owed it from eighty years ago.
It demanded its due one item at a time, and I checked the accounts page by page.
The grass by the pond turned green overnight, while my body temperature dropped day by day. Every night, someone beside my left ear recited the accounts from across eighty years, item by item, unhurriedly, until I answered.
The tailor's craft had passed into my hands, the photography studio's negatives were embedded in the walls, and all 1,300 name cards in the accounting room had found their places. This craft had waited eighty years for someone to settle the accounts for him.
Only when I reached the end did I understand: The pond wasn't waiting for just one person, and I had never been an outsider.
The seventeenth day of the twelfth lunar month. Don't go out.
That night, it was me the pond wanted to see.
