As Lu Tingwa wiped a bronze plate in the well house, three knocks came from inside the well, their rhythms strangely uneven. He copied the marks in chalk and recognized them as the code used by the Liu family to jump into the well at Liujia Ferry thirty years ago. The old marks on the rim of the well perfectly matched the positions of the knocks. The town archives only recorded a shipwreck. His mother urged him to leave it alone, saying the well had no water and was hiding something strange. Lu Tingwa found his father's blank ledger and recorded what had happened, then pressed his ear to the well and waited in vain for the missing fourth knock. The watchman's clapper stopped abruptly at the door, and his footsteps paced outside the wall until the sky began to pale. The answering pair of short knocks never came.
