After the Temple Gates Close

“Whenever the rain came down, people walking the hill paths would shelter in the temple. It was small, but there was always somewhere to sit.”

The caretaker's recorded voice came from the laptop. Min leaned against the desk. That would make a good opening for the film, she said. Cheng pressed his headphones closer instead of answering.

“Listen. Is that a bell behind him?”

She could not hear it. He turned up the recording. Somewhere in the rain were two faint metallic notes.

“Someone probably knocked something over,” she said. “There were tools everywhere. They're still doing the repairs.”

They were staying in a guesthouse below the hill, editing a short introduction for a small temple temporarily closed for restoration. That morning they had interviewed its caretaker, taken photographs and recorded the sounds of the place. Cheng remembered uploading three files to their cloud folder.

Now there were only two.

“Where's the third one?”

“Did you finish uploading it?”

“I watched it finish.”

His phone sounded. A message had arrived from a LINE account bearing a photograph of the temple gate. Min looked at the clock. It was eleven forty-seven at night.

There was no text, only a seven-second voice message. A woman said, “The third file… Don't listen to the last part.”

Cheng put the phone down.

“Who was that?” Min asked.

He did not know. Hadn't the caretaker used this account to send them directions that morning? No, she said. She had found the address on the map. He should call and ask.

The caretaker was still awake.

“Sorry to bother you. Do you use the temple's LINE account?”

“The temple has a LINE account?”

Cheng described the gate in the profile picture and the woman's message. After a silence, the caretaker remembered an old account someone had set up for the temple years before. They had not used it for a long time.

“A woman told me not to listen to the third file.”

“The third file?”

Cheng explained that he had recorded three that morning and one was now missing.

“Before you left, you recorded me talking, then the rain outside the gate,” the caretaker said. “There was another one?”

“Room tone. In that room at the back.”

“Which room?”

“Beside the stairs. The one with the paint bucket outside.”

The other end of the line went quiet.

“That room was locked today,” the caretaker said slowly. “I've had the key with me the whole time.”

Cheng turned to Min. She remembered him going behind the stairs but had not followed him in. He remembered an open door, and the smell of damp timber inside.

“Cheng, listen to me.” The caretaker lowered his voice. “They sealed that room during the repairs. Don't look for the third recording. Please.”

“Is there something you aren't telling us?”

The caretaker offered no explanation. He had locked the door himself, he said. It had already been locked when they arrived.

After the call, Cheng opened the morning's photographs. There was the paint bucket beside the stairs. Behind it, a padlock hung on the door.

“I was in there. I remember recording it.”

Min suggested checking the file times. Perhaps he had confused it with another place. Searching the laptop, he suddenly found the recording still stored locally.

“There it is. The third recording's still on the computer!”

“Wait.” She caught his attention. “That woman told you not to listen. Are you really going to open it?”

“Just the waveform. I won't play it.”

The file was forty-one seconds long. For more than thirty seconds, the waveform was almost flat. Near the end it rose sharply, as though someone had spoken very close to the microphone.

Cheng did not press Play. The cursor began moving anyway.

There were two soft knocks on wood. Then the woman's voice: “Don't answer the door.”

“Which door does she mean?” he asked.

Two identical knocks came from their guesthouse door.

Min gripped his hand. “Don't say anything. Please.”

There were no footsteps outside. No one spoke again. He closed the laptop. Neither of them went near the door. They sat there until daylight.

The next morning the caretaker took them back to the temple and unlocked the room beside the stairs. There were paint tins, an old stool and a boarded window. No recorder. No second door.

He asked whether they had opened their door during the night. Min said they had not. He let out a little breath. “Good.”

“Why do you say that?” Cheng asked.

The caretaker looked outside. “Because after I hung up last night, someone knocked twice on the temple gate too.”

Cheng did not ask who had been outside. He took out his phone and played the seven-second warning sent by the old account.

“The third file… Don't listen to the last part.”

The caretaker's hand stopped on the door handle.

“You know her?”

“Lin. She used to help us with the films and recordings. She set up that account.”

“Where is she now?” Min asked softly.

Years earlier, a landslide had struck the hillside. People had taken shelter in the front hall. Lin had told them to stay there and gone into the back room to close the door. The others had been rescued. She had not come back out.

Cheng looked at the room beside them. The caretaker gently pulled its door shut.

“The people who got out still remember her voice. She kept telling them not to open the door.”

“So she wasn't trying to frighten us last night?” Min said.

“She wanted you to get home safely.”

Cheng did not touch the third recording again. With Min beside him, he deleted the local file and the copy retained in the cloud. He did not keep the seven-second message either.

Before they left, he faced the back-room door. “Thank you. We're going home now.”

Over the following nights, no one knocked on their door. No more unfamiliar voice messages arrived.

A week later Cheng delivered the completed temple film. He used only two recordings: the caretaker's interview and the rain outside the gate. There was nothing about hauntings in the closing titles. Just one line:

“For the one who stayed to look after others that night. Thank you.”

When the gate was repaired, the caretaker carried the old bench back into the front hall. Rain fell outside. Inside, there were still a few places for people to sit.