在這個寂靜的夜晚，龍脊的山路被月光照亮，草叢隨著微風輕輕擺動，彷彿在低語著什麼不為人知的秘密。天色漸暗，四周只剩下我們兩個人。朋友提議慢慢走，欣賞日落的美景，我們便停下腳步，看著天邊的橙色漸漸融入深藍的夜幕。海面平靜得像一面鏡子，反射著最後一絲光芒。風很大，吹得山脊上稀疏的草叢沙沙作響。
日落之後，我們打開手機燈，繼續走著。山路並不難，但夜晚的氛圍卻讓人感到異樣的壓迫。四周空蕩蕩的，除了風聲和草叢的搖曳聲，一切都顯得格外安靜。就在我們走到一段窄窄的山脊時，朋友突然停下來，指著前方。「前面有人。」他的聲音壓低了，帶著一絲不安。我抬頭看去，果然，在不遠處的山路上，有一個人背著背包，慢慢地走著。
「可能是遲落山的行山客吧。」我試圖用理智解釋眼前的景象，但心底卻泛起一絲不安。我們繼續往前走，那人始終保持著和我們相同的速度，距離不遠不近，不快也不慢。奇怪的是，他從未回頭。按理說，我們的燈光應該很明顯，但他似乎完全沒有注意到。
朋友突然問我：「追唔追到？」我笑了一下，試圖緩解心中的緊張。「算啦，人哋可能趕落山。」我們加快了腳步，但那人似乎也跟著加快了速度；我們放慢腳步，他也放慢了。這種詭異的同步讓我們心裡越來越不安。
月亮升起來了，月光拉長了我們的影子。我無意間瞥了一眼地面，突然發現一個令人毛骨悚然的細節——前面那個人沒有影子。我以為是角度問題，便將手機燈照向他。燈光下，他的背包、帽子、衣服都清晰可見，但地上仍然沒有任何影子。
朋友低聲問我：「你睇到冇？」我沒有回答，只是默默地停下腳步。我們兩個站在原地，看著那人慢慢走向山脊另一端的轉彎處。當他消失在草坡後面時，我們迅速走到那個位置，卻發現前方空無一人。山路筆直，如果有人走下去，我們應該能看到，但此刻整條山脊上只有風吹草動。
那晚回到家，我心裡始終無法平靜。幾年後，我在石澳與一個常行山的朋友聊天時，他突然提起龍脊夜行的故事。他問我：「你有冇夜行過？」我點頭，他接著說：「有人話，龍脊夜晚會多一個行山客。」我愣了一下，問他為什麼。他說：「因為有啲人見過。山脊上面，有個人一直行。」
我試探性地問：「佢有冇影？」他愣了一下，看著我，慢慢說：「原來你都聽過。」他的話像一道寒冷的風，瞬間吹進我的心裡。我想起那晚，那個人，那固定的距離和速度，那消失的影子。但最讓我毛骨悚然的是，我當時忽略的一件事——整條龍脊上，其實只有兩條腳步聲。
這意味著，那個人根本沒有留下任何聲音。他只是默默地走著，像是一道幽靈般的存在。在那片空曠的山脊上，他究竟是什麼？是迷路的靈魂？還是某種未知的存在？這個疑問至今仍困擾著我，每當想起那晚，我都感到一股涼意從背後升起，如同龍脊上的夜風般刺骨。
English Version
Under the quiet glow of the moon, Dragon’s Back stretched out like a dark spine against the night sky, its narrow ridgeline cutting between the sea and the hills, the wind sweeping across the tall grass in restless waves that whispered against one another as if carrying fragments of something unspoken, and on that evening it was just the two of us, lingering longer than we should have after sunset, drawn in by the fading colors of the horizon as orange dissolved into deep blue and the last light reflected off the distant water like a dim, trembling mirror, until eventually darkness settled in fully and we turned on the lights from our phones, the small beams barely pushing back the surrounding night, and although the path itself was not particularly difficult, the atmosphere had changed entirely, becoming heavier, more oppressive, as if the open landscape had somehow grown narrower, the silence between each gust of wind stretching uncomfortably long, and it was along one of the narrower sections of the ridge that my friend suddenly stopped, his voice lowered in a way that immediately unsettled me as he pointed ahead and said there was someone on the path, and when I followed his gaze I saw it too, a figure walking some distance ahead of us, a person with a backpack moving at a steady, unhurried pace, their silhouette outlined faintly against the dim light of the sky, and at first it seemed completely ordinary, just another hiker who had stayed out too late, someone heading down the trail like we were, and I tried to reassure both of us with that explanation, yet something about the scene refused to settle into normalcy, because no matter how long we walked, the distance between us and that figure remained unchanged, neither shrinking nor growing, as though we were all moving within some invisible constraint that fixed our positions relative to one another, and more unsettling still was the fact that the figure never once turned around, not even when our lights must have been clearly visible behind them, not even when the wind carried the sound of our footsteps across the ridge, and my friend half-jokingly asked if we should try to catch up, perhaps to break the strange tension that had begun to build, but when we increased our pace, the figure seemed to do the same, and when we slowed, it slowed as well, mirroring us with a precision that felt impossible to dismiss as coincidence, and gradually the unease grew into something sharper, something that pressed against the edges of rational thought, until the moon rose higher and cast a pale light across the ridge, stretching our shadows long behind us, and it was in that moment, almost by accident, that I glanced down and noticed something that made my breath catch in my throat, because ahead of us, where the figure walked, there was no shadow at all, not even a faint distortion on the ground, nothing to indicate that the person existed within the same physical rules as everything else around us, and at first I tried to convince myself it was an angle, a trick of the terrain, so I raised my phone and directed the light toward the figure, illuminating their outline more clearly, revealing the details of their clothing, the shape of their backpack, the slight movement of fabric in the wind, yet even under that direct beam, the ground beneath them remained empty, untouched by any shadow, as though the light simply refused to acknowledge their presence, and beside me my friend asked quietly if I could see it too, but I found myself unable to respond, because the realization was settling in too deeply, too quickly, and instead we both stopped walking, standing there in silence as we watched the figure continue forward toward a bend in the ridge where the path curved behind a slope of grass, and when they finally disappeared from view, we exchanged a brief, unspoken understanding before moving forward more quickly, almost instinctively, driven by the need to confirm what we had seen, yet when we reached that same bend just moments later, there was no one there, the path ahead completely empty, stretching out in a straight line where any person should have been visible, and the only movement was the wind passing through the grass, the only sound the faint rustling that seemed suddenly louder in the absence of everything else, and it was only then that another detail surfaced, something so subtle that I had overlooked it until that exact moment, because throughout the entire encounter, despite clearly seeing that figure walking ahead of us, we had only ever heard two sets of footsteps, our own, echoing softly against the ground, with no third rhythm, no additional presence in the soundscape, and that absence felt far more disturbing than anything else, because it suggested that whatever we had been following had not interacted with the world in any conventional way, leaving no trace except for its appearance, and even that now felt uncertain, as though it might have been something projected into our perception rather than physically present, and although we eventually made our way off the ridge and back to the safety of familiar surroundings, the experience lingered, resurfacing again years later when I spoke with another friend who often hiked in the area near Shek O, and during that conversation he casually mentioned stories of people encountering an extra hiker on Dragon’s Back at night, someone who walked ahead at a fixed distance, never turning back, never falling behind, and when I asked him quietly whether that figure had a shadow, he paused before giving me a look that told me everything I needed to know, confirming without explanation that this was not an isolated incident but something others had experienced as well, and ever since then the memory has taken on a different weight, no longer just a strange night on a mountain trail but a glimpse into something that defies easy explanation, because the question that remains is not simply what we saw, but what that presence was doing there, moving along the ridge without sound, without shadow, maintaining a perfect distance as though guiding us or keeping us in place, and whether it belonged to the mountain itself, a fragment of some past moment repeating endlessly, or something else entirely that exists just beyond the limits of what we can perceive, appearing only under certain conditions before vanishing again without a trace, leaving behind nothing but a lingering sense that the world is not as fixed or as singular as it seems, and that in places like Dragon’s Back, where land, sea, wind, and darkness converge, the boundary between what is real and what is not may be thinner than we would ever like to believe