Tales of the End of the Century

Bai Ye was awakened by the cold. The walls of the agricultural machinery station were drafty, and no matter how thick the hay was laid out, it couldn't keep out the wind. He sat up and found that Lao Hu's bed was empty, the quilt neatly folded. Lan Susu was still huddled in the corner, wrapped in a coat, her hair disheveled, like a hedgehog awakened from hibernation.

Tie Niu wasn't home. Bai Ye pushed open the door, a gust of cold wind hit him, and he shivered. It wasn't fully light yet; a grayish-white hue hung in the east. In the farm machinery station's yard, the "Guangming Moving Truck" was parked, and Tie Niu was lifting the hood, bending down to inspect something.

Old Hu was squatting at the garage entrance, holding an enamel mug and drinking water, the water steaming hot. No one knew where he got the hot water from.

"Awake?" Old Hu didn't even turn his head. "Tie Niu said we have to leave early today. We need to get through before dark."

"Passed the test?"

"The northern pass. Without proper permits, we'll have to take another route."

Bai Ye didn't press for details about what "other roads" meant. He realized that ever since he got on this bus, he had gotten into the habit of not asking questions he shouldn't have.

Lan Susu also came out, her hair tied in a ponytail, her face refreshed after being splashed with water. She slung her canvas bag over her shoulder, glanced at Bai Ye, and neither of them said a word. The sentence Sergei had written on the back of last night's photo—"It gets a little closer to me every day"—had weighed on her like a stone all night.

Tie Niu closed the hood and patted the dust off his hands.

"Get in the car."

The car left the dirt road and turned onto a provincial highway. The road conditions were poor, full of potholes, and the tractor-trailer didn't drive very fast. On both sides were endless farmlands, fallow in winter, with a thin layer of frost covering the exposed yellow soil. Occasionally, we passed a village; the houses were low, smoke was just rising from their chimneys, someone was drawing water from a well, and a dog chased the car for a few steps before stopping.

Bai Ye leaned against the window, watching the villages recede one by one. He thought of the tenement buildings, Jubaozhai, and the bustling stalls of the antique market. Only two days had passed, but those things already felt like a past life.

"Tie Niu," Lan Susu leaned over from the front row, "Have you seen that photo from last night?"

Tie Niu did not answer.

"The one Sergei took. The thing in the mirror."

"I've seen it," Tie Niu said, his voice flat. "More than once."

"What do you mean?"

Tie Niu turned the steering wheel to the left, swerving around a pothole in the middle of the road. The car jolted, and Lao Hu nearly spilled his teacup.

"In the later stages of Project Aurora, similar descriptions appeared in many people's work logs," Tie Niu said. "At first, it was the test subjects. They would say that they always felt someone was watching them. At first, it was behind them, then from the side. Finally, they could feel that thing at the edge of their field of vision without turning their heads."

"and then?"

"Then their logs stopped."

Bai Ye recalled the sentence Sergei had written. "Since yesterday, I can see it without turning my head." That was his last record. What happened afterward, no one knows.

"Have you—" Bai Ye hesitated for a moment, "Have you seen it with your own eyes?"

Tie Niu remained silent for a long time. So long that Bai Ye thought he wouldn't answer.

"I've met him once," he said.

The air inside the car felt frozen.

"The night before Research Institute No. 17 was sealed off, I was patrolling the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a mirror, hanging above the sink. As I walked past, I saw something behind me in the mirror. It was about three or four meters away. It wasn't a person."

"What is it?"

"I don't know. I didn't turn around." Tie Niu's voice was flat. "I stared at the mirror for about five seconds. Then it moved. Not walked, but slid. Like a shadow on the water, it slid from the left to the right of the mirror and disappeared. I continued patrolling, pretending I didn't see anything. Later, I kept thinking, if I had turned around, would it have gotten a little closer to me every day from that day on, just like those test subjects?"

Old Hu put down his teacup with a soft clinking sound. He didn't say anything, took out a cigarette, lit it, and rolled down the car window. A cold wind rushed in, tearing the smoke into thin strands.

The car continued north. The provincial highway turned into a county road, and the county road into a dirt road. The farmland on both sides of the road disappeared, replaced by wasteland and low shrubs. The sky grew lower and lower, with thick clouds pressing down like a piece of gray cloth that could never be washed clean.

Around 2 PM, the car stopped at an abandoned quarry. Tie Niu said it wasn't far from the border and they had to wait until dark to leave. Bai Ye got out of the car to stretch his legs and noticed a dark hole in the quarry wall, covered by several pieces of rusted iron.

"It used to be a mine," Tie Niu said. "It was abandoned later. You could light a fire inside; it was warmer than outside."

Four men entered the mine. Tie Niu used his tools to start a small fire, then pulled out a few potatoes from somewhere, wrapped them in tin foil, and threw them into the fire. Lao Hu took out a packet of pickled vegetables and a bag of peanuts from his travel bag and laid them out on a spread-out newspaper. Lan Susu leaned against the cave wall, took out the blueprint from her canvas bag, and looked at it again by the firelight.

"A resonator," she muttered to herself, "a machine that turns people into highly sensitive individuals. But if what comes in after the door opens isn't light—then what did they actually open?"

"Have you ever thought," Bai Ye said, "that maybe it's not that they opened something, but that something has been waiting to be opened all along?"

Lan Susu looked up at him.

"Sergei's photograph. That thing in the mirror. It didn't come from somewhere else. It's always been there. We just can't see it normally." Bai Ye picked up a twig and poked at the fire. "The resonator doesn't open a door, it opens our own eyes."

Tie Niu looked over from across the fire, his gaze somewhat complicated.

"Sergei said something similar," he said. "In the days leading up to the incident, he locked himself in his lab all day, writing incessantly. Someone saw his notebooks, which were filled with diagrams. Not circuit diagrams, but... he called them 'maps of consciousness.'"

"What do you mean?"

He believed that human consciousness is not a chaotic mass. It has a structure, like a terrain with highs and lows, mountains and abysses. We usually only live on the surface layer. But there is something below. Something very deep.

Lan Susu put down the drawings and took out a notebook and pen from her bag. "Do you remember what he drew?"

Tie Niu shook his head. "I'm just security. I don't understand those things. Besides, all his notes were taken away later. They were supposedly sealed inside with the research institute."

A popping sound came from the fire. A potato split open, steam rising from it. Old Hu used a twig to pull it out, not minding the heat, broke it in half, handed one half to Bai Ye, and ate the other half himself while blowing on it.

"I say," Old Hu chewed on a potato, "you've talked for so long about the door, the terrain, the shadows. I just want to ask you one real question. What exactly is that thing trying to do?"

No one could answer that.

Tie Niu poked at the fire with a branch, the firelight reflecting off his face and illuminating the old scar running from his cheekbone to his chin. "I don't know what it wants. But Sergei said something that I've always remembered."

"What did you say?"

"He said, 'We think we're studying it. Actually, it's studying us. For every step we take deeper, it takes two steps toward us.'"

The mine fell silent, save for the crackling of the fire and the sound of the wind from the distant entrance. Bai Ye finished his potato, his fingers covered in ash and salt. He licked them; they were salty.

Night fell. Tie Niu stomped out the fire, and the four men returned to the car. The car drove along a barely discernible path behind the quarry, flanked by dense bushes whose branches scraped against the car body with a screeching sound. After about forty minutes, the bushes disappeared, revealing a vast, desolate wasteland. Under the moonlight, the wasteland stretched like a gray mirror, reaching all the way to the horizon.

There was a barbed wire fence in the distance. It wasn't high, and some parts of it had already collapsed.

Tie Niu stopped the car and turned off the engine. He got out, walked to the barbed wire fence, bent down, and crawled over. Lao Hu followed, carrying his travel bag. Lan Susu hugged her canvas bag tightly. Bai Ye was the last to crawl over; a piece of barbed wire caught on his sleeve, and he tugged at it, tearing a hole in his sleeve. He ignored it and continued walking.

The barbed wire fence looked no different from the other side. The same barren wasteland, the same moonlight, the same cold wind. But Bai Ye knew they were no longer in the same place.

After walking for about twenty minutes, Tie Niu stopped. He squatted down and used his hands to clear away the gravel and dry grass on the ground. Underneath, a cement slab, about a meter square, was revealed, its edges covered with moss. Embedded in the cement slab was a badly rusted iron ring.

"Help me," Tie Niu said.

Bai Ye and he grabbed the iron ring together and pulled hard. The cement slab moved, making a screeching sound, and a stale air rushed up from below, carrying the smell of dirt, rust, and an indescribable sweetness. It was dark below, and they couldn't see anything.

Tie Niu took a flashlight out of his bag and turned it on. The beam of light shone down onto a downward-facing iron ladder, rusty and with some of the rungs broken.

"Research Institute No. 17," Tie Niu said. "The main entrance is sealed off. This is the emergency exit. That's where I came out back then."

He put the flashlight in his mouth and went down first. Old Hu followed. Lan Susu glanced at Bai Ye and went down too. Bai Ye was the last. The iron ladder swayed under his feet, rust falling down in a flurry. He counted, and after descending about twenty steps, his feet finally touched solid ground.

The flashlight beam illuminated a corridor. The walls were painted with an old-fashioned green half-and-half paint, green on the bottom and white on the top, now faded and worn. The floor was covered with linoleum flooring, which felt a little sticky underfoot. The corridor stretched in two directions, both ends of which were dark.

Bai Ye's palms began to sweat.

He had seen this corridor before. In Lan Susu's candle array. Back then, he "saw" Sergei running, something chasing him. At the end of the corridor was a metal door with a round handle. Sergei reached out to open the door—

"Which way?" Lan Susu's voice brought him back to reality.

Tie Niu shone his flashlight to the left, then to the right. He was trying to determine his direction.

"This way," he said.

They walked to the left. The only sounds in the corridor were footsteps and breathing. Every few meters along the wall was a door; the signs on them were in Russian, which Bai Ye couldn't understand, so Lan Susu would sometimes stop to read them.

"Researcher's rest room".

"Physiological Monitoring Room"

"Electromagnetic shielding room".

As they passed door after door, the signs grew increasingly dense. Then, Bai Ye saw that door.

It was metal, with a round handle, and a rectangular frosted glass window on the door. Exactly the same as the one he had drawn in his vision.

He stopped.

"This is the one," he said.

Tie Niu glanced at him, then reached for the handle. It was locked. He handed the flashlight to Lao Hu, pulled a thin iron rod from his waist, inserted it into the keyhole, and flicked it a few times. With a click, the door opened.

Behind the door was a small office. There was a tin table, an overturned chair, and a cracked mirror hanging on the wall. Papers were scattered on the table and on the floor, as if they had been hastily turned over.

Lan Susu picked up a few photos and examined them with a flashlight.

"Sergei's work log," she said, her voice trembling slightly, "the last few pages were torn out."

Bai Ye walked to the mirror. The crack split his face in two, his left and right eyes misaligned. He stared at the lacerated face in the mirror and suddenly felt that it wasn't him.

The face in the mirror is opening and closing its mouth.

Just like Sergei.

Bai Ye suddenly took a step back and bumped into the metal table. Lan Susu and Lao Hu both looked at him.

"What's wrong?"

Bai Ye didn't speak. He looked in the mirror again, and all he saw was his own terrified face. The crack was still the crack; nothing had changed.

But the image of that mouth opening and closing was etched into his mind. Just like Sergei. Just like those test subjects. Since yesterday, I can see it without turning my head.

He remembered what Tie Niu had said.

"For every step we take deeper into the area, it takes two steps toward us."

Bai Ye pulled her hand away from the mirror, her fingertips icy cold.

"Let's go," he said. "Let's get out of here."