Tales of the End of the Century

The corridor felt longer than when they entered. Flashlight beams pierced the path ahead, sweeping across the green half-painted walls, the peeling ceiling, and the tightly closed doors every few steps. Bai Ye walked in the middle of the group, with Tie Niu in front of him, Lao Hu behind, and Lan Susu to his left, carrying the canvas bag. The sound of their footsteps overlapped in the empty corridor, making it seem as if more than four people were walking.

They had already passed more than a dozen rooms. Lan Susu didn't stop to decipher the Russian writing on the signs; she just glanced at them and continued walking. It wasn't that she wasn't curious, but the things written on those signs were becoming increasingly strange.

"Deep Monitoring Room"

"Consciousness Frequency Sampling Room"

"Isolation and observation area".

Every door was closed. Bai Ye tried to push one of them, but it was locked. Tie Niu said there was no need to bother; when they evacuated, they locked all the doors they could. As for why they were locked, he didn't say.

At the end of the corridor was a double fire door, its green paint bubbling like blisters on skin. Tie Niu, flashlight tucked under his arm, pushed the door open. The hinges creaked sharply, like the scream of some animal.

The door opened.

The flashlight beam shone in, but was mostly swallowed by the darkness. It was a much larger space; the beam of light couldn't reach the edge. Tie Niu took a few steps to the left, found the switch on the wall, and instinctively flipped it. No power. Of course there was no power. This place had been sealed off for over a decade.

He pulled a second flashlight from his bag, turned it on, and handed it to Lao Hu. The two beams of light swept across the room in a crisscross pattern. Rows of iron shelves were piled high with dusty instruments. Against the wall was a row of workbenches, with untidy folders, coffee cups, and ashtrays on them. The cigarette butts in the ashtrays were still there, cigarette butts from more than ten years ago, the grayish-white ash perfectly preserved in the shape it had been stubbed out.

Bai Ye felt this place didn't feel like a laboratory. It resembled an ordinary office, where staff had only gone out temporarily and would be back soon. But the things on the wall reminded him that no one would be returning.

The entire wall was covered in graffiti. Not the kind of street graffiti, but writing done with markers, ballpoint pens, and even fingernails. Russian, English, and some unrecognizable symbols, densely packed, layer upon layer, stretching from waist height all the way to the ceiling. The writing varied in size, some neat, some so illegible that they were almost impossible to decipher, and some had been crossed out by later writers and rewritten next to them.

Lan Susu walked to the wall, and the beam of her flashlight stopped on one of the lines of English text. The handwriting was forceful, the strokes embedded in the wall plaster.

"It gets a little closer to me every day."

Bai Ye felt a tightness in his back. This was the sentence Sergei had written on the back of the photograph.

Lan Susu moved the beam of light to the side. Another line, different handwriting, even more illegible.

"I'm not going to look in the mirror anymore."

Next to it.

"It was standing behind the door. I could hear it breathing."

Next to it, there was a line of text that was particularly large, almost taking up half a square meter of wall space. It was carved in with something sharp, and the wall plaster was scratched open, revealing the cement underneath.

"Don't open the door."

Bai Ye shifted his gaze from the wall and noticed Tie Niu standing at the other end of the room, shining his flashlight on something on the floor. Bai Ye walked over. It was a tape recorder. An old-fashioned one, cassette tape type, its plastic casing yellowed, the battery compartment cover missing, battery fluid leaking out and forming a layer of white frost. Several cassette tapes lay scattered nearby, some cracked, some trampled, the tape strips pulled out of the casing and tangled together like intestines.

But one cassette was intact. Tie Niu bent down, picked it up, and blew off the dust. A line of Russian text was written on the cassette with a ballpoint pen. Lan Susu walked over and glanced at it.

"Sergei. November 17th. The last time."

The four men were silent for a few seconds. Tie Niu put the cassette tape into his pocket.

"Go outside and listen," he said. "Not here."

Bai Ye didn't know what he meant by "no," and didn't ask. He noticed his hands were trembling, not from the cold, but from something in this place that made him feel uncomfortable all over. It wasn't fear, but something deeper, like someone slowly scraping his bones with their fingernails.

Lan Susu noticed it too. Her face was paler than usual, and her lips were pressed into a thin line.

"The residual messages here are too strong," she said, her voice low. "An entire wall, an entire room. A dozen people, each of them wrote something on it. Their fear, their—" She paused, unable to find the right words.

"Their final moments," Old Hu interjected. He was squatting in front of the wall, his cigarette extinguished sometime during the night, and he hadn't relit it. "Objects can talk. Walls can too. What this wall said was the most awful thing I've ever heard in my life."

Bai Ye was about to say something when he suddenly stopped.

He heard the sound.

It was very light, coming from the other end of the corridor. It wasn't footsteps, nor was it knocking; it was a rubbing sound, like something moving along the wall. It was slow and light, but definitely coming this way.

Tie Niu heard it too. He raised his flashlight and shone it into the corridor outside the fire door, while his other hand slowly reached behind his waist. Old Hu stood up and shielded Bai Ye and Lan Susu behind him.

The four people remained motionless. The scraping sound grew closer. Then it stopped. It stopped less than two meters outside the fire door.

The flashlight beam shone into the empty corridor. There was nothing there. But Bai Ye saw it. Not with his eyes, but with the antenna that had been pried open since yesterday. He "saw" a person standing outside the fire door.

It wasn't a person. It was the shape of a person. But its edges were blurred, like an out-of-focus photograph, like smoke, like fog, like a reflection on water ruffled by the wind. It stood motionless in the darkness outside the door, facing them.

Bai Ye felt his blood freeze. Not from fear—though fear was present—but from the fact that something was "seeing" him. Not with eyes, for it had no eyes. It was in a more direct way, as if something had reached into his brain, turning the pages of his memories, one by one, like flipping through a book.

Then it quit.

It didn't leave, it retreated. Like the receding tide, it slid back down the corridor, farther and farther away, fainter and fainter, until it finally disappeared into the darkness at the end of the corridor. From beginning to end, it made no sound. Bai Ye gasped for breath, realizing that he had been holding his breath the whole time.

"I'm leaving," he said, his voice hoarse.

Tie Niu looked at him: "You saw it?"

Bai Ye nodded. Tie Niu didn't ask any more questions. He pointed the flashlight back at the fire door, making sure the corridor was indeed empty, before slowly lowering it.

"Is it that thing?" Lan Susu asked. "The one in the photo."

"Yes," Bai Ye said, "but it's different from the photo."

"Why is it different?"

Bai Ye thought for a moment.

"In the photo, it was just a shadow. Now it has a shape. A human shape." He paused. "It's learning from us."

No one spoke. The graffiti on the wall looked like a swarm of worms huddled together in the dim flashlight beam. Don't open the door. It's standing behind the door. I can see it without turning my head.

"Let's go," Tie Niu said. "Take whatever you can. It's almost dawn."

Bai Ye then realized that they had been downstairs for almost a whole night. He helped Lan Susu gather the papers and documents scattered on the ground into a canvas bag, while Lao Hu wrapped the intact cassette tape in cloth and stuffed it into a travel bag. Tie Niu stood motionless by the fire door, his flashlight shining down the corridor.

Returning the way he came was faster than coming in. No one spoke, no one stopped. Bai Ye didn't look into the mirror when he passed it. He didn't stop when he passed Sergei's office. The iron ladder was still swaying, rust falling down, and he climbed much faster than he had come down. The concrete slab overhead was pushed aside, letting in cold air, carrying the smell of earth and withered grass. Bai Ye crawled out of the hole, plopped down on the ground, and gasped for breath.

It was indeed almost dawn. The east was tinged with gray, and a thin layer of frost covered the barren beach. Old Hu was the last to come out, dragged the cement slab back to its original position, plopped down on it, and lit a cigarette. He took a couple of puffs before remembering to speak.

"I've been down into more cellars and crawled through more graves in my entire life than I've done in one night." He exhaled a puff of smoke. "From now on, you'll have to pay more for this kind of work."

Bai Ye sat leaning against the barbed wire, his knees still trembling slightly. Lan Susu squatted beside him, took out the cassette tape from her bag, and examined it repeatedly in the morning light. The handwriting on the cassette tape, illuminated by a flashlight all night, looked even older in the natural light.

"We need to find a place to put this thing," she said.

Tie Niu drove the "Bright Relocation" van out of the bushes, and the four of them got in. The van drove across the wasteland, back onto the bush-lined path, and re-entered the world on this side of the barbed wire fence. Bai Ye looked back; the barbed wire, the wasteland, and the concrete slabs were quickly swallowed up by the bushes. If his knees hadn't been still trembling, he would have almost thought that nothing had happened last night.

Around noon, the car stopped on the edge of a small town. Tie Niu found a small appliance repair shop, behind which sat an old man wearing reading glasses. Tie Niu placed the cassette tape on the counter and asked if it could be played. The old man looked at the tape, then at Tie Niu, then at the three people standing at the door, and without asking any further questions, he pulled out an old-fashioned tape recorder from under the counter, plugged it in, inserted the tape, and pressed play.

The tape hissed as it spun. First, there was a blank space, only background noise. Then, Sergei's voice appeared.

Russian. Bai Ye couldn't understand it, but the voice sent shivers down his spine. It was so calm, too calm, unnaturally calm. A person speaking into a tape recorder dozens of meters underground shouldn't have such a calm voice.

Lan Susu's expression changed after hearing a few words.

"What did he say?" Bai Ye asked.

Lan Susu didn't answer immediately. She listened to the tape continue playing, her fingers unconsciously tightening their grip on the strap of her canvas bag. The tape played for a few minutes, then Sergei's voice stopped. Another blank, then it started again. Over and over, as if he were thinking, organizing his thoughts, and then continuing during the breaks in recording.

The tape finished playing. The play button on the tape recorder popped up automatically with a click. The old man repairing the appliances looked at them over his glasses, asking nothing. Tie Niu ejected the tape and put it back in the case.

"What did he say?" Bai Ye asked again.

Lan Susu took a deep breath.

"Sergei said that at first they thought the resonator was opening up human consciousness. Later they realized that wasn't right. Human consciousness is already open. It doesn't need to be opened. The real function of the resonator is to make human consciousness visible." She paused, "Like a lighthouse. When you light a lamp in the dark, it's not so that you can see the way, but so that other things can see you."

Bai Ye felt a tingling sensation in her back.

"What else did he say?"

"He said that thing didn't come in from the outside. It's always been there. We can't see it, and it can't see us. There's something between us, like a layer of glass. The resonator shattered the glass." Lan Susu looked at Bai Ye. "Those subjects weren't crazy. They were found. Once they were found, they could never hide again."

Bai Ye recalled the blurry human figure outside the fire door in the corridor. It was imitating us. From a shapeless shadow, it transformed into a human silhouette. What if it could imitate us even more perfectly? What if one day it learned how to pass through that pane of glass?

Old Hu stubbed out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe.

"What was the last sentence on that cassette tape?"

Lan Susu remained silent for a while.

He said, "I haven't looked in a mirror for two days. Not because I'm afraid to see it. It's because I'm afraid I won't see myself."

The small appliance repair shop was quiet for a few seconds. The old man behind the counter took off his reading glasses, wiped them, put them back on, and continued repairing his circuit board. Someone rode by on a bicycle outside, and the bell rang once.

Bai Ye stood up.

"It's dawn," he said. "Let's go."