Tales of the End of the Century

The moment the tape finished playing, Bai Ye knew there was no going back. Not back to the ancient city, but back to those old days. Mornings spent at Jubaozhai, chatting idly with Lao Hu, evenings back in the tenement building, listening to the couple next door arguing. Those days were gone. From the moment he opened that suitcase, it was like stepping into quicksand; the more he struggled, the deeper he sank.

Tie Niu drove the car to a place called Yushugou. It was called a town, but it was really just a street with two rows of bungalows on both sides. There was an old elm tree at the entrance of the street, and a few old men were squatting under the tree, sunbathing. There weren't many people on the street. A yellow dog was lying in the middle of the road, and it only lazily stood up and moved aside when the car wheels were almost in front of it.

Their "base" was a detached house at the end of the street. When Tie Niu took out his key to open the door, Bai Ye saw a blue sign with white lettering nailed to the door frame. Half of the paint had worn off, but it was still recognizable: No. 17 Xiangyang Road, Yushugou Town. The courtyard was not large, with three main rooms and one room each in the east and west wings. There was a jujube tree in the corner of the courtyard, bare in winter, its branches sticking out against the gray sky.

"Whose house is this?" Bai Ye asked.

"A friend," Tie Niu said, "went abroad and asked me to look after him."

Bai Ye didn't ask which friend it was, whether they had really gone abroad or something else. He noticed that the word "friend" that Tie Niu used covered a wide range of people.

The first thing Old Hu did upon entering the courtyard was to inspect the kitchen. The stove was made of bricks, and the iron pot was rusty, but still usable. He pulled out a packet of noodles, half a bottle of soy sauce, and a bag of salt from his travel bag, and then, as if by magic, produced a clove of garlic. Bai Ye had no idea when he had slipped them in.

"It'll have to do," Old Hu said. "It's better than eating potatoes in the mine."

Lan Susu occupied the east wing. She spread the contents of her canvas bag out on the kang (a heated brick bed): notebooks, blueprints, loose documents she had brought from the research institute, the cassette tape, and her tarot cards. The items filled the kang, and she sat cross-legged in the middle, like a street vendor.

Bai Ye stood at the door for a while.

"Are you planning to watch all of these?"

"Otherwise what?" Lan Susu didn't even look up. "Sergei's diary, the experimental data from Project Aurora, and that cassette tape. Putting all these things together, there has to be some explanation."

"What do you mean?"

Lan Susu picked up a piece of paper torn from the wall of the research institute. It was handwritten in Russian, the handwriting messy, with several lines crossed out and rewritten. "This is Sergei's notebook. He's studying the behavior patterns of that thing." She handed the paper to Bai Ye. "You can't understand Russian, but look at this."

She pointed to the bottom half of the paper. There was a simple graph there, with time on the horizontal axis and distance on the vertical axis. A hand-drawn curve stretched from the upper left to the lower right, getting steeper and steeper. "He was measuring the distance between himself and that thing each time it appeared. At first it was five or six meters. Then three or four meters. Then two meters. The last time he recorded it was less than a meter."

Bai Ye recalled the words Sergei had written on the back of the photograph: "It gets a little closer to me every day." It wasn't just a metaphor; it was a real measurement.

"He also drew this." Lan Susu flipped out another sheet of paper. It showed a rough outline of a human figure, with three question marks next to it, circled in red. At the head of the figure was a swirling symbol, like a fingerprint, like tree rings, receding inwards in circles. "He called this 'mimicry.' That thing initially had no fixed shape; it was a shadow. The more you touched it, the more it resembled a person. Sergei thought it was learning."

Goosebumps rose on Bai Ye's arms. He remembered the thing standing outside the fire door in the corridor of Research Institute No. 17. A human shape, with blurred edges. It stood in the darkness, facing them, motionless. It was watching. No, it was learning.

Lan Susu placed the two sheets of paper side by side. "These two together represent Sergei's final research conclusions. First, it is attracted to highly sensitive individuals. The higher the frequency of consciousness, the closer it gets. Second, it mimics the consciousness it encounters. You perceive it, and it perceives you. You observe it, and it becomes you." She looked up at Bai Ye. "Third, Sergei believes that when the distance shrinks to zero, it no longer needs to 'learn.' It will come in."

Bai Ye was silent for a moment. "And then?"

Lan Susu didn't answer. The top tarot card on the kang (heated brick bed) was the moon, a winding path under the moonlight, scorpions in the water, and dogs and wolves howling at the moon. She didn't turn the card over; the card itself was revealed.

The aroma of cooking noodles wafted from the courtyard. Old Hu was making clanging noises in the kitchen, seemingly pulling out another pot from somewhere. Tie Niu squatted under the jujube tree, sharpening a knife; the whetstone struck rhythmically. Bai Ye emerged from the east wing and sat on the threshold for a while. Dusk was approaching; the twilight in Yushugou was much quieter than in Beijing. There were no car horns, no market vendors' shouts, only the occasional bark of a dog in the distance. White smoke rose from the chimney; Old Hu's noodles were almost ready.

"Bai Ye," Lan Susu called to him from inside the house.

He stood up and walked back. Lan Susu held the cassette tape in her hand, turning it over and over. "We only listened to Sergei's recording once. But cassette tapes are recorded on more than one side." She turned the tape over, pointing to the back, "This side has content too."

Bai Ye then noticed that next to the date Sergei had written on the cassette tape, there was a tiny arrow pointing to side B of the tape. The arrow was so faint it was almost invisible, as if it had been deliberately written very lightly.

"You've heard of it?"

"No," Lan Susu said, "I'll wait for you."

They borrowed an old radio cassette player from the old man who repaired electrical appliances, from Lao Hu. Tie Niu eventually bought the old man's cassette player for two hundred yuan, along with a bunch of spare batteries. Bai Ye flipped the cassette over, inserted it, and pressed play. The cassette hissed and crackled. Sergei's voice appeared. Unlike side A, this time his voice was no longer calm. It wasn't panic, but exhaustion. Like someone who hadn't slept for many days, speaking with the last of their strength.

Lan Susu provided simultaneous translation, keeping her voice very low.

"Today is November 18th. The second day since Institute No. 17 was sealed off. I'm still inside. They've sealed all the exits. I know why. That thing is here. It's not leaving. We thought we were studying it, but it was studying us. The resonator doesn't open the door. It knocks. Every time we use it, it responds. We've used it too many times. It's found the door. I'm hiding in Archives Room No. 11. All the lights are off, and the emergency power won't last much longer. It's in the corridor. I can hear it. Not footsteps, but—I don't know how to describe it. Like someone breathing on a glass window."

There was a gap in the tape, only background noise. Then Sergei's voice returned, even lower, as if afraid of being heard.

"It stopped for about ten seconds as it passed the archives door. Then it left. I don't know why it didn't come in. Maybe it knew I was inside. Maybe it was waiting for me to open the door myself. I looked in the mirror today. I could still see myself. That's the good news. The bad news is, the way I blink in the mirror seems a little different from how I blink."

Bai Ye felt his breath catch in his throat. He glanced instinctively at the window on the east wing wall. The glass reflected the light from inside, his own face floating in the darkness. The frequency of blinking. He stared at the face in the glass. It blinked, in sync with him.

The tape continues to spin.

"If anyone finds this tape, don't use the resonator. Don't try to find it. Don't knock. It's already at the door. Every time you knock, the door gets thinner. I've knocked too many times. I don't know how much longer the door can hold. If it gets in—I don't know what will happen. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe I'll become the one standing in the hallway, watching you through the glass. You won't know it's not me. Because it's imitated so well. Even I can't tell the difference."

As Lan Susu translated the last sentence, her voice trembled slightly. The tape skipped another section, and the play button on the tape recorder hadn't yet popped up. Bai Ye thought it was over and reached out to press stop. Sergei's voice rang out again. This time it was very soft, like his lips were pressed against a microphone.

"It's here again. Standing in the doorway. It's waiting for me to open it. I won't. I'll slip the tape under the door. If anyone finds it, remember my words. It's afraid of two things. First, people who don't know who they are. It can't learn things it's uncertain about. Second,—"

The tape emitted a sharp screech, followed by a violent thud. It didn't come from the tape itself, but from the recording studio. The door was flung open. Sergei's voice cut off. The tape continued spinning, recording what followed. Not speech. It was a wet, sticky friction sound, like something slowly moving along the ground. From near to far, from far to near. Then came a sigh. Not a human sigh, but some low-frequency vibration recorded by the recording equipment under extreme conditions. Like the entire room exhaling. The tape broke completely there, leaving only a continuous hissing sound. The play button on the tape recorder sprang back up.

The house was as quiet as a grave. In the courtyard, Old Hu called out, "The noodles are ready!" Tie Niu's sharpening of his knife stopped. Bai Ye sat on the edge of the kang (a heated brick bed), staring at the tape recorder, his palms sweaty. Lan Susu ejected the tape and put it back in the case. Her hands were trembling, but her movements were gentle, as if she were holding something that would break at the slightest touch.

"The last two things he mentioned," Bai Ye began, "the first was 'people who don't know who they are.' The second thing he didn't finish."

"right."

"What's the second thing?"

Lan Susu shook her head. "Perhaps Sergei himself didn't know. Perhaps he didn't have time to say it."

Or, Bai Ye thought, he said it, but after that impact, it was erased by something.

Old Hu brought in a bowl of noodles. Seeing the expressions on their faces, he placed the bowl on the table without asking any questions. Tie Niu followed behind, leaning against the doorframe. Old Hu handed a bowl of noodles to Bai Ye, who took it but didn't eat. He placed the bowl on his lap, watching the steam rise and dissipate.

"Old Hu," he said.

"Um."

"You said that objects can talk."

"right."

"What did that cassette tape say?"

Old Hu thought for a moment. "It says that the person who wrote these words eventually locked himself inside, not because he was afraid of that thing outside coming in, but because he was afraid of going out himself."

Bai Ye ate the noodles. The noodles were a little mushy, and Lao Hu had put in too much soy sauce, making them too salty. But he ate them all, bite by bite. After finishing, he put the bowl on the edge of the kang (a heated brick bed) and stood up.

I want to go out for a walk.

The jujube tree in the yard was bare, with only a few dried-up jujubes from last year hanging from its branches, shriveled into small, dark brown clumps. Bai Ye stood under the tree, looking up at the sky. The sky in Yushugou was cleaner than in Beijing, and the stars were bright and numerous. He remembered Sergei's words. "It imitated me so well, even I can't tell the difference." What if one day, even he couldn't tell the difference anymore?

He looked down at his hands. His fingers were trembling slightly, but they were cold. He clenched his fist, then released it. He could still control it. He could still be sure that this hand was his own.

Tie Niu appeared beside him at some point, without saying a word, and handed him something. Bai Ye took it; it was a folding knife. The handle was polished to a shine, and the blade was old but very sharp.

"Keep it with you," Tie Niu said. "Not for stabbing anything. Just so you have something to hold onto."

Bai Ye gripped the folding knife in his hand. The metal slowly warmed as he touched his palm.

"Tie Niu, what was the second thing in Sergei's last sentence?"

Tie Niu remained silent for a long time.

"Mirror," he said.

"What?"

"The second thing it fears is a mirror," Tie Niu said, looking at the bare branches of the jujube tree. "It's not that it's afraid of looking in the mirror. It's afraid of the reflection in the mirror. Because it can't tell which one is real."

Bai Ye put his folding knife into his pocket. A night breeze blew by, the jujube branch swayed gently, and a dried jujube fell to the ground, rolled twice, and came to rest at his feet.

He didn't pick it up.