At 6:45 a.m. on Saturday, the alarm went off.
When Wei Chen opened his eyes, his left hand was still pressed against the wall. His palm was cold, and his fingertips were faintly numb, as if they had remained in that position for a long time. He pulled his hand back and looked at his palm. There was nothing there. Just a hand.
He sat up, turned off the alarm, and began his morning routine.
But while brushing his teeth, he stopped for a moment. His reflection looked slightly different. It wasn't his features. It was something subtler—the focus in his eyes seemed off, as if he were looking at something behind the mirror.
He blinked. It was normal again.
He put the toothbrush back in the second slot of the holder, bristles facing left.
He didn't have work today. He had planned to organize his camping gear; next week, he was going to a campsite in Jianshi, Hsinchu. But as he sat on the living-room sofa, he kept staring at the wall on his right.
At 8:23 a.m., he stood up and left the apartment.
The hallway was silent. The apartment building on a Saturday morning was like a body that hadn't woken up yet. The fluorescent lights were on, humming as they cast a ghastly white over the off-white floor.
Unit 1203 was to his right.
He stood in front of the door. It was a dark-brown fire door with a silver handle, identical to his own. He lowered his head and looked at the gap beneath it—about an inch of space. It was black inside. He crouched down, tilted his head, and tried to see something through the slit.
There was nothing. Only black.
He stood up and hesitated. Then he reached out and pressed the doorbell.
There was no sound. The doorbell might have been broken, or there might not have been any power connected inside. He waited ten seconds and pressed it again. Still nothing.
He tried the handle. It didn't turn. It was locked. The metal was ice-cold, colder than he expected. He let go and looked at the shape of his fingerprints left on the handle.
Then he noticed something.
There were already fingerprints on the handle. They weren't his. They had been there before. Several sets, layered over one another, as if someone had gripped it repeatedly.
He took a step back.
They could have been the superintendent's. They could have been left by a previous tenant. Metal surfaces held fingerprints. That was normal.
He turned and walked toward the elevator.
The super's office was on the first floor, near the mailboxes. It was a small room with the door half open. Inside sat a man in his sixties with the surname Liao. The residents all called him Old Liao. He was reading a newspaper, his reading glasses balanced on the tip of his nose.
“Old Liao.”
“Hm? Oh, Unit 1202.” Old Liao lowered the newspaper. “What is it?”
“Unit 1203 next door. Has anyone moved in recently?”
Old Liao shook his head. “No. It's been empty for a long time. Why?”
“I've been hearing some sounds at night these past few days. They're coming from over there.”
“What kind of sounds?”
Wei thought for a moment. He didn't know how to describe them. Scraping? Knocking? Those words were too specific, specific enough to sound like an accusation.
“Probably the pipes,” he said.
“Oh, the pipes. This building's old. The pipes make noises all the time. Especially in the middle of the night, when the temperature difference is big.” Old Liao pushed up his glasses. “If you're really worried, I can have someone take a look. But Unit 1203—the last time anyone went in was... probably three or four months ago. The landlord asked me to check for a leak. There was nothing inside. It was empty.”
“Three or four months ago.”
“Yeah. Clean as a whistle. There wasn't even much dust.”
Wei nodded. “Okay. Thanks. It must be the pipes.”
He walked back to the elevator. While waiting for it, he glanced over his shoulder toward the super's office. Old Liao had already picked up his newspaper again.
The elevator doors opened. He stepped inside and pressed twelve.
The moment the doors closed, he smelled something.
It was very faint. Not the cleaning solution that usually lingered in elevators, and not cigarette smoke. Something else. Something like a flower, but not a fresh flower. A dried flower that had been sitting around for a long time and was close to losing its scent.
His mother used to keep dried flowers in the living room.
The thought surfaced a fraction of a second faster than he could suppress it. He felt his breathing grow shallow. The elevator reached the twelfth floor. The doors opened, and he stepped out.
There was no smell in the hallway. The fluorescent lights were still humming.
He walked past Unit 1203 without looking at it. He unlocked his door and went inside.
That afternoon, he forced himself to organize his camping gear. He took the tent out of its storage bag and checked the poles, stakes, and groundsheet. He spread the sleeping bag out to air on the balcony. The stove head, cookware, and water filter were laid out one by one across the floor, like an inventory ritual.
These things made him feel safe. Each one had a clear function, a clear place, and a clear method of use. There were no gray areas.
He was crouched on the floor, wiping down the stove head, when his hand stopped.
He was thinking about the smell. Dried flowers. What kind had his mother kept? He couldn't remember. It wasn't that he couldn't remember the name of the flower. He couldn't remember the image. The living room, dried flowers, his mother—those three words should have formed a single scene, but all he had in his mind were the words, without the image.
Like a photograph with the picture removed, leaving only the caption.
He set down the stove head, stood up, and walked to the window. Outside was the gray afternoon city, a hazy sky, and the cranes at a distant construction site moving slowly.
He picked up his phone and opened his photo album. He swiped backward. Camping photos, pictures from company dinners, a streetscape he had photographed on a business trip to Japan. Farther back. More camping photos. A selfie of him standing on some mountaintop, wearing a hat, his expression flat.
He kept swiping until he reached the bottom of the album.
The earliest photo was from four years ago. An empty room with white walls and a wood floor, sunlight coming through the window and slicing the shadows into geometric shapes. He had taken it just after moving into the apartment.
There was nothing from before four years ago.
He closed his phone and set it facedown on the table.
That night, he didn't cook, and he didn't order takeout. He sat at the dining table facing the wall and drank a glass of water. Then he drank another.
At 10:51 p.m., he shut down his laptop. Nearly half an hour earlier than usual.
He completed every step of his routine. But in the bathroom that night, he stood in front of the mirror longer than usual. He looked at his reflection, trying to find the wrongness he'd seen that morning. He couldn't. Everything was normal.
He lay down and put on his headphones. That day, he chose “Rain — Creek.” Volume 50.
Fifty. Eight notches higher than the 42 he had used on the first day. He noticed it, but didn't think much of it.
He closed his eyes.
This time, he dreamed.
In the dream, he was standing in a room. It wasn't his room. It was larger than his, with a higher ceiling. The light was yellow, like evening. The floor was wood, and there was a smell he knew well but couldn't name.
There was a dining table in the room. Three place settings were arranged on it.
He stood beside the table, looking down at the three place settings. The bowls were white, the chopsticks wooden, everything arranged perfectly. He knew who had set them out. He knew who the other two places belonged to. But he couldn't remember the faces of those two people.
He reached out to pick up one pair of chopsticks.
The instant his fingers touched them, he heard a sound.
It wasn't coming from inside the wall. It was behind him.
Very close. Right beside his ear. As if someone had leaned in, their lips almost touching his ear, and whispered a single word on a breath.
He couldn't make out what the word was. But his body understood it—his shoulders jerked upward, every hair on the back of his neck stood on end, and his stomach clenched as if a hand had gripped it from inside.
He woke up.
3:11 a.m. One side of his headphones had fallen off. Rain leaked into his left ear, thin and faint, as if it were coming from somewhere far away.
He lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for his heartbeat to slow.
The wall on his right was silent.
But he wasn't sure whether that was because the sound had stopped, or because it had been there all along and he could no longer tell it apart from his own heartbeat.