Chapter 7: Chapter Five — The Paradox of Reality

Chapter Five — The Paradox of Reality

At 3:50 in the afternoon on the twenty-eighth, Jianxiang’s heavy-lidded eyes fluttered open. He saw Zheng Shaode standing before him, neatly dressed and smiling, and only then realized he had been asleep in his hospital bed for eight hours.

“Senior, still lazing about?”
Shaode teased.

“Ah…”
Jianxiang’s voice came out hoarse. “You’re here?”

His vision cleared. Behind Shaode stood the young nurse who had tended him these past days; her clear eyes were slightly narrowed as if she’d just been laughing with someone. Jianxiang sat up slowly.

“Hmm.”

“Where’s the captain?”

Shaode’s face turned grave. “He’s at Zhong Sizao’s case. Another unidentified young man was found dead in 401 — preliminary estimate is he was killed last night.”

Jianxiang’s thoughts flashed to the bloodstained shirt he’d taken from the scene and hidden under his bed at home. Before six in the morning he’d left Xia Yongyu’s apartment, taking the bloodied shirt and the photos and notebooks he’d found; he had returned to the hospital later, around seven.

“Around 8:30 this morning someone from the bureau went through the victim’s belongings in 401, and another young man was found dead in the bedroom,”
Shaode continued, pulling a chair and sitting. The nurse — sensing the conversation was confidential — slipped away quietly.

“This time there’s a long wound on the left side of his neck, about ten centimeters long and seven centimeters wide, more than two inches deep. The fatal weapon was a small garden spade — the kind Zhong used to dig stones to stuff into the iron cabinet that blocked his door. It looks like the same tool.”
Shaode’s voice was incredulous. “I can’t imagine such a blunt thing could carve out a chunk of neck flesh. It must have been driven by some machine with brutal force — but what kind of machine?”

Jianxiang said nothing. Shaode regarded him sympathetically, as if thinking the senior still lacked the strength to talk.

“My assignment today was to sort Zhong’s purchase receipts, but I asked the captain if I could help investigate the new murder. He wouldn’t let me — he went himself to oversee the scene,”
Shaode said, flipping his notebook to the morning’s entries.

“There are sixty-three receipts in all from 401. They were in the toppled desk drawer in the bedroom near the door. Since Zhong’s girlfriend stopped coming around a month ago and he didn’t leave the house much, I sorted the receipts into those before March 1 and those after March 1.”

“After March 1 there are seven large purchases and many small ones — all at big-box stores, clustered in time: cans of food, bottled water, carpentry materials, and tools. Among those I found the spade — forty-seven receipts in that group.”

“As for the sixteen receipts before March 1, they’re mostly for film and blank tapes. I thought maybe I’d find restaurant invoices there and could trace whether he ate out with a woman, but there wasn’t a single one. It’s a pity.”

“Still, given Zhong’s fixed shopping locations, that woman may have frequented those same shops. Perhaps that’s where they met.”
He paused. “But —”

“But what?”

“The police did produce composite sketches of the mysterious woman from tenant statements, but different witnesses contradicted the images. The portraits diverge; we don’t have a reliable likeness. If we chase either sketch, the credibility’s low.”

Shaode closed his notebook and shook his head: even if that trail could lead somewhere, it was risky. He swallowed, then shifted topics.

“From colleagues doing forensics, I learned more about the new murder. Aside from the wound, they found the victim’s pockets had been searched. The corpse’s final lying position does not match the initial position at death — the bloodstain patterns confirm that. When the victim first died, the posture compressed the pockets, so someone must have rifled through and removed any identifying documents, then changed the body’s position to conceal that fact.”

Even though Jianxiang already knew much of this, the thought tightened his chest. Today’s forensic methods could read a scene coldly; when Jianxiang had moved Xia’s body earlier, he’d not paused much — any clumsy attempt to hide evidence would be revealed by the lab. He felt the chill of that truth now.

“The captain was supposed to come collect you for discharge, but this new case kept him tied up. My part of the work finished early, so he had me come check on you,”
Shaode said.

Jianxiang listened as though calm; in fact his heart hammered. Gao Qinfú had indeed worked to shield Jianxiang: he’d kept the most imaginative and incisive detective, Shaode, away from 401. Shaode, perceptive and quick, was exactly the sort who would sniff out inconsistencies.

“I’m about recovered,”
Jianxiang said. “The doctor says no infection. Once I pack, I’ll do the discharge.”

“That’s great,”
Shaode said, pleased. “We’ve been shorthanded without you these past few days. With you back, even the oddest case will crack faster.”

Jianxiang gave an absent reply. Privately he worried about the captain’s position. Shaode — though knowing little about Xia’s death — still offered sharp deductions that made Jianxiang sweat.

“This unidentified man had no ID on him; I think the killer took it,”
Shaode said. “The murderer didn’t want us to know the victim’s identity, perhaps because whatever tied them together is secret: the killer and the victim had no overt relationship.”

“If we trace that back to Zhong’s case — Zhong left no traces of friends in his room — then the killer probably scrubbed any link between them. So the killer and Zhong also had no apparent relation. In other words, the two victims can be unconnected to each other, but both share a hidden link to the killer. The killer needn’t be a friend — actually, the killer is unlikely to be a friend.”

The logic stunned Jianxiang. Yes — from a realistic perspective, Zhong’s social life was a mystery; if any trace remained, a careful killer would erase it. Thus the conclusion that “the killer and Zhong have no overt relationship” is plausible.

And by the same reasoning, the nameless victim fits the same profile. If you adopt that real-world view, the only person who fits all those constraints might be Wu Jianxiang himself.

He knew he was innocent; he could not refute the line of reasoning. Fiction writers sometimes make the police the murderer for a twist, and experienced readers might suspect a cop instantly — but Jianxiang never expected to be the plausible target of precisely that sort of argument.

More worrying: Shaode, outside work, loved detective novels.

A suffocating sense — as if a collar tightened around his neck — crept into Jianxiang.

Shaode was oblivious. He cheerfully greeted the nurse who had been caring for Jianxiang, and the doctor responsible for treating Jianxiang’s wounds joined them. After the discharge formalities the two officers headed out together, mounting their motorcycles in the hospital lot.

“Senior, want to swing by 401 to take a look?”
Shaode asked.

At ten that night on the twenty-eighth, Jianxiang returned to Xia Yongyu’s apartment.

Leaving the bureau, he could not calm himself. No matter how hard Captain Gao had tried to protect him, there was no stopping the objective facts: someone — or some people — had entered 401 on the night of the second murder. Although Gao had managed to reframe the caretaker’s testimony, painting them as absent-minded, colleagues now seriously considered the possibility that someone had tampered with the surveillance tapes.

Forensics also concluded that the “killer” had used the scene’s bathroom and washed away blood droplets that had splattered onto their clothing.

When Jianxiang came back to 401 at midnight, Captain Gao showed no unnatural expression. Jianxiang himself, standing again in the room that felt like an infernal dream, could not hide how much the new murder weighed on him. Shaode moved around the scene, talking to other officers — and Jianxiang felt his teeth clench at every step.

He kept telling himself that his conduct might arouse Shaode’s suspicions, yet all he showed outwardly was awkward silence.

He could only nod stiffly while the crime scene techs collected samples of Xia’s blood from the floor.

The night’s search meeting left Jianxiang crushed. When the meeting adjourned Gao’s embarrassed look seemed to say, “I can do only so much.” Gao alone could not block a team of detectives; whenever someone proposed a new hypothesis, the others would iterate and test it, consulting Gao in the process. As their conclusions edged closer to reality, Jianxiang felt as if handcuffs were slipping over him.

One small ray of hope came from Zhong’s receipts.

Shaode had noted that Zhong’s purchases before March 1 were mostly film and blank tapes. Unlike Jianxiang, none of the team actually had a photo of Zhang Zhimei. That gave Jianxiang an advantage: he could try to find Zhimei before the squad did. Using Zhong’s shopping locations cross-referenced with clues from Xia’s home, he might locate her quickly.

—Only I can find Zhang Zhimei. I must be faster than everyone else.

If the squad found her first, she’d be in grave danger. In a world that refuses to accept “demonic ghost murders,” the police would construct an explanation to lock her up. They would arrest her before someone realized Jianxiang himself was an obvious suspect.

But thinking it through, Jianxiang felt powerless. He believed in Zhimei’s innocence, but that faith might only endanger him. Even if he could protect her, his own position would erode.

He returned to Xia’s study to look for intersections between Xia’s activities and his own.

The room was hollow and silent. Objects lay as they had the day before; Jianxiang moved slowly, as if resuming a paused film.

There were many notebooks piled on the desk — a dozen at least — and three or four dozen on the shelf. Most contained strange diagrams: geometric forms, curves, arrows, pages filled as if they were a script or talismans. Each design covered a page like practice for ritual drawing.

In the blank spots of the diagrams, odd sequences of letters and numbers appeared. Jianxiang’s English was good enough to know those sequences were not ordinary words — entries like “zi,” “ninib,” or “utuk” were not dictionary terms.

Beyond the “Summary of Strange Events,” there was nothing else in Chinese: no address books, no letters, no business cards. Jianxiang sat at the desk, thinking long and hard, and could not find another direction for investigation.

He opened the window to let stale air out. A cool night breeze flowed in and eased his fatigue a little.

If only he could bring in another medium to interrogate Xia — Jianxiang thought. Xia had said he would reveal everything if one good medium called the dead into presence. But where could Jianxiang find such a medium?

His eyes fell on the bookcase and stopped at a volume titled Studies in the Personality of Mediums. He took it down to have something to do with his hands.

The early chapters recounted famous historical mediums.

—In late nineteenth-century America, the most renowned female medium was Mrs. Piper. She first discovered mediumnic traits after childbirth in 1884… (summary of Piper’s trance state and manifestations).

—In 1967, eleven-year-old Matthew Manning in Britain experienced poltergeist-like events at home and later produced automatic drawings reminiscent of famous painters, which researchers could not attribute to fraud.

—Pearl Curran of St. Louis channeled an entity calling itself Patience Worth in the early 20th century, producing high-quality poetry and historical fiction that scholars could not explain by ordinary means.

—Daniel Douglas Home of Scotland reportedly floated and displayed other uncanny phenomena in the 19th century.

As Jianxiang scanned the pages, the accounts — so credible-sounding — whispered almost like proof that Xia had real mediumistic abilities. If Xia could summon Zhong’s soul, then with another medium’s help the dead might speak.

But Xia hadn’t told Jianxiang where to find such a collaborator; and from Xia’s notes and the books on the shelf, it looked like Xia had learned his techniques from self-study — no teacher, no circle of peers.

Then something clicked: the photographs. Yes — the pictures in the darkroom.

Xia blackmailed the photographed people — high-society figures. In other words, he had contacts: the people he’d extorted had to receive payment somehow. Some would use bank transfers, but those leave traces. Wealthy, reputation-conscious people might prefer in-person cash exchanges.

If the extortion involved physical meetups, Jianxiang could, in principle, identify those people from the photos and ask them about Xia’s recent movements. Tracing Xia’s early-March activities combined with Zhong’s receipts could narrow the search for Zhang Zhimei.

Feeling reinvigorated, Jianxiang prepared to go downstairs.

Then a counter-thought struck him down.

Yes, he could identify some of the public figures in the photos and ask about extortion payments. But those matters involve intimate, shameful secrets — would any of them admit to being blackmailed? They might see Jianxiang’s inquiry as malicious or suspect him of being yet another extortionist, a corrupt cop seeking leverage.

Moreover, many of those figures were acquainted with high-ranking police officials. Even if they didn’t know Jianxiang’s motives, they could easily use their connections to ruin a small detective’s career. And doing so would increase suspicion among colleagues — especially Shaode.

He had no choice. There really was no viable option.… No — there’s one more way. The photographs themselves.

If Xia Yongyu had been taking pictures to blackmail people, he must have been tailing them first.

The relative positions in each photo mark where Xia was standing. So if you can identify the photo’s shooting locations and match them to timestamps, you can trace the outline of his stalking route.

Most of Xia’s time was spent trailing and photographing people. The place where he met Zhang Zhimei is very likely somewhere along that route.

The thought struck Jianxiang and he put down Studies in the Personality of Mediums, leaping out of the study. Before he went downstairs he glanced once more at the study door and suddenly realized: this room was Xia’s sealed sanctuary for practicing hypnosis, mediumship, and necromancy.

From the 29th on, the task force on the Zhong Sizao murder buckled down to identifying the nameless corpse. Detectives on the streets carried photographs of the unidentified man and walked the neighborhood near 401, asking around in hopes of quickly clarifying where the man might have come from.

Jianxiang’s assigned line of inquiry remained what Captain Gao had set: find Zhong’s source of income.

He kept a blank expression as he drove across Kaohsiung, ignoring his colleagues’ animated talk about Xia’s identity and the autopsy results. He had to chase down Zhong’s financial trail.

Zhong’s bank records showed a monthly deposit in the low twenty-thousands, but the dates were irregular and the cents varied. That modest sum supported his life; Zhong’s income, while steady, didn’t look like a normal salary from a company.

Jianxiang had no appetite for the work. Zhang Zhimei’s image crowded his mind. After leaving Xia’s place he had been exhausted, yet he kept replaying the DV tape—her smile and voice seeping into him again and again. He had spent the whole previous night at Xia’s home organizing a hundred or so extortion photos and trying to infer where each was taken. It had been grueling; the photos’ vague backgrounds, the dim lighting, and nondescript interiors offered few clues.

Worse, Xia’s notebook recorded that he, too, had tried to find Zhang Zhimei — he had already combed the places where the couple had met and gone on dates and turned up nothing. Jianxiang felt like he was repeating someone else’s dead end.

Going out and comparing the photos to the street in person would be a colossal waste of time. Even if he pinned every location down, that still might not reveal Xia’s actual stalking route: a tail is secret by design, known only to the tailer.

He thought, helplessly — everything I’m doing is already in Xia’s purview.

Zhong’s shopping locations and Xia’s movements didn’t intersect. Apart from both having been Zhang Zhimei’s boyfriend, the two victims seemed to live in different worlds.

At 3:40 p. M. Jianxiang returned to the Sanmin precinct, exhausted. That was the earliest time field officers usually came back to process leads. Only two or three colleagues were still on the floor; to his surprise, Shaode was already there.

“Xiao Zheng, you’re back so early?”
Jianxiang said.

“Yes.”
Shaode’s tone was ordinary, but Jianxiang felt as if he’d been hit in the chest with a slab of dry ice. “Senior, do you have a moment? There’s something I want to discuss with you.”

“What’s that?”

“Something about Zhong Sizao.”

Jianxiang froze.

He forced calm into his voice. “Oh? Go on.”

“This isn’t the place,”
Shaode said. “The others aren’t back yet. Let’s step outside.”

“Okay.”

They greeted the desk officer and walked out to the parking canopy. The traffic on Jianguo Road roared around them; the engine noise ricocheted less than a meter between the two men. Despite the racket, both officers’ inner worlds were ice-cold.

They were silent for a long while. Finally, Shaode — who had insisted they speak outdoors — opened his mouth.

“Senior,”
he said, “do you know who killed Zhong Sizao?”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it was you!”

Jianxiang drew a tight breath. The air in Kaohsiung smelled foul that day; he didn’t reply immediately. He knew that any outburst now would be disastrous. He had to remain composed, construct defenses, and resist provocation.

“What do you mean?”
he asked.

“I’ve found you to be the person most suspicious in these cases,”
Shaode said with firm conviction. “Senior. But I don’t want to take this straight to the captain. I want to hear your explanation first.”

“Explain what?”

“The motive for killing Zhong Sizao and that nameless man.”

“I had no motive,”
Jianxiang said coldly. “Besides, where’s your evidence? How am I a suspect?”

“You left the precinct last night and you didn’t go straight home.”

Jianxiang felt his heart skip: that was when he’d gone to Xia’s place. “Were you following me?”

“No. I noticed you didn’t plan to go home.”
Shaode’s tone was cool. “You walked out right after the search meeting. That’s not your habit.”

“Ha! Since when did you learn mind reading?”

“I haven’t. But in the meeting I saw you weren’t interested in the planned investigative work for tomorrow. The meeting wrapped and you left immediately. That’s not like you.”

Jianxiang had thought taking the longer route to Xia’s would deflect suspicion. He hadn’t realized he’d been so transparent.

“Normally, when there’s a major case you immerse yourself in it,”
Shaode continued. “Look at the Mrs. Ge rat case — you stayed in that building all night without sleep. But now you seem indifferent to breakthroughs or bottlenecks. That looks like you already know the case’s inside story! Or rather — you carry an unsolved personal problem, and your direction isn’t aligned with the team’s. You hurried off because you were trying to solve it.”

“You’re imagining things.”

Shaode ignored that. “I have evidence. Half an hour after you left the precinct I called your home. You weren’t there. Your aunt told me you’d come home the night before. You also returned the night before that.”

Two late-night returns — last night at midnight, the night before in the early morning.

“…!”
Jianxiang realized he had overslept that morning and rushed to the precinct, leaving breakfast untouched. He’d had no chance to hear about that call.

“You were still hospitalized that night,”
Shaode said, narrowing his gaze. “Your brother is serving in the military. Who else would be at your house? If you truly never left the hospital that night, then how come you apparently slept so much that day? If you had been out, the hallway cameras might not show you, but footage can be swapped and testimony misremembered — none of that proves you never went to 401.”

Jianxiang was struck dumb by Shaode’s sharp line of reasoning, but he tried to push back. “Shaode, even if I acted oddly, even if I went home, none of that proves I murdered the nameless man. You can suspect I left the hospital, but you can’t conclude I entered 401 just from that.”

Shaode took a breath. “Right — you’re entitled to your silence about the last two nights.”

Up to that point Jianxiang had managed a fragile defense.

“So I want to discuss the Zhong case with you,”
Shaode said.

Jianxiang nodded without expression.

“From the start I thought how you solved the rat case was unusual,”
Shaode said. “Yes, your deduction fit the facts. But I don’t believe an ordinary cop could make such a rapid discovery, then casually say, ‘sleepwalking is medically called somnambulism,’ without prior knowledge.”

“If I told you I had sleepwalking as a child, would you believe it?”

Shaode blinked. “Senior… That would explain it. Because you had it, you’d know the term.”

But he added: I think you just lucked into an opportunity and steered the team into opening 401.

“Shaode, don’t forget: 401 was a sealed room from the inside. Nobody could have left it.”

“It was sealed all right,”
Shaode conceded. “But there’s one exception — you.”

Impossible!

The iron cabinet full of stones blocked the door from the inside; all the windows were barred with heavy planks. The only tiny opening was a kitchen drain hole that only a rat could pass through.

Shaode’s face lit with an idea. “There are three central mysteries in this case. One: where did out-of-work Zhong get his money? Two: why did the killer mimic the ‘Bone-Eating Demon’ Hong Zecen’s method? Three: how was the room made into a sealed chamber? I think these three are linked; solve them one by one and you’ll find the killer. I’ll save the sealed-room part for last.”

“As I was sorting the receipts,”
Shaode continued, “I found something odd: the sixteen receipts before March 1 were mostly for film and blank tapes. He visited one major camera shop twice a day, buying a roll or a tape each time for eight consecutive days.”

“Who buys a single roll at a time? It’s odd. Then I realized a better explanation: Zhong didn’t care about photography. He kept going to the shop to scope it out. He’d stolen an expensive camera from his former employer’s shop — maybe he was stealing from the big store too.”
The shop owner confirmed a theft in late February.

“If he’d been fencing stolen goods, that explains his irregular small sums in the bank. The box of unlabeled tapes in his living room? He could have been trying to use them but didn’t know how to record properly.”

Jianxiang, though now confronted by Shaode, couldn’t help admiring the reasoning. The DV tape Jianxiang had kept — likely Zhang Zhimei’s gift — might indeed be the only trace of Zhong’s love, the reason he kept that tape with him.

Shaode went on: “The second mystery is the similarity to Hong Zecen’s murders. But Hong was executed years ago — he couldn’t have returned. For the Hong-style details to appear only in some cases, you’d think someone had inside knowledge. That’s where you come in.”

He stated bluntly that Jianxiang had once taken a keen, personal interest in profiling Hong Zecen — even attempting to liaise with higher-level investigators and Professors like Li Gandan. Jianxiang’s private study of those cases, Shaode argued, gave him the knowledge to imitate Hong’s method.

“Plus,”
Shaode said, “you were the first to enter 401 after its breach.”

Jianxiang recoiled slightly: the first person to enter a locked room — how did that implicate him?

The “sealed room” had been Jianxiang’s last refuge: if Zhong had indeed been killed by something supernatural, the room had no human exit. Jianxiang remembered being hypnotized by Xia and, while unconscious, touching things that affected the crime scene — maybe Shaode planned to use that as a supporting point.

Shaode’s next line was cold and precise: only you, he said, could plausibly have escaped the apparent sealed-room scenario.

Jianxiang protested. Shaode outlined a plausible, methodical plan: the killer could have climbed out the bedroom window (which, though on the fourth floor, faced a narrow alley and could be descended with rope), tied the rope to some high fixture, gone down to the street, then returned later with help to break back in through the door and stage the scene — placing the heavy cabinet against the door and nailing boards on the windows so the room appeared sealed from the inside. Small pre-drilled holes for the nails would make the sound of nailing much quieter.

Hearing Shaode’s reasoning, Jianxiang’s mind went numb. The argument was elegant; if he weren’t the suspect, he might applaud the cleverness. But the logic tightened the noose.

“Shaode…”
Jianxiang forced out, “your sealed-room theory is brilliant, but you forgot one thing: if I had re-entered the room and nailed the boards back myself, the noise would have been loud and someone would have come running.”

“I know,”
Shaode said with a light laugh. “But you wouldn’t hammer them in. You’d pre-drill holes in the wood and the wall and drive nails that were slightly larger than the holes. That reduces the noise a great deal.”

The plane of their conversation sharpened into accusation; outside, the city continued to hum. Inside Jianxiang, the friction between the world’s cold logic and the otherworldly horrors he had witnessed tightened into a single, terrifying paradox.

Shaode’s expression hardened into that of a presiding judge sitting high at the center of a court.

“The crime scene was a bedroom. When you tacked the boards on you could have muffled the sound with whatever pillows were at hand, and the tool you used to drive those nails is the same weapon you used to kill the monstrous rat — your police baton!”

All the way through that day’s case meeting, Jianxiang felt as if he were sitting in the precinct as an accused man awaiting judgment.

A voice in his head kept telling him that tonight might be his last night free.

“Senior,”
Shaode said, “whether you admit to murder or not won’t stop me from gathering the full evidence. Yes, you’re right: I can’t yet prove you knew Zhong Sizao personally. But if Zhong was fencing camera gear, there must be an invisible link between you two. I’ll find that link soon enough.”

Shaode didn’t belabor the point during the search meeting, nor did he reveal his sealed-room theory. The favor he did for their friendship was to promise that, once he established a connection — that is, Jianxiang’s motive — he would report everything to Captain Gao.

Of course there was no link between Jianxiang and Zhong, so Shaode would not find one. Yet how could Jianxiang be sure there wouldn’t be another coincidence — some tipster with a fleeting, one-time contact who just happened to be Zhong’s fence?

At one point Jianxiang had been tempted to tell Shaode the truth. But he could foresee Shaode’s reaction: if he didn’t accept that it was merely a coincidental alignment of facts, Shaode might conclude he was inventing a coincidence to clear himself — or he might lock Jianxiang away in a psychiatric facility.

The situation felt like Xia Yongyu’s attempt to lift his curse: desperate and doomed.

Was there really no way out? With handcuffs looming, Jianxiang’s single desire remained to find Zhang Zhimei and uncover the truth behind the curse.

He returned to Xia’s house for the third time. Even if this led to another dead end, he had to try — maybe there was one last scrap of evidence he’d missed. He entered the study with that resolve.

The study window stood open; the night wind was stronger than the night before. He remembered rushing downstairs after the darkroom photos and forgetting to close the window.

The open Studies in the Personality of Mediums lay on the desk, the pages fluttering in the cold breeze.

When he went to pick it up, a single glance at the spread pinned his feet to the floor. A violent chill ran through him that he could not shake.

The heading read: “Chapter Thirteen — Initial Techniques for Self-Training as a Medium.”

Within five minutes, Jianxiang had the book tucked into his scooter’s storage box and was roaring off.

First, he had to go home. After that, 401.

This was his last chance. The instant he’d seen “Initial Techniques for Self-Training as a Medium,” all those accounts of famous mediums he’d skimmed the night before slammed back into his mind in an electric flash.

—Mrs. Piper’s vague premonitions and inner warnings…

—Pearl Curran’s automatic writings and the convulsive frenzy that accompanied them…

Talent. That was the quality of a medium.

Reading the book’s instructions carefully, he found the claim that mediums are born with a particular constitution: an innate sensitivity that makes them a bridge between the living and the dead. Such people are easily affected by external signals — not only from other humans but from everything around them: earth, trees, animals — invisible frequencies that tug at the medium’s third eye.

Those predisposed souls often hear cries at night, have bizarre nightmares, bouts of nausea, tremors, or even episodes of psychosis. Jianxiang realized, with a jolt, that he himself had the medium’s traits. He had been a sleepwalker since childhood; lately, those sudden shudders at his chest had intensified. Especially during this investigation, the sensations had become more frequent and more violent.

—If there was no other medium to call, the only remaining method was to become the medium himself.

If he could take Xia’s spirit into his own body, he might get access to what Xia knew. Previously Xia had made Jianxiang the interrogator when he summoned Zhong’s spirit — but Jianxiang was alone now. He would have to do this himself.

He had to fetch his brother’s DV camera. Xia’s was of a different model and Jianxiang didn’t know how to operate it; there wasn’t time to learn. He packed the camera into a paper bag and rode back, feeling the last-chance tension of a soldier with a single bullet left in the chamber.

Seeing the chapter title had also brought back the medium anecdotes that had formerly seemed merely curious. Mrs. Piper sometimes had evil spirits that possessed her and made her wild; Pearl Curran lost consciousness and wrote as if seized by a drug-induced frenzy. Those accounts suggested that mediumship was a dangerous talent.

But Jianxiang had no choice. He would set up the camera, speak his questions aloud, and attempt to perform the necromancy: let Xia’s soul answer onto tape, through his body.

He arrived at 401 for the third time with that resolve. The bedroom’s air felt heavier than the last time. The superintendent ignored his visit, as if indifferent to everything that had happened in the building.

Up the narrow stairs a faint amber glow marked the way. In the bedroom, Xia’s body had been removed; the floor was chalked with the outline of a human figure and new evidence tags had been affixed near the blood-splatter.

He set up the camera: tripod, tape, power. He pulled a stool close and sat in front of the lens. He had prepared his questions and waited ten seconds before starting.

“Xia Yongyu,”
he said to the camera, “if you can use my body and eyes to record onto this tape, then my first attempt at necromancy has succeeded. I’m sorry — I failed to accomplish either of the two things you asked before you died. I still can’t find Zhang Zhimei, and I can’t find any other medium of comparable ability. So I must try this myself. From your notebooks I found a reference book; the characteristics match mine. This is risky, maybe foolish, but it’s the only plan I have. My colleagues already suspect me — if I do nothing, there will be no time to probe your ‘terrible curse.’”

He recited the questions he wanted answered: describe the strange dream he’d had and how that dream related to the ability to see ghosts; explain in detail the nightly phenomena he experienced; recount, step by step, how he met and courted Zhang Zhimei — anything that might point toward her whereabouts or reveal the mechanism of the curse. He said the tape would run an hour; he asked Xia to use that time well. He admitted he didn’t know how long a soul-possession would last; if Xia could stay in him until the truth was found, all the better.

Jianxiang had never spoken to a camera like that. His voice felt flat and wooden as he finished and replayed the recorded segment. The person in the playback looked like him but somehow not him.

Satisfied the recording had been made correctly, he turned off the camera and moved on to the ritual.

He recalled Xia’s last summoning. Xia had struck him as he’d regained consciousness; later, Jianxiang had watched Xia sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, muttering incantations, the lights extinguished — the silhouette of a conjurer calling a spirit.

Jianxiang followed the book’s instructions: he sat cross-legged, adjusted his breathing to even four-second counts in and out, focused on the “third eye” between his brows, and intoned the Hebrew-style litany the book suggested for summoning a dead person’s last awareness.

After ten minutes his limbs grew heavy, his heartbeat slowed, and a haze threatened the edges of his mind. Suddenly a tidal wave of chill and dread hit him; his breath stalled, tinnitus thundered in his ears, and he felt as if drowning in deep sea pressure.

He tried to preserve consciousness but could not.

When he opened his eyes he first saw a patch of black. As his sight adjusted he realized he was on the bedroom floor, his clothes soaked with sweat, limbs weak. He had no memory of what he'd done during the blackout.

The penlight lay several paces away; the camera was pointed at him.

Had it worked?

He crawled to the camera, switched it on, and saw the tape had reached its end. Someone had manipulated the recorder — and it could only have been Xia.

His breath caught as he hit rewind and then play. The screen showed himself sitting on the floor, alert and speaking in a voice that was not his.

“Officer,”
the recorded voice said, with a strangely admiring tone, “perhaps I should add an adjective: supremely clever officer. I did not expect you to risk so much to summon my soul.”

Jianxiang was stunned. The man on the screen was him, but his manner, his cadence, the feel were different — like a face swapped in a movie.

This, he realized with a cold certainty, was Xia Yongyu’s summoned soul.

“I’m sorry,”
the voice said. “I can’t find Zhang Zhimei for you. My soul cannot leave this room long or remain in the world for long. I’ll use my last strength to answer your questions.”

The speech was hollow, each word strained by Xia’s ruined throat; the fatal wound around his neck had left him barely able to form sound. Seeing his own body speak with another’s consciousness filled Jianxiang with an odd mix of awe and revulsion.

“I met Zhimei on Jianguo Road,”
Xia recounted, coughing. “Near Zhongshan Road under the arcade — many small clothes shops and stalls. I remember it clearly: March 4, a Saturday afternoon. The crowd was thick. I was working — you can imagine from my darkroom photos my trade was blackmail. Maybe you think that’s despicable. I don’t want to hear your judgement. It was thrilling and profitable. That day I lost sight of a rich heir and his secret companion in the crowd. I drifted into a small shop and that’s where I saw Zhimei. The shop felt lonely; she looked lonely. My sixth sense told me she carried a heavy fear. I’m not a mind-reader, but I can sense when two people are entangled. I trailed her, we met, and I fell in love.”

He described courting her — walks, dinners, drives, the lock on the darkroom door when she came over. But the danger began with a nightmare.

Xia’s voice, speaking through Jianxiang’s frame on the tape, described the dream in terrifying detail: a midnight graveyard, a monstrous dead hand clawing up from beneath a shattered stele, a withered old man who called himself Cornelius Agrippa, who painted a sigil on Xia’s palm with his claw, letting Xia open a gate into the nether world by knocking twenty times and turning a “key” drawn on his hand.

In the dream, when Xia opened that iron gate, he heard screaming and saw a dark throng beyond, and it was only a dream until he woke and found fresh small cuts on his palm and the bedroom door mysteriously ajar. From then on, he began to see and hear things at night: ghoulish figures prowling, the sound of scratching at doors, the vision of a woman with a butcher’s cleaver battering the balcony glass, a head in a glass cabinet — all the grotesque horrors he recorded in his notebook.

He had tried to protect himself by barricading the door with a heavy cabinet and staying awake all night to hold it in place. He said he believed that the dreams had given him an ability — a cursed faculty to perceive the dead — and that the apparitions grew so violent they could physically attack.

When the taped Xia grew hoarse, he urged Jianxiang: “Find Zhimei. I loved her even in that short time. She needs help. When I hypnotized her before she lost memory, I baked into her subconscious a ‘key’ — a trigger sentence. It’s like those TV plots where a keyword makes someone obey. This key is a fifty-word sentence. When Zhimei hears the tenth word, her head begins to hurt; at the twentieth word she is likely to pass out. But you must speak all fifty words directly into her ear; even if she resists and goes mad she must hear them through to the end. I was too tender, and several times I stopped at the twentieth word and couldn’t bring myself to finish.”

He laughed weakly. He said he could have taught Jianxiang a gentler method but time had run out; his spirit was fading. If Jianxiang revived him again he should not bother — he had already exhausted himself answering.

“Use your time well,”
he chuckled, and warned that the trigger sentence was powerful and hard to control: if you stop at the fortieth word instead of finishing it, Zhimei will have an over eighty percent chance of going mad.

The tape ran out.