2

Lin’s apartment was too quiet.

The usual sounds of the city—traffic rumble, air conditioning hum, distant shouting from the mahjong parlor below—had dulled, as if his windows were sealed with cotton. Even the ticking of his kitchen clock seemed to falter now and then, skipping or echoing faintly.

He tossed his bag on the couch and locked the door behind him, twisting the deadbolt harder than necessary. The apartment was small, sterile, and filled with secondhand furniture that didn’t quite fit. The walls were bare except for a few framed prints of urban ruins. Most people found it depressing.

Lin found it… honest.

He sat on the floor, back against the couch, and opened his camera. The screen flickered once—no glitch, just static from a bad sensor. But it made his skin crawl.

The photo was still there.

The mirror shot. The woman in red.

He studied it again, now in the safety of his apartment’s dim lamplight. But it didn’t feel safe. The figure was too clear. She wasn’t just in the photo; she inhabited it. The depth, the detail—it was like looking through a window.

He zoomed in.

Her expression was complicated. Not smiling, not frowning. Her lips were parted, yes, but not in surprise. They were shaped around something—a word or a note. She had been singing. Performing. The muscle tension in her neck suggested projection. Her eyes, wide and dark, held something close to grief.

Or longing.

Lin leaned in. The background behind her flickered with the faintest orange tone. Flame? A reflection? It didn’t look like the backstage of the opera house. There were no ropes, no curtains, no dust. Just a shadowy, golden haze.

He shut the camera with a click and set it down.

He’d never believed in ghosts.

He believed in sadness.

And whatever this was, it felt like a sadness that had never been given a name.

The bathroom was the first place he noticed the change.

He brushed his teeth like always—shirtless, tired, blinking away the beginnings of a headache. The overhead bulb was dim but steady, casting his reflection in pale yellow. He leaned forward, spit, rinsed, looked up.

And froze.

The mirror was… warped.

Not obviously. Not like a funhouse mirror. But subtly. The edges bowed inward, just slightly, as if something behind the glass was pulling it toward itself. The center of his reflection shimmered—not enough to be clearly wrong, just enough to make his stomach lurch.

He reached forward.

His fingers hovered just above the surface. It didn’t feel cold. It didn’t feel warm. It felt… absent. As if something had stepped aside to let his touch pass through—but didn’t.

And then, from the edge of the mirror, a fog spread.

Slow and sure. Condensation. But he hadn’t showered. There was no steam.

The fog formed a breath.

A shape.

Words written in breath.

Three characters.

林谢.

His name.

He stumbled back, knocking over his toothbrush cup. Water sloshed across the counter. The writing vanished as quickly as it came.

He turned on the tap, splashed his face, forced himself to breathe.

"Get it together," he muttered. "It’s just suggestion. Leftover light. Ghosting from the camera’s flash."

He didn’t believe it.

That night, sleep came slowly, then violently.

He dreamt of the opera house again—but not as he had seen it. Not in ruin.

It was alive.

The chandeliers were bright. Music swelled, a strange hybrid of strings and something older, hollow, like a guzheng but deeper. He stood at the edge of a full house. Red lanterns lit the ceiling. Nobles laughed behind lace fans. The scent of opium and rose water hung heavy in the air.

Then silence.

On stage, the curtain lifted.

She stood there.

The woman in red.

No microphone. No speakers. Just her voice.

But Lin couldn’t hear it.

He saw her mouth move—slow, deliberate, mournful. He strained, leaned forward, desperate to hear.

Still, nothing.

Then she turned her head. Looked straight at him.

And sang a final note, too silent to hear—too loud to ignore.

He woke up on the bathroom floor.

His head throbbed.

He must have gotten up in the night. Sleepwalking? He hadn’t done that since childhood. He pushed himself upright slowly, wiping a dried trickle of blood from his nose. His mouth tasted of iron and heat.

The mirror loomed above him. For a moment, he expected it to be broken.

It wasn’t.

But something was off.

He rose to his feet and looked.

She was there.

Not a vision. Not a flicker. Not a ghost.

Just her—clear and still and wrong.

Her face filled the reflection. Behind her, gold mist swirled. Her lips moved, slow and sad, forming syllables he couldn’t hear. But he could feel them.

In his head.

A tune without notes. A language without breath.

It ached.

Lin reached forward. The mirror didn’t feel solid. His fingers sank a millimeter deeper than they should have.

He felt heat on his palms.

He pulled away.

The mirror returned to normal. His reflection stared back at him, eyes wide, blood beneath his fingernails.

He didn’t leave the apartment the next day.

He sat in front of the mirror for hours, notebook in hand, trying to transcribe what her mouth formed. Over and over, he rewound the photo, the memory, the dream. He tried phonetics. Mandarin, Shanghainese, even bits of Wu dialects.

Nothing fit.

But the song haunted him. Not a melody, exactly—but the shape of a melody, the shadow of it, like a note remembered but never heard. It followed him from room to room. Whispered in the tap. Flickered in the corner of his eye.

At dusk, it stopped.

And the mirror darkened.

He approached it, cautious.

For the first time, it didn’t reflect anything at all.

Not even him.

He leaned close.

A breath formed again.

This time, not his name.

A single character.

“等.”

Wait.

He whispered it aloud. “Děng…”