No One in the Room

There was a person hidden inside the locked room that no one had ever been able to open—the thought made Yu Sheng's scalp prickle in an instant, and hard on its heels came an unstoppable string of guesses. Who was it? When had the owner of that voice hidden in there? Had it crept in while he was asleep, or had it already been in there two months ago, when he first arrived? If it was the second case—well, there had been a long stretch when he stayed inside this big house without going out, and he could be certain that no one had opened the second-floor room during all that time. So the person in the room had simply been hiding in there the whole time? Did the room have another passage, or else... Was the thing that had given that soft laugh really a "person"? Messy thoughts surged and churned wildly through his head, yet the expression on Yu Sheng's face gradually calmed—perhaps his earlier encounter with that "frog" had brought about some change, or perhaps it was the effect of "coming back from the dead." He felt that his current state of mind... was a little strange. He could hear neither goodwill nor ill will in that voice, but he could tell that it was genuinely eerie. Yet Yu Sheng found that after the first instant of prickling scalp, all his fear and hesitation had drained away. All that was left now... was intense curiosity. He wanted to find out just what was in that room. He wanted to find out just what secret this big house he used as a foothold was hiding. This was his safe house, his only "home" in this enormous city—and a safe house could not contain anything unsafe. He slowly moved closer and pressed his ear to the door. Inside, there still seemed to be a low laugh hidden somewhere, though it might have been an illusion—perhaps only hollow wind circling in his ear. He crooked his fingers and knocked on the door. "Open up. I heard you." The door, of course, did not open, but the hollow laugh did indeed vanish. As expected, Yu Sheng said nothing and simply turned and left—he went to the room next door, the one piled high with odds and ends, and took an axe from it. Back in front of the locked door, he raised the axe high in silence and brought it down with all the strength in his body. The keen blade struck the thin wooden door with a shrill sound like metal striking metal. Sparks sprayed out from the edge of the blade, and the door—which looked as though one kick would stave it in—did not take so much as a scratch. That soft laugh drifted over again, faint and indistinct, but Yu Sheng paid it no attention at all. Face perfectly calm, he lifted the axe again, as though he were doing a piece of work that demanded particular care, thoroughness, and patience, and went on swinging, one blow after another. He knew this door could not be opened—an electric drill and an electric saw could not open it—but even knowing that, he had tried nearly every day for the past two months to open it by some means or other. Today a strange voice had come from inside, and that only sharpened his drive to get the door open today. And as blow after blow accomplished nothing, that drive only grew stronger. Every swing of the axe in Yu Sheng's hands came down harder, more smoothly, and... ever more to his own liking. In his gradually emptying head, some outlandish associations even cropped up out of nowhere—he felt like Wu Gang chopping at the tree on the moon: the moment he got that damned cassia tree down, Chang'e, the Jade Rabbit, Logger Vick, and Sisyphus, all watching from the sidelines, would gather in a circle and clap for him... He had no idea why Sisyphus had turned up among his associations. Meanwhile the soft laugh from behind the door was growing more grating, clearer, and closer, as though its owner had already walked over step by step and was pressed against the back of the wooden door. As though she knew full well that the door was unbreakable, and so mocked Yu Sheng from the far side of that Wall of Sighs, without the slightest scruple, as he swung his axe outside. But suddenly another voice broke into that weird, grating laughter, sounding tense and annoyed: "Will you stop laughing! If he really does open the door and come in, the first one he chops will be me!" The laughter inside the door stopped at once. Yu Sheng, axe raised to strike, froze—and then heard a sharp crack from his lower back. At the sound, the axe in his hands, its momentum unchecked, came down too, biting into a spot he had not intended at all. A crisp sound, nothing like the earlier grating clash, came from the door. The axe fell from Yu Sheng's hand to the floor, and in the next instant he abruptly raised a hand... and pressed it to his lower back. His lower back hurt. He had thrown it out badly, and the pain came in sharp, smarting twinges. With a hand pressed to his lower back, he hobbled over to the door, and it took him a couple of seconds to focus on where his last axe blow had landed. A "flash" of light hovered two or three centimeters off the door panel, on the hinge side. It looked like a spark struck off by the axe, yet it seemed fixed in the air, frozen at the instant it had flared bright. And by the light of it, Yu Sheng dimly made out something on the door panel nearby. He reached out to touch it. From behind the door came a stifled, shrill scream: "Eek—" Yu Sheng's eyes flew open. The living-room light was glaringly bright, and sleeping on the sofa had left him aching all over. The wall clock not far away ticked, and its face showed he had slept less than forty minutes. He lay on the sofa in a daze for a while, and only then did the memories in his numb mind gradually come clear. He had fallen asleep... Had all of that just been a dream? He stared blankly—and then suddenly felt that something was wrong. The "dream" had been too real in the way it unfolded, its details too clear and complete. He could distinctly remember the feel of the axe in his hand, remember the frozen spark on that door, remember... He jerked upright on the sofa and abruptly raised a hand... and pressed it to his lower back. His lower back hurt. He had thrown it out badly, and the pain came in sharp, smarting twinges. "F—... hiss... ck..." Yu Sheng could not help but offer up a few words of praise. His freshly wrenched lower back, the sudden movement, and the all-over ache from sleeping on the sofa had come together into a kind of compound therapy that for an instant made him wish he had just let that frog stab him through the heart—at least that had only hurt for two seconds. Only then did he struggle to his feet with a hand pressed to his lower back, his certainty growing that this had been no ordinary "dream." A back thrown out in a dream couldn't keep hurting in reality. Something truly uncanny had appeared. That thing had invaded his safe house. He adjusted his posture and his state of mind so that his back pain would not get in the way too much, thought it over briefly, and then, grimacing, went up the stairs to the second floor. With the collapsible baton in his left hand, he went back to the junk room, found the axe he had used in the dream, and gripped it in his right hand—the feel of the haft in his palm was exactly as it had been in the dream, and the wooden handle even seemed to retain the warmth of his palm. He came to the locked door. The door was still intact and looked as good as new, and there was no sign of the "glow mark" his chopping had left in the dream. Inside, all was quiet. As though everything were as usual and nothing had happened at all. But Yu Sheng still clearly remembered where that glow mark had been. He hung the baton at his waist, shifted the axe to his left hand, and reached out his right to feel over the door, feeling for the spot where his axe had struck a flash of light in the dream... He remembered it had been near the hinge, where he had seen a faint... The next second, his hand found a handle—a handle invisible to the naked eye. But he remembered clearly that there was no handle here. On his first day, when he discovered this locked door, he had examined every inch of it and run his hands across every surface, and he was certain he had never felt any "handle that did not exist"! Why? Because he had observed it in the dream? Because his axe had "seen through" some disguise? Because he had confirmed that it existed, and so it truly existed? Yu Sheng ran through every movie, TV show, game, and novel he had ever encountered, and instantly assembled a whole pile of possible explanations, while his hand did not hesitate in the least—it had already closed around the invisible handle and given it a gentle turn. The unbreakable locked door opened just like that, effortlessly, from the hinge side. It was an empty room. Looking in through the slowly widening gap, he saw only floor and walls, and the light spilling in from the doorway lit that dim place little by little—yet even after he had carefully opened the door all the way, Yu Sheng still did not see the owner of the voice that had laughed mockingly from inside. Axe gripped tight in one hand, he cautiously studied the situation in the room, and found that there really was nothing at all inside it—not even a bed, not even a chair. There was only cold moonlight, spilling into the room through a gap in the worn curtain and leaving a mottled patch on the floor. But suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something. There was "something" in the room: on the wall directly facing the door hung a painting. A fine frame, with intricate classical vine patterns decorating the edges of the picture; in the center of the canvas, serving as the background, was a chair covered in soft red carpet. But beyond that there was nothing else—no cursed ghost sitting in the oil painting, looking at the intruder and giving a mocking laugh. Frowning, Yu Sheng stared hard at the oil painting's frame, roughly half a meter tall, for a long while. Keeping his gaze on it, he felt around for the light switch beside the doorframe and turned on the room's light. Under the lamplight the details of the painting stood out in even finer clarity. He carefully stepped up to the painting and stared at it for a long time. And then he saw, in the corner of the frame, something extremely, extremely faint... the hem of a skirt. "..." He thought for a moment, then spoke with a somewhat odd expression: "Are you there?" "No!" A guilty voice came from the oil painting.