Chapter 4: The Figure in the Little Hotel

Even now, I do not like to talk about what happened to me in Shenzhen three years ago. The thing I saw in that cheap little hotel has never really left me. It returns sometimes in the dead hours of the night, lodged behind my eyes like a stain that will not wash out. Since then, I have believed without embarrassment that there are things in this world for which science has no language.

It was an unusually cold winter. I had just changed jobs, and the little money I had saved was almost gone, so I found the cheapest room I could in one of the city’s urban villages. The hotel was in terrible shape. Paint curled from the walls in pale flakes. The corridor smelled of damp concrete and mildew. The doors still opened with old brass keys, the kind that made a dry, reluctant clicking sound when you turned them in the lock.

The moment I pushed my door open, a bitter cold rushed out at me.

It was winter, yes, but this was Shenzhen. No room should have been colder than the street outside.

The bathroom door stood open. Inside it hung a large mirror with chipped paint around the frame, facing the entrance directly. The instant I stepped in, I met my own reflection head-on. For one brief second, something about the figure in the glass seemed wrong. I could not have said what. Only that it was wrong.

Two yellowed pillows lay on the bed, and the quilt gave off the stale odor of something long shut away. But the room was thirty yuan a night. I was exhausted, broke, and in no position to be delicate about such things. I put down my bag, lay down, and fell asleep almost at once.

I do not know how long I had been asleep when I woke suddenly at two in the morning.

My head was thick. My eyelids felt weighted shut. Still, some instinct made me look toward the bathroom.

In the thin moonlight leaking through the window, I saw a woman standing in front of the mirror.

She wore a long garment. I could not tell whether it was a kimono or some kind of mourning robe. The fabric was a dull gray, clinging to her body as if it were damp.

I rubbed my eyes, trying to bring her into focus.

Then she turned.

I went rigid.

Her hair was cut in a blunt fringe across her eyebrows, black in a way that looked unnatural, almost wet. But it was her face that froze the blood in me. She had no eyes. Where her eyes should have been were two black hollows, deep and empty, like bottomless pits. They were far too large for a human face.

Her expression was worse. Her lips were pressed tight, as though she were sucking hard at the flesh inside her cheeks. The sides of her face had caved inward, giving her a cold, hungry look that even now makes my stomach tighten when I remember it.

She seemed to realize I was watching.

Her head began to move from side to side.

At first it was only a slight motion. Then it grew wider, faster. A dry creaking sound came with it, sharp and distinct in the silence of the room.

And yet I was so worn out that night that fear did not reach me properly. My mind felt packed in mud. Absurdly, I told myself I must be dreaming. I turned over and sank back into sleep.

The second time I woke, it was four in the morning.

This time I came up from a deeper sleep, and my mind was horribly clear.

The moment I opened my eyes, it felt as if an invisible hand had closed around my heart.

The woman was standing at the head of my bed.

She was less than a meter away. Her black, empty sockets were fixed straight on my face, and her mouth still held that same terrible, pinched expression.

Every hair on my body rose. My hands and feet went cold. I tried to shout, but no sound came out. I tried to move, but my body would not answer.

Then her head began to sway again.

Left, right. Left, right.

The same creaking came from her neck, only now it sounded beside my ear. The noise carried a coldness with it, something that seemed to slip under my skin and settle in the cracks between my bones.

I stared at her without blinking. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes for even an instant, she would throw herself onto me.

I knew then that it was not a dream. It was not some trick of the mind. I have never suffered from hallucinations, never had any illness that could explain what I saw. What stood before me was real—impossibly, terrifyingly real.

Her head kept rocking for what must have been five full minutes. My eyes began to burn. At last, without meaning to, I blinked.

In that instant, she vanished.

She was simply gone, as if she had never been there at all.

The room remained cold, but the pressure in the air had not lifted. I did not dare go back to sleep. I was afraid that the next time I opened my eyes, she would be lying beside me.

I sat up abruptly.

Then I thought of the dragon tattoo across my shoulder and upper arm, the one I had pricked into my skin with a needle when I was young. As a child, I had heard old people say that dragons could ward off evil. Half out of my senses, I took off my shirt and stared at the dragon on my arm, repeating silently, Protect me. Protect me.

Somehow, without knowing when, I fell asleep again.

That sleep lasted only half an hour.

I woke to a cold I could not explain.

This time, I broke.

The woman had climbed onto my bed.

She was standing on the right side of it, only a single step away from me. Her figure had grown blurrier than before, as though a thin veil of mist had settled over her, but the black hollows of her eyes were the same, the awful expression the same, the ceaseless rocking of her head the same.

There is a point at which fear hardens into something else.

I could not take it anymore.

I sprang up, grabbed the backpack beside my pillow, and pulled out the long knife I kept inside for protection. It was the knife I had used when I worked on construction sites, mostly for shaving wood, and I had carried it with me ever since.

I shut my eyes and slashed hard in her direction.

But the instant the blade cut through the air, a violent current tore through my body. My limbs went numb. Sparks burst across my vision. It felt like a sudden crash of low blood sugar—my head heavy, my legs hollow beneath me.

Then everything went black.

When I woke again, the alarm was ringing.

It was seven in the morning.

Sunlight had entered through the window, taking some of the cold out of the room. I sat up at once and looked around. The woman was gone. Everything was as it should have been, as if the night before had been nothing but a grotesque dream.

I did not dare think about it. I washed quickly and went to work.

That evening, when I came back, I stood outside the room for a long time, wondering whether I should ask to move. In the end, I did not. I could not bear to spend the extra ten or twenty yuan.

But after that night, I never saw the woman again.

Later, I changed jobs and moved out of that little hotel. I never went back.

Still, I will never forget that freezing night. I will never forget the eyeless woman, or the way her head rocked from side to side. I will never forget the numbness that rushed through my body when I swung the knife.

Some people say I must have been exhausted and hallucinating. Others say the hotel was unclean.

But I know what I saw.

It was real.

Even now, I will not stay in cheap, run-down hotels. I will not sleep in any room where a mirror faces the bed.

Some fears, once carved into the bone, never leave.