On the third day after moving into his new apartment, Lin En discovered the alley.
It was right below his building, sandwiched between a 24-hour laundromat and a long-defunct record store. There were no lights at the entrance; only a faint glow from the streetlamp filtered in, illuminating just the first three meters. The brick walls were covered in moss, feeling damp, cold, and sticky to the touch, as if they had been soaked in rain for years.
That night, he worked overtime until eleven o’clock and took a shortcut home. As he stepped into the alley, his footsteps echoed in the narrow space, as if someone were following him. He stopped, and the sound stopped too. He kept walking, and the sound resumed. Only this time, the echo seemed half a beat behind, as if something had only realized it needed to stop after he had already halted.
The alley was much longer than he had imagined. Usually, it took only two minutes to walk from the main street to the back door of his apartment, but tonight he’d been walking for nearly five minutes and still hadn’t seen that familiar iron gate. The air was thick with a musty odor, a mixture of old newspapers and damp earth.
He pulled out his phone to check the time. The screen lit up: 11:47.
Strange. He distinctly remembered entering the alley at 11:30.
He quickened his pace. Graffiti on the wall flashed by in his peripheral vision—a single open eye, drawn crookedly, as if a child had scribbled it with a black crayon. He remembered that when he’d passed by yesterday, the eye had been closed. Now, not only was it open, but the pupil seemed to have shifted slightly, as if it were staring right at him.
Finally, the iron gate came into view. He pushed the door open, rushed into the stairwell, and locked it behind him. As he leaned against the door, catching his breath, he heard footsteps outside. They paused at the door, then slowly drifted away. The rhythm of those footsteps was exactly the same as the ones he’d heard in the alley just moments ago.
The next day, he made a point of walking around to the entrance of the alley to check. The alley was still there, but it was absurdly short—it took less than twenty steps to walk from one end to the other. The eyes on the wall were still closed, and the moss had dried out completely, feeling as rough as sandpaper to the touch.
He asked the owner of the laundromat, “Did anyone go through this alley last night?”
The owner wiped a cup without looking up. “This alley was sealed off three years ago. There’s no exit.”
Lin En froze. “But the day before yesterday, I…”
“Are you sure you were walking through an alley?” The owner finally looked up, his gaze unnaturally calm. “Or were you somewhere else?”
That night, Lin En stood at the window looking down. The entrance to the alley was deserted. But he saw his own shadow standing in the alley, looking up at him.
The shadow didn’t move.
And he was, indeed, standing inside.
