Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Granny Wu died on a sunless morning.

It was just after six o’clock. The sky hung heavy and low, and the exterior walls of Old River Bend Building 3 were so damp they had turned black, looking as if the entire structure had just been hauled out of a river. The ambulance was slow to arrive, so the police car got there first, its red and blue lights pulsing against the stairwell entrance in a rhythmic flash of light and shadow. Standing at the corner of the seventh floor, I watched two uniformed men carry a stretcher upstairs. Their soles scraped against the dust on the landing, making a faint, dry sound.

Granny Wu lived next door to me, in 703.

When they carried her out, her face was covered with a white sheet, leaving only a shock of grayish-white hair exposed. Lin Wan was kneeling by the door, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. She cried silently, but her tears fell fast, hitting the floor tiles one by one like water dripping from a ceiling during a midnight thaw.

The strange thing was that although a crowd had gathered in the hallway, no one went to comfort her.

Some whispered questions about whether the old woman lived alone; others were on the phone notifying the neighborhood committee; some craned their necks to peer into the apartment. Yet their gazes seemed to slide right past Lin Wan, as if she weren’t there. Not a single person met her eyes.

Standing in the shadows of the stairwell, I felt a sudden chill.

It wasn’t because Granny Wu was dead.

It was because from the very first day I moved into 704, I knew something was wrong with Lin Wan. She never went out during the day. She never looked into the elevator mirrors. Every time she spoke to me, she never looked at my face-only at the shadow on the ground. Living people fear such things; the dead do not.

I never called her out on it.

Because I was the same.

The commotion lasted until evening. Once the body was taken away and the people from the neighborhood committee dispersed, the door to 703 remained open. Just after one in the morning, a soft knocking sounded at my door-three taps, slow and steady.

I pulled the door open. Lin Wan stood under the hallway light, her eyes swollen like bloated apricot pits.

She still wouldn’t look at me, focusing instead on the blurred dark shadow at my feet.

“Cheng Ye,” she said, her voice raspy. “Can you help me pack up my mother’s things?”

It was the first time she had called me by my name.

I looked into the dark, yawning doorway of 703 and nodded.

When Granny Wu was alive, she used to leave a bowl of hot soup at my door-ginger soup in the winter, mung bean water in the summer. She never knocked, and she never asked why I was never seen during the day. She was kinder to me, a young man of mysterious origins, than any living person in this building.

Now she was dead.

I had no reason to refuse.