Chapter 43: Haunting

The light died and the apartment plunged into a darkness deeper than before — the kind where even shadows vanished. Everything in sight was reduced to a hazy outline.

At first Ma En assumed his eyes hadn't adjusted. But he realized quickly that the outlines weren't uniformly blurred. He could still distinguish small, distant details — the handle on a cabinet, for instance. Its contour was as indistinct as the cabinet surface, yet the two separated clearly from each other.

That alone proved nothing. Perhaps he'd never paid this much attention before, and was now paying too much.

What unsettled him more than the shapes dissolving into darkness was the window facing the street.

While he was still adjusting to the dark, still registering the cold against his skin, he looked at the window. He remembered the curtain being drawn. It was open now. The sheer privacy curtain — just a veil, meant only to block sight lines — was rippling as though stirred by a breeze. But behind it, the window was shut tight.

He was absolutely certain: the airflow moving the curtain was not coming from the side, and not from behind him. It was blowing from the window. Otherwise the fabric wouldn't billow at that angle.

But the window was closed. Where was the wind coming from?

He could only see the window's outline, yet he could tell with unusual clarity whether the frame was sealed. Because in his vision, even the outline separated into distinct parts.

He stood from the coffee table, flicked his lighter, and lit another cigarette. He kept the flame burning.

If he wanted to confirm that what he was seeing wasn't an illusion, he'd have to go look.

The cold hadn't stopped. It came in waves, as though carried on a current, pulsing with a slow rhythm. But the cigarette smoke rose in a straight line. The lighter flame didn't waver. If this were real wind — wind strong enough to feel on skin, strong enough to move a curtain — the smoke and fire should have bent.

The curtain kept drifting. But unlike the scenes in most horror novels, nothing grotesque appeared at the window. Not even a shadow.

Only this wind from nowhere, blowing in segments — as though it had been cut into strips, touching only specific things: the curtain and his skin. Nothing else.

He'd already left the coffee table behind, but the cutting cold followed him. His clothes were unaffected. His hair didn't stir. Only his skin felt it — not the coolness of early summer but a genuine, burrowing cold that penetrated through his pores and drew his nerves taut. His muscles were stiffening, as though something tiny and sharp had embedded itself along the fibers, preventing them from responding normally.

This wasn't natural. His body was trained and conditioned — it didn't seize up from a little chill. And even if cold could do this, it shouldn't happen this fast, and not at this temperature.

Then he understood: what was locking his muscles wasn't the cold itself. It was something riding the cold — something he couldn't see, could only try to identify through the changes in his own body. And in the end, he couldn't identify it at all.

These unmistakably unnatural conditions persisted all the way to the window.

A step away. Through the lighter's glow, the first thing he saw was not the glass, not the cityscape that should have been visible beyond it. Outside was pure black — no lights, no skyline, no reflection of anything. That strange, total darkness turned the lighter's faint flame into a spotlight on the glass, making everything it touched sharp and clear.

Ma En saw a face.

Anyone else would have recoiled. He didn't — but his heart kicked once, hard. Then he saw it clearly: it was not his own reflection.

A stranger's face. A face so ugly it defied imagination. Skin like tree bark — pitted, covered in lumps. It possessed human features, but only in outline. No eyeballs. No teeth or tongue. No ear canals, no nostrils. The shapes were there. Nothing filled them.

By any measure, this was the stuff of cliché horror — and yet it was his first time experiencing it in the flesh. The shock lasted less than a second. In the next instant, he was calm.

No — his thinking had never stopped being calm. His body had reacted to the stimulus involuntarily, but by now even his heartbeat had returned to normal.

His instincts told him to retreat. Not the stumbling backward lurch of an ordinary person in terror. His ankles and knees compressed like loaded springs, and he launched himself three meters back in a single bound — well past the standing long-jump benchmark for a college athlete.

He'd felt his muscles locking up, but the moment he moved, he knew: his body's motor functions were completely unimpaired. The stiffness, the sensation of something lodged in his muscle fibers preventing normal movement — against what he could actually do, it was nothing more than an illusion.

The lighter flame went out before he'd even landed. The tiny loss of light registered sharply. Everything before his eyes went a shade darker. And he saw the face lunge from the glass.

Inside the glass, it had looked like a reflection. Outside of it, the thing was smoke.

The cold sharpened to a blade's edge. The wind hitting his face became real and directional. But the wind that should have been blowing toward him was instead dragging his cigarette smoke toward the face.

The ember at the tip couldn't illuminate anything, but Ma En could still see the smoke's outline — his cigarette's and the face's — flowing together, one into the other. Those tendrils of smoke curled and twisted in midair like living things, a gossamer thread connecting him to the apparition.

As fast as he retreated, the face advanced to match.

Between leap and landing, the cigarette's red point traced a bright arc through the darkness, swinging wide around the sofa, threading the gap between the coffee table and the TV, and coming to rest at the entryway.

Ma En seized the black umbrella from the rack. The cigarette he clamped between his teeth.

The smoke face surged toward him like opposite poles of a magnet, replicating his trajectory precisely. Even so, he didn't extinguish the cigarette. He drew on it hard, once, twice — the ember flared bright.

Then he charged straight into the face and hit the release. The umbrella canopy snapped open with a percussive whump, spreading to its full span. In the same instant, he felt the impact — real force slamming into the fabric.

Like someone had swung a solid object into it.

No wisp of smoke could hit that hard.

He couldn't see past the umbrella, but the cigarette smoke scattered violently, spraying around the edges of the canopy. He didn't count, but at least seven or eight tendrils.

He didn't think. He lowered his shoulder and drove forward, umbrella first. The pressure on the canopy vanished. Nothing ahead resisted.

Smoke exploded outward in every direction, as though the umbrella had shattered the mass on impact.

But as Ma En pushed toward the living room, the front door blew open behind him — outward, violently. He never heard the lock disengage. It was as though the deadbolt had simply ceased to exist. Even without the sound, he felt the change at his back instantly.

Wind. Realer than anything before — unmistakable, forceful, continuous.

If the earlier "wind" had been illusion, this gust from behind was brutally solid.

Something heavy was generating it. Something worse than the scattered smoke face.

Ma En drove forward, umbrella braced, fighting resistance that hadn't been there a moment ago. He cleared the entryway, crossed into the living room — and before his feet touched down, something thick and rough seized his waist from behind.

The grip was like a giant's hand closing around his body.

He looked down. He could make out the shape: long, thick, like a tentacle — but the texture was coarse, the form irregular. It looked like it should be rigid, yet it wrapped around his waist with a muscular flexibility. More like a vine. Or a branch. Plant matter. He could see the nodes along its surface.

His feet never reached the floor. A massive, physical force held him suspended. This was no illusion. He couldn't break free, but there was no pain — only a spreading numbness at his waist.

The numbness replaced the burrowing cold, racing through his whole body. One second of paralysis was all it took. He was wrenched toward the door.

There was no time to mount resistance. As he passed through the doorway, he glimpsed the smoke face — still there, tangled in a second vine. The face was made of smoke, but the vine held it as though it possessed some force that smoke could not escape.

The thread between his cigarette smoke and the face had snapped.

An instant later, Ma En was out of Room 6 and slamming into the corridor wall. The only move he managed was to reverse the umbrella and brace its tip against the wall, absorbing enough of the impact to keep from hitting hard.

The vine around his waist slid free — fast, fluid — and was gone before he could react. He tracked it with his senses and his eyes, following its outline as it slithered toward a corner, plunged into the shadow pooled there, and vanished.

Gone?

For the first time, Ma En felt genuine surprise. A thing that had been physical — undeniably solid — had dived into an immaterial shadow and disappeared. He stared at the dark patch. A wave of nausea rose in his throat, sourceless. But what he was looking at was just a shadow. An ordinary shadow in an ordinary hallway.

The corridor lights were normal. No horror-movie pallor, no flickering. Just a hallway.

The sheer normalcy of the surroundings made everything that had just happened feel more impossible, not less. Ma En listened. Nothing. No sound out of place. As though he'd simply had a nightmare and woken up standing in the corridor. But the numbness hadn't faded from his body, and his breathing was still ragged from exertion. Both testified, in no uncertain terms, to how real the encounter had been.

And in the instant he'd been flung into the hallway — catching the corridor's normal light — he'd seen clearly what the "vine" looked like. Less a tentacle than a branch or creeper. Definitely plant matter — rough bark, visible nodes — yet despite its rigid appearance, it had moved with a living, pliable strength.

Compared to the smoke face, this thing felt more real. But like the smoke face, he had no idea where it had come from. And it had demonstrably entered a shadow and ceased to exist in any physical sense. It was not a vine or branch that belonged to any world he understood.

He couldn't explain the origin or destination of any of it — not through what he'd observed, not through what he'd felt. For Ma En, that made it both dangerous and exhilarating: proof that his years of pursuit were not a joke. Even with the precedent of the Seven Transmutations of the Profound Mystery Records, an encounter like this still made his blood quicken.

But he'd be lying if he said he felt no fear.

He took the cigarette from his lips. His thumb eased off the umbrella's release mechanism. In the moment he'd been thrown into the corridor, he'd already been preparing to deploy his contingency.

Back in the homeland, when he'd first begun pursuing the bizarre, he'd understood that existing knowledge and tools might prove useless against these things. In the worst case, contact could mean instantaneous death. That understanding had always been theoretical. Tonight it became visceral.

His weapons. His trained body. The enhanced constitution he'd gained after acquiring the Seven Transmutations. None of it guaranteed effectiveness against what he'd just faced. The vine-like thing could dissolve into shadows — meaning ordinary physical force might not apply. The smoke face, even more so.

Maybe I should have grabbed the vacuum cleaner instead of the umbrella.

The thought drifted through, dark and absurd, and he almost smiled.

He'd been lucky. The vine and the smoke face had turned on each other. But he couldn't assume the vine had been helping him. Nothing about it was normal, let alone benign.

In any case — this much danger seemed to be over. For now. Ma En looked around. Every room on the thirteenth floor was dark and silent. Not a sliver of light, not a whisper of sound. As though on this strange night, every last person had simply fallen asleep.