Chapter Fifty-One — Standing Room Only

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The black silk ribbon swayed gently in the draft from the ventilation grate. It was tied in a standard bow, identical in every detail to the one worn by the dancer in the 1983 performance photograph.

Shen Mo clenched his back teeth until they ached. His knuckles pressed against the glass of the display case, the chill seeping through his skin and into his bones.

He could hear his own heartbeat, pounding against his ribs. This was no coincidence, no chance occurrence caused by the natural aging of an old object. Something was “imitating.”

Just as a murderer might leave behind traces matching the victim’s habits, deliberately creating the illusion of natural death.

“Wu, pull every public incident record in the city from the past ten years related to ‘the stage’ or ‘the curtain call.’” He turned abruptly, the hem of his coat sweeping across the tablet in Su Wanying’s arms. “Cover the period from 2013 to 2023. Include, but don’t limit it to, ‘unfinished performances’ and ‘mass psychological abnormalities.’”

Technician Wu was typing at three computer screens. At that, his fingers paused. “Brother Shen, what you’re asking for involves municipal archives, hospital emergency records, even self-media reports. We’d have to break into several systems—”

“Now.” Shen Mo’s voice was ice-hardened. “The subway girl’s autopsy showed an endorphin spike 0.3 seconds before death. The overlap with the victim data from the first activation of the dance shoes is ninety-seven percent. It’s evolving, Wu.”

Wu swallowed, then clicked the mouse at lightning speed.

The printer in the surveillance room suddenly began spitting out pages. Shen Mo caught the sheets as they emerged, his fingertip brushing over the still-wet ink in the date column:

In 2015, the play Untitled at the Workers’ Cultural Palace was interrupted by a lighting failure. Three months later, an entire class at a secondary school applauded during evening study until their palms were bruised;

after a collapse in 2018, every member of a community choir remained in an applauding pose for three hours during rehearsal in 2019;

in 2022, a children’s dance competition was canceled because of torrential rain. Three months later, customers in five shopping malls across the city were found lingering and applauding.

“The interval.” Shen Mo suddenly pressed down on the pages. “From 2015 to 2018 is thirteen months, and from 2018 to 2022 is forty-eight months? No.” He seized a pen and drew a timeline in the blank space, the tip punching through the paper. “Thirteen weeks! Thirteen times thirty days is ninety-one days. March 12, 2015—the subsequent abnormality was June 11. The collapse in 2018 was May 7, and the mass applause came on August 6. Ninety-one days in both cases!”

At that moment, Su Wanying’s phone vibrated. As she pulled it out, she knocked over the mug on the table. Brown liquid spread across the collection checklist, resembling a coagulated bloodstain.

The anonymous text came from a nonexistent number. Its attachment was a photograph: the stub of an exhibition ticket. On the back, someone had written in lipstick, You should take your curtain call now.

The handwriting was hers, but pressed harder than usual. Fine threads of blood seeped through the edges of the lipstick marks.

“Wanying?” Shen Mo leaned closer, his breath brushing the back of her neck.

Su Wanying suddenly seized the back of his hand, her nails nearly biting into his skin. “This lipstick is the one I tested in the exhibition hall last week. That day, I left it—”

She jerked her head up toward the display case. On the inside of the glass was a thumb-sized lip print, its color exactly matching the lipstick in the photograph.

“Check the printing shops.” Shen Mo’s voice dropped, suddenly gentle, as if soothing a frightened test subject. “Every shop in the city that printed this photograph. Payment methods, surveillance footage.”

“I’m already on it.” Wu pushed up his glasses. He brought up the city’s security network, blue points blinking across an electronic map. “Thirteen printing shops received identical orders within the past three days. Every payment was made in cash. In the footage, the people…”

He enlarged one segment. A man in a checked shirt mechanically handed over the money, the joints of his fingers gone white. “Their movements look as if someone pressed fast-forward. Every one of them clapped three times before leaving.”

Su Wanying’s fingers blurred across the tablet as she pulled up the patients’ medical records. “They all visited the exhibition. Brain MRIs show frost-like deposits in the temporal lobes, matching the abnormal regions in the subway girl’s autopsy report.” Her voice trembled. “The echo… is programming them.”

By the time someone knocked on the surveillance-room door, night had fallen completely.

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Old Cheng’s hunched figure squeezed into the room. In his hands was a charred notebook, the words 1983 Performance Journal on its cover curled and blackened by fire.

His callused hand closed around Shen Mo’s shoulder with unnatural strength. “Little Shen, I should have come sooner.”

The final page of the journal still held half a line:

The curtain call is not for the audience. It is for—

The rest had burned into a blackened hole.

Old Cheng pried apart the pages stuck together by heat, revealing hurried pencil marks on the reverse:

“She never meant to escape that day. She said that if she couldn’t finish the dance, then it would never be over.”

The old man’s Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed. “She was the lead dancer. The fire sealed off the backstage door. Everyone else got out. Only she…”

“What if the person conducting the ritual changes?” Shen Mo interrupted.

The old man’s clouded eyes suddenly cleared. “As long as someone still ‘believes’ it is a curtain call, it doesn’t matter who stands there. It doesn’t want a particular person. It wants the act of a ‘curtain call’ itself.”

He released Shen Mo, and the charred journal fell into the younger man’s arms. “I’ve guarded it for forty years. Now it’s your turn.”

At two in the morning, Director Lin’s knock came more urgently than Old Cheng’s.

The camera in his trembling hand displayed footage that kept jumping and flickering. “When I was editing the opening video, the software automatically generated a hidden track.” He pressed play.

Su Wanying’s figure appeared at the center of a virtual stage. She was wearing the blue dress worn by the dancer in 1983.

“This footage was never exported. I didn’t film this scene at all!”

When the “Su Wanying” in the video turned, the ends of her hair swept across the lens. Shen Mo abruptly leaned closer.

That was not Su Wanying’s hair whorl. It was the stray lock curling up behind the girl’s ear in the 1983 photograph of the lead dancer.

In the final frame, “her” face suddenly twisted. Bluish-purple veins surfaced beneath the skin, and the upward curve at the corners of her eyes was exactly the same as the upward angle of the dance shoes’ toes inside the display case.

“I’m not recording an event,” Director Lin said, his voice strangled. “I’m helping it reenact one.”

Shen Mo drove everyone into a corner of the surveillance room, then stood before the whiteboard and drew a heavy circle with a red marker.

“The echo has broken free of any specific object. It uses cultural memory as its medium. It needs a ‘curtain-caller’ to complete the ritual, and a ‘curtain call’ is defined as ‘the audience applauding until the end.’”

He pointed at Director Lin’s video. “Now it needs someone to believe this is a curtain call. That’s why it needs a conductor.”

“Then how do we break it?” Wu gripped the mouse, his knuckles white.

“Create a cognitive anchor of ‘voluntary incompletion.’” Shen Mo’s marker punched through the whiteboard. “Someone must play the curtain-caller, but stop 0.7 seconds short and interrupt the movement deliberately. That will break its rule, because the incompletion will be the conductor’s choice, not the result of outside interference.”

Su Wanying suddenly rose. The legs of her chair shrieked against the floor.

She took the exhibition journal from her bag and opened it to the page titled The Curator’s Responsibilities. The tip of her fountain pen pressed against the paper.

“The conductor of a ritual has the authority to terminate it.”

When she looked up, her eyes were startlingly bright.

“I’ll do it.”

“No.” Shen Mo’s voice tightened. “It will parasitize you, just as it did those people from the printing shops—”

“Have you read the reports from 1983?” Su Wanying interrupted him. Her fingers brushed over the lip print on the display case. “The lead dancer was named Zhou Xiaotang. Her mother was a longtime museum employee. When she donated these dance shoes to us, she said Xiaotang’s last words were, ‘Mom, you tied my shoelaces wrong.’”

Her voice was as soft as a sigh.

“Even as she was dying, she cared about the perfection of the ritual. Now I’m going to tell it that the conductor is allowed to be imperfect.”

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At four in the morning, the empty exhibition hall was lit only by the stage spotlight.

Su Wanying stood in the center of the beam. The blue dress had been borrowed from the prop room. As its hem brushed the floor, it made a faint rustling sound—the sound of frost-like deposits flaking from the surfaces of the exhibits.

Shen Mo was hidden behind the curtain, his palms slick with sweat.

He watched Su Wanying raise her arms. Her movements were identical in every detail to those of “her” in the video: the first turn, the second lift of the wrist, the third circle…

At the twelfth and a half turn, she suddenly stopped. Her waist bent slightly, but she did not complete the bow.

Click.

The sound was so faint it resembled a shoelace snapping.

Shen Mo rushed onto the stage. Su Wanying was staring at her wrist, where a pale blue mark had appeared, as though an invisible cord had been tightened around it.

The frost patterns covering every exhibit cracked at once. Tiny fragments pattered onto the floor, gleaming with cold light beneath the spotlight.

“Did it work?” Wu ran out of the surveillance room, tablet raised. “All the abnormal readings are dropping!”

Su Wanying touched the back of her neck. There was a patch of warmth there, as if someone had lightly pressed it.

She looked toward the display case. At some point, the dance shoes’ laces had come undone. The black ribbon hung limply, no longer tied in a perfect bow.

When the sky outside began to pale, the museum’s electrical system suddenly restored itself.

As Shen Mo watched the ceiling lights come back on, he noticed a new crack in the glass of the display case. It began at the dance shoes and wound its way toward the label reading Thirteen Exhibits.

He crouched down and picked up a fragment of frost.

The fragment melted on his fingertip, leaving behind the faintest salty taste, like tears.

(The following morning, the museum’s electrical system restored itself automatically, and the thirteen exhibits were detected as…)

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