Bi Shenghua and Xiao Qi both felt their hair stand on end as they listened.
Especially since Mo Yu was standing in front of a murky gray mirror as she spoke, and the lighting in Qingmu's studio was far too dim. It was almost midnight, and they worried that something strange might appear in that mirror too.
It's time to get him some brighter bulbs, thought Bi Shenghua, his landlady.
"What happened next?" Xiao Qi asked, looking at Mo Yu with concern.
I was terrified, Mo Yu said.
I thought my screams must have been audible throughout the building. Strangely, though, my roommates all seemed unaware of them. Only Li Qian rushed in.
Li Qian held me and soothed me softly, helped me back to bed, and coaxed me to sleep. She even reassured me that any ghost would only be my own soul and told me not to be afraid.
Li Qian was my roommate. She was actually even more superstitious than I was. Not only was she obsessed with looking into mirrors, but more importantly, she was obsessed with Situ. Whatever Situ said, Li Qian treated it like an imperial edict and wouldn't tolerate a single word against it. She often said she was destined to belong to Situ for the rest of her life. No matter how many other women Situ had, she was willing to be with him.
She even rented a place off campus to make it easier to see Situ. The truth was, we all knew Situ didn't like her at all and had never once visited her place. We were all friends, though, so no one said it out loud.
That day, she happened to come by the dorm to see us. She stayed with me all night. The next day, she said Situ had gone back to MIT and her place was very empty, so we might as well move in with her.
The other girls gradually moved over, but with finals coming up, I stayed behind.
For those few days, I was the only one left in the dorm. Li Qian sometimes came over to keep me company. Seeing how distracted I was, she said I'd probably left my soul in the mirror.
After finals, Li Qian came to see me. She said she'd called Situ and learned how to get my soul back.
I remembered summer vacation had just begun that day. It was a Sunday, and I went with her to her place.
None of the other girls were there. She said they had all gone out to work part-time.
There were two mirrors in her room, each taller than a person. They were like two doors, joined together with hinges so they could fold.
At twelve, she unfolded the two mirrors into one large square mirror.
She had me stand in front of it. I saw myself in the mirror, split in half by the seam between the two panels.
I stared into my own eyes and imagined the biological waves coming from my body reflecting off the mirror, then reflecting back again from my pupils, oscillating between me and the mirror.
Gradually, I felt the air between me and the mirror grow heavy, as though it had taken on some kind of substance.
Li Qian said my soul had formed. She began slowly turning one of the mirrors, bringing it to an angle with the other.
She told me not to move. She said that once the two mirrors closed together, my soul would be caught, allowing "me" to return to my body.
At the time, I wondered what would happen to me when the mirrors closed. Unless I was shut inside the mirrors too, how could my soul return to my body?
But I was soon captivated by my own reflection and forgot to ask.
As the mirror turned and formed an angle, I saw two versions of myself, one in each mirror.
I stood there without moving at all, yet the two "me"s in the mirrors were slowly moving.
When the angle between the mirrors approached ninety degrees, I saw a third "me."
I knew this was the principle of image formation in plane mirrors that we'd learned in middle school physics, but I still found it amazing. Especially when the third "me" emerged bit by bit from the gap between the mirrors, as though reenacting the process of a person's soul coming into being.
That "me" appeared bit by bit, then split bit by bit into two "me"s.
Then I saw four "me"s.
The angle between the mirrors continued to shrink, and the "me"s in them kept moving.
Like the endlessly repeating, ceaseless evolution of life, I saw a fifth "me," repeating the process of the third.
Li Qian was still turning the mirror. Perhaps because it was too heavy, her movements grew very slow.
I saw six, seven, eight, nine...
As the angle between the mirrors grew smaller and smaller, I saw more and more "me"s.
The mirrors on either side were almost touching my body, and I could no longer count how many versions of me there were.
The space grew cramped and the light grew dim. I felt stifled and oppressed. I wanted to get out, but I couldn't make a sound or take a step. Apart from my eyes, I couldn't move any part of my body.
All I could do was look into the mirrors at one "me" after another. Those "me"s were both real and illusory. I didn't even know which was the real me, or whether they were all my souls.
I suddenly noticed that every "me" had a slightly different face. Some were bright, some dull, some youthful, some old. I began looking at them one by one, until I saw the thirteenth face.
Mo Yu stopped at that point.
The studio was so quiet that everyone's breathing could be heard.
Xiao Qi bit his somewhat shriveled lips and opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. It was the straightforward proprietress who asked, "What was wrong with the thirteenth face?"
Mo Yu's body trembled slightly. After a long while, she said, "I don't know how to describe that face, but I know it was what I would look like after I died."
Bi Shenghua feared nothing, yet even she couldn't help feeling her skin crawl. She smoothed the short hair over her forehead and swore softly, "Shit. I'm never looking in a mirror again."
Xiao Qi couldn't help standing up and walking behind Mo Yu, reaching out to pat her shoulder. He wanted very much to tell her that a mirror was only ever a mirror, and all this stuff about souls was false. But before his hand touched her, he felt a hand settle on his own shoulder, and he could even feel the cool breeze of someone's breath on his neck.
Startled, Xiao Qi whipped around and saw that Qingmu had come up behind him without his noticing.
"Why are you scaring me?" Xiao Qi asked.
"So you do know how frightening that is," Qingmu said.
Xiao Qi looked back at Mo Yu and his own hand, which had almost landed on her shoulder, and knew Qingmu was right.
"Stop keeping us in suspense," Bi Shenghua said to Qingmu. "What exactly is going on?"
"Someone has controlled her with a sophisticated form of hypnosis. You could also think of it as sorcery," Qingmu said. "Her memories probably end at the moment she saw what she would look like after death. Judging from her account, that should have been last Sunday, seven days ago today. She has no awareness or memory of anything she's done in these seven days, including coming to sing at Ruhua Bar."
"In other words, she's been sleepwalking for the past seven days."