Chapter 545

Mei lived in a towering apartment complex in Chongqing, a city that never seemed to sleep. Neon lights painted the night sky, reflecting off the slick, rain-washed streets below. From her window on the 28th floor, the world looked like a shimmering, blurred painting.

Mei, however, saw more than just the city lights. She saw shapes, shadows that moved differently from the usual reflections and distortions of the urban landscape. They flickered at the edges of her vision, dark and formless, yet undeniably present.

"Mama, look," Mei once said, pointing at a corner of their small living room. "There's something...moving."

Her mother, bent over a bowl of steaming noodles, had only glanced up. "Mei, it's just the light. Eat your dinner before it gets cold." She never looked hard enough. Never really saw.

The school was no different. One afternoon, during art class, Mei drew what she saw: dark, writhing tendrils clinging to the ceiling, twisting around the fluorescent lights. Her teacher, Ms. Li, smiled uncomfortably.

"Very creative, Mei," Ms. Li had commented, but the way she avoided Mei's eyes afterward made the girl's stomach twist. "But maybe we can draw something a little...happier?"

At night, the shapes were bolder, clearer. They congregated around her bed, watching her with something that felt like cold interest. Mei began sleeping with her small, plush panda clutched tightly, its presence the only small comfort in her rapidly darkening world.

She tried again with her father, one evening while he was watching television. A particularly large, black, thing undulated behind the screen, its edges smoky and indistinct.

"Baba, behind the TV…," Mei started, her voice small.

He didn't look away from the program. "Mei, not now. I am watching the news." He dismissed her again. It was just the city, playing tricks on her, the way it was very bright even in the late hours, always light.

Mei's older brother, Jian, was even less sympathetic. He was fifteen, consumed by video games and online chats. He thought Mei was seeking attention, making something, or just everything, up to disturb the house.

"Stop being weird, Mei," he'd sneer whenever she tried to talk about what she witnessed. "Nobody wants to hear about your imaginary monsters."

But they weren't imaginary. To Mei, they were as real as the hard plastic chairs in her classroom, as real as the roar of the traffic outside her window. The difference, a significant one, was that she was the only person who seemed capable of acknowledging them, witnessing the existence of these things.

One night, the things moved closer. Mei watched, frozen, as one of them extended a long, pseudopod-like appendage towards her. It stopped just inches from her face, the air around it vibrating with a cold, strange energy. She would be in big trouble if she wet the bed again.

Mei screamed, a high, piercing sound that brought her mother running. But when her mother burst into the room, the shape was gone, withdrawn back into the shadows where it normally was residing.

"Mei, it was just a nightmare," her mother said, holding her close, but the words felt hollow, useless. How could her mother comfort her when she couldn't see the very thing that was terrorizing her?

The isolation grew. Mei stopped talking about the shapes. She kept her eyes down in class, avoided corners, and slept with the covers pulled up to her chin, even when the small apartment was suffocatingly warm in the humid city air. She felt watched by something outside the human world, beyond the usual lights and smells, which she had no power to stop.

One rainy afternoon, as Mei walked home from school, she saw a small group of children gathered around something on the sidewalk. Curiosity won out.

They were looking at a dead bird, its feathers matted and broken. Around it, Mei saw the familiar, dark shapes, denser and more active than she'd ever observed before. They were feasting on something invisible, something the other children couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, see.

As she watched, one of the shapes detached itself from the group and turned towards her. It seemed to acknowledge her, to recognize her in a way nothing else ever had. It glided closer, no longer content to remain in the shadows.

"Mei," a voice hissed in her head, a voice that wasn't a voice, but a thought, an intrusion. "We see you." She looked at the sky, to her apartment, and could no longer tell the shadows of the creatures, and the edges of her home.

Mei backed away, fear turning her legs to jelly. She ran, her schoolbag bouncing against her back, the sound of the rain drowning out the whisper in her mind. She tried looking straight, without looking at her periphery, but that made the shapes she witnessed come to the center more, at this point in time.

That night, Mei refused to sleep in her room. She huddled on the sofa in the living room, pulling a thin blanket around her. Her parents argued in hushed tones in the kitchen, their words muffled but their frustration clear. She was getting to be too much trouble.

"I don't know what to do with her anymore," her mother whispered, her voice laced with a weariness that cut Mei deeper than any of the shapes' cold touches. "She's…different."

Jian was the first one she witnessed it happen to. She witnessed the way his dark silhouette behind the TV was growing closer. One second, he was engrossed with his video game. The other, it had reached his form and absorbed it. He screamed, but it became muffled with a speed she had difficulty registering, it happening far too fast for what was occuring.

Just as quickly, his form slumped over, completely, head on his desk. When her father got home, he found him this way. He rushed him out of the house to get help, telling her to get her mother to the hospital, running down the stairs to try and hail an infrequent taxi, even at this time of night, and at this city. She complied and notified her mother.

Her mother was wailing. Jian, she found out days later, was braindead. And this, despite no clear cause. No injury. Nothing that should have brought him to that state, no real answers being given. Only, she saw, in the darkness, there being less of it now, the size not having gone away.

She stayed quiet, understanding slowly, gradually. They would only take so much. But so long as she was near, it would always find a way, to feast.

The things were getting what they wanted now, in other ways, anyway. It was all the same.

When it took her father, a week after the funeral, with them sitting and talking, a hand over his mouth before anything could happen, it was almost relieving to the creeping thoughts she'd have. To walk over and stand, where he was, was easier and easier as time passed and she saw what occurred when she stood back.

Her mother tried taking her to temple, lighting incense, speaking to doctors, anything she could think of doing.

The doctors gave Mei pills, telling her to take them to see less. The pills made the colors brighter, dulling down the edges of reality, of what was real to Mei, as time and again it was affirmed she was simply confused. And with what she observed, she couldn't be sure if that was not right. But it took them longer, the figures.

Her mother, she had heard, after a visit to the doctor without her, after the second passing, considered sending Mei to a special boarding school, a special kind of boarding school, upstate. That was not possible though.

She stood by her mothers side when her mother, having exhausted all, was lighting incense, at the altar set up in the apartment, praying desperately. And as usual, the shapes and figures got close, inching and seeping in the walls, growing in anticipation.

Her hand on her mothers back. When the shapes lunged to reach out to grasp her mother's, she felt them absorb through. And they got bigger again.

The lights weren't as visible at night, out her window, with all the extra dark, after her mother's final, complete collapse. She thought about that a bit.

But still she observed shapes out her window. Even with this, some part was left. It was, she guessed, that she still was there. And as long as she was around it, even after they got this way, there was not a final peace. It didn't have it.

It was days later she came to the conclusion of what needed to be.

There wasn't anything left in the way of immediate family. With what happened with the apartment, everyone she would go to would see it too. She couldn't, no she wouldn't have them undergo the agony and sadness her presence here would cause, anymore. Not after all this time. She made it through the shapes before, when there were less.

After eating some noodles she found in the fridge and clutching her panda, Mei climbed up on the low windowsill of her bedroom window, watching the flickering darkness she saw down the street lights of the roads, 28 stories down. It felt bigger. It was more.

There was one more she had to consider.

She hugged the plush closer, rubbing the soft fur on her face. When it crept around, what would happen? What could occur? Would it absorb like the people did, and simply slump to the floor? Or just get bigger as they grew smaller, from consuming it, it dissolving into nothing? It was made different than what had gone away so far.

But as much as this panda offered a distraction from what occurred and comforted her when there was nobody else, with everything that did, in truth it wouldn't be able to understand how much she valued her time with the plush. It was not capable of having those thoughts. She had to stay with the people it took.

She clutched the toy tight. She knew it wasn't real. But there were too many others getting close she'd have to look at too, if she left her only one behind, out here. That wasn't something she wanted.

Mei opened the window, the noise of the city rushing in.

"I see you too," Mei told the darkness out the window. It was less dark than other parts. So she looked over to see what she usually does. It did not take long to find, the entire apartment, even the ceiling above, fully enwreathed in shadow and shifting forms. She'd never witnessed this much of it. She understood, as they had said, all this time it seeing, and them seeing her, always was two ways. It knew that she saw.

As she had for so much of her life, it came up and close, near her. The largest part in front of her now, getting close to what was left of what was holding everyone close, everyone she cared for close. The figures.

She took one final look at her room, its emptiness feeling heavy and solid. Then, she let go. She fell toward the city and into it. Toward the last people that could still see her now. Toward everything she saw still, on the way down. Toward where her mind told her the figures took everyone that saw it when close, now, even if just for a little bit. She saw that they were everywhere in between, her falling getting close, faster.

The figures stretched out, trying to envelop her.

But she wouldn't give them the satisfaction, any longer, of what they got through others. No matter the comfort.

The last thing Mei saw, before her eyes closed, was a final bright, red light, a final feeling of an entire street and an apartment above, the biggest and clearest they've ever been, now more a thing that would surround, more and more, until it had everything here fully. She had been able to witness.