I slid down the door and sat on the floor, legs gone. Outside, silence. Then the footsteps retreated — slap, slap, slap — heading toward the stairwell.
It had gone back.
I sat there for a long time before my heartbeat settled. I looked at the wall clock. Twelve-oh-three a.m. Six hours till dawn.
For the rest of that night, I didn't leave the duty room. I piled everything I could move against the door — desk, chairs, filing cabinet — a mountain of furniture. Then I curled up in the corner, wrapped in a blanket, staring at the gap under the door all night. The light through the crack never changed much. The corridor lights stayed on, steady, just an occasional flicker.
At daybreak, I pushed the barricade aside and opened the door. Nothing in the corridor. Clean marble floors, gleaming in the morning light.
I went to the third floor for a look. The Ceramics Hall door was locked. Padlock intact. The stairwell door, locked too. Same as last night.
But I noticed something on the wall beside the stairwell door. A mark. Starting near the floor, stretching upward more than a meter, like someone had smeared wet mud across the wall and let it dry into a grayish-brown trail.
The trail ended at a corner of the ceiling, where one of the ceiling panels had been nudged askew, revealing the concrete slab above.
I stared at that trail for a long time.
Then I went back to the duty room, booted up the computer, and pulled up last night's surveillance footage.
The corridor camera caught me sprinting out of the stairwell — flashlight jerking wildly, face white as a ghost. Then I was on screen, bursting into the duty room, door slamming shut.
I dragged the timeline forward.
One minute. Two minutes. Empty corridor.
At the three-minute mark, something appeared on the screen.
It came down from the ceiling. Grayish-brown. Long, like a rope, but the tip split into a forked tongue. It swayed in the air, slow, like a snake tasting for scents.
Then it retracted. Fast. Whoosh — back into the ceiling.
I replayed that clip again and again. I circled the spot on the ceiling where the tongue had emerged, zoomed in.
The ceiling panel sat flush with the ones around it. No sign of tampering.
I screenshotted it, sent it to the captain with one line: "There's something in the fourth-floor ceiling."
He replied after a long pause. Two words: "Delete it."
I didn't.
When I came in the next day, the "Night Patrol Precautions" document had been tampered with. Everything after Item 3 had been deleted. Just a blinking cursor sitting there. The last modified timestamp showed that morning at 9 a.m. The editor wasn't me.
I checked the document's version history. The earliest version had been overwritten too. All that stuff about "don't turn around," "patrol in groups of three," "notify the curator" — gone.
Someone kept erasing this information, over and over.
I sat in the duty room, staring at the blank document, and a thought hit me so cold it made my back prickle —
Had an employee even written that document?
If not, who had? And who was deleting it line by line?
The next day, while the museum was open, I went back into the Ceramics Hall as a visitor. In daylight, the exhibition hall was a completely different world. Sunlight streamed through the windows. Tourists milled around. Kids pressed their faces against display cases. A tour guide held up a little flag and lectured.
A small crowd had gathered in front of the storyteller figurine's case. A young mother held her child up, and the kid sprawled against the glass, peering in, giggling.
I stood at the edge of the group and looked at the pottery figurine's gaping mouth. Under bright natural light, the inside of its mouth looked normal — just a hollow cavity, pale gray clay interior, nothing there.
I stepped beside the case and looked down at the label.
"Han Dynasty Storyteller Figurine. Excavated from Luoyang. Grade II Artifact."
The line of small print below was gone.
The label had been swapped. The new one was slightly larger, with a shinier metal surface, mounted with different screws. I crouched down for a closer look. Around the edges of the label, on the glass, was a faint ring of adhesive residue — marks left by the old label. The new one hadn't fully covered them.
I pulled out my phone and opened the photo I'd taken before. In the picture, a line of small print sat clearly beneath the label: "Contained a tongue inside the mouth upon excavation." The character for "tongue" even had scratch marks where "eye" had been scraped away.
Now, that line of text was gone.
I straightened up and scanned the hall. The daytime security guard was a coworker in his fifties, leaning against the wall playing on his phone. I walked over, gestured at the storyteller figurine's case, and kept my tone casual. "Hey, has the label on this case been changed?"
The man glanced up and shook his head. "No idea. Didn't notice."
"I remember there used to be another line of small print under it."
"What kind of small print?"
"It said —"
I stopped mid-sentence. On the wall behind him, the security camera was pointed straight at me. The red indicator light blinked, steady, like a watching eye.
I smiled and said never mind, must've remembered wrong, and walked out of the hall.
That night I had another shift. Alone.
Sometime past eleven, I sat in the duty room with every camera feed pulled up on the main screen. Sixteen feeds, the whole grid. I'd blown up the corridor cam outside the Ceramics Hall to full size, focused on that silver padlock.
At eleven forty-seven, the lock moved.
Something pushed against it from the inside. The lock jumped upward, then fell back, swinging against the latch.
Something inside the hall was pushing on the door.
No — nobody was in the hall at night. Something inside was pushing on the door.
On the screen, the padlock kept getting knocked upward, the door panel vibrating faintly, making a muffled thud. The sound wouldn't carry down to the first floor, but I could imagine it — tap, tap, tap. The exact same rhythm as the tapping on glass.
Then it stopped.
The screen stayed still for a few seconds. I thought it had gone back.
Then I saw something squeeze out from under the door.
Grayish-brown. Flat, like squashed mud, forcing itself out through the gap between the door panel and the floor — a gap less than a centimeter wide.
Outside the door, it slowly gathered on the floor. Reshaped itself. Took the form of a foot — arch, sole, toes. Every toe was moving, wriggling like a newborn testing the world.
Then another foot squeezed out from under the door.
Two bare feet stood on the marble floor of the corridor. Gray. Covered in cracks. Toes splayed, gripping the stone.
Noise started crawling across the edges of the feed. The image jittered, like signal interference. The corridor's motion-sensor lights began flashing. Each time the lights cut out, the feet had shifted forward.
They were heading toward the stairs.
Toward the first floor.
Toward the duty room.
I stared at the screen as those feet walked step by step to the stairwell and started descending. The feed switched from corridor to stairwell cam. Under infrared, the stairwell looked empty. But the motion-sensor lights were turning on, one stretch at a time — third floor to second floor.
Then second floor to first.
It had reached the ground floor.
Footsteps sounded outside the duty room door.
Slap. Slap. Slap. Bare feet on marble, with a wet, sticky squelch — like mud slapping against stone. The footsteps drew closer. Stopped right outside.
I watched the sliver of light beneath the door. A thin black line split it down the middle. Something was pressed against the gap.
Then the light in the crack started dimming. Not because the corridor lights went out. Because something was seeping through. Grayish-brown matter oozed in like fluid, pooling on the floor, slowly rising, shaping itself.
Feet first. Then calves. Thighs. Torso.
Right in front of me, it assembled itself into a human shape. A grayish-brown body, rough surface, riddled with cracks — like something molded from clay. The head formed last. No hair. No ears. Facial features indistinct. Only the mouth was clear.
A huge mouth, stretching from one side of the face to the other, gaping wide. Inside, a black void.
It stood at the door of the duty room, face to face with me.
My body locked up. Every muscle rigid. Even my breathing went shallow and fast. My brain was screaming at me to run, but my limbs couldn't receive the signal.
It didn't move. It stood there, head cocked, and its mouth opened and closed, making a sound.
Muffled. Like someone talking with something in their mouth. It took me a long time to make out two words.
"Help me."
The voice came out of that enormous mouth, rasping with the scrape of clay on clay — like two pottery shards grinding together.
"Help me… take it out."
It raised a hand and pointed at its gaping mouth. The hand's fingers were five uneven clay strips, each fingertip a tiny black hole. It shoved its fingers into its own mouth, digging around deep in its throat with a dry, scraping sound.
Then it pulled the fingers out and extended them toward me.
Nothing on the fingertips. But it was waiting for me to do something. It wanted me to reach into its mouth and pull something out.
Was it the eye?
The eye lodged in its throat.
"Take it out," it said again, the voice clearer now, almost normal. "It's in there. I can't reach it."
My mouth opened and made a sound I didn't recognize as my own. "What are you?"
Its head tilted the other way, neck cracking with a brittle snap, as if it were thinking the question over. Then it shoved both hands into its mouth, jaws stretching wider, face nearly tearing in two. It dug around in its throat for a long moment. Then pulled the hands out and reached toward me again.
This time, the fingertips were wet with something. Transparent. Viscous. With a faint metallic tang.
"Hurts," it said. "It's in there. It hurts."
I don't know where I found the strength, but I got up from the chair and stepped back. My back hit the cabinet behind me. The door flew open. Everything inside spilled out — folders, flashlight, walkie-talkie, keys.
Keys.
I looked down at the keys on the floor, then back up at this clay-formed thing. It was still reaching out, still making those muffled sounds, cycling through the same words — "help me," "take it out," "hurts."
My mind snapped into clarity for one second.
The restorer from three years ago — he'd smashed the display case glass. The cameras caught him facing the corridor, saying "It's out." Then he disappeared into the stairwell. Never seen again.
How had he disappeared?
If what was trapped inside that pottery figurine was a person — or had been a person — then what it wanted might not be what I'd assumed.
"Who are you?" I asked again.
It stopped moving. The cocked head slowly straightened. That huge mouth closed a fraction, but stayed stretched, like a fixed expression.
"I'm…" The voice came out faint, as if from somewhere far away. "I'm… the pottery restorer."
Pottery restorer. Artifact conservator.
I stared at that grayish-brown face, trying to find some trace of human features. But the face was too indistinct — just a lump of molded clay. Where the eyes should've been were shallow indentations, no eyeballs. The mouth was an irregular hole taking up half the face.
Only the mouth moved.
"Three years ago," I said, testing, "a restorer went missing. Was that you?"
Its mouth stretched wider, like it was trying to say something, but only a cascade of scraping static came out. Its body began trembling. More and more cracks split across the surface. Tiny clay fragments flaked off and hit the floor as gray powder.
Then it did something I didn't expect — it bent down and wrote on the floor with its fingertip.
That grayish-brown fingertip scratched white lines across the marble, horizontal and vertical strokes, laboring over each one.
By the time it finished the last character, its fingertip had worn down to a stump, exposing the black hollow inside.
I looked down at the words on the floor.
Four characters, crooked but legible:
"Don't shine it on yourself."
I looked up at it. Its mouth was still moving, silently repeating those words. Don't shine it on yourself. Don't shine it on yourself. Don't shine it on yourself.
Then it started backing away. Step by step, retreating to the door. Its body began breaking down the same way it had entered — starting from the feet, flattening into mud-like matter, flowing out through the gap under the door. The last thing to go was a hand. Five fingers clung to the door gap, then slipped away one by one.
Footsteps faded down the corridor. Slap, slap, slap. Toward the stairs. Toward the third floor.
Then silence.
I stood in the wrecked duty room, staring at those four words on the floor for a long time. Then I bent down and picked up the flashlight, gripping it in my hand.
"Don't shine it on yourself."
A detail surfaced in my mind. Old Zhou, when he was drinking that day, had said he'd worked here four years and never once gone into the Ceramics Hall at night. But what he didn't say was this — if someone did go in, saw that pottery figurine, shone a flashlight at it… what would happen next?
I had done it. Liu Xu had done it. The restorer three years ago had done it.
The restorer smashed the glass, shouted "It's out," and vanished into the stairwell.
Liu Xu quit, but his voice came through the walkie-talkie. And in the background of his transmission, there was that tap-tap-tap sound.
And me?
I looked down at the hand holding the flashlight.
The skin on the back of my hand looked normal. But higher up, on my forearm, under the fluorescent lights of the duty room, a patch of skin was the wrong color. Grayish. A shade darker than the surrounding skin. The surface felt rough — like fine-grit sandpaper.
I rolled up my sleeve.
The gray patch stretched from my wrist to my elbow. The edges were irregular, like a spreading patch of mold. I scraped it with my fingernail. A fine gray powder came off and scattered on the desk. It looked just like clay.
I suddenly understood what "it's out" meant.
Not that it had come out of the display case.
That it had come out of a person.
Whatever was trapped inside that pottery figurine — the eye, or whatever it was — it needed a host. You look at it, and it enters you.
And the previous host — the restorer trapped inside the figurine — had become the thing tapping its fingertips on the glass. Tap, tap, tap. Over and over. Wanting someone to shine a flashlight. Wanting the next person to see that eye.
So that it could —
Swap out.
"Help me take it out."
He hadn't been asking me to pull the eye out of his throat. He'd been asking me to pull him out of the pottery figurine.
Then what did "don't shine it on yourself" mean?
I pulled my sleeve back down, covering the gray patch on my arm. The fluorescent tubes in the duty room buzzed, the hum waxing and waning. I looked up at the ceiling. Between the light fixture's housing and the ceiling panel was a narrow gap. Pitch black inside.
I stared at that gap for a long time.
Nothing dangled out of it. But I could feel it there. In the space between floors. Above the fourth floor, pressed flat, waiting. That grayish-brown tongue licking the concrete seams in the ceiling.
I picked up the walkie-talkie and switched to the captain's channel.
"Captain," I said. "I need to see the complete file on that restorer from three years ago. Tomorrow."
Silence on the other end. Then, after a long pause, the captain's voice came through, worn out like he hadn't slept in days. "Shen. Some files don't exist anymore."
"Deleted?"
"Not deleted," he said. "They were never there. After that man left, every record of him disappeared. Employment form. Pay stubs. Attendance logs. All gone. It's like he never worked here."
I held the walkie-talkie without speaking.
"Shen," the captain's voice continued. "You can still leave."
"What do you mean?"
"After dawn, leave. Quit. Go somewhere far away. As far as you can."
"Why?"
He stayed silent for a long time. Then, just one sentence: "Because it can find its way back."
A piercing burst of static erupted from the walkie-talkie. Then it cut out.
I sat in the duty room, watching the clock. Three forty-seven a.m. Less than three hours until dawn.
I set the flashlight on the desk, aimed at my face. My finger rested on the switch. I hesitated.
Don't shine it on yourself.
But I needed to confirm something.
I pressed the switch.
The beam hit my face, blinding. I squinted. Then, slowly, I aimed the flashlight at my mouth, opened wide, and let the light bore into the depths of my throat.
In the mirror on the opposite wall, I saw my own gaping mouth. The light lit up my throat — red mucosa, my pharynx.
And something else.
Deep in my throat, near the tonsils, a small depression. Nestled inside it was a tiny round thing, its surface coated in a wet sheen, glistening under the flashlight's beam.
It was slightly larger than a grain of rice. Nearly transparent. You could see fine lines inside it, layer after layer.
It was growing.
Don't shine it on yourself. Because if you do, you'll see it. And once you see it, it can see you. And when it sees you, it's also watching you.
I turned off the flashlight. Sat in the dark.
From the end of the corridor, the direction of the third floor, came the sound. Tap, tap, tap. Slow rhythm. Like someone drumming their fingertips on glass. Waiting for a passerby. Waiting for someone to shine a flashlight at it, read that label, see those words, aim the beam into its mouth, see the eye.
Then become the next one.
I put the flashlight in my pocket. Stood up. Walked out of the duty room. The corridor's motion-sensor lights lit up one by one as I passed. At the stairwell, I looked up. The third-floor lights were on. The Ceramics Hall door was locked. The padlock gleamed silver under the lights.
I turned and went up the stairs.
Not to the third floor. To the fourth.
I was going to find out where that restorer had gone after vanishing into the stairwell. I was going to find out what was in the ceiling — the thing that kept deleting that document, line by line.
I reached the fourth floor and pushed open the stairwell door. A long corridor stretched ahead, lined with storage rooms and office doors. Nameplates read "Artifact Restoration Room," "Archives Office," "Curator's Office." At the far end stood a window. The sky outside was still black. The glass reflected only the corridor lights and my own shadow.
I stopped in front of the restoration room door. Hand on the handle. It wasn't locked. One twist and it opened.
The light inside was on.
Warm yellow light spilled across the worktable, illuminating scattered tools and a half-restored pottery figurine. In the chair sat a person, back to me, hunched over, using a fine brush to dab something into the figurine's mouth.
He stopped at the sound of the door.
"A lock's no use," he said. His voice was thin, like he hadn't had water in days. "It's not in the display case anymore."
He turned around slowly.
Where his mouth should have been was an enormous black hole, stretching from one side of his face to the other. The edges were ragged, like something had forced it open from the inside.
No tongue in that mouth.
But he was still speaking. The voice came from deep in his throat. Muffled. Unclear. With that clay-scraping rasp.
"Have you come to pick me up?"
I looked at that face — a face I'd seen countless times in surveillance footage. The artifact restorer who had vanished into the stairwell three years ago.
"No," I said. "I came for the truth."
He smiled. The huge mouth stretched even wider.
"The truth is," he said, "it doesn't need glass anymore. It uses something else now."
"What?"
He raised his hand and pointed at me.
"You."
Then he stood and took a step toward me. I stepped back, my back hitting the doorframe. His walk was strange — stiff, each step awkward, like he wasn't used to using legs. His knees wouldn't bend. His feet slapped the floor: slap, slap, slap.
He stopped in front of me and raised his right hand. The back of that hand was covered in gray cracks. Where the fingernails should've been were five tiny black holes.
He opened his palm.
In it lay a small mirror. Round. Plain plastic backing. Like something taken off a female coworker's desk.
"You've already shined it on yourself," he said. "You've already seen it. Right?"
I said nothing.
"It'll grow," he said, his voice calm, like stating a fact. "First, a grain in the throat. Then a second grain, in the eye. Then a third, in the brain. When it's grown enough, you're no longer you. It becomes you. You become it."
He pushed the mirror closer.
"Want to see how far along you are now?"
I shoved his hand aside. The mirror flipped over, and in the desk lamp's glow I caught my own reflection.
On my face. The inner edge of my left lower eyelid. A tiny bump. Like the start of a stye. But that bump was transparent. You could see rings inside it, layer after layer.
Exactly like the one in my throat.
"When the third grain is in your brain," the restorer's voice came out of that hollow mouth, "you'll start hearing it talk. It talks the same way the one in my mouth does. It's not just tapping on glass. It's learning human speech. That's its language. You have to listen carefully to understand."
"What does it say?"
The restorer tilted his head. His neck cracked. He seemed to be remembering. Then, in an odd voice — a sound like a tongue clicking against the roof of a mouth, crisp, in groups of three —
The eye in my throat was slowly opening.