Conversation Outside the Reception Room

That night, Hui Nan stayed at the school.

This wasn't a decision made out of courage. It was made out of the knowledge that going home and lying in her apartment alone would be worse than staying somewhere familiar, even somewhere terrible. The building was empty except for the night-watch security. She sat in the teachers' office with all the lights on, a thermos of tea going cold in front of her, listening to the building.

She was the only one of the original four still functioning. Zhang Yao had been taken to a hospital after Zhai Jia's death — he hadn't spoken since the classroom. Zhu Hua had called in sick. There was just Hui Nan left, sitting in the fluorescent light while the rest of the school slept.

Sometime after midnight she heard voices.

She turned off the desk lamp and went to the window. The campus below was dark and still. She couldn't see anyone. But the voices were clear — two of them, one low and one lower, coming from somewhere near the gateman's reception room.

She recognized them both.

Jia Shi's voice. And Uncle Du's.

Hui Nan closed her eyes. Jia Shi was dead. Uncle Du was dead and in a coffin twenty meters from where she was standing. She told herself: you are hearing things. Your mind is producing sounds because of pressure. This is not real.

She opened her eyes. The voices continued.

She could not make out words from the window. She stood there for a long time not moving, conducting an argument with herself about whether to go down. Eventually she lost the argument. She walked out of the office, down the main stairwell, out the side door, across the dark campus toward the reception room.

The voices stopped when she was about twenty meters away.

She stood in the cold. The night was overcast, no stars, the school grounds barely visible by the spill from the security lights at the gate.

Then she saw it.

In the window of the disciplinary office — which was beside the reception room, which Hui Nan had never found locked and had never gone into at night — there was a face.

It was Ma Dahua. The disciplinary director.

Who had been dead for over a month.

Ma Dahua had no head. The neck ended in a stump, black in the dim light, and above the stump there was nothing. But the shape below — the round body, the thick arms, the particular way Ma Dahua had stood with her weight on her left foot — was unmistakable.

Hui Nan heard herself make a sound. She turned and ran. She ran across the campus, up the stairs, back to the office, and shoved her chair against the door. She sat there with her back against the chair and the door, in the middle of the room with all the lights on, until the sky outside slowly began to gray.

By the time the first teachers arrived in the morning, she had composed herself enough that no one could tell she had not slept. She unlocked the office door and said good morning and went to teach her class.

But she didn't mention to anyone what she had seen. Not yet.