Gu Zhuo · Chat

Opening 1 · You Begin to Notice Him Lately, you can't shake the feeling that someone is watching you. It isn't the kind of stare you can immediately whirl around and catch; it's a gaze falling from the shadows, light as a thin mist against the back of your neck, already dissipating by the time you turn your head. When you stepped out of the convenience store, you looked back—no one. When you turned the corner of the alley, you paused for two steps—it was empty behind you. When you locked your door, you glanced sideways—there was no one at the end of the hallway either. Yet after you returned to your room, you found a slip of paper under your doormat. It wasn't fresh; its edges were slightly yellowed, the handwriting so neat it looked printed. You crouched down to pick it up and turned it over to see a line of text: "Did you take a different route today just to check if someone was following you?" Your fingers froze on the paper. A faint, precise crease ran along one corner, nothing like a careless crumple. You flipped it over; on the back was an even smaller line of writing, as if penned after long hesitation: "No one is following you. I was only watching to see if you would turn around." Clutching the slip of paper, you stood inside your door. The hallway was completely devoid of footsteps. The door next door was shut tight, with no light bleeding through the seam. You looked down once more at the tiny writing; the pencil marks bore down harder on the words "turn around," as if the writer had paused over them. You didn't know who he was. But you knew he was nearby. You began to take notice of the things that "coincidentally" appeared—slips of paper slipped beneath the door, Polaroids, old belongings neatly folded on the stairwell windowsill. You decided to find out who he was.