The Midnight Knocking

At 3:17 a.m., just as dawn mist snuffed out the city’s neon lights, someone knocked on Chen Yan’s front door.

“Knock, knock, knock.”

The sound was faint, like someone scraping a fingernail against the door, yet it struck his eardrum with uncanny precision. This was the 28th time he’d heard the knocking at exactly the same hour. As the night-shift attendant at a folklore archive, Chen Yan was always receiving “strange” files: a backward-walking figure hidden in the mirror of an old Republic-era mansion; talismans covered in blood-red writing oozing from cracks in the walls of a demolition zone; the last car of the subway’s final train always empty, yet footsteps in leather shoes could be heard inside…

Then, on the 29th knock, he opened the door and saw a woman in a white dress standing in the corridor. Her face was as pale as rice paper, and she clutched a yellowed newspaper. The headline read: “1943: Fire at the West City Theater, No Survivors.” And the woman’s name, Su Wang, was listed right there.