Chapter 15: Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15: The Faces in the Walls

Fang's phone clattered to the floor. The screen cracked, but the message still glowed: *Doctor Fang, the face in my mirror just blinked. But I didn't blink.*

The Taoist didn't look at the phone. His eyes stayed locked on Mrs. Chen's twisting face—the one that wasn't hers anymore. The one that had started to speak in borrowed tongues.

"One hour," the Taoist said. "Tick-tock."

"You think I'm afraid of you?" Fang's voice came out steadier than he felt. "You're a fraud. A man in a costume, playing exorcist for rich women who don't know better."

The Taoist smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the kind of smile that had watched empires crumble and monsters crawl out of their graves.

"Tell me something, Doctor Fang. When you cut that first spirit—the girl in the karaoke bar—did she scream? Did she beg? Did she offer you anything if you'd just let her go?"

Fang's jaw tightened. "She was already dead."

"Was she?" The Taoist stepped closer. "Or was she just stuck? Lost? Waiting for someone to show her the way home?"

Mrs. Chen's body went rigid on the table. Her arms snapped to her sides. Her back arched until only her heels and the crown of her head touched the surface. The face—the stolen face—opened its mouth wider than human anatomy should allow. The jaw unhinged. The lips peeled back. And from that impossible darkness, a sound emerged.

It was not a scream.

It was a song.

A Chinese pop song. Tinny. Distorted. As if played through a blown speaker in a cheap karaoke room.

"I can't find my way home," the face sang. "The lights are all wrong. The streets are all different. I've been walking for hours but the door won't open."

The Taoist's hand shot out. His palm pressed flat against Mrs. Chen's forehead. The singing stopped. The jaw snapped shut. But the eyes—still closed—began to move beneath the lids, tracking something only they could see.

"This is what happens when you steal a spirit's face," the Taoist said. "You don't just take their identity. You take their anchor. You take the thing that ties them to this world. And when you glue it onto someone else, you don't free yourself from the spirit. You weld yourself to its misery."

"I didn't know."

"You knew enough." The Taoist's voice went cold. "You knew they were spirits. You knew they weren't human. You just didn't care. Because they made you rich. They made you famous. They made you the man every woman in Shanghai wanted to see."

Fang's hand tightened on the scalpel. "I was helping people. Women who'd been told they were ugly their whole lives. Women whose husbands left them for younger models. Women who'd lost everything because of how they looked."

"You were helping them steal."

"Is that so different from what you do? You sell amulets. You perform rituals. You charge desperate people money to talk to their dead grandmothers."

The Taoist's beads clicked. "I don't charge."

"Then you're a fool."

"Maybe." The Taoist looked at Mrs. Chen. Her breathing had steadied. The stolen face had gone still. "But I've never had to sleep in a room full of jars."

The lights flickered again. This time, they didn't come back.

The room went dark. Not pitch black—there was still the glow from the hallway, the faint green light of the emergency exit sign—but dark enough that shapes lost their edges and faces became suggestions.

"I wouldn't move," the Taoist said.

"Why?"

Because something is standing behind you."

Fang didn't turn. He didn't breathe. He felt the cold—the sudden, unnatural cold that had nothing to do with the air conditioning and everything to do with the presence that had materialized at his back.

It spoke.

"You took my skin."

The voice was male. Deep. Rough, like gravel wrapped in wet leather.

"You took my skin and you gave it to a banker. A man who cheats on his wife. A man who laughs at beggars on the street. You gave him my face."

Fang's legs went weak. "I didn't know."

"You knew. You always know." The voice moved. It circled him. He could hear the footsteps, but they didn't sound like feet on tile. They sounded like wet meat slapping against concrete. "You knew when you cut me. You knew when you peeled me. You knew when you dropped my body in the incinerator and watched the flames turn my bones to ash."

"I had no choice. The spirit brokers—"

"—paid you well." The voice laughed. It was a horrible sound. Wet. Broken. Like a drowning man's last breath. "They paid you well, and you took their money, and you took my face, and now I walk the earth as a liar and a cheat."

The Taoist's voice cut through the dark. "Doctor Fang. Drop the scalpel."

"No."

"Drop it. Now."

"I said no."

The presence moved closer. Fang could smell it now—a mix of rot and smoke and something else. Something chemical. Something that reminded him of the formalin he used to preserve the skins in his collection.

"You want to know the worst part?" the presence whispered, its mouth inches from Fang's ear. "The worst part is that he knows. The banker. He knows the face isn't his. He sees me in the mirror every morning. He sees my eyes staring back at him. And he doesn't care. He likes the way I make him look. He likes the way women turn their heads when he walks by."

"He doesn't know you're real."

"Oh, he knows." The presence chuckled. "He knows because I've been talking to him. I've been whispering in his dreams. I've been showing him what I saw in my last moments. The knife. The table. Your face, hovering above me, calm and professional and utterly without mercy."

Fang's breath caught. "You can't—"

"I can. I have. And tomorrow, he's going to walk into your clinic and ask you why the face he's wearing belongs to a dead man."

The lights flickered back on.

The room was empty.

Mrs. Chen lay on the table, unconscious. Her face—the stolen face—was still. The Taoist stood by the door, his beads in his hand, his eyes fixed on a spot in the corner where the shadows seemed thicker than they should be.

"He's gone," the Taoist said. "For now."

"Who was that?"

"A construction worker. Fell off a scaffold three years ago. You took his face two weeks later. Sold it to a hedge fund manager named Liu Wei."

Fang's stomach turned. He remembered the case. He remembered the body—broken, bloody, the face still intact. He remembered the spirit broker's call. *Good specimen. Young. Healthy. Clean skin.* He remembered the money. Three hundred thousand yuan. The largest single payment he'd ever received.

"He's not the only one," the Taoist continued. "There are others. Thirty-seven, by my count. Thirty-seven spirits wandering the city, bound to faces that don't belong to them, trapped in bodies that can't see them, can't hear them, can't feel them."

"Thirty-six," Fang said.

The Taoist's eyes narrowed. "What?"

"I said thirty-six. There were thirty-seven containers. But one of them broke. Last night. I don't know how."

The Taoist's face went pale. "Which one?"

"I don't know. I didn't check."

"Show me."

Fang led him through the clinic. Down the hallway. Past the examination rooms. Past the storage closet where he kept the spare surgical supplies. To the door at the end of the corridor—the door that required a keycard and a code and a thumbprint to open.

The basement stairs creaked beneath their feet. The air grew colder. The smell of formalin grew stronger.

The refrigerator stood at the far end of the room. Stainless steel. Industrial grade. The kind used in morgues.

Fang punched in the code. The lock clicked. The door swung open.

The racks were empty.

Every single one.

The jars were gone. All twenty-seven of them. The containers that had held the skins—the faces, the hands, the patches of stolen flesh—were gone.

"No," Fang whispered. "I locked it. I checked it this morning."

"You checked it," the Taoist said slowly, "but did you check it?"

"What does that mean?"

"It means the spirits have been waiting. They've been patient. And now they've taken back what belongs to them."

Fang's phone buzzed again. He picked it up. Another message. Another patient.

*Doctor Fang, the face in my mirror just smiled. But I didn't smile.*

He scrolled down. There were more. Dozens of them. All from different patients. All saying the same thing.

*The face in my mirror just cried.*

*The face in my mirror just whispered my name.*

*The face in my mirror just asked me to help it find its body.*

*The face in my mirror just broke into a thousand pieces.*

*But I'm still looking at it.*

*And it's still looking back.*

Fang's hands shook. "What do I do?"

The Taoist looked at him. His eyes were old. Tired. Filled with a sadness that had seen too much death and too little justice.

"You find them," the Taoist said. "Every single one. You find the people who bought your stolen skins, and you take them back."

"And if they won't give them up?"

The Taoist's beads clicked. "Then you cut them off."

The basement lights went out.

The refrigerator door slammed shut.

And somewhere in the darkness, a voice—young, female, familiar—began to sing.

The same song. The same karaoke pop song. The same distorted, staticky recording.

But this time, it was closer.

This time, it was inside the refrigerator.

Fang pressed his ear to the cold metal. The singing was muffled. Distant. Like it was coming from very far away.

Or like it was coming from very deep inside.

"Let me out," the voice whispered, the song cut short. "Let me out, Doctor Fang. I want to see my face again."

The Taoist grabbed Fang's arm. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't open it."

"Why not?"

"Because she's not in there alone."

The refrigerator shuddered. The handle rattled. The lock clicked—once, twice, three times—and then the door swung open on its own.

The jars were back.

All twenty-seven of them.

But they weren't empty anymore.

They were full of faces.

And every single face was looking at him.