****
Merebear note: This is the online version from daomubiji.org so it differs slightly from Chapters 11 and 12 of the published version I did back on 5/31/2020 and 6/1/2021 (POV is different, a few things added, difference in wording on some things, etc).
****
It wasn’t easy for me to find one person missing from the photos, because most of them were taken during the bonfire party and there were many people in the chaos. I was able to find it because among the stack of photos I was shown before, Lan Ting took a large number of photos with another woman, but in this stack, there were none.
“Why’s the illustrator missing,” I asked. “What’s her name again?”
“Daodao.”
“Yes, why did she disappear? Did she quit halfway?” I looked at Lan Ting and asked. I had a bad feeling that something had happened to her during their trip, but Lan Ting was smiling so brightly in the photos. If she still smiled like that when something happened to her best friend, then I needed to reconsider her personality.
Lan Ting bit her lower lip but said, “She didn’t leave, she was in our group.”
I looked at the photo and made an incomprehensible gesture.
Lan Ting said, “Or, to be more precise, she’s in these photos—”
I continued to look at her, “She’s not here.”
“She is, she’s in most of the photos. She’s someone who likes having her photo taken very much. When I took these photos, I focused on her several times.”
I suddenly understood what she was trying to say, but I couldn’t believe it. I looked at her and waited for her to continue.
“But after I developed these photos,” she continued, “I found that she didn’t appear in any of them. Even those I’m absolutely sure were taken of her didn’t show her.”
I took a deep breath and looked at the photos. My first thought wasn’t to wonder whether this was possible but whether she had been playing with me from the start.
I often heard that authors who wrote mystery novels would turn crazy themselves. Had Lan Ting’s rush to write her manuscript caused her to completely collapse, and now she couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality?
But I couldn’t see any confusion when I looked into her eyes.
“Could it be that you made a mistake and your friend deliberately avoided the camera? I’ve read a novel before in which a man’s friend disappeared. When he looked for a picture of that friend for a missing person’s advert, he found that the man had never left a photo with his full face shown. In all the pictures, the friend had deliberately avoided the camera or only showed his side profile,” I said. I was trying to convince myself that this was true and avoid the urge to leave. “In the end, they found out that the friend was actually a spy and had been trained to avoid cameras.”
“I wrote that novel.” Lan Ting looked at me. “It’s only a novel, and these photos don’t even show a side profile. It’s actually quite difficult to completely avoid all the shots.”
“But…”
Lan Ting suddenly made a gesture, “Lao Guan, I know you don’t believe me. I didn’t tell you all this to make you believe me, either. I just want to ask you: in photography, under what circumstances will this phenomenon occur?”
I wanted to say “when you’re dreaming”, but I refrained and thought for a moment before saying to myself, forget it, I’ll accompany you to the end. I asked Lan Ting seriously, “Is your friend herself normal? Can you see her?”
“Of course.” She nodded, “Or I would’ve gone crazy first.”
“In theory, camera photography and what the human eye can perceive share similar principles,” I said. “Therefore, it’s possible for a camera to capture what the human eye can see. The image of a person is produced because the light shines on that person and then is reflected into the photoreceptors. To make a person invisible in the photo, their reflection must be prevented from being exposed in the photo.”
Lan Ting’s eyes lit up, “Is that possible?”
I shook my head slightly, “Some special lenses can do it—for example, the perspective lens that’s been causing a lot of noise for a while—but such a lens is unlikely to achieve the effect of penetrating the human body. It might be easy to simply penetrate a layer of pure cotton fabric of the clothes someone’s wearing, but the human body is very, very complicated. If a lens can penetrate the bones, skin, fat and muscle, then the background, books, chairs, sand, and so on behind you can also be penetrated and nothing would be photographed. Besides, the camera lens can’t distinguish between people, so if your friend didn’t show up, then others wouldn’t either,” I said decisively. “So, the phenomenon you mentioned is physically impossible.”
Her eyes suddenly dimmed and she sighed, but she didn’t show too much disappointment.
I continued, “These photos look normal and there doesn’t appear to be any kind of problem with them. I don’t think they could have been tampered with. If you insist on saying that there was someone there, then it must have been something paranormal, which is even more incredible. So, there’s no other explanation to this except that you made a mistake.”
She shook her head and took a sip of tea, “There’s really no possibility of achieving this effect, even if it’s very complicated?”
I shook my head, “You must have made a mistake.”
She gave a wry smile, “I also hope so, but it was something I personally experienced. I still believe in what I’ve experienced even if you say I made a mistake.”
I looked into her eyes and suddenly felt a little angry. I felt like I was being teased. No matter how earnest her eyes were, it must have been some kind of hoax. She probably found the easiest one among our group to pull this prank on.
Jin Yong once said that the more beautiful the woman, the better she was at lying. I was a sensitive person, and because I was sensitive and simple, I was often tricked like this when I was in school. I thought I could spot a lie like this right away, but I didn’t expect that I’d fall for this again after becoming an adult.
I looked at Lan Ting’s serious face and tried to suppress my anger as I thought about how to deal with her and how to get rid of this matter.
Lan Ting continued, “Teacher Guan, don’t worry about it. Just think of it as a joke. But I hope you can do me another favor. Can you help me contact your friends? I want to go to Badan Jilin again.”
I frowned, “Go again?”
“It takes too long to wait for another group of tourists. You just said that you had a very good relationship there. I think you’ll be able to introduce me to some reliable people who would be willing to take me there. I want to go back to Gutong Jing so that I can climb onto the stone mountain and see what exactly is on it that would cause this kind of problem with Daodao.”
“I need to think about it.” I suddenly felt that it was unreliable to help her with this. She wanted to go to the desert again and seemed to want to go in and out very quickly. She was solemnly asking me for help with such a puzzling thing, which appeared a little problematic to me. I hesitated for a moment before summoning up my courage and saying, “Miss Lan, I think you’d better see a psychologist. Long-term writing can lead to poor judgment. I’ve experienced this process and think you’re a little obsessed.”
I hoped Lan Ting would get angry or throw coffee in my face so that this conversation could finally end, but she just sighed as if she had suddenly lost interest in talking with me. I noticed that she looked a little pale as I watched her pick up the photos and then say in a very low voice, “Thank you, Teacher Guan. I’m sorry for keeping you.” With that, she was about to get up and leave.
I felt a little worried and asked, “Do you need me to take you back?”
She shook her head, as if her mind was no longer with me. I thought for a moment and then asked, “By the way, why don’t you just ask Daodao what she saw. Why do you need to enter the desert again?”
Lan Ting walked out of the tea shop without looking back and said to me, “It’s impossible.”
After I got home and recalled the whole thing, I kept feeling that it was very odd.
There were many extraordinary people in the world and they all reacted to things very differently. I didn’t know if other people could accept this kind of thing, but I absolutely couldn’t accept it. If this incident really happened, I couldn’t pretend that it never existed.
I wanted to call the publisher and tell him about it since he had a vested interest in it after all. But when I thought about it, I promised Lan Ting not to tell this matter to others, so I put the phone down. But after thinking about it some more, I still felt worried.
First of all, my thirty years of experience told me that this kind of thing was usually a prank, so I was sure that it was fake. But I didn’t see Lan Ting’s expression as that of someone who was teasing others, so the most logical explanation was that her mental state was abnormal.
This wasn’t the first time I had encountered such a thing. My uncle was such an example. He wrote novels about the Cultural Revolution and later suffered from depression. Writing novels could easily make people obsessive, so my family chose to enter the photography field instead of writing.
With something like this, I had to get the people around her to pay attention. Someone who had a good relationship with her, cared about her, and knew the secret so Lan Ting wouldn’t be embarrassed. But I wasn’t familiar with Lan Ting, so who could I even look for?
I thought of Daodao.
As the heroine of Lan Ting’s strange story, not only was she Lan Ting’s good friend, but she was also her colleague on that desert trip, which was very suitable.
I recognized her in the photo because she had a connection to my magazine, so it wasn’t hard to find her. I thought about it for a while before picking up the phone and asking my editor for Daodao’s number.
On the other end of the line, my editor sounded a little annoyed by my late-night harassment, but when I asked for that name, he unexpectedly fell silent.
“Why are you looking for her?” He hesitantly asked me.
“It’s none of your business!” I was impatient. “Just tell me the number and shut up. Do you still want to sleep?”
“I deleted her number a week ago.”
I frowned. “Why did you delete her number? Are you not working with her anymore?”
“Lao Guan, do you really not know or are you messing around? It’s best not to joke about such things. She committed suicide just a week ago.”
“Suicide?”
“Suicide. It was a week ago in her apartment. I thought you watched the news.”
I was silent. Based on his tone of voice, it didn’t sound like he was joking at all, so I realized that it must really be true.
After I hung up the phone, I suddenly fell into deep thought and couldn’t shake this bad feeling I had. It was possible for you to encounter one unreliable thing in a month, but if you encountered two within a few hours of each other and they were both closely related, then something big had to be going on.
I sat there and thought in a daze for a very long time before turning on my computer and starting to search Baidu for information. I first searched for Daodao, and as expected, the news was overwhelming. I hadn’t been on a computer for a long time now, so I really didn’t expect such an incident to occur.
I couldn’t bear reading too much, but the news said that her mental state wasn’t particularly stable before she died. There was a photo at the bottom of the news article, which appeared to be a photo of the scene of the incident.
The photo showed the living room of a suite and that was when I suddenly noticed that something wrong—in this photo, I saw that the walls of the room were covered in photos.
This detail wasn’t mentioned in the news. I didn’t know if they deliberately or accidentally excluded it, but the news photo was only 300 x 300 in size, so I couldn’t glean any more information from it. But those photos on the walls were enough to make my hair stand on end.
A very depressed feeling emerged in my heart, and as I thought of Lan Ting’s expression at that time and her bizarre story, my fingers involuntarily shook. Although I wanted to tell myself that this was probably my own conjecture, I couldn’t help but start to doubt my judgment at the time. Was it true?
I continued to search for news from Gutong Jing, trying to find other versions of the phenomenon that Lan Ting had described to me.
However, there was no other information like that about Gutong Jing in Baidu’s database except for some mysterious travel blogs rendered by ordinary tourists. In terms of rumors about humans not being able to be caught on camera, I didn’t know what keywords to use for the search bar, so I only found one result after searching for a long time. It was said that there was a farmer in Hebei who couldn’t take a picture of himself with his camera. This incident was also aired on TV, but the explanation that finally came up was quite shocking—it was said that the camera was broken and everything worked normally after it was repaired.
Most of the information I found online was either copied or reposted, which was a common trait on the internet. In other words, the information spread very quickly, but it spread too fast, which resulted in too much repetitive information.
I turned off the computer, feeling restless. I didn’t know how to deal with this mood, but it felt very uncomfortable to hesitate here.
That night, I thought about it all night long before finally deciding that I had to see Lan Ting again. I needed to talk to her again to figure out what was going on, so I called the publisher, asked for her hotel’s address, and drove over there.
But after arriving, I was surprised to find that Lan Ting had already checked out. The concierge said that she had left in a hurry that morning and the front desk had even called a taxi for her since she said she had to catch a plane.
When I remembered what she said the night before, I immediately had a bad premonition. I remembered that her room was paid for by the publisher, so I immediately found his finances and investigated Lan Ting’s payment receipts for the room. As expected, I found that she had booked a plane ticket to Inner Mongolia through the hotel that night.
I couldn’t believe that she had already set off, and that she had departed so quickly.
I couldn’t help feeling very regretful. In any case, I should’ve given her some help yesterday, even if it was as simple as asking my friend in Inner Mongolia to pick her up after she arrived. This way, no matter what her condition was, at least I would know her whereabouts. I should have considered the fact that she had the ability to go back to Badan Jilin without my help. In this society, many things weren’t a problem as long as there was money, and she was undoubtedly very rich.
I checked my watch. She had left very early, but the airport had to close the gates twenty minutes before takeoff, so this meant that the plane should’ve already departed.
At that time, I might have been able to change something with a slight twist in thought, but I didn’t. After all, Lan Ting and I had just met and I didn’t think I had to take any responsibility for her.
But in the days that followed, this incident lingered in my mind. I was a little curious on whether there had been any developments, but from that moment on, Lan Ting never appeared in front of me again. The novel contract she had signed with the publisher didn’t go anywhere, either. Just as my memory was becoming fuzzier, a young man knocked my door open, bringing a photo album and a strange story with him.
<Introduction 3><Table of Contents><Introduction 5 Part I>
****
Translated by: Yvette
Edited by: merebear226
MereBear's Translation 