Chapter 10: The Jars Are Empty

The refrigerator hummed.

It was a medical-grade unit, seven feet tall, stainless steel, with a digital temperature display that read exactly 4.2 degrees Celsius. Fang had paid thirty thousand yuan for it. It had a lock. A backup generator. An alarm system that would text him if the temperature fluctuated by more than half a degree.

It was empty.

Fang stared at the open door. The titanium racks gleamed under the interior light. The glass containers were gone. All thirty-seven of them. The labels he had so carefully affixed—patient names, dates, skin types—were scattered on the floor like dead leaves.

"No," he whispered.

The Taoist stood behind him. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man who had expected exactly this. "When did you last check?"

"Last night. Before I went home."

"And you didn't hear anything? See anything?"

Fang shook his head. The security system was flawless. The cameras. The motion sensors. The door that required both a keycard and a biometric scan. Nothing had triggered. Nothing had alerted him.

Mrs. Chen sat in the recovery room down the hall. Sedated. Restrained. The Taoist had done something to her—pressed his wooden beads against her forehead, whispered words in a language Fang did not recognize—and the face had stopped moving. It was still there. Still wrong. But it had gone quiet, like a radio that had been unplugged.

"It's her," Fang said. "The face. It told me—"

"I know what it told you." The Taoist picked up one of the labels from the floor. *Zhang Li, 32, Type B.* He turned it over in his fingers. "The spirits are not just attached to their skin. They are the skin. Every cell remembers. Every pore holds a memory."

"I didn't know."

"You knew enough." The Taoist dropped the label. "You knew they were not ordinary donors. You knew the skin healed faster. Stayed fresher. You knew because you tested it. You knew because you charged premium prices for the privilege."

Fang had no answer. The Taoist was right. He had known. Not the full truth—not the spirits, not the binding, not the faces that could twist and speak and laugh—but he had known something was different. The skin had never rejected. Never scarred. Never aged. He had told himself it was science. A breakthrough. A gift.

It was a lie.

"Where are the jars?" the Taoist asked.

"I told you. I don't know."

"Then who took them?"

The phone buzzed again. Fang pulled it from his pocket. Another message. Another patient.

*Doctor Fang, I tried to remove the bandages. My fingers went through my face.*

A second message followed immediately.

*There's something living under my skin.*

Fang showed the Taoist. The old man read both messages, his expression unchanged, then handed the phone back.

"How many patients have you performed the procedure on?"

"Sixty-three."

"Sixty-three." The Taoist closed his eyes. "Sixty-three spirits. Sixty-three stolen faces. And now they're loose."

"Loose? They were in jars. They can't—"

"They can't what? Walk? Open doors?" The Taoist opened his eyes. "They are not dead, Doctor Fang. They were never dead. They were trapped. Bound to pieces of their own flesh, preserved in formalin, locked in a refrigerator. And now someone has let them out."

"Who?"

The Taoist did not answer. He walked to the door of the storage room and looked down the hallway. The clinic was quiet. The night staff had gone home. The security guard was at his post in the lobby, watching the monitors.

But the cameras had not caught anything.

The motion sensors had not triggered.

The door had not been opened.

"Someone with access," the Taoist said slowly. "Someone who knows your systems. Someone who knows your schedule."

"I don't have partners. I don't have employees who know about—"

"About the faces? About the spirits?" The Taoist turned. "Then who else knows?"

Fang thought. His mind raced through the possibilities. The nurses who assisted in surgeries but never asked questions. The supplier who delivered the formalin. The cleaning crew who came at midnight, who never went near the storage room, who—

The cleaning crew.

"There's a woman," Fang said. "She cleans the clinic. She's been here for three years. She never speaks. She just works."

"Does she have access to this room?"

"No. But she has access to the clinic. And she's here every night."

The Taoist's jaw tightened. "What does she look like?"

"Old. Sixty, maybe. Gray hair. A limp in her left leg. She wears a red headscarf."

The Taoist's face went pale. Not the pale of fear. The pale of recognition.

"Red headscarf," he repeated. "Limp in her left leg."

"Yes. Do you know her?"

The Taoist walked past him, out of the storage room, down the hallway. His beads clicked faster now. His footsteps were urgent.

"I know her," he said. "I buried her. Three years ago."

---

The security footage showed nothing.

The cleaning woman—the one the Taoist claimed had been dead for three years—was not on any camera. The lobby camera showed the security guard asleep at his desk. The hallway camera showed empty corridors. The storage room camera showed a door that never opened.

But the jars were gone.

"Spirits can bend light," the Taoist said. "They can make you see what they want you to see. Or make you not see what they don't want you to see."

They stood in the lobby. The security guard was still asleep. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. He looked peaceful.

"Is he dead?" Fang asked.

"No. Just dreaming. She put him under." The Taoist touched the guard's forehead. The man stirred, muttered something, then went still again. "She was kind. She didn't want to hurt him. She only wanted the jars."

"Why?"

The Taoist looked at Fang. His eyes were old. Tired. Full of things he had seen and wished he had not.

"Because she knows what I know. The spirits cannot cross over without their skin. And they cannot rest without their faces. If she has the jars, she can free them. She can give them back what you stole."

"And that's bad?"

"That's impossible. They are bound now. Stitched to the living. If she tears the skin off your patients, they will die. And if she gives the skin back to the spirits, the spirits will not cross. They will become something worse. Something that cannot be guided. Something that will hunt."

"Hunt who?"

"You." The Taoist's voice was flat. "Me. Everyone who knew. Everyone who helped. Everyone who wore their faces." He paused. "Everyone who looked in the mirror and saw them staring back."

Fang's phone buzzed again. He looked at the screen.

Ten new messages.

Ten patients.

He opened the first one.

*Doctor Fang, the face in my mirror is crying. But I'm not crying.*

He opened the second.

*Doctor Fang, I can hear her voice. She's inside my head. She's telling me things. Things I did. Things she did. I don't know which are mine anymore.*

The third message had no words. Just a video.

Fang played it.

The video showed a woman—one of his patients, he recognized her, the wife of a real estate developer—sitting in front of her bathroom mirror. She was crying. Her face was red and swollen. But the face in the mirror was not crying.

The face in the mirror was smiling.

It was a young face. A pretty face. A face Fang remembered. He had harvested it from a girl named Chen Mei, twenty-three years old, who had died in a car accident four years ago. Her skin had been perfect. Flawless. He had used it for three separate procedures.

The face in the mirror was Chen Mei's face.

And it was talking.

"You took my skin," the mirror-face said. "You took my skin, and now I'm going to take yours."

The woman in the video screamed. The mirror shattered. The video ended.

Fang lowered the phone.

"We need to find her," he said. "The cleaning woman. We need to stop her."

The Taoist shook his head. "We need to find the spirits first. Because they are not in the jars anymore. They are not in the refrigerator. They are in the world. And they are looking for you."

The lights in the lobby flickered.

The temperature dropped.

The security guard stopped breathing.

For one long, terrible second, he was completely still. Then his eyes opened. They were not his eyes. They were the eyes of an old woman. Gray. Faded. Full of sorrow.

"Hello, Master Taoist," the guard said. His voice was not his own. It was a woman's voice. Soft. Old. Familiar. "I'm sorry I had to take your jars. But you know I had no choice."

The Taoist stepped forward. "Auntie Lin. Let him go."

The guard's head tilted. The movement was wrong. Mechanical. Unnatural.

"I can't. I need a body to speak. And you never listen to ghosts." The guard's lips smiled. "You should have let me cross. You should have let me go. But you kept me here. You kept all of us here. You said we were not ready. You said we had unfinished business."

"Because you did."

"No, Master Taoist. You had unfinished business. You were afraid. Afraid of what we would become. Afraid of what we would tell the living." The guard's eyes glistened. "But I'm not afraid anymore. And I'm not going to let you stop me."

"Stop you from what?"

The guard's smile widened. Too wide. The skin around the mouth began to tear.

"From showing them the truth. From showing everyone what Doctor Fang did. What you helped him do." The guard's voice cracked. "Every patient. Every face. Every mirror. They're all going to see. They're all going to know."

The Taoist raised his beads. "Auntie Lin. Please."

The guard's eyes went dark. The smile vanished.

"Too late, Master Taoist. The jars are empty. The spirits are free. And the first one is already at Doctor Fang's house."

Fang's blood went cold.

"His wife," the guard said. "She's already in the bathroom. She's already looking in the mirror. And the face looking back at her is not her own."

Fang ran.

Behind him, the Taoist's voice rose in a chant. The guard let out a scream. The lights went out.

The door to the clinic was locked.

Fang slammed against it. It did not budge.

The guard's voice came from the darkness, still carrying Auntie Lin's sorrowful tone:

"You should have let us rest, Doctor Fang. You should have let us keep our faces."

The door clicked open.

Fang stumbled into the night.

His wife's face was not her own.

And he was twenty minutes away.