The Winding Through the Wall
In Yong'an Li, a village-in-the-city, young Yan rents a thin-walled room. Each night at 3:33 a.m. a patient click-click-click of clock-winding seeps through from the sealed room next door — where Old Shen, a clock-mender, died years before. Yan, a hobbyist mender, leaves a working clock at the wall; by morning it is gone, yet a new tick-tock answers from within, and he learns to sleep.
The houses in Yong'an Li, the old village-in-the-city, were built thin. Brick walls carried sound — a neighbor turning over, a tap dripping. Yan rented the innermost room on the second floor for eight hundred a month, mostly for the quiet.
On the third night he heard it.
Not a turning body, not a drip. It was the sound of a clock being wound: a movement drawn tight circle by circle, click, click, click — slow, patient, as if someone pressed against the wall fussing with an old mantel clock. The time was 3:33 a.m. His phone's glow lit the wall. What lay on the other side of it — a neighbor, or something else — Yan could not have said.
The next day he asked the landlord, Old Zhou, who smoked without lifting his eyelids. "The room next to yours? Empty. Years back a clock-mender lived there, surname Shen. He died inside, and nobody knew. It was half a month before the smell gave him away. The room's been sealed since, used for storage."
"Sealed?"
"Sealed. Planked over from the outside. You heard wrong."
Yan let it go. Yet the sound came every night, on the dot, 3:33, click-click-click, never early, never late. He pressed his ear to the wall; the sound seeped through, warm and unhurried — not frightening, more like someone waiting for an answer.
Yan liked tinkering with clocks himself. He sorted parcels at a depot by day and had the nights free; on his desk stood a row of old alarm clocks and stopped wristwatches, all salvaged and mended. Old Shen, in his time, had probably kept much the same hours.
On the seventh night he did a foolish thing. He took the tidiest clock he had fixed — a brass case, keeping perfect time, three evenings of adjusting — and leaned it gently against the wall, facing the neighbor's side. If someone in there was winding a spring, he thought, maybe they were short of one that ran.
In the morning the clock was gone. The wall's foot was clean. He knocked on Old Zhou's door; Zhou said no one had gone in there, the planks were intact, the nail marks untouched.
That night at 3:33 the sound came again — but changed. Two clicks, then it stopped. After a pause, from inside the wall came a very soft tick-tock, brand new, like that little brass clock walking on its own. Then nothing.
After that, every night at 3:33, two or three winds, then the ticking. Yan began to sleep. He no longer pressed his ear to the wall; only sometimes, turning over, he heard the punctual, restrained few winds from the other side — like an unfinished pleasantry, or someone who had at last got a reply.
Later he moved away, to deliver parcels in the east of the city, where rent ran higher, yet he thought of that wall. On late nights coming home he would remember: some houses have thin walls, and the one next door can be more patient than the living.