Chapter 12: The Curator's Choice
The hand on his shoulder was a weight from a dream, the cold of the leather penetrating the thin cotton of his shirt, seeping into the skin and muscle beneath. Chen Zixuan stood rigid, eyes locked on Lin Xiao’s placid, amber gaze. It was the look Lin Xiao had given him just yesterday in the library attic, contemplating a tricky line of poetry. Now it was a mockery, a fossil.
“A curator must first understand the work,” the庄园主人 whispered, his voice a soft scrape against the dead air of the gallery. “Not just observe it. Know its texture. Its weight. Its silence.” The pressure on Chen Zixuan’s shoulder increased, not with brute force, but with an implacable, guiding insistence. “Touch him. Know what you would preserve.”
“No.” The word was a dry leaf, crumbling as it left his lips.
“This is the first lesson,” the庄园主人 continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Sentiment is a draft. It clouds judgment. You must assess the artifact.” He gave a gentle push.
Chen Zixuan stumbled half a step forward, now within arm’s reach of the plinth. The spotlight bathed Lin Xiao’s form in a sterile, surgical glow. Up close, the details were worse. The pores were gone, but a faint, artificial topography remained on the cheeks, like the grain on a photograph. The eyelashes were individual, delicate filaments, each perfectly placed. He could smell a faint, clean odor—like ozone and lavender soap, with an underlying note of something chemical, acrid.
“Go on.”
His hand rose, trembling. It felt like someone else’s hand. The air around Lin Xiao’s face was cooler, a localized chill. His fingertips, grimy from the discard pile, brushed the statue’s cheek.
It was not cold like stone. It was room temperature, with a slight, yielding firmness, like very dense wax. It was utterly, profoundly inert. This was the worst part. His brain screamed that he was touching his friend, but every nerve, every instinct, reported touching an object. A thing. There was no vibration of life, no capillary warmth, not even the imagined thrum of a trapped consciousness. It was a void shaped like Lin Xiao.
A violent shudder racked Chen Zixuan. He snatched his hand back, wiping it frantically on his trousers.
A low, pleasant hum came from the庄园主人. “Discomfort is the friction between old understanding and new truth. You see now. This is not your nervous art student. That person was a temporary arrangement of fears and hopes. This…” He gestured elegantly at the figure. “This is the essential idea of him, given permanence. No more existential dread over his mediocre portfolios. No more unrequited crushes. He is solved.”
“You killed him.” Chen Zixuan’s voice was a low, frayed wire.
“Killed is such a finite word. I edited. I refined. I… stabilized.” The庄园主人 turned, his coat tails swinging. “Come. The initial acclimatization is always jarring. Let us discuss your role in a more comfortable setting. The library. You liked the library, didn’t you?”
It wasn’t a question. Two figures emerged from the shadows between the plinths. The管家, his face a mask of vacant courtesy, and another servant, a young man Chen Zixuan vaguely recognized from the first night—a physics major who had boasted about his scholarship. His eyes were now the same flat, polished obsidian as the管家的.
They flanked him. Their posture was not overtly threatening, merely present. Blocking. Guiding.
“We can continue our conversation among the books,” the庄园主人 said, already walking toward the gallery’s far archway. “A more suitable atmosphere for a prospective curator.”
The walk back through the house was a silent parade. They took a different route, through lavish, dormant rooms where dust motes danced in slanted light from shuttered windows. Chen Zixuan’s mind raced, a trapped bird slamming against glass. Touch him. Know what you would preserve. The sensation lingered on his fingertips—that terrible, neutral firmness.
The library was as he remembered: vast, silent, smelling of aged paper and leather. A fire crackled in the hearth, a touch of staged normalcy. The庄园主人 settled into a high-backed armchair, steepling his gloved fingers. The管家 and the other servant took positions by the doors, becoming still as furniture.
“Sit,陈子轩. Please.”
Chen Zixuan remained standing, his back to the fire. The warmth felt like a lie.
“The curator’s duties are primarily archival and interpretive,” the庄园主人 began, his tone that of a department head outlining a thesis. “You would document the provenance of each piece. The candidate’s original state, the particular instabilities that made them suitable for correction, the aesthetic choices made during their… realization. You would also give tours.”
“Tours.”
“For new guests. To help them understand the destination before they begin the journey. It alleviates confusion.” He picked up a small, leather-bound book from a side table. It looked ancient. “You have a way with words. You see the narrative. That is rare. Most only see the horror or the beauty. You see the story connecting them. That is what I wish to preserve in you.”
Chen Zixuan’s eyes darted to the管家 by the door. The man’s neck, above his stiff collar, showed a fine, hairline seam, like a glued ceramic repair. He was a finished piece too, just one with motor functions. A tool.
“What’s the process?” Chen Zixuan heard himself ask. The question felt like a betrayal, but it was the only tool he had left: curiosity. “For a curator.”
The庄园主人’s mask tilted. The firelight glinted off its smooth surface. “More delicate. A series of treatments. Infusions that sharpen memory and focus while softening… certain emotional attachments. The loyalty to a concept of ‘self’ is particularly tenacious. It must be gently persuaded to expand its definition. To include the collection. To see its reflection in the stillness.”
He said it like he was describing a course of antibiotics.
“And if the persuasion isn’t gentle?”
“Then we have a different category of artifact.” The庄园主人 closed the book with a soft thump. “The Aggrieved. The Reluctant. They have their own wing. Their expressions are… louder.”
The quiet of the library was suffocating. Chen Zixuan thought of Zhao Mingyuan, his boisterous roommate, dragged away. Was he in that louder wing now, his athletic frame twisted into a sculpture of perpetual struggle?
“I need to think,” Chen Zixuan said. It was the oldest, most transparent stall in the world.
“Of course.” The庄园主人 stood smoothly. “The管家 will show you to your new quarters. Adjacent to the archives. You’ll find some preliminary texts there. Consider it a syllabus.” He began to walk toward a different door, then paused. “The thinking, however, must be done here. Within the context of the collection. Leaving the context is not an option. It corrupts the perspective.”
He left without another word, the door sighing shut behind him.
The管家 stepped forward, his movement fluid but without rhythm. “This way, sir.”
He was led not back to the guest wing, but up a narrower, colder staircase to a small, well-appointed room. It looked like a scholar’s cell: a desk piled with ledgers and strange, hand-bound journals, a narrow bed, a single high window reinforced with wire mesh. On the desk lay a clean set of clothes in dark grey, simple and functional. Curator’s clothes.
The door shut. A key turned.
Chen Zixuan stood in the center of the room, the memory of Lin Xiao’s cheek burning on his fingertips. He walked to the desk, his legs moving automatically. He opened the top journal. The pages were filled with precise, tiny handwriting that wasn’t quite Chinese, wasn’t quite anything. Diagrams of nervous systems, arrows pointing to junctions labeled “Attachment Nodes” and “Aesthetic Override.”
His eyes scanned, uncomprehending at first. Then a word leapt out. It was scribbled in the margin in a different, frantic ink: Hollowing.
He flipped back a page. There was a schematic of a face, with points marked for “ocular replacement” and “dermal sealing.” In the same desperate margin hand, it said: The eyes are last. They sometimes see until the fluid sets.
Chen Zixuan dropped the journal as if it had bitten him. He backed away, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He looked at his hand, the hand that had touched the finished thing that used to be Lin Xiao.
They sometimes see until the fluid sets.
The horror wasn’t just in what had been done. It was in the possibility, however faint, that some part of Lin Xiao had been present, aware, watching through forming amber as his old friend’s trembling fingers reached out and touched his sealed tomb of a face.
A dry, soundless sob choked him. He wasn’t going to be a curator. He was going to be the next volume on the shelf. But in that terrible, scribbled margin note, he saw something else.
A crack. Not in Lin Xiao’s form, but in the perfection of the process. Panic left a paper trail. Someone, some previous apprentice to this nightmare, had tried to leave a message.
He had to find the rest of them.