Chapter 87: Chapter 61: Mai Mingle: The Condition for Leaving (2)

The next step was to lower her foot and land it behind the mannequin.

Behind it, yet before her.

The two of them—one human and one... ’Mai Mingle truly couldn’t say what on earth the mannequin was’—remained in a motionless standoff in the dead silence for a dozen or so seconds.

Slowly, Mai Mingle lowered her foot, stepping on the part of the toilet connected to the wall.

The mannequin’s eyes rolled down to look at Mai Mingle’s foot, revealing mostly their whites. Because even though she—no, *it*—had lowered its gaze, its eyelids remained stretched wide, as if they couldn’t move at all.

Also unmoving was its smiling, vividly red mouth, a row of teeth half-hidden within.

’This is sickening. This thing is way too close...’

However, this wasn’t the closest they would be.

As Mai Mingle climbed off the toilet, it was impossible for her to avoid physical contact with the mannequin. Even though she had deliberately chosen the side without the toilet paper holder, the space was still so narrow it could barely contain her.

Her back pressed tightly against the stall wall, she sucked in her stomach, wishing she could shrink into a ball in the corner. The mannequin’s face still hovered behind her, and Mai Mingle could almost imagine she felt its breath.

Mai Mingle tried to squeeze past and, just as she’d expected, bumped the mannequin’s shoulder. Its head swayed slightly in response.

’It’s fine—it doesn’t feel bad or sickening, not like when the slender resident touched me—’

Mai Mingle threw caution to the wind. She stopped looking at the mannequin, gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, and took a large stride forward. She felt its body press and scrape against hers—and when she opened her eyes, she was standing safely by the stall door.

She quickly turned sideways, positioning herself in the gap of the half-open door. Only then did Mai Mingle look back at the mannequin.

One arm was still stretched straight forward, a wine glass in its hand, as if waiting for a toast. A curtain of long, wavy, light-brown hair fell over its chest from the back of its head.

Bracing for death, yet clinging to the hope of survival, Mai Mingle turned her head and stepped out of the stall.

In the utter silence, she found she was still alive.

’...I-I chose correctly?’

’I really did choose correctly.’

She stood on the tiled floor, her breath coming in short gasps, heart pounding—out here, there was no Mai Mingle lying dead on the ground.

Ahead was a row of sinks. At the far left sink stood a woman, her back to Mai Mingle, touching up her makeup.

Mai Mingle’s gaze landed on the space above the sinks, where a mirror should have been.

’No wonder... No wonder when I climbed up to look over the stall, I still saw the back of the woman applying her makeup.’

Because on the other side of the sinks, where the wall and mirror should have been, stood the back of that same woman applying her makeup. And next to the back of *that* woman stood another back—one Mai Mingle recognized in an instant. It wore the same casual ZARA outfit and had the same head of messily cut hair.

’So the "mirror" that should have been reflecting faces was instead showing backs that shouldn’t have been there?’

Mai Mingle gazed blankly at the back of the woman applying makeup, then glanced at the restroom’s main entrance. ’If I make a run for it from here, dash out the door...’

’Wait a minute.’ Something she’d glimpsed in her peripheral vision felt wrong—Mai Mingle snapped her head back and discovered there were only two stalls in the entire restroom.

One was the stall with the mannequin, which she had just exited. The other had to be the one she had first fallen into.

’Had the stall she didn’t choose somehow vanished?’

’Or had it never existed in the first place?’

When Mai Mingle turned her gaze forward again, the back of the woman applying makeup was standing right before her eyes.

"Why did you come out of the stall on the left?"

A thin, feminine voice emanated from the back of its head. Its right hand, which had been touching up its lipstick, finally lowered, revealing a tube of lipstick.

It felt as if both Mai Mingle’s voice and breath were frozen in her chest, unable to escape.

"Please answer carefully," the voice said from within the thick hair on the back of its head. "Why are you silent? Did you just pick one at random, getting lucky with a fifty-fifty chance, and that’s why you can’t answer?"

Its tone made her heart clench, implying grave danger if she failed to answer.

"No, that’s not it."

The moment Mai Mingle spoke, she realized her voice was trembling like a plucked string that had yet to quiet. "The scene of the advertising mannequin toasting someone... that’s the real photo shoot, right? That’s why I chose the left stall."

The back of the head remained silent.

Mai Mingle didn’t know if it was waiting for her to continue her explanation, much less what would happen next. She found herself speaking again, as if filling the silence with her voice could delay the unknown that was sure to follow.

"There’s a mirror next to the mannequin. During post-processing, her reflection in it was erased. That part is actually easy to notice. But why erase the reflection, and why add an extra hand? I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time... until I tried to understand the first sentence of the ad’s copy, ’Multiple images, embrace the possibilities.’"

"The phrase is vague and hard to understand, but you can still glean a few key points from it. One, there is more than one ’image.’ Two, the images are different, which creates different ’possibilities.’ Three, I can choose one of those possibilities."

Trying to explain her thought process to a motionless head of hair had an absurd, terrifying quality, like being trapped in a nightmare...