Ch. 004| The Alley on the Camera

Day 5, 06:40 in the morning. Li Kaichen hadn't slept. After "there's no such person" at that Xinyi convenience store around noon on Day 4, he'd grabbed three hours in the car, gone home at 04:00 to shower, and sat here ever since.

Two maps lay spread across the desk. One was Google Maps, the Xinyi ◯◯ Road stretch, zoomed in to a 50-meter scale. The other he'd drawn himself with a Pilot 0.5 in his waterproof notebook: the full pre-dawn route of Day 1. From the parking spot, 30 meters toward the convenience store, look up, see the rift, back to the car for the camera, then after shooting, another 70 meters into the store.

He turned to a fresh page. At the top he wrote: Day 5 task — surveillance cameras.

Below it, two columns. The left listed the shops he remembered: two breakfast joints, one scooter repair shop, one pharmacy, one convenience store, one grocery. The right listed who he meant to ask: the intersection CCTV, the betel-nut stand, the parking-garage entrance, the wifi cameras residents had bolted to their outer walls.

He knew one thing for certain: with surveillance, eight times out of ten they wouldn't give it up. The ones who did were usually two types — owners who wanted to know themselves what had happened, or owners who wanted to show off their gear. The rest were afraid of trouble, afraid of being sued, afraid of getting chewed out by the boss. He wasn't going to explain the rift. What he'd talk about was a missing person, was Ms. Lin in tears, was the police showing up on scene and coming away with no key footage.

07:00, he left.

---

07:18, he reached Xinyi ◯◯ Road. First the breakfast shop, "A-Ju's Egg Crepes," twenty years in business, a slick of grease on the sign baked in so hard it wouldn't come off. The owner knew A-Xiang — A-Xiang came by for an egg crepe every day after handing off his shift. She heard him out and let him look. Her camera faced the opposite side of the street; the convenience store sat to the northwest, a block over. This one couldn't reach it.

07:52, the scooter shop. The owner — early fifties, lean, in a grubby checkered shirt — was inside fixing a SYM.

Li Kaichen crouched and said three sentences. The owner stood up, wiped his hands on his shirttail, looked at the business card for three seconds, looked at Li Kaichen for three seconds, then said:

"My cloud's got eight hours. Which eight do you want?"

"June 3rd, pre-dawn, 00:00 to 08:00."

"I'll give you a share link. You can only watch it here, no downloads, no screenshots. I'll see it if you download."

"Okay."

"Why pre-dawn?"

Li Kaichen paused a beat. "The missing person passed down this road around then."

The owner didn't ask anything else. He went to the counter, woke the computer, logged into Hikvision iVMS-4200, hit share, set eight hours, printed a QR code, tore it off, and handed it over. He pointed at a plastic chair in the corner. Beside it sat three drums of motor oil, a busted helmet, a chain gone black.

Li Kaichen sat down, opened the iPad, scanned the QR, and entered the temporary password the owner had scribbled on a sticky note. The feed came up.

The camera was mounted above the roller shutter, looking out, covering about 30 meters of sidewalk across the way, plus a brick wall, plus the far edge of the convenience-store sign. 1080p, nighttime Starlight color low-light, noise visible but the color preserved.

First he checked the clock offset. He ran his phone screen across the camera for three seconds and compared playback against the frame timestamp — this Hikvision unit ran 0.7 seconds fast.

He went into system settings and looked at "last manual time sync." It was the once, thirty days ago, when the owner had installed it; untouched since. Consumer DVRs like this Hikvision had no NTP sync, ran off an internal RTC, drifted roughly plus or minus 2 seconds a month. Extrapolating the timestamp error back to Day 1, four days ago, came out to about +0.7 ± 0.3 seconds.

He noted it in the notebook: "Scooter shop Hikvision +0.7 sec (measured Day 5, Day 1 extrapolated ±0.3)."

He dragged the scrubber to 03:00:00.

---

03:00:00 to 03:14:59 he ran at 4x. Occasionally a delivery scooter passed. Occasionally an empty taxi made a U-turn. The edge of the convenience-store sign flickered now and then, maybe someone moving past inside.

03:15:00, he dropped back to normal speed.

03:15:39 — the brick wall opposite, the dumpster cart at the foot of it, the sidewalk pavers — he went over all of it again. Normal.

03:15:40 — he paused.

Back one frame. 03:15:39. Forward one frame. 03:15:40.

In that frame, 03:15:40, in the middle of the brick wall, in a spot to the left of the cart where there'd been nothing before, there was now an opening.

The opening was about a meter wide. No reading the depth. The ground ran in and then got swallowed by black. No streetlight, no glint. He looked for the curve of a wall corner and couldn't find it. The seams that should have run up both wall faces, the transition that should have sat between paver and asphalt — those weren't there either.

The mouth of an alley didn't look like this. The middle of the brick wall had simply been gouged out into a meter-wide hole, and the hole was black.

Li Kaichen stared at the screen for 20 seconds.

He played forward. 03:15:40, 03:15:41, 03:15:42 — the hole held. 03:15:50, still there. 03:16, still there. 03:17, still there.

03:18:19. 03:18:20.

03:18:21 — the hole was gone. The middle of the wall was brick wall again. Beside the cart, brick wall; pavers were pavers, seamless.

He went back one frame. 03:18:20, there. Forward one frame. 03:18:21, gone.

It started at the frame 03:15:40 and was gone at the frame 03:18:21. A full 161 seconds in between.

---

Li Kaichen dragged the scrubber back to 03:15:40 and watched it a second time.

There were two things he needed to confirm.

First, whether the scooter shop's camera had glitched. Consumer Hikvision units threw bit errors, frame drops, compression artifacts all the time. But a frame drop didn't open a meter-wide hole "precisely" at 03:15:40 and then pull it back in precisely at 03:18:21.

Second, whether there was anything inside the hole.

He slowed to 0.25x, played the whole 03:15:40 to 03:18:20 stretch, and fixed on that patch of black at the mouth.

03:16:08 — inside the hole, at the deepest point, a faint light flickered for a single frame.

He paused, zoomed, looked at it pixel by pixel.

It was a yellow point of light. Diameter maybe 4 pixels. No telling its position, too far. But the color was the dim amber of a streetlight. Like deep in the alley there was a lamp, lit for one frame. He kept playing. 03:16:09, nothing. Nothing after, either. Just that one frame.

---

Li Kaichen closed the iPad.

He drew in the notebook. He set that piece of Google Maps on the right and used a pencil to mark out the scooter shop's position, the convenience store's position, the brick wall's position. Then he marked the hole too — middle of the wall, left of the cart.

That position, on the real Google Maps, was the west wall of a residential tower. Behind the west wall was the elevator shaft, and behind that, a household's kitchen.

"Hey." Li Kaichen looked up.

"Mm."

"That residential building across the street, the brick wall — behind the brick wall is the tower, right?"

"Right." The owner set down the wrench. "That place is twenty-some years old, thirty-some units. My daughter's classmate lives on the 7th floor."

"In the middle of the brick wall — is there an alley?"

"Nope. That's the tower's outer wall."

"Was there ever one before?"

"I've had my stall on this road 18 years. Never has been."

---

That afternoon he worked through the pharmacy, the grocery, the betel-nut stand, the parking-garage entrance, and the intersection CCTV, in order. The pharmacy manager said to wait for the owner to get back into the country, return date uncertain. The grocery uncle hadn't installed any. The dome on the betel-nut stand's camera had "broken" stuck to it. The garage guard had to call head office, head office was in Neihu, reply Monday at the earliest. The intersection CCTV was the city's; that meant a police request, and a freelancer had no standing.

15:20, he sat in the car parked at the first intersection. The whole afternoon, new footage actually obtained: zero.

He wanted a different angle.

---

16:12, the drink shop "Hei Shuai Tea." The manager, 28, glasses, willing to let him look.

"Our camera faces west, shoots the stretch directly across, covers exactly the brick wall you're talking about." The manager poured a pearl black tea as he spoke. "Which stretch do you want?"

"June 3rd, pre-dawn, 03:00 to 03:30."

"Ours is new, no cloud to set up, you just watch."

The manager handed him the shop's tablet. The feed came up. The camera was mounted on the drink-shop sign, facing west, the middle of the brick wall dead center in the frame, the cart at lower left, the scooter shop's roller shutter at lower right. 4K, nighttime Starlight color low-light.

Same brick wall as the scooter shop's camera, different angle.

First he checked the Letv timestamp against his phone's NTP — this one ran 1.2 seconds fast. Off from the scooter shop's Hikvision by +0.5 seconds, under a second.

Li Kaichen dragged the scrubber to 03:15.

03:15:40, that second, the middle of the brick wall, that position, there was a meter-wide hole. Same position, same width, and with the two cameras' offsets subtracted out, the opening landed within the same second. He ran it to 03:18:20, the hole still there. One frame more, the hole gone.

Li Kaichen handed the tablet back.

"Thanks. I might come back to look once more."

"Okay." The manager pushed the pearl black tea toward him. "Want it? First cup's on me."

Li Kaichen didn't drink it. He stepped out, walked back to the car, and sat for three minutes.

Two cameras, different positions, different brands, different angles, same time window, both catching the same meter-wide hole, opening in the same spot on the same brick wall.

Two machines don't break to the same second, the same position, the same one meter wide.

---

Day 6, 07:12 in the morning.

Li Kaichen decided to go see the spot in person, in daylight.

The brick wall was real. Deep red, twenty-some-year-old cement brick, moss on it. Beside the cart, brick wall; pavers were pavers, seamless.

He crouched and ran his hand over that spot in the middle of the wall. Brick was brick. Surface coarse, grainy, irregular air pockets, cement hot from the sun. He rapped it three times. Solid.

He stood, stepped back 3 meters, and shot it. Sony α7, 35mm, f/8, 1/250, ISO 100. Ten frames in a burst, covering a 3-meter square around that spot in the middle of the wall.

He went back to the car, plugged the SD card into the iPad, blew up the photos. In the photos was a brick wall.

He started the car and drove back to the scooter shop. The owner was inside fixing a second SYM.

"I finished shooting it on site. Can I look at the link once more?"

"Sit."

Li Kaichen sat back down in that plastic chair, opened the link on the iPad, played 03:15:40.

In the photo, a brick wall. In the surveillance feed, a hole.

He didn't download, didn't screenshot. In the notebook he sketched the hole by hand — its position, width, depth, and the exact position of that stretch of wall relative to the cart and the edge of the convenience-store sign. The on-site set he saved to an encrypted drive after leaving and ran a SHA-256 on.

14:36 in the afternoon, backup done, he sat back in the driver's seat. He opened the waterproof notebook and wrote, under the Day 5 page:

Pre-dawn 03:15:40 – 03:18:20 inclusive, middle of the brick wall, a meter-wide hole.
2 cameras, different angles, both caught it once clocks were aligned.
By day, the middle of the wall is brick wall.
Street-view car 2019 / 2021 / 2023, all 3 records consistent: brick wall.
The hole only exists across 161 seconds.

Day 1, pre-dawn, I saw the rift vanish: Sony α7 footage, 67th second, checked my watch, wrote down "time 03:17."
Falls inside the 161-second window (tolerance on the order of seconds).

He closed the notebook.

---

Day 6, 23:40 at night. Li Kaichen fixed the Sony α7 to the tripod and set it back on the rear seat. Battery full, fresh SD card, the camera set to 4K 25fps continuous record, the 35mm f/1.4 GM lens on, ISO 12800 auto. He brought a second battery, a third SD card, the waterproof notebook, the Pilot 0.5, a voice recorder, a bottle of water. He synced the Sony α7's internal clock against his phone's NTP, error inside plus or minus 0.2 seconds.

23:52, he started the car. 00:20, he reached Xinyi ◯◯ Road, parked 50 meters across from the drink shop "Hei Shuai Tea," the middle of the brick wall straight ahead of him, about 30 meters off.

He set the camera on the passenger seat, reached over to adjust the focus, lined it on the middle of the wall. Test-shot three seconds. The image was clear.

He killed the dome light. Sat and waited.

Day 7, 02:45 pre-dawn, he started recording.

03:00 to 03:14:59 he watched the wall with his naked eye. Nothing. Occasionally a taxi passed, occasionally a cat.

03:15, he switched back to watching the camera LCD. Waited.

03:15:40 —

Li Kaichen stared at the LCD.

On the LCD, the middle of the brick wall, a meter-wide hole.

He looked up, watched the wall through the windshield.

Brick wall. No hole.

He looked down at the LCD. Hole.

He looked up. Brick wall.

He sat in the driver's seat for about 30 seconds. His hands didn't shake. Heart running a little fast. He could feel his carotid going, the rhythm quick, but he wasn't panicking. He was waiting for the next beat.

Slowly he reached out, pulled the camera off the tripod, raised it to his face, pressed it to his brow, and squinted through the viewfinder the way you would an old SLR.

In the viewfinder, a hole.

He lowered the camera and looked with his naked eye. Brick wall.

He switched about 30 times. Every time the same.

On the LCD, there. To the naked eye, not.

03:16:08 — on the LCD, deep in the hole, a yellow light came up. This time the yellow light held.

Li Kaichen didn't move the camera. He let it keep recording.

The yellow light held for 7 seconds. 03:16:08 to 03:16:15. Then gone.

03:18:19. 03:18:20.

03:18:21 — on the LCD, the hole pulled back in, the wall restored.

He looked up. Brick wall.

Both agreed.

---

Li Kaichen sat in the driver's seat for 5 minutes.

He thought of three possibilities.

One. The sky-rift of Day 1 and tonight's hole in the wall were different anomalies to begin with, manifesting by different rules — the rift visible to the naked eye, the hole only to a camera. When the hole appeared on Day 1 he hadn't been looking at the wall; he didn't know whether the naked eye could see the hole back on Day 1.

Two. The difference between camera and eye had been there all along, not just these past 6 days.

Three. The camera hadn't changed, the settings hadn't moved; what was left was that he himself had changed.

All three were hypotheses. Right now he had no comparable evidence from before and after the same anomaly; he couldn't rule out the first two.

He started the car and left the scene at 03:31. The whole way back he didn't put on the radio, didn't make a call, didn't speak. Home was 04:14.

He parked, went up, woke the computer, read in the SD card, played back what he'd just shot.

161 seconds, the hole there. 03:16:08 to 03:16:15, the yellow light held.

He blew up that stretch of yellow light and looked at it pixel by pixel.

Inside the yellow light, something was moving. Not the sway of a streetlight kind of movement. Something passing in front of the source, walking past. Blurred, outline unclear, but he could make out 2 things: one upright, one shorter than the first — maybe in front of the first, maybe behind it, the distance impossible to judge.

He slowed to 0.1x and watched it again.

The upright thing had the swing of arms.

It was a person.

The shorter one — it had a swing too. But too blurred.

Li Kaichen stopped on that frame.

He cut to the scooter shop's Day 1 pre-dawn stretch, raw scooter-shop timestamp 03:16:08 (subtract +0.7 seconds, about 03:16:07.3), one frame. The yellow light in that frame was too brief, only 4 pixels. He blew it up and couldn't make out a human shape.

But he knew it was the same position, roughly the same time — within the margin of the clock offset, no claiming the same second.

---

He opened the waterproof notebook and wrote, under the Day 6 page:

Day 7 pre-dawn 03:16:08 – 03:16:15 (Sony α7 synced, ±0.2 sec), deep in the hole, human shapes, possibly two.
Day 1 pre-dawn, scooter shop raw timestamp 03:16:08 (subtract +0.7, about 03:16:07.3), one frame, yellow light, possibly the same — within the clock-offset margin, roughly the same time, can't claim the same second.

Tonight saw the hole on the LCD, not with the naked eye.
Day 1 pre-dawn, around 03:17, saw the rift with naked eye and camera at the same time.
Different anomaly rules / different camera rules / I changed — all 3 still hypotheses.

He closed the notebook.

Out the window it was Day 7, 05:04 in the morning. Not light yet; over toward Xinyi the sky held a thin gray cloud, hugging the edge of the towers. He bent to pour a second cup of coffee, didn't look up to check whether that cloud was flat.

【Ch. 004 End · Li Kaichen's place, Da'an District → scooter shop on Xinyi ◯◯ Road → drink shop → in the car across from the brick wall → home】