The Alley That Doesn't Exist

Halfway along the west wall of a residential tower in Xinyi District, to the left of the rubbish cart, there is an opening about 1 metre wide. It has no corner curve, no seam, no transition — a 1 metre wide patch of black dug out of the middle of a brick wall, the ground running in and then being eaten.

Go and touch it in daylight and brick is brick. Dark red, twenty-odd-year-old cement brick, the surface rough and grainy, the air pockets irregular, hot from the sun; knock three times and it is solid. Behind the wall is the lift shaft, and past that a household's kitchen. The street-view car's three records, 2019, 2021 and 2023, agree: brick wall. The scooter shop owner who has been set up on this street for 18 years says he has never seen an alley.

It isn't there all the time. It exists only between 03:15:40 and 03:18:20, 161 seconds, to the second. 2 surveillance cameras of different makes and different angles caught it in the same stretch of time — one a Hikvision running 0.7 seconds fast, one a Letv running 1.2 seconds fast, and with each unit's offset subtracted out the opening falls inside the same second. Two machines don't fail on the same second, in the same position, at the same 1 metre wide.

For the person walking in through the viewfinder, the naked eye has him walking the whole way with his face against the red brick wall, while inside the viewfinder there is a complete concrete alley: concrete walls on both sides, cracked concrete tile underfoot, an old long-snouted, birdcage-shaped plastic lamp shade hanging from the power lines overhead, water on the ground. The air is 3 degrees colder than inside the car.

The alley has an end. Around the twentieth step you come to an old streetlamp: the post concrete, grey, the shade green-and-white enamel and rusted, not of the same era as the electroplated metal Taipei uses now. Under the lamp is a low stool, and on the stool an old woman in a thin dark-blue jacket and plastic sandals has sat. Go back in after a night and the post is still there, with a fresh scratch half a palm long about 1 metre off the ground, on the side facing the end of the alley, scraped through the rust to the grey concrete beneath; the stool, the old woman, and the low house at the end she pointed to are all gone. On the asphalt there is no water mark, no print from the stool's legs, no footprints.

Deep in the opening there is a single frame of dim yellow light. The first time it was 1 frame only, about 4 pixels across; in the version shot on site on the seventh day, that point of yellow held for 7 seconds. Zoomed to the pixel level, something crosses in front of the light source laterally, one upright and one shorter, both with the swing of arms.