“I swear the pet bed was right here yesterday,” muttered Detective Chen, squinting at the empty corner of Ms. Li’s apartment. The outline of where it had been was visible in the dust - a perfect circle of emptiness.

Ms. Li, an elderly woman with eyes that seemed to look both at you and through you simultaneously, simply smiled. “Things have a way of becoming unclear when we need them most, don’t they, Detective?”

The case had started simply enough: reports of missing pets in the building, all disappearing on nights with no moon. But what puzzled Chen most was how the pet beds vanished along with their occupants, leaving behind only those ghostly circular impressions in the dust.

“Tell me again about the night your cat disappeared,” Chen prompted, notebook in hand.

“Ah, but Detective, who said anything about disappearing?” Ms. Li’s smile grew wider. “Perhaps they’ve simply become… indistinct. Like memories of childhood dreams, or the edge of consciousness just before sleep claims you.”

Chen felt a familiar headache building behind his eyes. Every conversation with Ms. Li left him feeling like he was trying to grasp smoke. “Ma’am, with all due respect—”

“Look closer at the dust,” she interrupted, gesturing to the empty corner.

Chen knelt down, and for a moment, the world seemed to tilt sideways. The circular impression wasn’t empty at all - it was shifting, rippling like the surface of a pond. And within its depths, he could almost make out… shapes. Familiar shapes.

“You see them now, don’t you?” Ms. Li’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “All those poor creatures, abandoned and neglected by their owners. They needed somewhere to go, somewhere between here and there. The pet beds… they provide a gateway.”

“This is impossible,” Chen whispered, but he couldn’t deny what he was seeing: dozens of pets, their forms blurred and overlapping, existing in a space that somehow occupied both everything and nothing.

“Impossible? No more impossible than the cruelty they endured.” Ms. Li’s voice had lost its dreamlike quality, taking on an edge of steel. “Every owner who abandoned their pet, who neglected their responsibility - they all live in this building. And now they live with the consequences of their actions, watching their beloved possessions fade into uncertainty.”

Chen stood up abruptly, his head spinning. “You… you did this?”

“I simply provided a sanctuary. The universe has its own way of balancing accounts.” Ms. Li gestured to a pet bed in the corner of her own room - one he hadn’t noticed before. It seemed to flicker in and out of existence as he watched. “Would you like to see for yourself, Detective? After all, didn’t you once have a goldfish you forgot to feed?”

Chen backed away, but he could already feel the edges of his vision beginning to blur, reality becoming as indistinct as the pet beds themselves. His last clear thought was that perhaps some mysteries were better left unsolved.

The next day, another circular impression appeared in the dust of Ms. Li’s apartment, and Detective Chen’s case notes were found abandoned on her coffee table, the edges of the paper mysteriously fuzzy, as if they too were slowly fading into that in-between space where forgotten pets went to find peace.