The broken window had been hastily cordoned off with a sagging strip of yellow caution tape, fluttering slightly with each draft like a warning that came too late.
A janitor moved stiffly through the wreckage, his broom rasping over the floor as he swept up shards of glass still glittering with cold afternoon light.
The students clustered at the far end of the room, huddled in nervous knots, their voices reduced to whispers that never settled.
The teacher tried to restore order with chalk in hand, his voice tight and hollow, echoing off walls that no longer felt safe.
He kept glancing back at the window as if expecting the rest of the world to come crashing in behind it.
Jiwoo had been taken to the infirmary.
Now she sat alone outside on the bench, knees pulled to her chest, the infirmary's faded blue blanket draped across her like a paper-thin barrier against something far colder than air.
The nurse had said she was fine, scrapes, no bruises, just shaken.
But her silence said otherwise, too much fear for just a window.
The teacher had blamed the storm: pressure from the rain, brittle frame, and bad luck, but Taejun had felt it too, that deep, crawling wrongness that no storm could explain.
When the bell rang, students flooded out, subdued and watchful, their usual chatter replaced by silence and sidelong glances.
The sun hadn't returned; it stayed behind the clouds like a closed eye, waiting.
Taejun lingered in the room, pretending to search for a missing pen until the last of them had gone.
Then he made his way down the dim corridor, his footsteps soft against the tile. Jiwoo sat still, her gaze fixed on the floor, as if afraid that lifting her eyes might invite something back.
"You okay?" he asked, barely above a whisper.
She didn't answer at first, but when she looked up, her eyes weren't fogged with confusion; they were sharp.
"You saw it too," she said.
Not a question.
He sat down beside her, close enough to feel the chill radiating from her skin.
The hallway was nearly silent now, except for the dull hum of a flickering ceiling light that buzzed like a distant insect.
"The woman in white," Jiwoo whispered. "You saw her, too, right? Right?"
Taejun nodded.
"This morning. Outside Ms. Kim's house."
She inhaled like someone surfacing from deep water. "I thought I imagined it. I thought maybe I was tired or seeing things. But when I looked out that window… she was already there. Like she knew I'd come to look."
He didn't respond for a long moment.
Then: "She said something to me." Jiwoo turned sharply.
"What did she say?" His voice dropped to barely a breath.
"She said, 'Help me,' and it's a never-ending cycle." The color drained from Jiwoo's face.
"She didn't say anything to me," she said. "She just… stared, like she was waiting for me. Perhaps watching me from afar. I couldn't move."
They sat in that silence again, the corridor growing darker by degrees, shadows from the windows slowly crawling across the floor like fingers reaching for them.
Jiwoo's voice was thin, but steady. "I think she's looking for something. Or someone. And I think… I think we've seen her before."
Taejun frowned. "What do you mean?"
Jiwoo's eyes met his, her expression unreadable. "Have you ever had a dream that felt too real? Like not a dream at all, just like something you forgot, but your body still remembers?"
He nodded slowly. "Yeah."
Her lips trembled slightly. "I think I've seen her before. Though not last night. Not even this year. Maybe years ago. Somewhere I can't place, like a hallway I've walked down a hundred times in dreams but can never describe once I wake up."
And suddenly, Taejun knew exactly what she meant.
Something inside him twisted, a shape in his mind shifting just out of reach, a hallway, a stairwell.
The sound of water dripping in the dark.
He couldn't name it, couldn't grasp it, but it was there, crouched behind some old door in his memory, waiting.
And for the first time, he realized he wasn't sure he wanted to open it.
The walk home, though unremarkable at first glance, carried with it a weight that Taejun couldn't shake, not a sense of active danger, but something quieter, more elusive, like a voice behind a wall whispering just out of earshot.
He kept his eyes trained straight ahead, earbuds loosely fitted into his ears, though no music played, only the soft hum of static that filled the silence like insulation.
It wasn't for distraction, it was armor, a buffer between himself and the world, a thin veil he hoped might blur the edges of what he didn't want to feel creeping back in.
Nothing followed him, at least not visibly, no strange flickers in the periphery, no warped shadows sliding along fences, and no unnatural chill brushing the back of his neck as he passed under trees.
Everything around him felt stubbornly normal.
A late autumn breeze tugged at the branches overhead, rustling leaves in lazy spirals down onto the pavement.
The air smelled of wet bark, crushed grass, and the faint metallic scent of rain that hadn't yet fallen.
Somewhere down the street, a garden hose sprayed in rhythmic bursts as someone watered their hedges, and from further off came the fading peal of children's laughter echoing from a distant playground, comforting, but hollow, like a memory played through a cracked speaker.
He let himself believe, if only for a moment, that whatever had unsettled the day might now be over, that he might return home to the banality of routine, to four walls that meant safety, and silence that didn't breathe behind him.
But as he turned the final corner and his house came into view, the illusion collapsed like wet paper.
He stopped walking, not suddenly, but as if his body gradually lost the instruction to move.
Across the street, in front of the neighbor's house, was a scene that shouldn't have existed on a quiet residential afternoon.
A swelling crowd had formed, people gathered like moths beneath the static swirl of three police lights spinning in silence.
Yellow tape crisscrossed the yard in sharp lines, fluttering gently in the wind like warning signs hastily painted by invisible hands.
Some neighbors clung to their porches or stood shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, arms crossed tightly or hands to their mouths, whispering in urgent tones that sounded like prayers spoken through disbelief.
Taejun's chest tightened before he even knew why.
It was the house directly across from his own, the same one where she had stood, the same porch, the same step.
Uniformed officers moved deliberately through the yard, lifting evidence bags and speaking into radios, but it was the man in the dark overcoat, older, gray at the temples, face drawn into lines of something more than tiredness, who caught his attention, a detective, most likely.
He stood beside the front door, notepad in hand, listening as another officer spoke to him in a low voice, occasionally nodding, occasionally frowning, but never reacting.
His presence was heavy, like a stone dropped into still water, warping the world around him.
Taejun felt his breath catch, but forced himself to keep walking, each step deliberate, too slow to be natural but too steady to draw attention.
His heart pounded beneath his school jacket, a staccato rhythm he tried not to listen to.
When he reached his front door, he paused only long enough to push it open, drop his bag silently just inside the threshold, and step back out again under the shadow of the awning, pretending to scroll through his phone with mechanical ease.
From here, he had the perfect angle, and he wasn't the only one listening.
"They said she's been dead for days," someone whispered from nearby, the voice thin with disbelief and edged in dread.
Taejun didn't move, but every hair on his arms stood up.
Another voice, this time shakier, older, answered, "That can't be right. I saw her out there just yesterday morning. She was standing right there on the porch, plain as day."
A nervous laugh followed, the kind of laugh people make when they want to dismiss their memories, to convince themselves they'd imagined what they saw.
"It must've been someone else. Or it's a mistake. Probably one of the older kids playing a prank or something."
But their voices dropped further, and he couldn't make out the rest.
A stretcher emerged from the house, its metal legs creaking slightly as it bumped over the threshold.
A white sheet covered the body beneath, clinging to the contours of stillness with an unsettling finality.
The detective didn't even look up.
He spoke again to the officer beside him, who now pointed upward, toward one of the second-floor windows.
Taejun followed their gaze.
At first, there was nothing out of the ordinary.
The curtains were parted slightly, just enough for the breeze to slip through and send the fabric swaying like a lazy pendulum.
The window was closed, the glass untouched, but something about it felt wrong.
Wrong in a way that didn't have a clear shape, like a smell without a source or a shadow that didn't match the light.
And then he saw them.
Two footprints, faint, damp, and perfectly outlined, rested just outside the front door of the house.
They faced him, not the street, not the police, not the world, just him.
There was no rain that day, the grass was dry, the pavement warmed beneath the sunless sky, yet the footprints shimmered slightly, as though freshly made by something not quite of this world.
They hadn't been there earlier, they hadn't been there when the police arrived.
And he knew, without knowing how, that whoever had left them hadn't come from inside the house.
They had walked toward it.
They stopped, stared, and then vanished.
A slow, deep chill slid down his spine, the kind not born from temperature but from recognition, because he had seen those feet before.
Not on the ground, but behind his eyelids, in his dreams.
Pressed against the other side of the glass.
The murmurs beyond the hedges had begun to swell with the restless pulse of curiosity, the kind that only blooms when something terrible happens just close enough to home to feel both unreal and unavoidable.
A fresh car door slammed shut with a muted thud, prompting a shifting of bodies and a ripple of chatter that thickened like fog; someone important had arrived.
Perhaps another officer with a higher rank, or a reporter looking to peel a headline from fresh grief.
The crowd adjusted in subtle waves, drawn almost magnetically toward the driveway, where a man in a grey suit emerged from the vehicle, his shoes crunching the gravel with a steadiness that marked authority.
Perfect.
Taejun, still obscured by the shadow of his porch, seized the moment not with hesitation but with the practiced quiet of someone who had learned how to disappear in plain sight.
He moved with the softness of falling ash, head bowed and body close to the hedge-line as he slipped past the crooked boundary of shrubs dividing his yard from the neighbor's.
He did not sprint, he did not dare, but every movement was charged with that razor-thin tension that exists just before something breaks.
His hands brushed the yellow police tape near the side entrance, and he ducked beneath it like a thread through a needle, careful not to let it flutter or snap against his back.
No voices called out, no radios crackled, no eyes followed.
Everyone else remained glued to the front lawn spectacle, where authority and death paraded themselves beneath blue lights and solemn uniforms.
The side door was ajar.
Just slightly, just enough to let out the breathless scent of rot and abandonment that hadn't yet been scrubbed clean by gloves or protocols.
Taejun froze, his body stiff with the natural reflex to run, to turn, and pretend he'd never come this close.
Every instinct inside him screamed against the silence.
Don't go inside, don't look, don't breathe what she left behind, but something else answered louder than fear, something more primal than curiosity, more ancient than caution.
It was not just a boy's fascination with the forbidden, nor the need to witness the truth, it was closer to gravity, a kind of obligation that pulled him forward step by step, as if some buried part of him already knew what waited in the house, and had merely been waiting for the rest of him to catch up.
The hallway swallowed him whole the moment he passed through the threshold, and he stood for a long second in the liminal hush that exists between the outside world and something private.
Light slanted through thin curtains, painting dull stripes across the wooden floor where dust spun in slow constellations, disturbed only by his presence.
The air was saturated with a smell that clung to the throat, stale, metallic, unmistakably blood, but old enough to be curling at the edges.
He could hear nothing but the faint creak of the settling house and the strange hollowness that follows the dead.
Everything inside was preserved in the mockery of routine.
Shoes sat in the entryway, neatly aligned as though waiting for feet that would never return.
A pair of house keys hung from a hook beside the door, untouched.
On a side table sat a porcelain teacup half-full with cold liquid, the surface covered in a skin of gray.
Nothing had been packed away, no signs of struggle.
It was as if the house itself had not yet accepted that its occupant was gone, and worse, as if it might be waiting for her to walk back in and finish the cup.
Each step Taejun took across the floor was muffled by the wood beneath his soles, which groaned only faintly in protest.
He moved slowly, not out of caution but reverence, as though he'd entered not a crime scene but a mausoleum.
No photographs stared at him from the walls, and the television in the corner remained unplugged, screen black and smudged.
It wasn't until he reached the base of the stairs that the silence shifted in weight, turning from stillness into presence, as if something unseen was now watching, something that had been dormant but stirred by his approach.
The air on the staircase was different, thicker, colder, as though each step carried him deeper into something buried, something forgotten.
The first board he stepped on gave a sharp cry beneath his foot, and though the sound wasn't loud, it rang through the house like a wound splitting open.
He paused, half-expecting someone to call down, to challenge him, to demand his purpose, but there was nothing.
No footsteps, no breath, no voice, only that suffocating quiet, heavy, and watchful, and the knowledge that if something waited upstairs, it was listening.
Taejun climbed, slow and deliberate, each step dragging him upward like the tick of a clock winding toward midnight.
At the top, the hallway stretched out before him in a corridor of shadow and dust, the narrow walls crowded with closed doors that held their secrets too tightly, but one of them remained ajar at the far end, and he did not need to guess which room it was.
He already knew.
The pull in his chest was no longer subtle. It throbbed with recognition.
His breath was barely controlled, thin and trembling in his throat as he reached the door, fingers grazing the frame like touching the edge of a wound.
He did not speak, he did not knock, he just looked inside and froze.
The room was cloaked in gray light, the curtains drawn just enough to allow the dull haze of late afternoon to settle across the furniture.
The walls were bare, the bed unmade, but none of it mattered, none of it existed compared to what was suspended at the center.
She hung from the ceiling like a grotesque chandelier, her body unnaturally still despite the thin creak of rope that whispered with each subtle sway.
The cord bit into the ceiling beam like a mouth locked in eternal tension, and her neck, twisted slightly from the weight, gave her head a forward tilt that made her appear as though she were merely nodding off.
Her chin touched her chest, hair limp across her face, but it wasn't the rope that captured Taejun's attention first.
It was the blood.
Thick, dark, and fresh enough to glisten, it trailed down her thighs in heavy ribbons, soaking through the cotton fabric of her blouse and pants, staining her in deep vertical streaks that dripped without pause.
It did not come from a wound that made sense, it was not a slit wrist, not a gash across the chest.
It bled from her legs, from somewhere deep and hidden, leaking steadily with the certainty of something that had not finished dying.
Her feet, bare and pale and smudged with something that might have been soil, did not touch the floor.
And then, impossibly, horribly, her head lifted.
Not fast, not in a jerk, but slowly, with the terrible resistance of atrophied muscles straining to remember their purpose.
The motion dragged her hair back from her face, revealing cheekbones sunken like dried riverbeds, lips cracked and purpled as if thirst had taken her long before death.
Her skin had the lifeless tone of porcelain soaked too long in water, mottled with the faint bruising of decay.
But her eyes— Her eyes were open.
Not just open, wide, round, and glistening with something that should not have remained after death.
They stared at him with unflinching intensity, wet and alert, as though they had never closed at all, not even when the rope first tightened.
Blood had dried in the corners of her eyes, forming dark lines that looked like tears painted in rust.
She was looking at him.
Directly, as if she had been waiting.
And then, with a sound like skin splitting down the seam of memory, her mouth opened into something that barely resembled a smile, slow, wide, and weird, as though her face no longer understood how to shape emotion.
Her jaw trembled, cracked, and parted, and from the hollow of her throat came not breath, but something colder.
"Found you," she rasped, voice thick with rot and finality.
The rope broke.
Then, she fell, not downward in gravity's natural grasp, but forward, straight toward Taejun, arms outstretched, eyes locked on his like a hunter reclaiming something that had never escaped.