Taejun couldn't scream.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't run.
The space between them vanished in an instant, and all he could see as her face rushed toward his was that her eyes had never blinked, not once.
They still hadn't.
She was hanging from the ceiling.
Not in the way a body might dangle in the crude clumsiness of death, not like a forgotten ornament left to rot in a dusty attic, but with a precise, disturbing stillness, her posture rigid yet relaxed, her form hovering like a painting hung askew by invisible hands.
The thick rope that stretched from the cracked ceiling beam above her looked old, its fibers fraying at the edges like something that had been tested again and again, as though it had borne the weight of more than one soul.
It didn't sway, it didn't creak, it held her there in a silence that should not have existed in any place still touched by life.
And yet, despite the rot eating at the wood, despite the thick dust collecting on the floorboards around her, she looked untouched by time.
There were no signs of decay in the way her pale limbs hung, no signs of bloat or color change or the telltale slack of ruined tissue.
Her body was fresh, not newly dead, not recently injured, but fresh in the most unsettling sense of the word, as though she had been suspended in that place for hours, maybe minutes, and yet the rope digging deep into the wood above her suggested otherwise.
That contradiction alone rooted fear deep in Taejun's spine, chilling him far more than the blood that followed.
Her hair, long and dark, spilled in limp strands that veiled most of her face like a curtain of wet reeds dragged from the bottom of a lake, clinging to her cheeks and mouth in heavy ropes.
Her school shirt, once as crisp and white as any student's uniform should be, was no longer clean.
It clung to her small frame with the weight of something soaked, the fabric heavy and darkened in places where liquid had gathered, absorbed, and stained.
Down at the hem, just below her hips, where the folds of fabric touched the top of her thighs, there was a spreading patch of red, thick, syrupy, and wrong in every conceivable way.
The blood wasn't old.
There were no crusted edges, no dull browns or blacks of dried fluid.
It ran like something fresh from a wound still weeping, a quiet, steady flow that snaked down the backs of her legs in jagged, broken trails, cutting through the paleness of her skin with a starkness that made Taejun feel like he had stepped into a place where time had no meaning.
From the soles of her bare feet, which hung limp and colorless, the blood continued its descent, slowly dripping one fat drop at a time onto the floor below.
One.
Two.
Three.
Each droplet struck the wood with a sound too loud for how small it was, each like a stone dropped down a forgotten well, the echo traveling further than sound should be able to go.
Taejun's gaze, despite every instinct inside him screaming to look away, followed the thin crimson lines down to where they pooled beneath her.
The puddle wasn't wide, but it was deep, dark, and thick enough to reflect a twisted, shifting version of her outline, the distorted silhouette of her dangling limbs, and the rope that disappeared into the ceiling above her.
That reflection shimmered slightly, not because of motion, but because the surface of the blood itself trembled, as though something just beneath it was trying to rise.
He couldn't breathe, not properly.
His throat locked, his lungs pulled tight against his ribs as if the air in that place no longer belonged to the living.
His body had gone rigid, legs rooted to the floor, hands hovering stupidly near his chest as though they could catch the scream his mind had tried and failed to release.
Every heartbeat throbbed behind his eyes, thick and distant, like he was standing underwater.
And then she moved.
It wasn't dramatic, it wasn't fast, it wasn't even the full body, but the suddenness of it nearly buckled his knees.
Her head.
It jerked violently to one side, snapping so hard it made her hair whip across her face, strands peeling away from her cheeks and revealing more of what lay beneath.
The motion made no sense.
Her neck should have been broken.
The rope still held her tightly by the throat, taut and unrelenting, but her chin rose anyway, slow and unnatural, tilting upward like something inside her had decided to disregard the physical rules her body had once obeyed.
And then he saw her face.
Taejun wished he hadn't.
The skin was too smooth, too pale, but it was pulled at strange angles, warped by something that wasn't grief or suffering but glee.
The flesh at her cheeks and the corners of her mouth had stretched as if her face had been stitched around a grin too large to be human, too wide to belong to anything that had once smiled in kindness.
One eye, lassy, murky, but alive, met his gaze and locked onto him with an intelligence that didn't belong to the dead.
The other eye twitched, slightly misaligned, lid quivering open as a dried nerve fired a twitch, its pupil pointed in no direction at all.
Her lips moved slowly.
They didn't open like someone preparing to speak; they peeled, split apart as if they'd been sewn together, and the thread had finally snapped.
The sound of cracking skin was quiet, barely audible over the thudding in his ears, but it was there.
Her lips bled at the corners, raw and flaking, but she smiled through the pain like someone remembering an old joke they couldn't wait to share.
And then she spoke.
"You came," she whispered.
The words slithered past broken teeth, a few of which were missing, while one dangled by a bloody root, swaying slightly with the motion of her tongue.
The sound wasn't loud, it didn't need to be.
It found its way into his ears like smoke seeping under a door, suffocating and invasive.
The voice was hers, but not, as though it had been passed through layers of dust, grief, and rot before being allowed to reach him.
Taejun stumbled backward.
His foot struck the edge of the doorway with a dull thud, and his hand scrambled against the wall beside him, trying desperately to find something solid, something real.
The cold in the room had changed, no longer a passive chill, but the kind of suffocating cold that reached inside his clothes and pressed into his chest with icy fingers.
His breath misted in the air like smoke from a dying candle.
Every instinct inside him screamed at once, told him to run, told him to never look back, but his legs didn't listen.
The rope above her groaned softly as her weight shifted, her shoulders beginning to rock from side to side in small, erratic movements.
Then her foot twitched.
Once.
Then again.
A quick, involuntary spasm.
A shudder crawled through the muscle, like something dormant was beginning to stretch.
Taejun turned.
He didn't dare look again.
Not when he tore away from the room, not when the hallway moaned behind him with footsteps that didn't belong to him, not when the very walls seemed to close in and the air thickened with the copper sting of fresh blood and something worse, something like mold and rot and something older.
He crashed down the staircase, slamming into the wall at the base so hard it knocked the wind from his lungs, but he didn't stop, didn't care, didn't even pause to see if anything followed.
His body moved on instinct, legs launching him toward the side door with every ounce of panic his mind could not process.
He threw the door open so hard it bounced against the frame, and the sudden sunlight struck him like a violent slap, blinding, overwhelming, and searing.
He stumbled out into the yard, panting, gasping, wide-eyed and wild, looking like someone who had glimpsed hell and hadn't quite returned.
The crowd saw him, multiple heads turned, murmurs rising, but he barely heard them.
He ran, not for safety, not for help, but just to get away.
And yet, when his breath finally slowed, when he turned back to the house he had escaped, he saw nothing.
No shadow in the window, no silhouette at the door, no rope swaying from the ceiling, just stillness, like it had never happened.
Then he looked down, and saw the streak of red across his wrist—bright, wet, and still warm, as if something had touched him on the way out, as if she had marked him.
And as the wind stirred the trees overhead, something in him whispered:
This isn't over. Not even close.
Taejun didn't remember how he got home, not really.
The world between the neighbor's yard and his front steps had dissolved into something viscous and lightless, like moving through a tunnel filled with fog and static.
He might have run.
He might have stumbled.
He might have simply floated, untethered from time and place, the streetlights flickering like failing stars while his heart pounded against the inside of his chest with a rhythm too loud to be human.
When the front door closed behind him, it wasn't a gentle click, it was a slam that echoed like thunder in a tomb.
He locked it.
Once.
Then again.
His fingers hovered over the bolt as though tempted to go for a third turn, and maybe a fourth.
Only when the cold brass pressed against his forehead did he realize he was leaning on the door, breath short, ribs aching, eyes wide and vacant as they stared at the floor beneath him.
His legs were numb.
His palms stung from how tightly he'd been clenching them, the crescent shapes of his fingernails now etched in red into his skin.
And still, there it was.
That stain.
The ugly brown-red smear that had dried along the inside of his wrist, right where the blood had touched him.
It hadn't vanished, it hadn't even faded.
If anything, the color had deepened, like dried rust soaking into the grain of old wood, and as he slowly raised his hand to his face, he could smell it again.
Foul in a way that no imagination could conjure.
It was real.
The voice, the twitch, the rope, and that smile.
It had happened.
Yet out there, beyond his door, the world had continued with impossible indifference.
He had run from a house that should have been a crime scene, led from a room where a corpse dangled like a puppet, leaking warmth and horror, and no one had screamed.
No neighbors peering from behind their curtains.
No curious voices calling out.
The entire block had remained wrapped in a sterile silence, blind and deaf to the grotesque reality that had nearly swallowed him.
Why?
He pushed off the door at last, his body sluggish and clumsy, and staggered toward the hallway, dragging one foot slightly behind the other as though the weight of what he had seen had twisted something inside him.
The kitchen light was still on.
He needed to sit.
Maybe getting a glass of water. Maybe to throw up. Maybe—
"Hyung?"
The sound of Taejun's voice broke through the haze like a stone through glass.
Taejun froze mid-step, his heart skipping painfully, his spine locking up as the air suddenly felt colder than before.
Behind him, framed faintly in the soft light of the hallway, Haneul stood barefoot on the wooden floor, a half-eaten apple in his hand and a strange, cautious expression slowly forming on his face.
There was a pause, brief but weighty, where neither of them moved, as though time itself had become uncertain about whether it should continue.
Haneul's eyes flicked over Taejun's pale face, then dropped to the dark stain smeared across his sleeve and wrist.
His brows furrowed.
"Did something happen?" he asked, voice low but steady, like he was unsure whether to treat this moment like a joke or a warning. "You look like you saw a ghost or something."
Taejun felt laughter bubble at the edge of his throat, but it didn't come out right. It curled inward instead, collapsing into a sharp exhale, and he staggered toward a chair as if his bones had finally surrendered.
He dropped into the seat, elbows on the table, face buried in his hands.
The kitchen smelled like apples and soap and wood polish, normal things, but none of it helped.
Haneul took a step closer, then another, finally sitting across from him without a word.
The apple rested gently against the wood of the table, rolling slightly before settling.
For a long time, neither of them said anything.
When Taejun did finally speak, his voice had turned to paper, thin, frayed, and barely held together.
"There's something wrong with that house."
Haneul blinked slowly. "Next door?"
"There's a woman," Taejun said, his voice cracking as he struggled to push out the words that didn't want to be said.
"She's dead. She's hanging from the ceiling. And she saw me. She looked right at me. She smiled at me. And she spoke."
Haneul didn't laugh, didn't scoff, didn't even ask if it was some kind of prank.
Instead, he placed the apple down gently and leaned forward, something dark and knowing flickering behind his eyes.
"You mean the woman who used to live there? The one the police were asking about last week?"
Taejun looked up, startled. "You knew?"
Haneul nodded slowly. "The neighbour told me they were looking for her. No one had seen her in days, and the mail was piling up. That's why the cops came."
Taejun stared at him, disbelief crawling across his features as the pieces began slotting into place with agonizing slowness.
"She said something to me," he whispered, every syllable weighted with dread. "She said, 'You came.' Like she'd been waiting. Like she knew I would show up."
Haneul's face went pale, his lips parted, but no sound came out.
And then, from the other side of the house, so soft it was almost imagined, came a knock.
It wasn't sharp, it wasn't loud, but it was deliberate.
A tap.
Then another.
Knock. Knock.
The sound of fingertips brushing wood, not fists, not nails. Just knuckles pressing gently, rhythmically, patiently, against the door Taejun had locked not long ago.
They both turned to look toward the hallway, neither of them speaking, neither of them blinking.
The silence between knocks stretched long enough to make Taejun wonder if he had imagined it.
Then it came again.
Knock. Knock.
Taejun stood first, brushing crumbs from his lap and muttering something under his breath. "I'll check—"
"No." Haneul's voice snapped out sharper than he'd intended, louder than the room seemed to allow.
He stood so fast his chair scraped backward with a screech. "Don't. Don't open it."
Taejun frowned, eyes narrowing with irritation. "It's probably just someone from the neighborhood. Maybe one of the officers is coming to ask questions—"
"I said don't," Haneul growled, stepping in front of him with a protective force he hadn't known he could summon. "Don't open that door. Trust me, this one time."
Taejun hesitated, confusion now tinged with unease.
Haneul moved forward alone, each step toward the front entrance slower than the last, the hair on his arms standing on end, his breath shallow and quick.
He could hear the blood rushing in his ears again.
As he reached the door, he didn't touch the handle right away.
He just leaned in, bringing one eye to the peephole with agonizing caution.
There was nothing.
No one.
Only the dim orange glow of the porch light illuminates an empty doorstep and a windless street.
He stared for another moment, counting slowly to ten, and then, in a motion that felt more like ritual than reason, he opened the door just a sliver, just wide enough to let the night air brush against his face.
The porch was empty.
Not a sound, not a leaf out of place, but something in the air was wrong.
It didn't smell like nighttime, it smelled like rot.
He shut the door again and locked it once, then twice, then slid the chain across with trembling hands.
A voice somewhere in the hollow of his skull whispered that the knocking hadn't come from someone alive.
Not anymore.
That night, long after Taejun had gone to bed and the house had gone still, Haneul stood in the bathroom alone, staring into the mirror with a kind of stillness that didn't feel like his own.
The overhead light buzzed faintly, casting shadows in the corners of the room that seemed just a little too dark.
His reflection looked worse than he felt.
His skin had lost its color.
His cheeks looked hollow.
His eyes had become something else entirely, wide and haunted and ringed with the kind of exhaustion that doesn't come from sleeplessness, but from knowing something you shouldn't.
He rolled up his sleeve again.
The stain was still there.
He scrubbed at it.
How did I get this stain? I wish she had just disappeared without causing a scene, even after her death.
First with water, then with soap.
Then again, harder, with hot water and shaking hands.
But the mark refused to fade.
He grabbed the alcohol bottle from the cabinet and poured it over his skin, wincing at the sting, grinding his thumb against it until the skin was raw and reddened.
It didn't matter.
The blood wasn't on his skin anymore.
It had sunk in, into the pores, into the muscle, into him, as if it had always belonged there.
His eyes, glassy and wide, locked on his reflection once more.
And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the light above flickered.
Just once.
And in the space between flickers, half a second, maybe less, he saw her.
In the mirror, behind him, closer than before, still hanging, still smiling, like she had never left, like she never would.
Then, with a slow breath and a face drained of all warmth, Haneul lifted his gaze, his expression carved from stone, his eyes cold and unblinking as they locked onto hers, those empty, watching eyes that had no right to be looking back at him from a place beyond life.
The air around him seemed to tighten, thick with an invisible pressure, as if the atmosphere recoiled from what he was about to say.
His voice, low and steady, rang out with a finality that cut through the silence like a blade—
"You don't belong in this world, and whatever brought you here, it ends now. Leave this place before I force reality itself to forget that you ever existed. And I meant you, Kang Hyeonjae."