I Couldn't Tell You Who It Was

Woorim looked straight ahead again and asked, “Did I mess with someone who I shouldn’t touch by any chance?”

“Not really.” It wasn’t my business whether Hyehyun felt happy or not. It would be more accurate to say that I didn’t want to see him happy at all. Every time I saw him smile brightly, I imagined stabbing him in his heart with a kitchen knife.

Despite that, there was a reason I resorted to timidly avoiding him all the time. Hyehyun’s memory was good in a bad way. By that, it meant that he never forgot the wrongs done to him.

“…He could bother you a bit. He doesn’t let things go very easily.”

“Then that’s fine. I don’t like people like him in the first place. I don’t plan on becoming friends with him,” Woorim replied readily. I hesitated for a moment because I felt like I was badmouthing him, but it went unrewarded. Since he said he was fine, I had no energy to say anything more.

I also didn’t want to talk further about Hyehyun so I just nodded. “Okay.”

When we reached the lower floor, Seogeung Ahn must have been forcing open the remainder of the doors because I could hear loud banging sounds from upstairs. With every sound, the old ceiling creaked, and dust fell like a waterfall from the ceiling. It was to the point that I thought that maybe the building would collapse before we found the filming staff.

We went past the hallway decorated like an abandoned school, then moved wordlessly down to the next floor that looked like a deserted hospital. We didn’t really have anything to say to each other, especially since we were on our way to find Goyeon’s corpse. Not long after, we arrived at the room where I first found Goyeon.

The floor where Goyeon was found was bright because Woorim turned on the hall lights.

Woorim had temporarily turned off his light, but he turned it back on in front of Goyeon’s room. He motioned for me to stay in the hallway and flashed the light down below to carefully examine her corpse. His serene face made it seem like he was looking at something other than a corpse.

“It doesn’t look like there’ll be any point going down to the next floor. Judging from the height, it looks to be two or three floors down… We’ll need to go down two more floors to reach her room.” That was a detail that we couldn’t catch because it was so dark before. Woorim turned to face me. “If it was one story, I was thinking of just jumping down, but I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Don’t do that,” I said with a serious look.

Woorim just smiled. “I can’t do that now, even if I wanted to. If I jump from that height, you’ll need to clean up two bodies. Nobody would be in sound condition after jumping from that height. Plus, I don’t want to die just yet.”

He seemed to be telling the truth when he said he didn’t want to die just yet. We walked to the end of the hallway to go downstairs.

When Woorim said that Goyeon was two to three floors down, I thought our adventure would take longer than expected. At the end of the hall, I realized that I was mistaken. What greeted us at the end of the hall was not a flight of stairs but a large door.

Woorim flashed his light at the door. The metal door painted black was covered with chains. “Damn. We’re screwed.”

There was a lock on the chains. It was not a commonplace metal lock. Rather, it was one that looked like it jumped out from a fantasy novel. It was quite hefty, so it didn’t look like it could be broken by smashing it with a rock.

“…I guess we should find the key.” Our search was going to take way longer than expected. Would we be able to reach her body by the end of the day? I was worried.

We stood there, deep in thought for a moment.

Counting the rooms that we saw so far, we walked by a total of 12 or so rooms altogether on this floor and the floor above. Excluding the first room that Goyeon and I searched together, we still needed to look around more than 10 rooms. Even if the odds were somewhat favorable, I still felt like we would need to look through the first half of the rooms. A lot of time would be wasted.

Plus, I was a very unlucky person who had never even won the fifth-place prize of the lottery. I couldn’t speak for Woorim though. But seeing as he had to come to this mansion, he didn’t appear to be a particularly lucky person either.

“What should we do? Should we go back upstairs to ask for help?” I asked. With his arms crossed, Woorim hummed loudly in disapproval. Then, he gestured at me with his hand. He wanted me to follow him. He walked back into the abandoned hospital. I stared at the back of his head for a moment before following him.

Crunch, crunch.

I stepped on what felt like dirt and dust beneath my feet. I looked down and clicked my tongue. Some wacko sprinkled broken syringes on the ground. No matter how finely the glass was broken, if someone rolled on this floor, they would surely become covered in their own blood in no time.