I Couldn't Tell You Who It Was

“You know, the mansion with 101 doors. That urban legend,” I probed.

“Yes?”

“Do you know where that started to spread?”

“Sorry?” Woorim’s eyes grew round. The thought must never have occurred to him before. He seemed to be combing through his memory as he stroked his chin with his fingers.

The interest was a vast sea, overflooded with information. Humans were like microscopic plankton floating within it; it was difficult to pinpoint where the seawater they were drinking originated from. That was the same with urban legends. The origins were always unclear.

“…The oldest post I read was about someone’s classmate named ‘A.’ I’m not sure if that was the first post since there were so many other posts following it,” Woorim answered and I knitted my brow and looked at the ground.

“That story about the classmate named A who said they would go into the doorless room, and then died of a heart attack…” I started.

Urban legends tended to bud off into a wide range of variations from the original. Like how fairy tales changed with time and took on various meanings in different regions, urban legends morphed as they spread widely through one generation.

Instead of many people inventing one story, many people took the same concept and made up several stories. Thanks to that, the lifespan was as short as a popular trend, and the damage done to the original story was severe. Ultimately, it was difficult to tell which one was the original. Some people didn’t even know that there was an original at all.

I took a deep breath and continued, “I was the one who spread that story.”

Woorim tilted his head. He didn’t seem to fully understand what I was saying. I said, raising my voice a bit louder while turning to look at Woorim, “The story about the 101 doors. I wrote and spread that urban legend.”

Woorim furrowed his brow when he heard that. He asked me why. His question sounded ponderous and sincere. I searched for the meaning of the glint in his eyes and slowly replied, “I wanted to meet it.”

* * *

“But I think I found a way to end it all.”

“What is it?”

The face A made then is burned into my memory.

“I saw a room with no door. That was the only special one, so I’m sure that it’s the exit.”

After he said that, A slumped over his desk and fell asleep. I was pretty surprised, so I tried to wake A up. But right then, the bell rang, so I couldn’t shake him awake. I left A to sleep and returned to my seat.

(…)

The ‘A’ that appeared in this story was based on the classmate who threw himself off the roof while I was watching. He didn’t die from a heart attack, but I tried to match the other facts—the part about dreaming a bizarre dream, the contents of the dream, and my classmate who became strange as he continued to have that dream.

Of course, I never directly heard about his dream from him. After he died, his friends came to pick fights with me when they had nothing better to do, as if it was my fault that he died. The story about the dream was also something that the classmate’s friends told me. “After he started having that dream, he became weird.”

The dark hallway of the mansion with countless doors. The doorless room. Black eyes. Suicide.

I will never know if my mother had the same dream. She died before I had the chance to ask. I didn’t even know when she started to turn strange, becoming no different than a stranger.

She already had those black eyes upon her return from her convalescence. When I asked my uncles, they all told me that they thought she was better. When did my mother enter the doorless room? She seemed to have suffered from horrible nightmares even before she was admitted to the sanatorium.

Then what about Yeonseon?

…Just like how the living will inevitably meet death, urban legends also have a cycle of life and death. It was different in that it didn’t wane and die down like a trend. The death of an urban legend was when it became a story that held no fear.

People living in the same generation who spread the story by word of mouth could kill a myth in the same way—by talking about the method of defeating it.

The woman with the ripped mouth hates pomade, or if you write words on your palm and swallow it, she can’t chase you anymore—stuff like that.

These methods were meaningless and illogical, and yet they were somewhat plausible ways to avoid the situations described in urban legends. Ultimately, these tricks became accepted as fact.

Nothing like that appeared for the mansion myth yet.

However, I had blind faith in it—that, if I reunited with the Child that I had met in the mansion back then again, I could find the way to destroy the story. Specifically, all the strange phenomena surrounding me and the mansion could be obliterated.

After the story about A entered the web portal for urban legends, I prayed desperately to myself that the Child would come to meet me. If that didn’t happen, nothing would end. Death wouldn’t come.