I Couldn't Tell You Who It Was

This silence was different than before. The stillness borne from the dead remains of chaos chilled a part of our hearts and made our hairs stand on end. Nobody mentioned it out loud, but anxiety sprouted, grew, and bore the fruit of fear. It made people jump to conclusions.

The staff didn’t leave after abandoning the shoot. They also didn’t trick anyone.

The shoot was still going.

“…You jerk!” Seohang suddenly bolted up from his seat and strode over to Woorim. He grabbed him firmly by the collar and yelled while shaking him, “You son of a b*tch, how dare you drag me to this kind of place?”

Everyone was shocked at the abrupt burst of vulgarities. I could tell that Seohang wasn’t a kind and gentle person, but he didn’t look to be the type to yell profanities at someone in front of others. He seemed more polite than Woorim.

Seohang’s outburst continued, “You b*stard, I told you I didn’t want to come on this show! You f*cking scoffed at me because you didn’t believe me, and look what happened! How are you going to take responsibility for this now, b*stard? If something happens to me, I’ll kill you!”

After spitting out his curses, he shoved Woorim hard. He pushed past the people gathered in the hall and returned to his room. Bang! He slammed the door so hard it echoed in the hall.

What was more astonishing was Woorim’s reaction. He hit his head several times while being jostled by Seohang, yet all he did was placidly rub the back of his head. For someone who just received a death threat, he looked quite calm. He simply dusted off his clothes as if a rider on a loud motorcycle drove by.

Of course, everyone here knew that Seohang and Woorim’s relationship wasn’t great. However, what we just saw wasn’t a simple conflict of opinion between group members. Seohang gave Woorim quite the spiteful glare.

“…Are you all right?” I asked, and Woorim smiled like this was a regular occurrence. He glanced at the door Seohang disappeared into and then said, “He’s just a bit superstitious.”

“Superstitious?”

“He made a big fuss before we came here. He said something about how he couldn’t sleep well these days.” He then sighed. “And he recounted some other stories.”

Seoyoon asked this time, “What do you mean?”

Woorim shrugged unconcernedly and cast a glance at each person remaining in the hall. “It was nothing. Remember, there was that urban legend before? The stories were about how one of the hobbies of some rich folks was hunting people and others liked to take missing people to create snuff films.”

Urban legend.

The words weren’t unfamiliar. Everyone here had heard about the story about the mansion at least once. That considered, these people were here thanks to that urban legend. Maybe that was why, while this could have been something they would normally have not taken seriously, they became tense at Woorim’s narrative.

Moreover, this mansion was the material manifestation of the one popularized on the internet. The location gave rise to a certain magnetic pull and made it so that they couldn’t just ignore what Woorim said. Woorim continued to blow life into this magnetism. “One of the most famous stories of that sort is the one where they locked people up in a mansion, you know. There were so many traps installed that it could only be a murder mansion that you could only die in. They filmed people dying in that mansion and sold the footage all over the world at a very high price.”

“…”

“That guy was suddenly telling me all that really sincerely. He asked me, what if this shoot was something similar? Wouldn’t it be dangerous? He said that this shoot was super suspicious no matter how hard he thought about it,” Woorim continued with a smiling face, then tossed a question back at the crowd, “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

Nobody conceded with him out loud. Even I was rendered speechless. There was nothing more apt to describe our bizarre situation except for the urban legend that he mentioned.

People wordlessly clutched their flashlights as if that was their lifesaver. The bright lights shining down upon our heads felt too feeble and delicate.

“E-excuse me,” Raehee took the chance to speak amid the tense, thin ice. She looked terrified as she continued, “…I don’t know if this is the right time to say this, but I thought that I still needed to bring this up, at least now.”

Following that, she placed a black object on the table.

It was a key. It was dark and thick, like one that was used for an old basement dungeon back in the day. It looked quite heavy, but based on the sound it made as it was placed on the table, it only appeared heavy on the outside while the core was made of light metal material.