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The foggy house loomed from its hilltop just above the birches and sorrowful willows, while the moon, without mercy, spilled its overly bright white light, making everything around clearly visible without a single lantern. The moonlight even cast shadows from the trees onto the leaves in the river, as if by day, everything was covered in translucent dark copies. The only difference lay in the sky, which wasn’t veiled by clouds; besides the scarred white circle, there were small dots, like on the first rolls of film. They stretched across the entire upper canvas, as if that were their true home. As if they weren't the ones disappearing without a trace every morning, afraid of the sun and the gazes of those who, unfortunately, were already awake and going about their business.
Night could have been a pleasant thing, especially among the banks of the stream littered with willows’ sparkling leaves and a few nearby fireflies, if only the cottage above didn’t overshadow all the harmony of the silent night. It groaned loudly — compared to everything around — every time a coal-black bird landed or a breeze, softer than a river fish, slipped past. It unnerved. It brought on chills. It even tormented the conscience, as if it were a skilled manipulator and not just a glued pile of damp boards with glass.
Beneath the boots, leaves rustled enough to betray whoever was making their way up the path. A path that now stank of something dead. It reeked terribly, more so than the usual scent of stagnant water, grass, and coolness. As the person walked, the cold was felt not only by smell — it entered the nostrils and vanished inside them: each breath of air became a stinging pain, bringing tears to the eyes that also suffered from the night’s chill.
He now stood before the house itself, at the very top of the hill, where not a single tree or bush stood nearby — nothing that stood out against the short grass and the structure itself. Everything else was left behind, below. And the moon, seemingly amused by the sight of the man in a black coat searching his pockets for a flashlight, peered slightly from behind the wooden roof, growing scared itself.
Or maybe just fearfully curious.
Seonghwa. That was written at the top of a page in his notebook, to draw his future self’s attention to his own foggy mind. Below it were notes about this terrifying house, written in a strange hand, as if the hand wasn’t his and the pen didn’t fit in his palm.
“Don’t stand too long. Don’t stare into the reflection for too long. Don’t call your name in the basement. Don’t look at the door longer than necessary – open it immediately, grab the handle, close it, strike it with an axe, just don’t stare with an empty gaze. Don’t remove the cobwebs from the corners. Don’t touch the paintings. Don’t lie about what you did to stray animals as a child. Don’t be surprised if it breathes on your neck. Don’t tremble like your drunken father.”
The notebook had ended up in his hand by accident, just before he finally felt the smooth stick in the bottom corner of the pocket. Black and shiny, when he pulled it from its deep place. Seonghwa nervously brushed a straight black strand from his eye, then came a soft buzzing — and the flashlight flared to life, though not brightly enough to outshine the moon on this pale white night. But it would surely be the brightest thing once the boards surrounded him on all four sides instead of the calm, sluggish forest.
And truly, that’s exactly what happened — the moment his dirty boots with leaves stuck in their soles stepped onto the threshold of the already slightly open door, and deep darkness stretched before his gaze. With each step came the house’s louder groan; the wood underfoot sagged and shifted into a satisfyingly crisp creak. Strange, how that creak sounded so satisfying when breathing had just become a much harder act than before. Or maybe it was only after the sound that each breath felt like all the air around had vanished, and he had to seek an oasis in a desert. Or at least a place without so much dust and suffocating heat.
Still, this place was quieter than being underwater. There, at least, the water hums in your ears — but here, nothing at all, as long as you didn’t move a limb or disturb the air. But not moving was impossible, so the steps continued, deeper into the building.
The door was tattered, clawed-up, with some yellow slime long since dried, accenting the gray patterns of the wood. The slime fit it well, oddly enough. And the handle, darker than everything else, was also beautiful, also scratched up, and promised splinters in the skin—one would definitely slip in unnoticed, only to glow red across half the palm the next day. It would be unpleasant if a piece of wood got under the skin so deep it couldn’t be removed—unless you cut the flesh open with a boxcutter, digging into it for the shard just to stop the pus from forming.
Definitely, don’t stare too long, don’t examine it, don’t gape at it like some bewitched piece of foul timber. Seonghwa remembered the warning and immediately grabbed the handle, slamming the door open so hard it hit the wall, shaking off what seemed to be a great amount of dust. He quickly stepped inside, crossing the new threshold.
Until now, he hadn’t tried to pay attention to his surroundings—only whatever his eye happened to catch and linger on a moment longer than expected. But in this room, he was already looking around. It was larger, more spacious, though still clearly cluttered with junk and broken things. Because of that, it seemed smaller than it truly was, but large enough that Seonghwa could finally approach the furniture and take a closer look.
What had once been a beautiful armchair, in the lantern light within the darkness, now looked deathly gray, with white floral patterns. Threads protruded here and there, boldly escaping the fabric and reaching in various directions, mostly back toward where they had once been pulled from. Except for a few too long to return—gravity had taken over those. The main thing was that the same dandelion-yellow slime seen on the door now clung here too, where he'd looked too long and already regretted it. The drops, dense and aged—who knows how many years or decades—had soaked into the fabric. On such a gray surface, the slime nearly glowed neon.
Next, Seonghwa moved to the nearby table. Nothing strange—a typical abandoned wooden desk, except its surface was lacquered, unlike the other wood around. Because of this, its color wasn’t the sickly gray of rot, but a simple, ordinary tone of aged wood, with a couple of drawers. And a few claw marks—rather large ones.
Inside one drawer, opened with a screech, lay some simple erasers, sticks, scraps of notepaper that looked untouched, a conker, an oddly large amount of sand, and a small bottle of valerian. Nothing interesting or particularly meaningful to the eye. The second drawer had much the same: yellow paper, a green pencil, sand, and a few band-aids. Again, nothing special—just empty junk.
On the wall nearby stretched long claw marks. So long that the lantern couldn’t immediately find where they ended. They finished up on the ceiling.
Suddenly, a whistle. Human or unnatural—it was hard to say. Maybe the building itself had started to sing again in the wind. It sang often, almost always. But this whistle grew louder within seconds. The lantern wouldn’t help, but Seonghwa kept trying to find the source of that surprisingly pleasant yet somehow mocking sound.
But he had to move.
A few heavy steps. He stopped again, this time staring at a torn-up painting. It once held a beautiful landscape, but now only the frame remained—and even that wasn’t golden anymore, just flaked gray. Unpleasant. Nasty.
He shouldn’t have looked at the painting, shouldn’t have—there were plenty of paintings, why this one? Why did his gaze linger longer than it should?
His coat caught on the broken edge of a stool as the man moved forward—toward new views of the room. For a moment, he was startled that the windows, although present, let in no light. Outside, everything was surely bright and cloudless, the sky wide open, and yet inside, that became suddenly impossible. His only savior remained the lantern, before which particles of dust fell in a dense stream.
The new door, which Seonghwa tried not to look at for longer than necessary, opened and let him in just as easily as the whistle had simply dissolved. By the end, it had sounded cheerful, unmistakably mocking something – or rather, someone.
Now it was the kitchen. Nice, tidy, as light gradually made its way from one side to the other corner. Just as gray as the house from the outside and the previous room. He stepped a bit closer to the knife stand. Only, there were no knives there anymore – just the same old wooden holder for a pair of cold weapons, now holding a hanging thick gray cobweb. Without the spider: only its thin dangling corpse remained.
Cold crept in through the collar, through the neckline of his turtleneck, sending chills down his spine and tensing his muscles. The cold seemed more like a random accident, as it disappeared shortly after. It lingered in the room, barely two seconds at best, but left Seonghwa with a deep sense of discomfort. His hair stood on end, and his eyes blinked rapidly as if even the flashlight began to flicker. His nose stung with tears again.
The kitchen was full of nothing, cluttered with trash, dust, and a few scratches on the surfaces: on the floor under the table and on the ashen table itself. Still far too large for it to be the innocent doing of a hungry animal from the woods. And a few drops of yellow liquid by the threshold of a new room. Seonghwa crouched near the cluster of drops, ignoring the fact that this was the least familiar slime he had encountered so far. He didn’t touch them, just bent down far enough to finally smell it – the stench was so vile it immediately turned his stomach inside out.
He stood up at once, as did his eyes, now directed at the fine smoky door. He knew it would creak. He knew it was tragic.
The same kind of door he opened again, this time slower, tensing his muscles out of fear or perhaps caution – a feeling he had somewhat forgotten. He thought, “Don’t stand here too long,” “Don’t look at the windows, because with the flashlight they become mirrors.” But he forgot that he had to be alert not only to the warnings he had learned in advance.
His muscles tensed painfully as his head slowly scanned the space. Looked clear, Seonghwa thought. But he didn’t know if something might be lurking nearby outside the reach of the faint light.
His boots stepped to the right of where he had entered, echoing slightly with creaks beneath him each time he shifted his weight. And each time the boot shook off some orange leaf mixed with clay. It was unpleasant to think that he was leaving traces for someone who, without a doubt, would have seen them already. To be followed was the last thing he wanted while he was here.
A cobweb stuck to his face at the worst possible moment, just as he was distractedly heading toward another table where one of the legs had been roughly torn off, and on the sharp edge, a dark – nearly black – liquid was visible. Not fresh, so he pitied whoever’s blood it had been. Whether beast or human, it was no longer inside another body.
Jerking the web off, he pulled out his notebook and a stub of a pencil to open the next empty page near his earlier notes and, with trembling hands, write:
“The house, as expected, is abandoned. In the same place everyone told me. The tracks are unnerving: many claw marks, and yellow slime with the worst smell I’ve ever experienced from anything. Not sure if this could be mutant blood or something worse, something I shouldn’t encounter. But I’m certain that eyes from the darkness were already watching my back. I stared too long at the door, I stared at the window trying to see the street beyond these walls. I’m guilty – I was helpless in those moments. They aren’t hunting me or waiting in any specific place. I’d already be dead. But even now I feel eyes searching my back – I’m sure of it. I feel them slipping past my clothes, I feel like they can literally read this text as I try to put it into coherent sentences.”
Oh no – a splinter from the doorknob had indeed stabbed into his skin.
While he was writing, the surface trembled dangerously with every second trembling word. The table shook even from the way Seonghwa couldn’t stop his own hands from shaking, which he leaned on while writing. He was getting cold again, as if claws were running down his back like they scraped along the walls. This time colder and longer than a few minutes ago. Beneath all the layers of warm clothing, he could feel the path along his back muscles that strange eyes would take if they were watching him. The shoulder blades would be their favorite place to observe.
“If you are reading this, please—don’t. Don’t do anything, I beg you. Just leave me alive. I still want to live.”
He knew he had no right to leave this house. It wasn’t by his own will that he had come here, nor some noble calling or task he could refuse. He still had to somehow pull himself together, realign his bones and joints, and keep going to finally understand this ghostly house. Yes, maybe there were ghosts here too – the thought crossed his troubled mind. The house definitely held something that had to be found and understood, identified amid the storm of thoughts.
He had stayed in one place for far too long.
Ahead of his own eyes, when he lifted them from the table, he was met by an empty wall, which, for the first time in a long while, was illuminated by a bright flashlight. In the corners, there were cobwebs and a buzzing cluster of crawling black bugs—hundreds, thousands of them. They rustled softly, yet in such numbers, the colony created an unpleasant cacophony. A repulsive sight for Seonghwa’s eyes.
The cold didn’t recede, not even now, as he passed through this empty little room, one without a window, without a new passage, without any clearly identifiable furniture that would suggest a theme—this, in his mind, truly felt like utter nothingness.
Then a terrifying thought suddenly seized him, slipping deep into his head so subtly. Because of it, he strode heavily out the door, once again passing by the former picture frame and the armchair. All just to stand before that same table, seemingly covered with only trash. He opened the first drawer and flipped everything inside upside down—too loudly in the revolting silence—only to now see, at the very bottom, a delicately carved message, done either with a knife or claw: “Aren’t you ashamed yet?”
A chill ran down his spine, and his hands trembled with the paper, like a leaf in the wind. The moment a peace of paper touched the floor, a monstrous, solitary whistle echoed from above. So clear. One could feel it with the body, it was that cold.
Seonghwa didn’t move. The flashlight barely clung to his palm, trembling along with his hand. And the whistle swayed in the air, drawing nearer. It undoubtedly imagined itself a predator.
But it didn’t reach Seonghwa: it vanished, as if had never existed at all.
The silence—it was sharp, so complete within these walls, it practically said, “no escape,” “don’t even try to move.” It filled all his lungs and throat, gnawing away at painful sores from within. And Seonghwa would’ve gratefully suffocated on it, if only he weren’t chasing it away with his loud gasp for air. He regretted still being capable of that.
Then, suddenly, he began to feel light, even, round pressure points around his neck. They touched his skin directly, not the collar of his clothing. Then the object they belonged to pressed against his throat. Seonghwa couldn’t see what it was, only realized that it wasn’t cold—quite the opposite of the air. As if… someone had warmed it with their hands before.
As the thing pressed harder against his neck, ripping bits of air from him, making his face slowly redden, his hand dropped the flashlight. The light fell to the floorboard and vanished. But now his free hand slowly rose upward, groping at the thing.
A rope.
A rope—more like a thick cord—with several knots along it. These were a gentler alternative to spikes that could’ve crushed him on the spot and spilled blood from his carotid arteries. Instead, this soft material simply stole his breath. One knot was right on his Adam’s apple. It hurt, was terrifying—sweat dripped in thick drops from his neck onto the rope. It tightened even further around his skin, making Seonghwa let out a raspy groan.
“I missed you.”
A whisper.
Right near his red ear. Strangely warm in the omnipresent cold. Seductive. Like the hand that slipped under his cloak—resting on his lower back. Everything that touched him now was unusually sunlit, like a ray of light. Fingers moved over his turtleneck, caressing, spreading an unexpected trembling through his body from the warmth, as the voice whispered again by his other ear:
“Just don’t lie again, my dear.”
Sweetly sang the shadow behind him.
“I… I don’t kno... w your name…” the trapped man struggled to say with all his might.
Faint claws could be felt on his neck, from the second hand holding the thick rope. That slime… it soaked even the knots, and now the surface of his neck was covered in the most revolting stench imaginable.
“Whether you know it or not, you’ll have to say it.”
“Please… no, don’t!..” his voice broke mercilessly, tears forming, the noose tight on his neck and a hot palm on his back.
“I’m just San, don’t be so terribly scared.”
Seonghwa would’ve screamed with all his lungs. Seonghwa would’ve rather kept living, looking at pinkish flowers and endless layers of bandages. Would’ve preferred if the hand didn’t warm his lower back so pleasantly. If that figure didn’t press so close that even through several layers of fabric he could feel the contours of a strong chest. If rabid demons didn’t hold him in the dark.
“You won’t die, sun. Not when you’re so…”
All the walls anticipated the final word. And it came with else's lips pressed directly to his neck.
“…frozen.”