CH 43

From the doorway to the wall opposite to me, there was no floor—just emptiness. I could understand why Goyeon screamed.

Goyeon was lying on the ground below, beyond where the floor should have been. I couldn’t see properly because it was dark, but her pale white face was still easy for me to see. Goyeon was staring at the ceiling without moving a single inch. She lay stiff, with her limbs sprawled out, and I couldn’t hear her breathing. The only thing I could sense was the smell of blood.

The taste of blood also seemed to linger at the back of my throat.

“…Goyeon.”

The people who heard the scream must have been coming down because I could hear noise coming from upstairs.

I plopped down where I was in utter defeat. I stared at the wall across the hole in the floor.

It was abhorrent.

The things that the staff said the other day flashed through my memory.

“What do you mean by tricks?”

“I guess it’s a surprise. You should watch out.”

…Across from me was a window that was fairly well decorated. Looking at it carefully, I could tell that it was a cheaply made fake, but if one simply walked by, it looked like a window covered by blinds.

Goyeon complained when we first came downstairs that she felt stuffy without any windows. She must have seen the fake window and stepped foot in the floorless room thoughtlessly.

Had I discovered it first, I would have recalled that Woorim said there were no windows in this building in the first place and had my suspicions. Apparently, nobody told Goyeon this piece of information.

“What happened?” Soon, the people who came down saw me on the ground and ran to me. Everyone had a brightly lit flashlight in their hands. They shone their light on me, then pointed their lights beyond the open door.

Then, they illuminated down below.

“Argh! Wh-what is this?” There was a sharp gasp and several sharp screams shook the dark building.

Illuminated by the light, Goyeon was no different from when I saw her in the dark as she laid on the ground. Her eyes were wide open, her hair was splayed about, and a drop of blood drew a thin line down from where it began in her mouth. A stream of blood pooled from her back on the ground. Her arms and legs were twisted in strange angles.

“H-how did this happen?” Raehee asked, grabbing my shoulders. However, it hadn’t been very long since I arrived on the scene too, so I couldn’t answer.

Only the sound of Hawoo muttered under his breath reached my ears, “D-did she fall? How could they make something so dangerous?!”

In the room that she fell into, there were a bunch of dolls that looked like her all around the room. No part of those dolls was in sound condition. Some had broken necks or missing arms and legs. Goyeon lay atop the grave of broken dolls. The colorful dolls’ clothes and their faintly smiling faces were stained in red.

Just like when my mother died, the room filled with toys was painted red.

A red room.

I stared down at her quietly until a flashlight caught my eye when it lit the doorframe. There were traces of it being scratched by something. It didn’t look like it was scratched on purpose while designing this place. It didn’t look like it had been long since those traces were made. They were fresh marks without a trace of dust which didn’t change color from exposure.

I brushed my fingers over that mark. The paint and wood splinters poked my fingers. The size of the marks didn’t differ much from the width between my fingers. They were fingernail marks.

“What is this?”

Did she grab onto this? Right before she fell?

I looked back down at Goyeon.

Then just how did she… Who did this to her…?

“Who…?”

At that moment, another person’s voice cut in. “There’s a window.”

It was a blunt and indifferent voice, unbefitting of the situation. The gazes that were filled with chaos and horror shot up at the one who just spoke.

It was Woorim Eun. He pointed at the wall across, then at the wall of the hallway. A mirror hung from the hallway wall. When Woorim flashed the mirror with his light, the beam of light bounced off and hit the fake window on the wall.

“What… about it?” Seogeung Ahn asked Woorim.

Woorim reached behind the mirror. Soon, the hallway grew bright with a pzzt sound. It was the sound of the electricity coming into the hallway ceiling lights. With the exception of Woorim, everyone was deathly pale.

In a thin track jacket and pants, Woorim said to everyone, “There’s a clover on the window blinds.”

He was right.

The blinds hanging over the window had a pale blue clover on them.

* * *