CH 57

His voice was trembling through his lips. Was it fear or glee?

Two people who heard Hyehyun quietly opened their mouths.

Blergh.

It was Seogeung and Woorim.

They each looked at different people—either me or Hyehyun.

I looked around at the silent people, then sighed deeply. I was truly tired.

“There were others. The staff, they went downstairs before we did.”

The hall fell dead silent—I didn’t hear anyone even swallowing.

Act 8

The disorderly moment between the first and second movements of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no. 1 stretched on. The looks and rhythm of the breathing of the group were imbued with the bold dissonance of the first movement and the stately but bleak eeriness of the second movement. Time continued to flow mercilessly, and the mess of emotions stuck stagnantly on the floor like spit.

On a remote island, the people were marooned on the top floor of a large mansion with no exit.

Upon hearing my words, everyone else was lost in thought, only swallowing repeatedly to show they heard. If the filming staff really did something to Goyeon, then we would need to rethink the entirety of our situation, right down to the baseless trust that allowed these people to retain their composure and sense of security.

Hyehyun’s stare from beside me made me extremely uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem like the right timing for me to leave, so I kept standing there. But nobody seemed to want to say anything at this rate, so I tossed them a light question. “What were the other staff members’ rooms like?”

“There was nobody there after all.” The one who answered was Raehee Park, who seemed to be treading carefully. Unlike the rest of the group, she didn’t seem too shocked about what Hyehyun had just said. Hence, she must have been able to think a lot more about our situation in the mansion compared to everyone else. She came up with the same question that I had, the very reason I was still standing in that room.

“But didn’t you say that the door going downstairs had a lock on it?” Her voice trembled slightly.

I replied tersely, “I did.”

“For that to be possible, it means that the staff must have had a key to open the lock… Haeseo, you said you ran straight down when you heard the scream, right? Could they have opened it with the key and closed it in that short time?” After she said that, she looked at Woorim, who was leaning against the wall some distance away from the other people who weren’t me. It was clear that she wanted to listen to the opinion of an objective someone instead of a murder suspect.

Woorim pushed himself off the wall a bit and pretended to think before shaking his head. “The lock was quite big and bulky. I think that would’ve been difficult.”

“But we went directly back upstairs after we discovered the body. Even if someone was hiding in a different room, none of us would have noticed.” After I added that, Raehee frowned in concentration as she combed through her memory. However, her memory would surely not be much different from mine. Ultimately, she conceded.

“You’re right. That’s true,” she muttered quietly as she let out a long breath.

After we discovered the body, we all immediately went upstairs and banged on the doors while shouting. Later, we focused our energy on breaking the door handles to get into the rooms. Even if some questionable sound came from downstairs, we wouldn’t have heard it at all.

Beneath our feet were innumerable rooms aligned throughout the hallways like the kernels on a corncob. Among those, there were several which were locked. Were they all locked from the beginning? It was possible that while Woorim and I were searching, someone could have watched us behind a locked door.

That person would be holding their breath in hopes they wouldn’t be discovered…

We were utterly lacking in information. We couldn’t even uncover the truth about the phenomena before our eyes—the mystery of how the staff vanished into thin air. Nobody had any idea of what to do going forward. In the end, the only thing people could do in this situation was cause conflict within the group.

Such conflicts were things like wasting energy on trivial suspicions.

“Raehee, what the hell were you listening to? There’s no way the staff would have done it.” Seogeung spoke up once more. As he glared at me, his eyes held disgust unlike before. Considering his personality, he would glare at me with those eyes even if I were found to be innocent.

“He’s probably the culprit and just spewing nonsense. Didn’t you say it yourself? There’s no motive. You b*stard! Why would the staff kill that woman?”

“…I’m really sorry to interrupt, but…”