CH 63

“Ahhhhh!”

My eyes snapped open upon the sudden scream. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I bolted up from my bed and stepped outside the room. The voice belonged to a man.

When I opened the door to leave, I saw that many others were gripping onto their doors and looking out into the hall like me. Hawoo was the one who screamed. He was sitting on the floor in front of the elevator doors.

“What’s the matter?” The drunken Seogeung approached him, but then he also let out a scream and fell on his behind. The others and I rushed to Hawoo’s side. The only ones who didn’t move were Raehee and Seoyoon, who must have gotten a bad feeling.

“What the hell…?” Standing beside the elevator, Seoyoon muttered with his eyes wide. He couldn’t scream since the first two men had screamed enough for all of us. He shakily took a few steps back.

The elevator door was open. Something was inside the elevator that only carried things up. These things were bright red, white, and yellow; they were dismembered human body parts. The walls, ceiling, and floor of the elevator were covered in red blood.

The limbs were diced up into small enough pieces that I couldn’t tell which body part belonged to whom. Drained of blood, the pieces of the bodies looked like those of dolls; it was surreal. That was until Seogeung pointed to a face and said in a raspy voice, “Th-that b*stard. Isn’t he that producer b*stard?”

So it was.

The corpses that filled the elevator belonged to the filming staff who had all vanished. Just as Seogeung said, the head with a detached jaw, dangling long tongue, and exposed upper teeth looked like the man who explained the rules to us.

Seoyoon gulped nervously and slowly approached the elevator. Everyone held their breaths as he did so. When he stepped one foot into the elevator, it made a loud beep. The alarm warned us that the lift was overloaded. The grief-stricken voice of Seoyoon reached our ears, accompanying the noise. “They’re… real.”

Blood seeped from the elevator onto the hallway floors, and from that, I could see why Hawoo opened the elevator.

The cameras were still running. For me, even though it was a given, I felt lightheaded from the motionless cameras silently capturing our images. It was like the moisture in my brain was drying out.

I was the one who spread the original urban legend. I couldn’t dream about the mansion at all, so I thought this would be the only way I could meet the Child. If I could evoke any reaction, I thought I could find people who knew about the Child, or meet someone who witnessed them.

But I never imagined that something like this would happen. In the worst case, I thought the producers would cancel the show, and we would be left stranded. From the moment Goyeon died, the situation grew more and more bizarre.

The metallic smell of blood filled the hallway. Hawoo, who was dry-heaving, stood up and walked to the kitchen. Soon after, I heard him throwing up everything that he had eaten.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end. There was another short scream.

This time, it was a woman; Raehee had screamed.

“Wh-what do we do?” She stood frozen while gripping a door handle. Beyond the open door, we could see inside. It was a perfectly normal room. People’s gazes focused on Raehee, and she trembled. Her face crumpled into an agonized grimace. “Goyeon’s stylist disappeared.”

The door she was holding onto was the one for the room of Goyeon’s stylist.

Act 9

As I had predicted, Hawoo was on his way back to his room when he saw the red fluid seeping out from the crack of the elevator, so he pressed the button to open the door. Since when were the staff placed in the elevator like that? It seemed like they were alive until at least the time that Seogeung had a beer with them last night.

If that was the case…

That wasn’t the only problem.

After the elevator doors closed, the people stacked the chairs in the hall up against the door. That wouldn’t make the corpses disappear. It just meant they were put away, out of sight, temporarily. It was a relief that the mansion was relatively cold. If they were left outdoors at this time of year, they would have started to decompose quickly.

But how much longer could they last indoors? To make matters worse, Goyeon’s body was downstairs as well.

Plus…

“…Those people didn’t have the lower halves of their bodies, right?”