Fellow Madmen
“This is a no-smoking area. There’s a child here. And it’s a wooden building.”
The suppressed voice hardly felt like her own. It was packed so tightly it seemed ready to burst at any moment, stretched thin and precarious. The man wiping orchid leaves glanced back at Gaon, then wore an expression as if something had finally clicked.
“Ah.”
That single syllable was the entirety of Cha Taekyung’s response.
He transferred the cigarette from his mouth to his fingers, shrugged, and exhaled. Slow smoke curled from between his handsome lips. The crisp air turned murky and gray with tobacco. Then he brought the white stick back to his mouth.
He did not put it out.
The deliberate way he kept smoking sent a clear message: her anger meant nothing to him.
Personality disorder. No question.
Gaon had not wanted to confirm her suspicion like this. Heat rose slowly through her skull.
Looking back, Gaon’s world had always been narrow.
Her only younger sister, Baek Gayoung.
Her uncle, Baek Jeong-hak.
The servants who worked in the mansion, Kim Ju-yeon and Lee Yong-hoon.
A handful of residents she passed on walks.
The doctors who came and went from Baekam Island.
So she had never encountered a human being this unreasonable, this rude. She had no idea how to deal with him.
“Put the cigarette out. Right now.”
Gaon ordered him in a low voice.
Cha Taekyung no longer even looked at her. He simply kept wiping the orchid leaves with perfect composure. Cigarette smoke could not possibly be good for the plant either, yet he showed not the slightest concern.
Is he just ignoring me completely?
Anger surged again and Gaon was about to open her mouth when Cha Taekyung broke the silence first.
“Why are you so angry? Baek Gayoung isn’t even here.”
His murmuring voice held nothing but calm.
“If you smoke in the garden, of course the smoke rises to the second floor.”
She wanted to stay as composed as Cha Taekyung. She did not want to show any emotional disturbance, any anger. But her face refused to stay calm. She felt the corner of her mouth, carefully lifted at an angle, trembling.
Meanwhile Taekyung glanced up at the second-floor windows. He swept his gaze across the ones sealed with double panes and drawn curtains, impossible to see through.
“It shouldn’t affect the child.”
He shrugged and went back to wiping orchid leaves.
What kind of person is this?
Gaon was discovering firsthand that when something was too absurd, a hollow laugh simply escaped.
“As long as you’re inside this mansion, smoking is forbidden wherever you go, and as the homeowner I have every right to demand that. If you keep acting however you please and being this rude, you won’t be able to stay here.”
Cha Taekyung let out a long sigh. Then he rose slowly, dragged over an empty ceramic pot, and stubbed the cigarette out on it. The way he removed his glasses and rubbed between his brows, looking tired, was saturated with equal parts languor and annoyance.
“If I’d known I was going to get this much nagging, I would have smoked in secret.”
If annoyance counted as an emotion, then Gaon had succeeded in drawing one out of that hard, cold face. Of course there was no satisfaction in it whatsoever. Even the will to continue the conversation snapped.
Gaon turned away without another word. She had reached her limit. Clinging to someone who refused to listen would only leave her mouth sore.
Personality disorder. Psycho. Mysophobia, my ass. From the looks of it, his actions are just as filthy as his personality.
She muttered the curses she had not dared fling in his face. Truthfully she had disliked him from the first impression. She never imagined he would be this deranged. Whether Cha Gil-ho choked on inexplicable terror and fainted or Baek Jeong-hak scolded her for creating tiresome trouble, throwing this man out of the mansion would feel satisfying.
Striding across the garden path, something caught Gaon’s eye.
At one side of the clearing, beside a bench, a flowerpot had been abandoned as if discarded. Inside the clearly expensive pot sat one of the orchids he had been carefully wiping—now blackened and dead. It looked as though it had withered from long drought or rotted from disease.
Without meaning to, Gaon stopped walking.
Did he smoke because he was upset the orchid died?
Had it been that emotional an act?
Even if it had, the attitude was still unforgivable. She had no reason to share in his incomprehensible anguish. What seized her attention was the sense of wrongness. At first she could not name what that wrongness was. Then she understood.
Can an orchid get like that in a single day…?
The orchid wore a shriveled, desiccated face. From long drought or neglect it had become a dry mummy with not a scrap of life left in it. Ominously so.
“Baek Gaon.”
Just then Cha Taekyung called her name. Gaon turned on reflex. And she startled—he had come far closer than she expected. She had heard no sound at all, yet the man was suddenly right there.
His cool scent washed over her. Gaon held her breath without thinking.
“Have you ever thought about it?”
He bent slightly at the waist to match her eye level. The scent grew thicker. Up close the man was far more overwhelming. He was not physically holding her, yet she felt unable to move. Behind his glasses, pitch-black pupils glittered with an unreadable light. An abyss whose end could not be seen lived inside them.
Gaon felt goosebumps rise.
“That you yourself are mad.”
He delivered the assessment briefly. Gaon had to turn the words over several times.
The silence stretched long. Even the sunlight that had been filtering between the pine needles seemed to vanish; Gaon felt strangely cold.
“…What do you mean by that?”
She tried to answer with composure, but her voice came out trembling wretchedly.
The truly mad person was telling her she was mad.
Seeing him this close, she understood. Whatever illness had made Cha Gil-ho bring this man all the way here, this man was not normal.
“You seem more sensitive than Baek Gayoung. It looks like the older sister needs treatment more than the younger one.”
The man whispered in a low voice. Now that she listened, it was the voice of someone having the time of his life. An unpredictable human being. Moments ago he had refused even to meet her eyes as if determined to ignore every word she said; now he had chased after her as she tried to leave and was spouting strange remarks. Rude and outrageous remarks.
“I don’t want to hear that from someone who’s actually crazy.”
Baek Gaon deliberately bit down on each syllable and spat them out with force.
Silence settled over the garden for a moment.
Then Cha Taekyung straightened and burst into laughter. Ha-ha—the laugh was short, and it did not last. In that brief span the corners of his mouth stretched long, and his black pupils caught in the corners of his eyes and warped. Gaon hated the way that man looked when he smiled.
“You’re a good judge of people.”
He offered a compliment that did not sound like one.
“Don’t come up behind me like that without a sound.”
Only then did Gaon step back and warn him. The laughter had stopped, but the amusement still lingered on Cha Taekyung’s face as he nodded and retreated.
“Gladly.”
It was the generous attitude of someone willing to grant a request of that size. To Gaon, whose feelings toward the man had already hit rock bottom, it only looked repulsive.
“Let’s get along from now on, fellow madmen. Don’t be so sensitive.”
Gaon did not answer. She turned and left the spot.
Mad? Who’s mad?
All the way into the mansion her heart pounded in an unpleasant rhythm. It was the first time she had held such a long conversation with the man. The conclusion was the worst. The worst conversation.
Who said anything about getting along from now on.
Baek Gaon had no such intention whatsoever.
Her patience for outsiders had run dry.
Instead of returning straight to her room she headed for the far end of the first-floor corridor. It stretched in the opposite direction from the hallway where Cha Gil-ho and Cha Taekyung’s consulting room lay. Rounding the corner revealed a heavy door. An entrance that preserved the grain of antique wood. The old chandelier hanging from the ceiling was coated in dust from long disuse, and with not a single window the end of this corridor was always the darkest place in the mansion. On either side of the door stood the taxidermied water deer and stag her uncle treasured. In the darkness their glass eyes shone quietly.
This space alone always made Gaon feel ill. That was why she avoided coming toward her uncle’s room whenever possible.
Today was the exception. She had something she absolutely had to say. Gaon drew a deep breath. She realized she had hurried here almost at a run. Her head burned with how furious she still was.
Without looking at the glass eyes of the stuffed animals, Gaon knocked on the door.