To Keep Something In

Heeseo knew her own weaknesses well. Even Haejeong, whose spiritual power was too meager to inscribe a single talisman, had opened her second sight years ago—she could see ghosts, and hear them besides.

And yet Heeseo, who had undergone the spirit-descending ritual twice, still saw nothing at all. That was precisely why she had leaned on Shadow-Breaking Talismans and Golswaebo Powder.

"Don't worry too much, though. Even if unnie's spiritually blind..."

Heeseo looked at the half-filled glass bottle, closed her eyes, and opened them again, slow. A familiar dizziness rocked her vision. She pressed a clean square of gauze to her split finger with practiced ease. The gauze darkened at once, soaking through—the same color as the liquid in the bottle.

"I'm confident in at least one thing. Beating them until they leave."

"Unnie! Unnie? Unnie!"

Haejeong's voice rang with worry, but Heeseo ended the call without hesitation. If the place she had thrown herself into really was a trap, she could hardly go dragging a faint-hearted kid into it too.

A low hum, so faint she had to strain to catch it, and then the car came to a stop.

Heeseo stood at the window and drew herself behind the curtain. Even with midnight approaching, the garden—fitted with countless lights—was bright as midday.

He doesn't even look tired.

More than twelve hours had passed since he'd left that morning, after spending it bickering with her over underwear, and yet Kim Jeeon looked exactly as he had when he walked out the door. His hair was swept neatly back, and the features it revealed were sharp enough to read even from a second-floor window.

...Did he change his shirt?

She found the difference soon enough. Unlike the one he'd worn to work, the man coming home was in a pale sky-blue shirt. Looking closer, the slacks were different too.

Don't tell me he changed out of what he was wearing because he was afraid I'd take his clothes?

The thought struck her, and a hollow laugh slipped out. She was overthinking it. And yet, considering everything Kim Jeeon had done—or more precisely, everything the ghost possessing Kim Jeeon had done—it wasn't entirely implausible.

This isn't an ordinary ghost. I checked the sheets and the pillows with Golswaebo Powder and found nothing. It recognized the Shadow-Breaking Talisman, too... What the hell is this thing?

There were cases where items that had held a possessed person's traces the longest, treated with Golswaebo Powder and washed in purification water, would yield marks according to the type of ghost. But the sheets she had gone to such trouble to obtain showed nothing at all.

All I did was become someone who does a lot of laundry.

The look the housemaid had given her rose in her mind, and her shoulders felt heavy. She had always been confident in her stamina, but mental fatigue was another matter. Heeseo leaned against the windowsill and caught her breath. She had a reason, after all, for waiting out her exhaustion until Kim Jeeon came home.

According to the butler, Kim Jeeon always returned around midnight. He left for work before nine in the morning, which meant he spent more than half of every day at the company. She had no idea how much money he made, but the man was relentless—that much was obvious.

I can't even tell the degree of possession, so I don't know if he's the relentless one, or if it's a relentless ghost.

Unlike the stories in horror films and campfire tales, possession unfolded in sequence. Recognition came first. From the instant the possessed became aware of the ghost, everything else began.

Once you sense its presence and can picture its form, it accelerates beyond anyone's ability to stop. Someone around him must have thought something was off...

People born sensitive, or whose spiritual sense had been sharpened by some accident, came to feel ghosts. A shiver looking at a haunted house with an earthbound spirit was the mild end of it; ancestral spirits sending prophetic dreams belonged to the same category.

The trouble started when you began to see them—when you could trace their form. See, and you would hear. Hear, and you would fall under their spell. From that point on, the possessed became prey for every ghost there was.

He should have been hounded by ghosts day and night. For someone living surrounded by people, hiding that would be impossible.

Ghosts, like people, came in every shape. Some looked perfectly fine, spoke, seemed more human than humans; others could barely be distinguished as having a form at all. An ordinary person would be terrified just from seeing one, start acting like a nervous wreck, and the people around them would notice. All the more so for someone like Kim Jeeon, who spent more than half of every day with attendants—it would have shown, one way or another.

"But nobody said a word. Which means it's one of two things. They're covering it up together..."

Or he had been swallowed by the ghost far longer ago than she had imagined. Heeseo murmured it under her breath, eyes sweeping the grounds.

Exactly two hours after Kim Jeeon came home, the mansion fell into a hush of sleep.

It was well past midnight, which meant even the live-in staff would be catching naps in their private break room. Heeseo glanced at the clock and moved with care.

She opened her bedroom door. Kim Jeeon's room lay at the far end of the long hallway. No light seeped from under his door; the corridor was complete darkness. She closed her eyes and opened them again, slow. Her vision settled into the dark, and it was much more comfortable that way. She had put on thick socks instead of slippers to kill the sound of her steps, and she started walking.

Check the first floor last. Start from the basement.

The maid's quarters where the live-in staff stayed were on the first floor. Heeseo avoided it and took the stairs that led down. The mansion's ceilings soared, and the stairs between floors ran long to match. By the time she reached the bottom, the depth of it felt like two or three stories underground.

Did they really need to hollow out a basement this vast?

The mansion already sat on grounds the size of a sprawling park. They had land to spare without digging this deep. Heeseo clicked her tongue and glanced left, then right.

Corridors stretched away on either side of the staircase that led back to the first floor. She hesitated a moment, then turned. When you couldn't tell which way to go, there was only one method that had ever worked—the most scientific method there was: trust your gut. She had relied on it her entire life. Her footsteps vanished into the dark.

She found nothing suspicious all the way to the end of the corridor. None of the usual things that gathered in a possessed person's house—not a trace of pests. There were cobwebs in the unreachable corners, so it wasn't thanks to the staff's diligence either.

The bugs that flock to ghosts don't disappear with cleaning anyway.

To those pests, a possessed person was a corpse. Bait that walked around reeking of rot. Kill ten and turn your back, and a hundred more would gather—that was their nature. And yet all she had found on the second floor, where her bedroom and Jeeon's lay, was a single rhinestone fallen from someone's hairpin and two or three strands of hair jammed deep beneath a bed.

The basement was no different. Heeseo was briefly discouraged, then changed direction. She had checked the right. Now the left.

"It's freezing..."

Security lights ran the length of the corridor, so looking around was no trouble. But because it sat so deep in the earth, the cold here was far sharper than anywhere else. At a particularly sudden chill, Heeseo let out a long, deliberate breath.

Is something here? It's too cold.

She glanced at the watch on her wrist. Not quite three in the morning—the hour of ghosts. The Hour of the Ox, when yin energy stirred and quickened. If a spirit was here, this was when it could make itself known.

"...Let there be something. Anything."

As if the whisper had been heard, she found it not long after: something that was, quite literally, suspicious. Suspicious enough that even someone with no reason to be searching would have stopped and stared.

"What is this?"

A clang. A heavy clunk. Thick metal struck metal and rang through the quiet. Heeseo looked down at the rusted padlock with a momentarily incredulous expression.

"...Who even uses a lock like this anymore."

There was a door at the end of the basement corridor. It was shut tight, and as if that were not enough, a chain had been wound round and round the handle and fastened with a padlock. It looked for all the world like it was meant to keep someone from breaking in.

No. No, that's not it. This is...

Heeseo gripped the handle and shook it hard. Even putting her full weight into it, the door did not budge. She turned on her phone's flashlight and found the stopper installed at the foot of the door.

The stopper was fixed flush to the corridor floor. Even if you undid the lock, you would not be able to pull the door open.