Chapter 2
002 – A Truly Terrifying Story (2)
My home was in a studio-apartment neighborhood near Sanmun University.
Geumyeong Villa. A studio apartment measuring barely six pyeong.
It had an air conditioner, a refrigerator, a microwave, and even a balcony with a small washing machine.
The kind of studio apartment you could find anywhere in a college district.
The first-floor entrance was locked with a keypad code shared only with the tenants, and most of the neighbors next door and upstairs were college students.
If anything had changed over the past few years, it was that more tenants from Southeast Asia had moved in.
Even the woman living right across from me….
…….
Anyway, that was where my studio apartment was.
Beep-beep. As I unlocked the first-floor entrance, something zipped past me─.
The thief in the padded jacket.
I went up to the third floor and beeped in the code for my place, too.
As soon as the door opened, that dark padded jacket shot inside ahead of me again.
“So you really followed me all the way home….”
I took off my shoes and went inside, too.
The thief in the padded jacket was crouched in a corner beside the bed, staring right at me.
Beneath the hood pulled over her head, her eyes were full of unmistakable wariness.
What on earth was that thing?
Grrrrrrrr─.
She clutched her stomach.
She looked hungry.
I was getting hungry, too, since I’d left my cup noodles unfinished at the convenience store.
I took some minced garlic and leftover bacon from the fridge and put them in an oiled pan.
Sizzle─.
When the garlic started to smell fragrant, I poured in about two cups of water and added a portion of pasta about the size of two 500-won coins.
After stirring it around and letting it simmer down, the one-pan oil pasta was ready.
As if I were just adding another helping to what I’d planned to eat, I split it between two plates and set them on the little table with forks.
Slurp, slurp─.
When I started eating my pasta, the girl in the corner sniffed at the smell, then crept toward the table.
Then─.
Gobble, gobble─.
She started eating the noodles with her bare hands, without even a fork. Her wild behavior made the hood of her padded jacket slip off, and I sucked in a breath.
Her hair was a blood-red mess, cut haphazardly.
Her face was grimy, with all sorts of things caked on it, but if you looked closely, she was as young as an elementary-school student.
‘A girl?’
Was that what my little sister looked like when she was in sixth grade?
Anyway, she quickly devoured the pasta, then went back to the corner where she’d been.
“…….”
She was like an abandoned dog, wary because people had abused and abandoned her.
That was exactly how Bori had been when she first came to our house.
But the problem was that she smelled absolutely awful.
How should I put it? That distinctive stale stench of people who live on the streets.
I’d been too flustered to notice until now, but after she’d eaten and settled down, the smell was so bad I thought my nose might twist right off.
“Hey, go into the bathroom and wash up.”
It didn’t seem like it would be easy to kick her out right away, anyway.
So I went over to the girl in the padded jacket, grabbed her by the wrist, led her into the bathroom, and closed the door for her.
“Ha.”
Once I’d closed the door, a sigh slipped out of me.
I couldn’t help wondering what I was even doing.
If she was just a hallucination or something, then I was making a scene all by myself.
I thought I’d search online to see if there were any similar symptoms, and pressed the PC’s power button with my thumb.
Tap-tap, click─.
「Schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness that causes symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, distorted perceptions of reality, and emotional blunting due to an imbalance in the brain’s neurotransmitters.」
It did sound a little like what I was experiencing, but….
The thing that didn’t quite fit was that my one real strength was being physically fit and mentally healthy.
‘Schizophrenia symptoms… No. I’m sure that’s not it.’
I searched one thing after another, including ‘invisible girl in a padded jacket’ and ‘invisible thief.’
As expected, I didn’t find anything satisfying.
Then a thought suddenly occurred to me.
“What was she saying earlier?”
Back when she’d been eating uncooked ramen in the underground parking garage of my apartment building and I’d caught her.
I remembered her babbling something at me.
It had been something about a chef.
“…Mecha Chef.”
I looked it up.
「Michelin two-star Chef Seong, who cooks like a machine, and his restaurant ‘Yosu’ reopen!」
「Mecha Chef Seong Jun-won confirmed as a regular cast member on Please Take Care of My Freezer!」
Damn it, that just put me in a bad mood for nothing.
With a desperate need to grasp at even a straw, I kept searching and came across a curious phrase.
“Oh… there it is. Mecha Chef.”
Mecha Chef.
It’s a Hebrew word from the Bible.
Hebrew is the language spoken by the rowdy Israelites in the Middle East.
“The Korean translation of the Hebrew word mecha chef is….”
「Sorcerer」
…A sorcerer?
Ha. A breath slipped out of my mouth.
Half of me felt oddly puzzled. The other half was amused.
And at that moment, I realized something was wrong in the bathroom.
“…….”
It was too quiet.
Creeeak─.
With a bad feeling, I opened the bathroom door.
The scruffy, red-haired girl in the padded jacket stood there, blinking blankly.
‘I’d hoped she might have vanished clean away when I opened the door…. I guess not.’
I’d told her to wash up because she smelled.
Had she not understood me?
Feeling at a bit of a loss, I turned the faucet and switched on the shower.
Fwoooooosh─.
“……!!!”
The girl in the padded jacket flinched in surprise.
It was as if she’d never once imagined that water would spray out of the showerhead.
She stared warily at the shower for a moment.
Then she dropped to her knees toward the water starting to pool on the floor─.
Slurp, slurp, lick, lick.
She started lapping it up like crazy!
Like thirsty African animals in the middle of a long drought gathering around a tiny puddle to drink!
The sight left me a little dazed.
“Oh, right. You’ve gotta stay hydrated.”
# # #
My younger sister, who was three years younger than me, was a tomboy who tore around everywhere.
It’s not something I’m bragging about, but I did a pretty good job of looking after her in place of our parents, who were busy working.
So washing a small, grubby kid was no trouble for me.
“First, let’s get these smelly things off.”
I pulled down the zipper of the dark padded jacket the strange convenience-store thief was wearing.
Then I took off the ragged dress underneath, which was little better than a dishcloth.
“Good grief, you’re nothing but skin and bones.”
For the record, the yellow dress felt less like clothing and more like a rough burlap rice sack.
‘Still, at least she’s staying calm.’
I’d worried she might thrash around like crazy.
Perhaps she’d instinctively realized I wasn’t going to hurt her, since I’d given her food and water. She was surprisingly docile.
I was just about to gather up the filthy clothes and toss them into the laundry basket.
Sway, sway─.
I caught an utterly unreal movement in the corner of my vision.
Something long extended from the girl’s lower back and swayed behind her.
It was about as thick as my index finger and looked almost a meter long.
It was glossy black, almost like an oiled leather whip.
The tip was a pointed triangle, like an arrowhead. No matter how I tried to make sense of it, I could only reach one conclusion.
“A taiiil…!?”
It was a tail.
To be precise, something like a demon’s tail.
A small, round metal ring was looped around it, like an ornament.
“No one else can see you, and you’ve even got a tail?”
What the hell are you, anyway?
Lather, lather─.
Anyway, I worked a generous amount of shampoo into her hair, starting at the scalp.
Ruuush, ruuush─.
She was so dirty that the filthy runoff turned the floor pitch-black.
Tomorrow, as soon as it gets light, I’ll have to clean the whole bathroom with bleach and water.
And with that, bath time was over!
“All right, let’s go out and get you dry and dressed.”
Shake, shake, shake─!
Just then, the girl bolted out of the bathroom toward the studio, shaking her wet body and hair everywhere.
Like a wet dog or wolf!
Water splattered in every direction.
“Ah, shit.”
Just thinking about the big cleanup I’d have to do tomorrow was already bringing tears to my eyes.
Fwoooooosh─.
After finishing drying her hair with the hair dryer, I put my T-shirt, underwear, and pants on her.
They were men’s clothes, but a hundred times better than that ragged dress or padded jacket.
So what should I do with those clothes?
They were so filthy that washing them would probably break the washing machine.
Should I throw them away?
With that thought, I reached for the padded jacket─.
Snatch. The girl, who’d been docile while I dried her hair, moved faster than I did, hugged the jacket, and hurried back to the corner of the room.
She acted as if that old black padded jacket were some priceless treasure.
“…Fine, do what you want.”
A wave of exhaustion swept over me.
I flopped onto the bed, and my body and eyelids felt unbelievably heavy.
Maybe when I woke up tomorrow, it would all have been a dream….
# # #
Sway, sway─.
I opened my eyes at the sensation of something tapping my face.
The tail swaying in front of me quickly shot out of sight.
Following its path, I saw the girl crouched in the corner.
I was wide awake now.
So it hadn’t been a dream.
Until just last night, all of this had felt like it was some kind of lie or joke.
By now, the sense of reality was spreading through my veins along with my pounding heartbeat.
“What on earth are you?”
“……….”
Of course, she didn’t answer.
After finishing the deep cleaning of the bathroom and room that I’d put off the night before, I threw the leftovers from the fridge into a pan and made a generous batch of bright-red ham kimchi fried rice.
Steam rose from a rounded hill of fried rice piled on a white plate.
Gulp─.
The girl swallowed hungrily and reached for the steaming rice─.
“Eek…!!!”
The freshly fried rice must have been too hot; she let out a yelp.
The sight was so funny that I burst out laughing.
“That’s why you’re supposed to use a spoon.”
I put a spoon in the girl’s hand and showed her how to use it, eating the fried rice with a spoon myself. A little salty, maybe.
“……”
She started eating with the spoon, as if she wasn’t used to it.
Clink, clatter─.
As the meal was more or less winding down, I turned on the computer and went online.
Girl with a tail.
A search brought up all sorts of things.
「Demon」
The girl’s tail most closely resembled the arrow-tipped tail of a demon from a cartoon or movie.
I searched for more information about demons.
Names I’d heard before, like Lucifer and Baal, came up alongside grand-sounding ones like the Lemegeton, the 72 Demons of Solomon, Mephisto, and Faust.
“Paimon… One of Solomon’s 72 demons, ranked ninth among them, with the title of King. His domains are pulverization, rampage, and destruction….”
Apparently, demon worshippers or sorcerers summoned or made contracts with such powerful demons to fulfill their desires.
Come to think of it, that girl had called me ‘Mecha Chef,’ meaning ‘sorcerer,’ hadn’t she?
I could see a demon no one else could, then brought her home, washed her, and fed her…. So….
“Does that mean I’m a sorcerer?”
Thump─.
For some reason, my heart was pounding.