Taejun barely had time to process the old woman's cryptic whisper before the stillness around him fractured.
A sudden, sharp burst of sound sliced through the quiet, the unmistakable crack of footsteps hammering the pavement behind him, fast, frantic, and far too close.
The noise didn't echo like a person's would.
It was sharper, almost splintering in his ears, like bone snapping under strain or claws tapping against stone.
He froze, breath catching in his throat, and spun around with a jolt of raw instinct, but the street behind him was empty, abandoned as before, bathed in the same pale morning light and veiled in curling threads of mist.
There was nothing, no figures, no shadows where they shouldn't be, but the presence, that suffocating, breathless weight of being pursued, had not left him.
It swelled in the silence, in the invisible space just behind his spine, too close, too real.
His legs moved before his thoughts caught up, driven by something primal and urgent.
He ran.
The world tilted as his body surged forward, feet pounding the fractured sidewalk with reckless desperation, lungs seizing in gasps as if the air itself resisted entering him.
The sound of his footsteps blurred into a frenzy of echo and impact, and yet, beneath it, behind it, came that other rhythm, the one that didn't belong to him, the one that never missed a beat.
A rhythm that grew louder the faster he ran, matching his pace, then gaining.
His vision narrowed.
The city bled around him, indistinct shapes and shadows smearing together, colors leached from the world.
All he could see was what lay ahead, a shape rising from the end of the road like a jagged scar against the sky.
A house.
The one no one spoke of without shuddering, the one children dared each other to look at but never approach, the one tucked behind rusted gates and wild grass at the edge of the district like a secret best left untouched.
It loomed there like a rotting carcass dressed in the illusion of a home.
Its roof sagged inward, black tiles broken or missing altogether, windows covered with crooked boards nailed like crude stitches into wounded walls.
The paint, once maybe white, now peeled away in long, curling strips like skin flayed by time and rot.
The iron gate stood open, crooked on one hinge, swaying slightly though there was no wind.
Every fiber of his being screamed not to go near it, not to enter, not to breathe near that place, but the invisible thing chasing him left no room for choice.
Taejun didn't slow down.
He tore through the open gate, shouldered the warped front door with both hands, and stumbled inside.
The door groaned open with a sound like a dying animal, splinters breaking free from the frame, and the house swallowed him.
Immediately, the world changed.
The air inside was heavy, thick with decay and something fouler beneath it, something that clung to his skin and seemed to crawl along the edges of his clothes like unseen fingers.
The smell was of damp wood, rusted nails, rotted paper, and the distant memory of something once living, now long dead.
Light filtered in through fractured slats in the boards, casting thin beams across the dusty air, illuminating dancing motes that shifted like spores in a stagnant pond.
The silence inside wasn't true silence, it was layered, dense, full of undercurrents: faint scratching, a breathless hiss behind the walls, the suggestion of words just beyond hearing, like the house itself had never forgotten how to speak.
He took a step forward, and the floorboard beneath his shoe let out a long, high groan that echoed far louder than it should have, warping in the silence like metal bending under strain.
The sound didn't stop.
It rippled through the room, down the hallway, into the foundation, like the house noticed him and answered.
Taejun's breath hitched.
The air was cold now, too cold for morning, the kind of cold that came not from weather but from absence, absence of warmth, of time, of life.
The shard in his pocket pulsed with that same cold, leeching through the fabric, pressing against his leg like a living thing curled against him.
He reached for it, hand trembling, and when his fingers brushed its surface, it was like touching something carved from winter.
He turned in place, slowly, eyes wide and unblinking as he scanned the warped interior.
Wallpaper peeled in long, curling strips from the walls, revealing discolored plaster streaked with mold.
Picture frames lay shattered on the floor.
A staircase led upward into shadow, its railing crooked, stairs broken like missing teeth.
Shadows clustered in corners even where light should reach, moving subtly, shifting when he wasn't looking directly at them.
It felt like being inside something alive, something that watched from beneath the floorboards and behind the walls, something that breathed without lungs.
He glanced back at the door, still ajar.
But he couldn't move toward it.
Something in his chest locked tight, as if the house itself had looped an invisible string through his ribs.
He could still feel it, the presence outside, waiting just beyond the threshold, patient, unseen, as if it knew he was cornered now, and was in no rush to break down the door.
Taejun shivered violently.
The hair on his arms stood on end, and every part of his body screamed to run, but there was nowhere left to run.
He was inside now, inside the story.
Inside the place, people warned each other about it in hushed tones and never truly believed it was real.
The house didn't feel abandoned, it felt inhabited.
And somewhere in the shifting dark, behind walls that pulsed faintly with warmth and hate, eyes watched him with patient hunger, eyes that did not blink, did not sleep, did not forget.
The wind howled through cracks in the boards, high and wailing like a cry lost in time, but inside, there was only the house.
And the shard in his pocket, growing colder by the second.
Taejun's footsteps faltered as he crossed the threshold, the rotted floor sighing beneath him like an exhausted corpse exhaling its last breath.
The heavy door groaned shut behind him, not in a gust of wind, but with a weight and finality that felt deliberate, as though the house itself had sealed him in, swallowing the light, the street, and any hope of retreat.
The muffled thud as the latch clicked into place reverberated through the narrow entryway like a verdict passed.
Darkness rushed up to meet him, swallowing the space whole, only narrow splinters of pale, ashen light leaked through the warped cracks in the boarded windows, cutting jagged lines across the dust-choked air.
The cold was immediate and unnatural, the kind that lived deep in walls and bones, not just the absence of warmth, but the presence of something wrong.
He stood frozen, the silence pressing against his eardrums until he could hear nothing but the frantic thrum of his heart, loud and disjointed like the footsteps of something panicked in the distance.
His breath hitched.
The air tasted of mold, rotted wood, and something metallic, a faint tang like rust or dried blood clinging to the back of his throat.
Dust floated in the shafts of light, swirling lazily, but as he watched them, they moved too deliberately, purposefully, as if stirred by a breath not his own.
The shard in his pocket pulsed with a dead cold that spread along his thigh, curling into his nerves like frostbite.
It wasn't just cold, it burned, paradoxically, a slow, cruel sting that made his skin crawl.
He pressed his hand against it, needing the contact as if to reassure himself it was still there, still real, and not just part of the sick unreality pressing in on him.
One foot lifted, then the other.
The wooden boards beneath his shoes creaked, not lightly, but in long, drawn-out groans, like strained sinew, each step echoing through the hollow house like a cry for help that no one would answer.
His fingers brushed the mildewed wallpaper.
It crumbled at his touch, revealing dark water stains that ran down the walls like veins or scars.
What little remained of the paint had peeled into curling ribbons, the color long leached into sickly tones of brown and yellow.
The whole house seemed to breathe in stillness, a long-held inhale just waiting to collapse.
Then, movement, a sudden stir of the tattered curtain in the hall ahead.
No windows were open, no wind had followed him in, and yet the fabric lifted, fluttered, fell, as though someone had brushed past it.
Taejun stiffened.
In the quiet that followed, a sound like whispering licked through the hallway, faint, distant, a breath of syllables that didn't belong to any language he knew.
It rose and fell, weaving in and out of his awareness, fading just as he tried to make sense of it, like a dream dissolving the moment it's grasped.
He swallowed, throat dry as splintered wood. "Hello?"
The word cracked as it left him, uncertain and too loud.
It was devoured by the stillness before it could even echo, vanishing into the void like it had never been spoken at all.
No reply, just the steady weight of something watching.
Still, his feet moved forward.
Some part of him, a quiet voice buried beneath the noise of fear, insisted he had to see.
The hallway stretched longer than it should have, narrowing, walls seeming to lean inward as if to press him flat. To trap him.
A narrow staircase loomed to his left, curling upward into the pitch.
The wood was warped, the railing broken in jagged intervals like snapped ribs.
But beyond it, at the far end of the corridor, a door waited, shut, but faintly lit.
A dull, steady glow seeped from underneath it, too dim to be electric, too warm to be real sunlight.
It pulsed slightly, as though something behind it breathed in time with the house.
Taejun stared at the light.
His pulse quickened.
There was something behind that door.
His legs felt heavier with each step toward it, like the air itself was thickening around him, trying to resist his movement.
Every instinct in his body screamed to turn back, to flee, but his hand reached out anyway, trembling as it hovered inches from the rusted brass doorknob.
His fingers twitched.
Something on the other side let out a sigh, low, drawn-out, nearly inaudible, not a sound of relief, but resignation.
He could feel it through the door.
Something ancient and still, something that had waited far too long.
The shard in his pocket grew colder, seeping through the lining of his jacket like frost beneath a grave.
He clenched it in his fist, closed his eyes, and twisted the knob.
The door creaked open.
And Taejun stepped into the unknown, not knowing whether it was a room or a mouth that waited to receive him.
Taejun hesitated only for a breath, just long enough for the shadows to seem to lean in, as though sensing his doubt, before turning toward the staircase that spiraled into the upper dark.
The steps loomed above him like the vertebrae of some long-dead beast, each one swollen with age and rot, their edges frayed and soft with decay.
He placed his foot on the first riser and the wood exhaled a deep groan beneath his weight, a slow, aching protest that echoed up into the ceiling like a whispered warning.
One step. Then another.
Each creak from the stairs sounded too loud, too deliberate, as if announcing his progress to something lurking in the dark.
The air thickened with every footfall, swallowing the faint glow from the hallway below until it felt like he was climbing into the throat of something vast and lightless.
The ceiling above pressed low, oppressive, and the cold grew sharper, clinging to his skin, seeping through his clothes until his breath began to mist faintly in the air.
He couldn't tell if the trembling in his limbs was from the chill or the fear coiling tighter around his spine.
At the top, the landing opened like a black mouth, its corners swallowed by shadow.
Taejun paused, peering into the gloom, but the hallway refused to resolve into clear shapes.
It was like staring into fog, but heavier, thicker, laden with something that hummed just beyond hearing.
Then it happened.
His foot snagged.
A sharp, invisible tug on his balance.
Beneath a crust of dust and curled paper, a warped floorboard shifted, catching the edge of his shoe with a sudden jerk.
Time fractured.
The world lurched.
He pitched forward, panic erupting in his chest as his arms flailed wildly in the dark.
For a terrible second, he saw it in his mind's eye, his body tumbling backward, knees snapping on the stairs, head cracking open on the banister, blood soaking into wood that hadn't seen life in decades.
The image was so real, so immediate, he could feel the sting of splinters in his skin before it even happened.
But it didn't.
With a desperate gasp, Taejun's hand slammed against the wall, the plaster cold and cracked beneath his palm, stopping his fall with a bone-jarring jolt.
He clung there, chest heaving, lungs gulping air that smelled of mildew, dead insects, and something older, something that should've stayed buried.
His forehead brushed the wall, clammy with sweat, the sound of his heartbeat thundering in his ears like the beat of fists against a locked door.
A sudden draft whispered down the corridor, tugging at his clothes, cold, wet, the breath of something that wasn't wind.
It slid along his neck, curled beneath his collar, and moved on, as though it had been testing him, tasting his fear.
The silence that followed was worse than sound, a silence that listened.
He pulled away from the wall, hand trembling, dust clinging to his fingertips like ash.
Every instinct screamed to turn around, to flee back down the stairs and out of this place, to find sunlight, warmth, noise— anything but this.
But something held him.
Not his will, not courage either.
Something deeper, like a thread pulled tight through his chest, guiding him forward into the dark.
A presence he couldn't name, but could feel, steady and insistent, drawing him onward as if it had been waiting, and he obeyed.
All the trembling, the breathless sprint, the sharp sting of splinters in his palms, and the choking dark pressing against his chest, he had gone through it all before something flickered, dim but undeniable, at the edge of his memory: the rumors.