1Ep.. The Visitor at Midnight

Ten minutes to midnight. Mingyu hadn't turned off the lights. For three nights now, he couldn't.

Mingyu watched the second hand crawl toward the twelve, not daring to breathe. At 0:00 sharp, the doorbell cries. It cries even though the screen shows nothing but an empty hallway. Security called it a glitch; a friend laughed and asked if it wasn't just a delivery alert. Each time that laugh came back to him, Mingyu felt a little more alone.

0:00. The bell rang.

Mingyu didn't look at the screen. It would only be the empty hallway again, and that was the more frightening thing. Instead, with trembling hands, he picked up his phone and dialed a number he'd barely managed to find while searching. A place whose sign was faded to nothing. The Midnight Consultancy.

At that same hour, in a single room in the basement of an old arcade. Doha sat with his back to the flicker of a dying fluorescent tube, staring into nothing but his cold ramen broth. Not a client—the one who, with nowhere to go, had settled into this one room. A place that took in the things people brought saying “it can't be explained”—that was here, the Midnight Consultancy.

More precisely, he was trying not to look at the ceiling corner reflected on the broth's surface. Something had hung there, upside down, for a while now. Look, and you get tangled. Don't, and it isn't there. He stirred the broth with his chopsticks, deliberately scattering the reflected shape. Pretending not to see what he saw—he'd survived seven years that way.

From the dark between the cabinets came the rustle of a turning newspaper. Doha didn't bother to look over. It was the old man they called the teacher. The one who, one night when Doha was drifting the streets, had wordlessly given him this room—who he was, why he kept such a place, even Doha still didn't know. He had never asked.

“Answer it.” The teacher spoke slowly, not lifting his eyes from the paper. “It’s your call.”

“It’s not my phone.” “It’s ringing, isn’t it.”

“Nothing that calls at this hour is fine.” Doha muttered, fishing noodles from the bowl. “If I were normal, I wouldn’t be living down here either.”

For all his banter, Doha’s phone hadn’t actually rung yet. The teacher only turned a page of his newspaper, as if he’d known it would ring. That was the part Doha hated more.

Sure enough, only then did Doha’s phone ring. He glared at the screen a long moment, then answered with a sigh. From beyond the receiver, a trembling voice leaked through.

“Every midnight the doorbell rings. But no one’s there.”

“…Probably a glitch.”

As Doha moved a finger to hang up, the voice clung on. “Tonight there was knocking, too. From the inside.” At those words, his finger froze over the screen. From the inside. A door is always knocked from outside.

Doha slowly pushed the cold ramen aside.

“…Give me the address.” Then, as if vowing it to himself, he added: “I’ll just go look. Only look.”

The hallway outside Mingyu’s door. When Doha arrived, someone had gotten there first, crouched at the entrance.

The woman didn’t turn at the sound of him, absorbed only in prying the doorbell apart with a screwdriver. A small voice recorder beside her blinked its red light. Doha looked down at that red light for a moment, then spoke.

“…Who are you?”

“Jang Sea.” She didn’t even turn, just gave the screwdriver another turn. “So you’re the ‘gifted one’ the client called in too?”

The recorder beside her blinked red, and her hands were stripping the part with practiced ease. No need to ask—you could read it in her fingers, that this was someone who made a living combing crime scenes. Only then did she look Doha up and down. A rumpled coat, the smell of cold ramen. Her words trailed off into a smirk.

“It’s a short in the doorbell wiring.” Sea held up the part she’d dismantled. “Moisture makes the contacts misfire. I’d have to open the junction box to read the exact timing log—but statistically, nine in ten of these ‘ghost doorbells’ are exactly this. By the look of it, a short is nine-in-ten odds. The tenth is a stalker.”

Doha didn’t answer. He was looking past Sea, at the front door.

Someone was standing at the door.

Soaking wet. Water dripped from the ends of their hair, drop by drop. Doha’s eyes followed the drops down to the floor without thinking—and froze. The floor was dry. Not a single drop had pooled.

Head bowed low, the thing stood close enough for its forehead to brush the door, its arm nearly grazing Sea’s shoulder. Yet Sea hummed to herself as she examined the part. She felt nothing at all. Only Doha saw it. Such things only ever appeared to him.

“…Step away from there,” Doha said low. “What?” Sea turned. “Not you.” He swallowed dry. “The thing standing beside you.”

Sea’s face stiffened, then curled into a smirk. “Here we go. So that’s the act—pretending to see what isn’t there—”

In that instant, the drenched figure slowly raised its head.

Don’t look. Doha knew. He’d survived seven years on that one rule. There was time enough to turn away. And still he couldn’t take his eyes off it. He had already looked.

A pale face, swollen with water. Two closed eyes. One beat, two. Doha’s mind thrashed to keep from recognizing that face, and it was no use.

It was the face of Mingyu, the client peering out through the intercom inside with a “Who is it?” The same. Identical, to the last detail.

The ‘Mingyu’ at the door opened its mouth toward Doha, eyes still shut.

“…Please. Let me in.”