2Ep.. One Step Each Night

Doha backed away three steps. Only when his back hit the wall at the end of the hall did his feet stop.

He blinked once. In that brief moment, the doorway was empty. Doha couldn't pull his eyes from the spot. It hadn't vanished, he thought—it had only gone deeper inside.

“What’s wrong.” Sea pressed in close. The smirk from before was gone; a professional edge sharpened her voice. “What did you see. Describe it precisely. Not a ‘feeling’—shape, position, motion.”

She was asking for data. The question felt strange to Doha. In situations like this, people usually called him mad, or simply ran.

“…At the door. One person.” He paused a beat and swallowed dry. “Soaked from the hair down, head bowed. Water dripping, but the floor dry.” There his voice cracked for a moment. “The face… was identical to the client’s.”

Sea repeated it word for word into her recorder. Not because she believed. It was the motion of collecting evidence—to throw back later what “this man babbled,” and refute it.

Mingyu, who opened the door, wore the face of three sleepless nights. When his eyes met Doha’s, he couldn’t bring himself to ask, and dropped his gaze.

Sea skipped the greeting and went in first, sweeping the place. As her fingertips swept the window frames and her eyes scanned the ceiling, her hypotheses fell away one by one. No condensation. No leak. Upstairs drainage normal. Then her hand stopped at one spot.

“The doorbell log.” She opened the entrance junction box, brow furrowing. “A short would ring at random, whenever the voltage dips. But the record—” she whipped the screen toward Doha. Her grip had tightened. “Exactly 0:00. Not a second off. All three nights.”

“So much for your short-circuit theory.” “…Not yet.” Sea bit her lip.

Doha looked down at the junction box as it shut. “…From here, it’s my department.” He didn’t sound glad about it.

All the while, Doha was staring at the living-room floor. Or rather—he didn’t want to look, but his eyes kept getting dragged that way.

From the entrance to the center of the living room, faint dampness spread in the shape of footprints. The kind of mark that would neither wipe away nor dry. Sea’s hygrometer only blinked “normal,” and Mingyu couldn’t see the thing on his own floor at all. That fact chilled Doha all the more.

“Mingyu.” Doha asked slowly. “Yesterday—how far had it come? Even a sense of it.” “…To the entrance,” Mingyu answered, trembling. “The day before, outside the door. Yesterday, inside. And today—”

“The living room.” Doha traced the marks to their end with his eyes. The footprints broke off just before the bedroom door. There, his gaze stopped. “One step closer each day. Toward the bedroom.”

It was a rule. The figure didn’t appear at random—it was coming one room deeper each night, until it was let in. And at the end of that line was the room where Mingyu slept. How many days were left, Doha did not bother to count.

Sea said nothing. But this time she didn’t turn off the recorder. Her hand, photographing the invisible marks one by one along the floor, had quickened a little. Not because she believed—because she, too, needed an explanation.

“Let me ask.” Doha turned to Mingyu. “That face—why is it exactly yours? Why would a dead thing wear the face of a living you?”

Mingyu’s pupils wavered. One beat before he opened his mouth. That one beat was too long. “…I don’t know. I did nothing wrong.”

Instead of answering, Doha turned the words over inside. I did nothing wrong. No one had brought up “wrong” at all, yet Mingyu had raised the word first. As people do when they’re hiding something. Doha didn’t say so aloud—he only looked once more at Mingyu’s trembling fingertips.

Back at the consultancy near dawn, Doha stopped his hand while taking off his coat.

A bruise-like mark had spread across his left wrist. Bluish, as if long soaked in water. He’d pressed nothing, struck nothing. He stared at it a long while, then slowly rubbed it with a finger. Beneath the skin it was cold. Cold, like the water that had dripped from that figure’s hair. Doha pulled his sleeve over the wrist. He already knew that covering it wouldn’t make it go away.

“You looked too long.” The teacher’s voice came from behind him—not its usual slow lilt. “Doha. That’s… the price of seeing. The deeper you look, the more it stains you.”

“I’ll just wash it off.” Doha said it lightly on purpose, hoping the teacher would agree at once.

The old man was silent a long while. The longer the silence stretched, the more Doha’s hand drifted, without thinking, over his wrist. At last the teacher said the thing Doha least wanted to hear.

“It doesn’t wash off. It accumulates.”