CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: He Should Be Dead (But the House Remembers)
The footsteps slowed at the last stair.
Seungbae stood still, spine stiff, pulse in his ears. His flashlight trembled in his grip, beam aimed at the base of the steps.
A shoe appeared. Then a leg. Then a full figure stepped down, into the dim.
And Seungbae's mouth went dry.
"…Kang Hyunwoo?"
The man blinked.
Scar down the side of his jaw.
Left shoulder still crooked, from the break Sangwoo had given him. Clothes the same as that night. Blood still dried along the collar.
But he had died.
Seungbae had seen it.
The autopsy photos.
The funeral.
The closed casket.
Kang Hyunwoo had been torn open by Sangwoo's knife when he tried to stop the second escape.
But now—
He was here.
And smiling.
"Knew you'd come back," Hyunwoo said, voice hoarse. "They always come back."
Seungbae stepped backward. "You're dead." "I saw your body."
"Yeah," Hyunwoo said simply. "You did."
Silence.
Seungbae's heart thundered in his chest. He raised the flashlight, keeping it between them.
"I don't know what this is," he said. "But it's not funny. It's not real."
Hyunwoo took a step forward.
"No one said it's meant to be funny," he murmured. "And real's a bit of a… thin term these days, don't you think?"
The beam of light flickered again. Seungbae's breath fogged in front of him.
Hyunwoo looked up toward the ceiling, toward the stain where Sangwoo's trapdoor used to be.
"He screamed, you know. Not when he died. But before. In here. In this house." He looked at Seungbae. "And now he's still screaming."
"I don't believe in hauntings,"
The detective snapped.
"Good," Hyunwoo said. "Because this isn't a haunting. It's a bruise. A psychic burn. The whole house soaked it in. Him. You. The kid."
A pause.
"Me."
Seungbae's lips parted. His grip on the flashlight tightened.
"What are you?"
Hyunwoo smiled again. Wider this time. Something too wide.
"Wouldn't you like to know?"
And then, abruptly, his face shifted.
Not visibly.
Just… wrong.
Too still. Too sharp.
"You're waking something up, detective,"
he said.
"Something that's been sleeping under this wood for years. And it remembers everything."
Seungbae took a step back.
Hyunwoo didn't follow.
Just stood there.
But his eyes— They weren't Hyunwoo's anymore. They were dark mirrors.
And deep in them, Seungbae saw Sangwoo's mother,
Yoonbum's final scream,
The cord,
And himself.
Watching. Always watching.
The air snapped. Cold and real again.
Hyunwoo was gone. The basement empty.
Seungbae stumbled back up the stairs.
He slammed the door behind him.
But something was wrong with the house now.
The furniture had changed.
The wallpaper was new.
The photos on the wall showed him, smiling.
Holding a cup of tea.
Sitting at the kitchen table with his arm around—
Sangwoo.