It happened again the next morning.
The sting in my left ankle only got worse, and in its place, I discovered another mark left by a pair of rodent teeth.
Our apartment was 63 floors off the ground. We were surrounded by ceramic tiles and concrete. How did they even get up here?
After I got treatment at the hospital, I went straight back home with a rat trap, a huge bottle of rat repellent, and the biggest chunk of cream cheese I could find from the supermarket. Apparently, I'd been so far-gone in my sleep that I didn't even notice when they got to me the second time.
In the kitchen, I strained my eyes along the linings between the walls and the floor for possible traces of dirt, feces or grease left behind by those cursed little critters, but found nothing.
With the trap set, I emptied the bottle of rat repellent over every corner of the house. I shut my bedroom door at night and even rooted out a mosquito net which I hadn't touched in years, just to make sure those things wouldn't get to me again.
I had no idea whether the setup would work. The bottle apparently had been mass-produced in Thailand and the metallic cage looked like a rat-sized torture chamber.
Maybe after centuries of witnessing their ancestors lose their lives to this little rusty contraption, the rats had come to the bitter conclusion that the morsel of food inside the cage was just not worth it.
This was why I used the whole wedge of cheese as bait so they wouldn't be able to overcome temptation.
Rat or man, we were all weak at heart. I wondered whether Maslow's hierarchy of needs applied to non-human creatures as well, or whether the mosquitoes also had a fair chance to evolve to a point where they started making art and smoking crack for spiritual growth if they were properly fed for a couple generations and didn't have to constantly scavenge for food throughout the twenty-four hours duration of their lifespan.
I also wasn't entirely sure what I'd do to them if they ended up in this cage. The old man next door suggested that I should drown them in the sink, but I doubted whether I'd want to keep having to drown every animal that came to my apartment. If anything, the cage was supposed to act as a last-resort. I was hoping the repellent would be sufficient on its own and I wouldn't have to kill anything with my own hands, even if it was out of self-defense.
It happened the third time.
Pus and blood were coming out of the swelling punctures and it was difficult to walk around the house. Those rats somehow got into my room and inside the net without having to bite or burrow through anything. I checked the trap and the big hanging chunk of cheese was still intact, covered with red ants. It was almost as if these invisible rats were after me and only me alone.
My wife and I left home to stay at my parents' place—our apartment had been badly infested with a swarm of invisible vermin—while pest control came to inspect and fumigate the area.
Dad tried to console me, saying everyone had at least one of these special days where they'd run into a seemingly never-ending streak of bad luck, and I was probably going through that right now. He told me he'd had his some years ago when he dropped his favorite, half-eaten bar of mung bean ice cream as his car ran over a family of four sitting in a cafe by the sidewalk. Nobody was hurt but he still had to scrape the last penny in his savings to pay for the damages.
Compared to that, according to my father, I was having it pretty easy.
I knew he made up that stupid story just for my sake—all of it, including the part about using up all his savings for the compensation—so I could feel a little better about my current situation—and it did to some extent.
But in the back of my mind, I was afraid that the decision to keep away from the house wasn't going to make much of a difference; they would come to me tonight regardless whether I was at my parents' house or whether I trekked deep into the mountains.
If they got to me again, I wouldn't be able to take it. So I stayed up that night, as well as the night after that.
But we all had our limits. At some point after three days of no sleep, I often started to drift off without even realizing.
When I woke up, the damage had already been done. I had to call off work again because I couldn't walk properly any more. The whole foot was bloated up to the ankle, bite marks that layer on top of each other and intersected started to resemble a bloody, purple, pus-ridden honeycomb.
Every night, they'd come for me.
As soon as I closed my eyes, they'd take another bite at my pockmarked foot, disfiguring it further.
I was soon struck with high fever and confined to my hospital bed. The doctors couldn't do anything about it. They said that I was afflicted with a rare variation of skin cancer.
How was I going to explain to them what was happening to me? Rats from the astral planes were after my feet?
The antibiotics did nothing to check the spread of the wound. They told me they'd have to remove my foot soon to prevent further damage but what was the point? The rats would just go for the other foot anyway.
Lying in my hospital bed, I stared at the pink ceiling. Research showed that the color pink helped soothe the nerves of those observing it. They'd probably painted the ceiling bright pink for this reason. How considerate.
What the researchers hadn't taken into account was the fact that pink was an obnoxious color liked only by women. The girliest of all hues. People were less likely to flip out at the sight of pink because it gave the impression that they were in the presence of something very feminine, like a little girl, figuratively speaking.
There was also the fact that any alleviating effect the color might have on the occupants of this room was completely lost when the rest of the room was painted in blood red.
Suddenly I remembered.
The girl with the red book.
It all started on that day when I ran into her.
Was she the cause of all of this?
Was she responsible?
Does she have the cure?
My mind was flooded with questions.
If modern science could not solve my issue, maybe she could.
She. The high schooler. The witch. Occultist. Enchantress.
Demon.
No.
What was I even thinking right now?
To throw baseless accusations at a total stranger you ran into on the street for every misfortune that fell upon you—how low could you get?
Why should it be her? It could have been anyone.
The officer who'd given me a parking ticket last month.
The demented grandma living in the opposite block several floors below who was permanently glued to the balcony.
Or maybe it was that homeless guy I'd given the finger to back when I was in middle school.
There was no end to the list of suspects.
But my encounter with her was also when I got bit the first time.
Kitsune.
A Kitsune. I'd heard from Japanese legends a Kitsune was a supernatural being that could shapeshift into a human, and the urine of a Kitsune could repel rats.
Normal fox urine was also said to repel rats.
Picking up the cell phone on the counter next to my bed, I dialed my wife.
Like usual, I had to sit through whole five beeps before she picked up. "What, miss me already?" she said. "It's been twenty minutes~."
"I know you're doing it on purpose." How did she even time the length of the rings on my end anyway?
"No idea what you're talking about, dear."
"Whatever, I have something to ask you. It's weird but worth a try."
Some car honked outside the hospital just as I told her my idea.
"A fox pet? Now?" Her reaction was a lot calmer than I expected.
Wait a minute, aren't those illegal, I thought. "No, what I want is a spray bottle of fox urine. I'm going to put that on the bite marks."
I had no idea why I'd thought it was going to work. What I got instead was the unfading stench of rotten eggs that inspired some very well-meaning and friendly—but not too friendly—death threats from some of the patients in the building. A few of these patients even came from a different hospital.
A fine mix of vinegar and baking soda was the only thing that could get rid of the unrelenting smell.
The girl.
Whoever she was, she could be holding the cure to my curse.
I didn't know what I was supposed to say to the young girl. I just knew I had to talk to her.
The number you've dialed is unavailable.
Of course she'd blocked my number. I was being "too nice" to her.
The world had stayed exactly the same throughout the past fifteen thousand years for humanity. Kindness was a myth, an urban legend parents read to their children at bedtime, like the Boogeyman, except statistically the possibility of the existence of the latter was significantly higher.
Just like how the parents paid financially struggling, debt-ridden college students to dress up as anorexic Santa Claus for their kids, we did nice things so we could trick ourselves into thinking that kindness might just be real. Or at least so we could pretend that kindness somehow existed.
Whatever, I'd send her a message asking for help.