Glen reflexively yanked his hand away from the desk.
The digital pen slipped from his fingers and skidded across the wooden floor, making a sharp clack in the middle of the silent night. His heart pounded so hard that the echoes seemed to hammer against his throat.
He stared at the pen display. The blotch of black liquid in the lower-right corner of the screen was still there. It glistened in the monitor's blue light, thick and dark. The fishy smell mixed with the scent of wet grave soil, growing sharper and churning Glen's stomach.
"No... that's impossible," Glen whispered, his voice trembling.
He worked up the courage to lean closer, trying to make sure. Was the screen leaking? Had oil from inside the tablet melted because it had overheated? But this smell... it was far too biological to come from an electronic device.
Glen took a dry tissue from the box beside his desk. His hand trembled as he touched the tip of the tissue to the black liquid on his tablet's screen.
The white tissue immediately absorbed the liquid. It was an intense black, and when Glen brought the tissue close to his nose, the sharp, rancid fishy stench stabbed straight into his senses. It wasn't digital ink. It was physical liquid.
'How could physical liquid come out of a digital image file?'
Glen's logic as a fine arts student accustomed to image technology collapsed at once. The fear that had been his greatest enemy since childhood was beginning to take control of his mind. Glen's thoughts groped toward the worst possibilities. The empty room next door. The dark boarding-house hallway. The unsettling stories about this area of Sewon having once been burial ground, stories his landlord had told him when he first rented the room.
Boom!
Glen jumped up in shock when he heard a dull thud from the wall behind his drawing desk. The brick wall directly bordering Room Number 6—one of the empty rooms that was always kept tightly locked.
He held his breath. His eyes bulged as he stared at the dull white-painted wall, peeling in several places.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.
Silence. Only the sound of the old fan still turning.
"I'm just hallucinating... I just need sleep," Glen muttered, trying to calm himself. He rubbed his face, which had grown colder and colder. "It's because of the coffee. Because I've been up for three days."
Glen wiped the remaining black liquid from his screen until it was clean, shut down his computer without saving again, then hurried to turn off the room's main light. He left the dim yellow bedside lamp on. Tonight, he couldn't bear being in total darkness.
Without washing his face or taking off his glasses, Glen immediately leaped onto the thin foam mattress on the floor. He pulled the blanket up over his chest and squeezed his eyes shut.
But closing his eyes turned out to be his biggest mistake.
Behind his closed eyelids, the darkness no longer felt empty. His utterly exhausted brain immediately triggered a second wave of microsleep.
Zap.
A sensation of hurtling downward slammed into his consciousness. Glen felt that his body was no longer on the mattress but floating in cold, stuffy air. The fishy smell of wet earth he'd caught at his drawing desk now crept into his nose dozens of times more concentrated.
In his dream, Glen stood in the middle of the second-floor hallway of his boarding house. But the hallway was no longer lit by dingy fluorescent lights. Thick black veins pulsed slowly across the walls, as though the boarding house were the inside of some gigantic creature's stomach.
At the end of the hallway, the door to Room Number 6 stood slightly open.
A tall, gaunt silhouette stood in the darkness of the doorway. Its long silver hair swayed gently despite the absence of wind. Beneath the shadow covering its face, a pair of black lips curled upward. Its jaw stretched wide with a horrifying click, revealing a jagged row of long, overlapping razor-sharp fangs.
The creature didn't take a step. It only tilted its head, then... (smiled).
Scritch!
Glen jolted awake! His eyes flew open, staring wide at the ceiling of his boarding room.
He was breathing hard. Glen's chest heaved violently. He rubbed his rigidly pounding chest and found that the black T-shirt he was wearing was already soaked through with cold sweat.
He glanced at the anime wall clock above his desk.
The hands showed 3:18 a.m. WIB.
Glen froze.
Only four minutes? It felt as though he'd just spent hours trapped in that long, torturous nightmare, but the wall clock had moved only four minutes. That meant the microsleep he'd just experienced had lasted only a few seconds in the real world.
Glen sat stiffly on the edge of the mattress, cupping both hands over his face. Extreme exhaustion attacked his head like an iron band being tightened around it. His brain screamed for deep sleep, but his fear held his eyelids open.
Suddenly, he heard slow footsteps from outside his room.
Puk... puk... puk...
Wet, bare feet moved slowly across the ceramic hallway floor outside. The footsteps came from the direction of the stairs, passed the empty rooms, and abruptly stopped right in front of Glen's door.
Glen held his breath. Every hair on his body stood on end.
Through the narrow gap beneath his wooden door, Glen saw a black shadow blocking the glow of the hallway light. Someone—or something—was standing right outside his door.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Three soft knocks sounded on his door.
"Glen?" a woman's voice called from outside. It was loud, firm, and showed no fear whatsoever.
Glen suddenly breathed a sigh of relief. His tense shoulders dropped at once. He recognized that voice.
"Amelia?" Glen called, his voice hoarse.
"Open the door, idiot! It's freezing out here!" the voice from behind the door shouted back.