Glen hurriedly got up from his mattress. His legs trembled slightly as he walked toward the door. He turned the lock and pulled the wooden door inward.
Amelia was standing on the other side.
The girl wore an oversized gray hoodie jacket with casual shorts. Her shoulder-length hair was slightly mussed by the night wind. In one hand, she held a white plastic bag containing two cups of coffee from Sewon and a package of toast.
"Are you trying to die stupidly or something?" Amelia snapped without preamble the moment the door opened. Her eyes immediately scanned Glen's deathly pale face. "You look like a corpse, but your bedroom light is still on. I saw your window glowing when I passed downstairs."
Glen let out a long breath, absorbing the overwhelming relief. Amelia's blunt, friendly presence instantly eroded the suffocating atmosphere that had just trapped him.
"Come in, Mel," Glen rasped, shifting his body to make room.
Amelia stepped inside and immediately kicked the door shut with her heel. She set the plastic bag on Glen's study desk, then planted her hands on her hips and stared at her childhood best friend.
"Unbelievable," Amelia muttered, shaking her head. "How many days has it been since you slept, Glen? Three days? Four? Are you trying to test your luck with death?"
"I have to meet the *deadline*, Mel," Glen replied defensively. He sat back down in his drawing chair and rubbed his stiff neck. "This comic project is really taking off on the webtoon. If I stop now, the readers will forget about it."
"The readers won't forget, but you'll be hauled away in an ambulance!" Amelia cut in firmly. She pulled a plastic chair from the corner of the room and sat across from Glen. "I've known you since we were little kids with runny noses, Glen. You're ambitious, but you're also scared half to death of everything. You wouldn't push yourself this hard just because of a *deadline*, would you? What's really going on?"
Glen fell silent. Amelia's sharp intuition always made it difficult for him to lie. His friend understood the way he thought better than he understood it himself.
"I... I've just been having nightmares again," Glen admitted softly. His eyes flicked toward the graphics tablet on his desk. The black stain he'd wiped with a tissue was indeed gone, but the fishy smell of earth still seemed to linger in his memory. "Nightmares about that creature. From when I was a kid."
Amelia raised one eyebrow. "The fanged-mouth thing you used to tell me about?"
Glen nodded slowly.
Amelia sighed, the sternness in her expression softening slightly. She took one cup of hot coffee from the plastic bag and held it out to Glen. "I told you, just pour it into your drawings and get it out of your head. But that doesn't mean you should stop sleeping altogether, Glen. You're a scaredy-cat. When you don't get enough sleep, your brain starts hallucinating."
'But this feels real, Mel,' Glen thought, staring at the calm surface of the coffee in his cup. He wanted to tell her about the foul-smelling black liquid that had dripped from his tablet screen a few minutes earlier, but he knew Amelia would only dismiss it as a hallucination caused by sleep deprivation.
"Does Melissa know you've been staying up this badly?" Amelia asked, breaking the silence.
Glen shook his head. "Don't tell Melissa. She worries easily. She'll just start dwelling on it and won't be able to focus on her studies."
"Whatever you say," Amelia replied, biting into her toast. "But promise me this: once you've finished the coffee and bread, you have to sleep. If I check on you tomorrow and you're still awake, I'll drag you to the hospital myself."
Glen smiled faintly. As stern as she was, Amelia's presence was the only thing keeping his sanity grounded in the real world.
However, just as Glen was about to take a sip of his coffee, his eyes accidentally caught something in the corner of the floor near the study desk.
There, on the ceramic tiles brightly illuminated by the yellow light, were wet footprints mixed with black mud. Bare footprints that had walked in from the direction of the door... heading straight toward the back of the chair where Amelia was sitting now.
Glen froze.
Amelia had come wearing flip-flops, and her feet were clean and dry.
'Whose footprints are these?'