"Gah!" Taejun yelped, the sound bursting out of him like a balloon suddenly punctured in the quiet.
He stumbled back, arms flailing instinctively, nearly knocking over a stack of boxes beside him.
The cardboard groaned under the shift, sending a small avalanche of dust into the air, and for a moment, the attic felt louder than it had any right to be, shadows jumping across the ceiling, motes of dust dancing in the flickering bulb like startled insects.
"There's a spider!" he cried, voice pitching higher than he would've liked.
He pointed to the corner of an old trunk by the far beam, where a knotted web stretched like a threadbare net, shimmering faintly in the light, and right at its center, a spider the size of his thumb crouched, unmoving, its spindly legs splayed with unnatural patience, as if it had been watching all along.
Taejun could've sworn its body pulsed once, not quite a twitch, more like a breath.
His pulse thudded stupidly in his ears, part disgust and part shame.
"It touched my hand," he muttered, shaking his fingers as though trying to fling the memory of it away. "Or... no, I touched it. Ew!"
Hyeonjae had turned slightly at the noise but hadn't stopped counting.
He raised an eyebrow, but a smirk was already tugging at the corner of his lips. "A mighty hunter, felled by a web."
Taejun shot him a glare, but it lacked venom. "Shut up."
"Do you want to concede, then?" Hyeonjae asked with mock solemnity, folding his arms as he reached "ten" in his count. "Declare defeat before the game even begins? A very brave decision, indeed, for losers like you."
Taejun looked around again, the boxes, the half-hidden corners, the curling shadows that now seemed to press in with just a little more weight.
The spider still hadn't moved, nor had the rocking chair, but the air felt heavier, like the game hadn't paused, not really, but was waiting with its back turned.
He drew in a breath, cleared his throat, and said, "Can we start again?"
Hyeonjae's smirk faded just enough for his expression to grow unreadable.
He studied Taejun for a moment, the silence stretching just slightly too long.
Then, with a slow, deliberate nod, he said, "Of course. But this time, don't break the rhythm."
The attic, in all its crooked silence, seemed to breathe around them, not with sound, but with the subtle press of memory, as if the room itself had lungs hidden beneath the floorboards and was slowly exhaling secrets long sealed in dust.
Shafts of thinning daylight pierced through the warped slats of the gabled window, catching the drifting motes in their descent like tiny ghosts tumbling through the air.
It wasn't just dust, it was age made visible, the soft shedding of forgotten decades.
Each breath Taejun took felt like it passed through someone else's memory.
The clutter wasn't merely storage, it was residue.
Boxes leaned precariously against one another like tired old men huddled in prayer, their corners softened and buckling under the weight of whatever time had pressed into them.
Leather trunks with brittle straps sat like coffins too small to bury anything human but too heavy not to have held something once alive.
One was cracked open just enough to reveal a blanket that hadn't seen light in fifty years, its weave stiff with mildew and ghost scent.
The faded curtains that hung crookedly over the attic's only window stirred not with wind, but as though disturbed by breath, the kind that doesn't belong to either of them.
Beneath the scattered objects, the very floor creaked with a patience that felt less structural and more sentient, like it was listening.
No sound was loud, yet everything was heard, and in that hush, so thick, so deliberate, Taejun felt a pressure building in his chest, a quiet that didn't simply lack noise, but suppressed it, smothered it, until every movement felt like trespass.
It wasn't just silence.
It was a kind of attention.
A stare without eyes, aged and bone-deep, threaded into the nails that held the beams together and the hairline cracks that ran like veins along the plaster.
This place had not been empty in a very long time. Even as it stood unused, it had been watching.
It was not haunted, necessarily, at least not in the ways children feared ghosts under their beds, but occupied, somehow, inhabited by the ritual of being forgotten.
And in that stillness, Taejun sensed something he couldn't name, not a presence, exactly, but a rhythm, like the room had a pulse, as though this attic had seen this scene before, two figures, one too eager, the other too wary, standing among the relics of other people's endings, poised to begin something that wasn't quite a game, but something that remembered pretending to be one.
Taejun didn't say anything at first.
He just stood there, feeling the dust settle on his shoulders like a warning, like fingers too light to feel but too real to deny.
The attic didn't creak randomly; it sighed, like it was adjusting itself around them, preparing.
And still, the silence watched.
Hyeonjae's smile had cracked wider at that, not manic, not crazed, but wide like a door that had just been unlocked.
It was the grin of someone who'd been waiting patiently for years to hear that word, who now stood with his hands folded behind his back as though pretending not to burst at the seams.
"Ah, yes! Okay. Okay," Hyeonjae said, barely able to contain the boyish lilt in his tone.
There was something off about it, not dangerous, not yet, but tilted, like a picture frame slightly askew. "I'll count to thirty. But if I find you too fast, I'm not taking the blame, alright?"
Taejun hesitated only for a breath before he turned, moving quickly before his mind could catch up with his body.
The floor groaned under him, the sound long and slow, like a warning whispered in an ancient tongue.
Shadows stretched and curved along the low, slanted ceiling, wrapping around the furniture like old friends too eager to embrace.
"One… two… three…" Hyeonjae's voice rang out in a crisp, exaggerated cadence, theatrical and echoing in the rafters. "Four… five…"
Taejun ducked behind a leaning wardrobe but quickly thought better of it and slipped toward the far wall where stacks of broken chairs and rolled-up rugs made a strange little alleyway.
He weaved through it with surprising stealth, brushing past moth-eaten fabric and the brittle ends of cracked broom handles.
There was something exhilarating in it, like stepping backward into a part of himself he thought he'd outgrown.
The part that believed games could hide the truth.
The right hiding spot could keep you safe.
That someone would always come looking for you.
"Seventeen… eighteen…" Hyeonjae was counting slower now, savoring the sound of each syllable like a chant.
The way he lingered on eighteen made it feel like more than a number, like an invocation.
Taejun found a narrow space behind a tall bookcase draped with a white sheet, the cloth stiff and yellowed with time.
He pressed himself into the gap, feeling cobwebs stick to his neck and arms like thin fingers.
The air was warmer here, more cramped.
His heartbeat sounded louder in this pocket of forgotten space.
"Twenty-six… twenty-seven…"
Outside, the wind nosed at the eaves, soft and searching, rattling the glass just enough to suggest it could come in if it wanted.
"Twenty-nine…"
Taejun shifted his weight slightly, trying not to dislodge the leaning box beside him.
His breath caught in his throat.
"…Thirty."
And then, nothing.
No footsteps, no sound, not even the gentle floorboard creak he expected, just that silence again.
That thick, unnatural stillness, like the attic itself had paused to listen.
Then came the voice.
"Is it not here…?"
It was sing-song, laced with a mockery so delicate it felt embroidered.
Taejun flinched, instinctively shrinking back into the shadows, his fingers gripping the edge of the bookshelf.
He couldn't see anything through the sheet.
Only felt the way the sound moved through the attic like a ripple across still water.
A creak, not close, but not far.
Then footsteps, deliberate and slow, padding across the ancient boards with that same offbeat rhythm as Hyeonjae's grin, unhurried, like he already knew where Taejun was and just wanted to savor the route.
"Don't hold your breath too long," Hyeonjae called in a voice that sounded lighter than it should, "or the attic might think you're one of its own."
Taejun's fingers curled tighter into the sheet, the dust biting his lungs.
The game was still a game, wasn't it?
"Hmm…" Hyeonjae's voice drifted from behind a crooked tower of crates, soft and meandering like the tune of an old lullaby hummed in the dark.
"Not in the boxes…" He crouched beside one of them, an old, warped thing with frayed twine still knotted across the lid like it hadn't been opened in years.
With a quiet grunt, he untied it, the rope stiff with age, then lifted the lid.
Inside: yellowed newspapers, a moth-eaten scarf, and a porcelain doll with its eyes scratched white.
"Not here," he murmured, gently placing the lid back as though afraid to wake whatever dream it had been holding in place.
He stood again, dusting off his knees with a half-hearted swipe, and wandered toward the splintered ladder leaning against the attic wall.
"Not under the ladder…" he muttered, dragging it aside with a rusty scrape.
A cloud of dust erupted from the corner, and something small skittered into shadow.
Hyeonjae didn't flinch.
He crouched again, fingers brushing along the warped floorboards.
Then his voice dropped slightly.
He straightened up slowly, his hand lingering on the wood a moment longer than it should have.
His gaze wandered, not toward Taejun, but through him, or past him, like he was seeing something not entirely there.
"Or maybe…" he continued, quieter now, "maybe it's not hidden in any of these things at all."
A pause, deep and echoing. "Maybe it's under the weight of things he hasn't told anyone yet."
He didn't clarify who "he" was.
His eyes drifted toward a cracked mirror propped in the corner, its surface smeared with grime and time, reflecting only vague movement.
"Things too heavy to carry in daylight. Things that get packed away without ceremony. Folded in silence. Pressed flat beneath the years until they stop making noise."
He turned his head just enough to meet Taejun's eyes, no grin now, just that strange stillness, like something in him had clicked into place.
"You ever feel that?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper. "That kind of weight? Like there's a room inside you no one's ever opened?"
Taejun didn't answer.
Hyeonjae didn't expect him to.
Then Hyeonjae turned, slow and deliberate, his gaze sweeping the room with a kind of theatrical casualness, as if he were still performing, still indulging in the pretense of a game.
But when his eyes came to rest near the stack of old canvas paintings leaning haphazardly against the far wall, right where Taejun had slipped behind the moth-bitten curtain and crouched, his expression shifted.
He didn't call out.
He didn't say "found you."
Instead, his eyes lingered just long enough, just precisely, to suggest he saw something more than dust and drapery.
And then, he smirked, slowly, like a man who had just stumbled across a secret he wasn't supposed to know.
But he didn't move.
He didn't reach for the curtain or shout in triumph.
He tilted his head the faintest degree and said, almost idly, "Ah… not in the boxes. Not under the ladder. But maybe…"
He trailed off, his voice a thread of smoke curling toward the dark ceiling. "Maybe behind the paintings. Or hiding beneath the skin of a boy pretending not to breathe."
(TL: What he meant by "the skin of a boy pretending not to breathe" was the dust floating in the air)
Then he turned away again, too easily, as if he'd given up, as if he hadn't seen anything at all.
But his smile remained.
Taejun's heart slammed once, hard, and then settled into a jittery pace.
That wasn't part of the game. That was something else.
Another footstep.
Then quiet.
The kind of quiet that crouches beside you, waiting for you to move.
And then—
The sheet whipped away with a sudden gust of motion that made Taejun cry out.
He scrambled backward instinctively, blinking against the light and dust.
Hyeonjae loomed in front of him, crouched, grinning, not menacingly, but like a magician who'd just pulled off his favorite trick. "Gotcha."
"Gah! You scared me, you freak!" Taejun snapped, cheeks hot, half-laughing, half-panicked.
"You scare yourself," Hyeonjae said gently, tapping a finger to his temple with eerie calm. "It's all in there."
They crouched there together in the dim attic light, both catching their breath.
The thrill still buzzed faintly in Taejun's limbs, but beneath it was something else.
Then Hyeonjae's smile softened.
His shoulders lowered, his voice easing into something less performative, more like himself, or whoever that was.
"...You're better at this than you think," he murmured.
Taejun tilted his head, skeptical. "At what?"
"Noticing the things most people ignore."
He stood then, tall and still and steady, and held out his hand again.
This time, Taejun didn't wait long; he reached up.
And when their hands met, the attic shifted, not with a tremble, not with a bang, just a sound, small and final, like a wooden drawer sliding into place after years of being slightly ajar.
Somewhere on the far wall, behind a stack of yellowed newspapers and a cracked dresser, something gave way.
A piece of paneling moved.
A seam of light split open where no seam had been.
It bled out slowly, thin, golden, unnatural, as though the attic had just blinked open an eye it hadn't used in years, and now that it had seen them, it wasn't about to look away.
Hyeonjae smiled again, slower this time. "There," he said quietly. "It's ready."
And with that, they moved forward together, their footsteps soft but deliberate, drawn toward the thin sliver of light cutting through the floorboards like a secret invitation.
It was the kind of light that shouldn't be there, a fragile, unnatural seam between what was known and what lurked just beyond the edges of reality.
They were like travelers standing at the very brink of an old, forgotten map, the kind that ended in frayed paper and cryptic warnings, where monsters didn't roar or claw but waited silently, patient and watchful, with hands folded as if expecting their arrival, ready to pull them into shadows deeper than any darkness they had ever known.
The narrow line of light grew wider.
It didn't flicker like candlelight, nor shift like a mirrored glint.
It pulsed steadily, with the calm, unnatural rhythm of something alive.
A thread of pale illumination bled through the seam between two warped floorboards at the far edge of the attic, spreading with such deliberate slowness it was as though the light itself had to decide whether it should be seen.
Taejun and Hyeonjae both turned to face it, instinct drawing their eyes even before their minds had caught up.
And then, faintly, too faint for certainty, they heard something beneath it.
A tap.
Then another.
Not like footsteps, not quite.
It was lighter, like fingers brushing against old wood.
A scratching, maybe.
The kind of sound you couldn't quite name until it got louder, but it didn't get louder.
It just stayed where it was, subtle and maddeningly steady, like it was listening too.
For once, Hyeonjae didn't smile.
His usual ease, the grin that danced too easily on his lips, the irreverent glimmer in his eyes that made everything feel like a joke only he understood.
He said nothing. He just stared at the light.
"…Did you know that was there?" Taejun asked, his voice low, breath half caught in his throat, as if raising it too much might wake something.
Hyeonjae didn't respond right away.
His head tilted slightly, like he was trying to hear the tapping more clearly.
Only then did he shake his head once, slowly. "No," he said, and the word carried none of his usual bravado. "I didn't."
That was new.
For all his peculiarities, for all the riddles he wore like armor, Hyeonjae always seemed to walk two steps ahead of the room, like he belonged here, like the house's creaks, the soft groans of its aging bones, and even the drifting dust had choreographed themselves around him.
This attic, strange as it was, had always moved with him, not against him.
But not now.
Now he looked as lost as Taejun felt.
And in that brief, terrible stillness, they were equals, two intruders in a place that had just opened its eyes.
Now he looked… smaller.
Not in stature, not in presence exactly, but in some subtle, almost imperceptible way, like the vastness of the moment had peeled away whatever clever masks he'd worn and left behind a quieter, more human shape of him.
There was no grin tugging at the edge of his mouth, no glint of knowing in his eye, only the thin, almost reverent stillness of someone who had just heard the wrong prayer spoken aloud in a forgotten temple.
His breath, once so casual and unbothered, now came shallow and controlled, the kind of breath a person takes when they realize they've stepped into something older than themselves, as though something sacred, or worse, something meant to stay sealed, had been nudged from sleep.
The light widened again, this time not gently, but with the uneasy groan of shifting wood, an old grinding sound that reverberated through the attic's ribs like the turning of some vast, slow key in a lock long rusted shut.
Floorboards drew back, reluctant but obedient, revealing a thin seam of shadow cradling the edges of a narrow staircase that spiraled sharply down into the black below.
It wasn't clean, cobwebs were clinging to the corners, and dust still sifted lazily through the air, but there was a chill, subtle and undeniable, seeping upward.
Not the common draft of a poorly built home, but the cooler breath of earth, the damp scent of something hidden away for far too long.
The attic air, already heavy, now felt like it was folding inward toward the hole, as if gravity itself were hesitating.
"It… leads down?" Taejun asked, his voice slow and cautious, each syllable chosen like stepping stones across a river he couldn't see the bottom of.
He took a step forward, not because he was brave but because stillness felt somehow worse, like waiting might invite the dark to rise on its own.
"Apparently so," Hyeonjae murmured, though even he didn't seem to believe the simplicity of his own words.
His gaze never left the opening.
There was something about it, something off in the geometry, in the way the boards had given way as though obeying instructions from a past no one had written.
"To the second floor?" Taejun asked again, grasping for logic, for architecture, for anything that could make this feel less like a trapdoor into a different world.
"No," Hyeonjae said, softer this time, squinting slightly as he traced the angle of the stairs with his eyes. "No… this slope's too steep. That doesn't lead to any second floor."
Taejun followed his gaze; he saw it now, too.
The angle was wrong.
This wasn't a domestic incline designed for foot traffic between levels.
This was a sharper descent, more like a ladder than a stairwell, the kind of angle built for storage or secrecy, for burial, maybe.
They both stared at it for a long moment.
The light below didn't brighten or dim, it remained still, patient, pulsing faintly like the breath of something sleeping just out of sight.
And then, in that waiting hush, something inside Taejun shifted, not with fear, but with a strange, compelling curiosity that felt like it had lived in his spine for years, waiting for this precise moment to unfurl.
It wasn't excitement, it wasn't even dread, it was something deeper than both, something ancestral, perhaps.
The soft, hypnotic draw of a door you were never meant to see.
Maybe it was the silence, not empty, but full, heavy and velvety, the kind of silence that feels like it belongs in sacred spaces or dreams, where time hangs and listens.
Or maybe it was the sound.
He didn't notice it at first; it was quiet, buried beneath everything else.
But now, with the attic hushed to the point where his pulse felt too loud, he heard it.
Drip… drip…
Faint and rhythmic coming from somewhere far below.
Not fast enough to be a leak. Not sharp enough to be a machine.
Just a steady, wet percussion that soaked into the quiet like ink into paper.
"Water?" Taejun whispered. His throat felt dry the moment he asked. "Or…"
He didn't want to say it. The other word. It hovered there anyway.
Blood.
Hyeonjae didn't answer.
He was staring harder now, his mouth slightly open, as though he too had heard something he didn't want to acknowledge.
Taejun swallowed. "Is there… a basement?"
"There isn't supposed to be," Hyeonjae said, but the words were no longer meant for Taejun.
They came out low, distracted, like the kind of answer you give when your mind is turning through maps and memories, trying to rewrite what it thought was true.
"Not in this house. Not in any of the records I found. There were no stairs. No door. No plan ever showed—"
"Yet here it is."
Hyeonjae looked at him then slowly, and in his face was something stripped of all performance, no sarcasm, no theatricality, no amused mask, but the raw, unblinking look of a man standing on the edge of a story that was writing itself beneath his feet.
"…Yeah," he said, voice flat and far away. "Here it is."
Taejun and Hyeonjae stood side by side now.
One uncertain, the other unnerved.
The attic had always been strange, eerily quiet, oddly warm, thick with memory and the weight of forgotten things, but this… this wasn't just atmosphere.
This wasn't the attic playing tricks again, whispering from the corners or shifting shadows just out of reach.
No.
This was the house changing. In front of them.
Taejun glanced at the opening again, as if hoping the stairs might vanish, sucked back into the boards like nothing had happened.
But they didn't.
They remained, dark and narrow, swallowing light and air with a patience that made his chest feel tight.
"Maybe it's just a crawlspace," he said, though the words fell limp as soon as they left his mouth. Even he didn't believe it.
Hyeonjae didn't look at him.
He only raised a hand, pointing toward the stairway now fully exposed in the shifting gloom.
"Look at the wear," he said. "That's not new. That looks old. Too old. Someone's been walking that path. A lot."
Taejun stepped closer and exhaled. His breath fogged faintly, hanging pale in the still air.
Why was it so cold?
The attic had been warm earlier, muggy, almost, but now the cold felt unnatural, like it had risen from the newly opened stairwell, curling upward in invisible tendrils.
He reached out to steady himself and touched the banister.
It was damp, as though water had seeped into the wood and never left.
His hand recoiled before he could stop it.
"Are you sure you didn't open this before?" Taejun asked, turning sharply toward Hyeonjae. "Like— accidentally? Some lever or latch? Maybe when you moved that sheet over there?"
"I told you," Hyeonjae said, quiet and firm. "This isn't mine to begin with."
There was no smugness in his voice.
That same stillness again, something unshakable.
"The attic… it listens. It answers. Sometimes. But this—" His eyes dropped to the stairs. "This wasn't an answer."
"Then what was it?"
Hyeonjae met his gaze. His voice dropped.
"A choice."
Taejun didn't reply.
He only looked down into the darkness, where the light, soft and unnatural, was starting to fade.
Slowly enough to feel intentional, as if whatever was waiting below had grown tired of being patient, as if the offer was shrinking, sealing itself again.
It's now or never.
Hyeonjae took a step back.
The gesture didn't feel like retreat; it felt like defiance.
"We can ignore it," he said. "We turn around and pretend we never saw it. Then we go down. Go outside. And get some tteokbokki on our way back. There's a stall on Gudeok-ro that stays open all night. It's disgusting in the best way."
He was trying to be light, but the humor didn't reach his face. Not this time.
Taejun didn't move.
He was staring again. Not at the stairs, but into them.
Into whatever space they led to.
The chill drifted up again, brushing his ankles.
The air down there wasn't just cold, it was quiet in a way he didn't have words for, like it hadn't been touched by voices in decades, or ever.
It didn't feel like it was waiting for a hero.
It felt like it had been left for someone lost.
"…You coming or not, ahjusshi?" Taejun asked, glancing back over his shoulder.
Hyeonjae blinked.
He looked caught for a second, then gave a soft, breathy chuckle, low and tired.
"You really do say it like a little brat," he muttered.
Taejun's lips twitched faintly. "You said I scare myself," he replied. "So I guess I want to find out why."
Hyeonjae tilted his head and gave a quiet hum.
Then stepped forward, past the line of safety, until he stood beside the boy again.
"Alright," he said. "Let's go see what kind of story this really is."
And together, shoulder to shoulder, they began to descend.
The attic above dimmed behind them, swallowed in silence as the light bled upward one last time, then faded, like the closing of an eye.
And below, beneath layers of floorboards and rot and unspoken memory, they stepped into a hush so deep it felt like it had never once been broken.
Not by footsteps, not by breath, not by time.
But by choice.