Round 21: Possibility
For a middle-school kid living in a rural town where the smell of cows and pigs on the wind made recess more a chore than a joy, maybe he actually was kind of amazing.
He had his own smart phone for one. It was brand spanking new and he got it for his birthday and he’d earned the quiet awe and respect of his classmates for a whole week.
On top of that, he was always getting perfect scores on his quizzes and tests, had amassed 250 signatures in last grade’s yearbook and could walk right by the hall monitors without a pass. He did all of this while still managing to spend all of his spare time talking about girls.
Yeah, Jung Jinyoung was pretty amazing.
That might be why it came as a shock that he would choose scrawny little Gong Chansik as his new lunch buddy. It was a Tuesday, everyone recalled. Jinyoung had walked right past his usual table to sit in front of Chansik who’d been trembling like a leaf at his approach. The whole cafeteria had gone quiet for exactly eight seconds, long enough for a lunch lady to come out of the kitchen and stare suspiciously at the kids.
Even now, a whole month after it had happened, Jinyoung and Chansik still sat together, but no one had any clue why. It couldn’t be to tutor him, Chansik had pretty decent grades. It couldn’t be because they were neighbors or anything like that because Chansik lived way on the edge of town and had to be driven in by his older sister. It definitely couldn’t be to make himself look better by association because Chansik, as the girls were now starting to discover, was quite cute.
Whatever the reason was, the two boys got along well, spending the lunch period whispering back and forth, smiling excitedly and sometimes huddling over Jinyoung’s cell phone gaping at something he’d pulled up on the screen.
Everyone had accepted this new development.
Everyone except Lee Junghwan, that is. He felt utterly betrayed by the fact that Jinyoung had found someone else to sit with at lunch without so much as a goodbye or an explanation. Jinyoung had ditched him completely and Junghwan had gotten back at him by sitting out of safe note-passing range during class and giving the monkey bars a wide berth on the playground. Jinyoung hadn’t seemed to notice, though. He was too enamored with Chansik’s dark and naturally curly hair or his skinny little nose or his stubby little fingers or whatever. Junghwan rolled his eyes.
It was never a fun thing to be the friend who got left behind, especially at a school so small where you couldn’t even fart in class without the girl three classrooms down finding out by the end of the day.
So two can play that game, Junghwan had declared and he’d found himself someone new to sit with, too.
Unfortunately, his migration caused no silence in the cafeteria and no eyes had watched him as he passed. He just got up from his lonely island of a table, walked to the row of tables by the windows that faced the playground and sat down at someone else’s lonely island of a table.
Cha Sunwoo was weird, which was why he always sat alone. He was a little chubby with two big crooked rabbit teeth and an oddly light hue to his brown hair and eyes.
A rumor had gone around school that he was actually a ghost, but this idea was quickly dispelled because everyone could see him. Now, though, everyone sort of went out of their way to avoid him, as if trying their hardest to actually turn him into a ghost just by sheer force of will. He didn’t seem too bothered by it. He was always attached to his handheld games, tapping away at the screen with his stylus. Sometimes, he pulled it out in the middle of class and none of the teachers said anything, but this may be because a few of them may have also been trying to ignore him, too.
Sunwoo glanced up; he was obviously startled that someone had acknowledged his presence.
It was easy to see the skepticism on his face, the wariness. He stared at Junghwan as if half-expecting the boy to jump at him or make some kind of joke at his expense, but Junghwan just smiled. He’d lost his best friend and was only trying to make another.
“We’re friends now,” Junghwan stated and then went back to eating.
Sunwoo nodded but then returned Junghwan’s smile, slowly and unsurely.
That was how it began.
Actually, it really began about two and a half weeks later when Jinyoung stopped showing up at school.
It was a rainy and windy Friday when Chansik sat his tray of food down on the edge of Junghwan’s and Sunwoo’s table. Their three trays barely managed to fit on the small thing, but Chansik dragged a chair from a nearby table and stared at each of the boy’s in turn, too nervous to do anything but make his bottom lip quiver.
Junghwan was the one who asked, “What’s your problem?” He narrowed his eyes, not exactly in the mood for being so close to the person who stole his friend.
“I think Jinyoung’s hurt,” Chansik explained. Sunwoo glanced up from his game and Junghwan just rolled his eyes again. “I stopped by his house but his parents wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
“Maybe he’s sick,” Sunwoo suggested without giving the boy’s concern much thought.
“Maybe he’s grounded,” Junghwan piped up. It was possible. Jinyoung was always acting like the world revolved around him. Junghwan wouldn’t put it past the guy to stir up some kind of trouble and get suspended from school.
However, Jinyoung was a bragger and if he’d gotten in trouble, he would have told everyone. Junghwan remembered that one time back in high school, their last year, freshman year, where Jinyoung had gotten suspended from school and hung out in the candy shop during afternoons to tell his buddies how it all went down before they made their ways home.
No, Junghwan realized, there’s no way Jinyoung could have been suspended for three days without anyone else knowing what he’d did wrong. Just as quickly as the thought entered his head, Junghwan abandoned it. “Maybe he’s sick,” he changed his story and went back to his food, hoping that would put an end to the conversation.
It didn’t.
Chansik still sat there, worrying his bottom lip with a stubby finger. “I think something happened to him.”
Sunwoo gulped, his handheld game still making blips and beeps and other noises. It sounded like his character was dying.
Junghwan rolled his eyes again, certain that Chansik was just being dumb, but he also had a feeling that the boy wouldn’t leave them alone until they believed (or at least acted like they believed) something was amiss. “What do you want us to do?”
“Come with me to his house after school,” Chansik stated; more like pleaded. “Maybe his parents will actually listen if there are three of us.”
“We’re only kids now, though,” Junghwan huffed. “If we were still teenagers, maybe… we’re only a couple of years away from being toddlers and infants and dissolving into genetic matter and spending the rest of eternity being a possibility.”
The other boys grew quiet. Sunwoo lost in thought but Chansik statue-still in his awe of Junghwan’s realism.
“Meet us by the flag pole after the last bell,” Junghwan said when the silence had stretched awkwardly thin.
Chansik spent the rest of the day wondering if it would hurt to be a possibility.
The weather didn’t let up by the time school let out.
In fact, the wind seemed to have picked up even more, making the trees violently dance on either side of the street. The rain wasn’t as bad, just a light misty drizzle that got blown every which way in the gale, but based on the nasty-looking dark clouds on the horizon, the three boys didn’t have a lot of time to be walking around so far from home.
The street Jinyoung lived on, some multi-syllable word that only Sunwoo could pronounce properly, weaved its way over the sweeping hills that stood to the west of the town.
If one were to look behind them as they made their way up the hills, one could see the hundreds of skeletal trees that lined the streets, the rows of houses, the farmland, and everything else clear to the lake by Sunwoo’s house.
It would have been a pretty sight in summer, but it was the dead middle of winter and with the sky darkening above them, the scenery looked nightmarish despite the expensive houses that surrounded them.
Chansik led them almost all the way to the end of the street, stopping in front of a brilliant red gate.
“Shouldn’t we be heading home?” Sunwoo had to half-shout over the noise of the wind. It would take him half an hour to walk back home from here and he doubted he would make it before the rain hit. Chansik, who lived even farther away, on the other side of the lake, probably should have been concerned about how he’d make it back home in this weather.
“We’re already here, Sunwoo,” Junghwan chided him. “We didn’t walk all of this way for no reason. Right, Chansik?” He gave the boy in question a none-too-gentle shove and the younger boy paled as he pressed the buzzer on the intercom.
They waited several seconds before a voice came through the speaker, light and calm and musical; a beautiful beacon in the murkiness of the weather.
It was Jinyoung’s mother.
Chansik interrupted her ‘who is it’ to demand to see Jinyoung, to just needing to know if he was alright.
“He’s out of town visiting family,” Jinyoung’s mother replied, immediately recognizing the voice. The musical quality left her voice, leaving nothing but steel and ice behind and even Junghwan stood up straight like he was being reprimanded.
“I’m his best friend,” Chansik insisted, getting shrill and panicky. “Why didn’t he tell me he was leaving?”
“He’s being punished,” Jinyoung’s mother said and it was like a hammer coming down on Chansik’s chest. She said nothing else, but the slight static of the speaker stopped. She’d disconnected the intercom and wouldn’t answer no matter how many more times Chansik rang the buzzer.
Sunwoo mildly suggested they climb over the white stone wall and go straight for the door but Junghwan knew there was no reason for them to be out here so he wanted to leave.
Chansik was half-crying now and Junghwan had to drag him away from the buzzer so they could make their way back down the sloping street.
“What’s he being punished for?” Sunwoo asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he ran up a high phone bill?” Junghwan spat out.
Chansik wasn’t convinced. He was as pale as a sheet and looked so fragile and thin, even in his heavy jacket, that the wind probably could have picked him up and carried him away.
“Doesn’t he have a cell phone?” Sunwoo stated the obvious. “Why don’t you call him?”
It made so much sense that it almost didn’t make any sense, but most of the boys had grown too young to keep their cell phones. ‘Now that you’re no longer in high school,’ had been Junghwan’s father’s response, but high school seemed like a lifetime away and not just a few short years.
Sunwoo had gotten the opportunity to keep his but he’d passed it up for a 3DS instead.
They’d have to go to someone’s house to make the call.
“Let’s go back to my place,” Junghwan suggested. He was finally starting to get interested in the whole situation, if only for the chance to play detective. “Maybe you guys can stay for dinner and wait the storm out?”
Sunwoo immediately agreed. The wind sounded like a massive train barreling towards them as it whistled through the branches of the evergreens. Even though he could probably see it from here, home seemed impossibly far away.
Chansik still seemed too hung up on the conversation with Jinyoung’s mother to properly respond.
“That settles it,” Junghwan went on, his dark blue scarf whipping in the wind behind him. He didn’t want to tell either of his friends how wrong all of this was starting to feel. He didn’t know Jinyoung’s mother, but it was more than a little eerie how quickly the tone of her voice had changed once Jinyoung had been mentioned. It was almost like she’d been two different people. “After we call Jinyoung, let’s play video games and laugh at how crazy we’ve been acting about this whole thing.”
Junghwan’s house was small and old and sat on a street with other small and old houses. In stark contrast to his house, Junghwan’s dad was fat and young. Surprisingly young, Chansik considered. He could remember being that age. Forty had been a good age.
“Why are you home so late?” Mr. Lee bellowed as he opened the front door for the kids. “Why would you take your time coming home in such weather?”
At first, Sunwoo was frightened at the red-faced and yelling man, but he quickly figured out that Junghwan’s dad just spoke loud and always seemed to be a little red in the face.
“I just turned the stove on so dinner will be in a while,” Mr. Lee continued, ushering the boys past the kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting company so I’ll have to see what I can do, but I’m just glad you got here before the rain hit. You might have caught colds out there.”
Once they’d been corralled into the family room, Junghwan smiled apologetically at his friends (correction: precisely one friend and precisely one unwanted guest.) “The phone is over there,” he pointed to the rickety old table by the sagging couch. “Hurry up and call Jinyoung before the wind knocks the power out.”
Chansik nodded and crossed the room obediently. When he was out of earshot, Junghwan grabbed Sunwoo by the shoulder and leaned forward to whisper into his ear. “Am I the only one getting chills?”
Sunwoo just shrugged. “It is cold outside.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, dummy. I mean this whole Jinyoung thing. Don’t you think something freaky is happening?”
Sunwoo raised an eyebrow. “His parents said he’s out of town. What’s freaky about that?”
So Sunwoo hadn’t noticed the 180 degree change in Jinyoung’s mother’s voice. Junghwan sighed, thinking that perhaps Chansik’s hysteria was just rubbing off on him. He decided it wasn’t worth thinking about and followed after Chansik. “Put it on speakerphone,” he said.
Chansik stared blankly at the phone’s cradle with its myriad buttons before Junghwan elbowed him out of the way and pressed the right one.
The familiar hollow ringing sound flooded the room, sounding even more eerie with the wind rattling the windows. Sunwoo tugged at the curtains, revealing the strangeness of the outdoors. The sky had taken on a muted, stormy green haze, rain slanted through the air almost horizontally as debris went skittering across the street.
Junghwan hated storms. He hated all the noise they made and all of the wicked ways the shadows moved outside. He gulped, ready to shout at Sunwoo to leave the curtains alone when Jinyoung’s voice filled the room.
All three boys stood rigid in their places, their eyes focused on the phone as if it had done them wrong by actually connecting them to Jinyoung.
“Jinyoung, is that you?” Chansik asked dumbly, still holding the phone’s receiver to his ear even though it was on speaker. “Your mom said you’re being punished. What did you do?”
“Something really bad,” Jinyoung stated. There was something different about his voice. All of the confidence and self-importance he usually spoke with was missing from his voice, like they were physical things that could be taken from him.
“Come on, what did you do?” Chansik pressed. “You’ve been gone from school and everyone is worried.”
Junghwan perked up at that. It wasn’t until that very second that he realized that, no, not everyone was worried. At school, people acted like there wasn’t a single thing out of place. Only Chansik had seemed frantic and it was only when he’d sat by them at lunch that Junghwan and Sunwoo had even paid attention to Jinyoung’s absence.
It was as if they had forgotten about him or as if he’d never been around in the first place.
“I didn’t mean to worry you guys. I just have to take responsibility.” Jinyoung said, snapping Junghwan out of his thoughts.
It sounded like Jinyoung, it really did, but it also didn’t sound like him. The Jinyoung everyone knew wouldn’t dare sound the least bit apologetic.
Chansik must have noticed it, too, because he slowly turned around to look over his shoulder at Junghwan, his eyes wide and vacant. “Your mom got mad at us for asking about you.”
“What do you mean ‘us’?” Jinyoung asked.
“Me and Junghwan and…” Chansik hesitated.
“Sunwoo,” Sunwoo prompted.
“Sunwoo,” Chansik said into the phone.
Jinyoung took a second to process this, as if recalling faces. “I’m fine where I am. You guys don’t have to worry about me.”
“Of course we do,” Junghwan took a few bold strides towards the phone. “We’re your friends, Jinyoung,” and as soon as he said it, it felt weird. He’d been going out of his way to ignore Jinyoung for nearly an entire month now. This was the first time in a while that he’d even put Jinyoung and the word friend in the same sentence, let alone thought.
“I don’t need friends where I am,” Jinyoung said and promptly hung up.
A rumble of thunder punctuated the end of the conversation and the three boys stood as still as frozen water.
“Something’s not right,” Chansik whimpered, still cradling the phone to his ear.
“He didn’t sound like himself,” Junghwan agreed.
Sunwoo looked from one boy to the other, his light eyes wide. “What’s gotten into you guys? We wanted to talk to Jinyoung so we talked to Jinyoung. I don’t see what’s weird about that. He sounded fine.”
“You don’t know him,” Chansik and Junghwan said at the exact same moment, their gazes first focused on Sunwoo and then on each other.
Sunwoo looked at both of them like they’d gone crazy.
“We have to find out where he is,” Junghwan reached forward to snatch the phone away from Chansik’s ear and put it back on the charger. “I think his parents may have hurt him somehow.”
“Are you kidding?” Sunwoo asked in disbelief.
Chansik nodded furiously in agreement with Junghwan. “It’s like they don’t want anyone to think something’s wrong.”
“Which just means something is wrong,” Junghwan agreed. He once again recalled how quickly Mrs. Jung’s voice had changed once her son had been brought up. He also thought about how wooden Jinyoung’s voice sounded, almost like he was reading what to say or like he was repeating what someone else told him to say. “I bet he’s not even out of town,” Junghwan sounded a whole lot more certain than he felt. “I bet he’s still at that house.”
Chansik, so unsure about what to believe that he was willing to believe anything, nodded quickly. “We have to go back.”
“You’ve both gone crazy,” Sunwoo took a step back, as if the crazy were contagious. “You’ve both completely lost it.”
Lightning flickered outside; sharp blue-white light flooding the dimly-lit room and leeching it of its color for a split-second.
“We go once my dad’s asleep,” Junghwan stated, right as booming thunder followed.
Time seemed to be malfunctioning. Minutes felt like hours only to turn around and feel like seconds. Time seemed to do that a lot. It seemed to ebb and flow however it pleased, stretching thin one moment and condensing thickly the next. There were days where it was almost like a physical thing in the air, warping and shifting and making things complicated for everyone.
Oddly enough, it had been moving in the same general direction lately: backwards. They’d all aged once before, their skin wrinkly and dry, their eyesight failing, their breath coming in wheezes… but then time hiccupped and, over the years, skin tightened, hair darkened and everyone grew spritely and young again.
There was no explanation for it. It just happened and had been happening for decades so no one talked about it anymore.
All those screwed up years could mess with memories and dreams, however, because wouldn’t it be odd to remember that you had already been fourteen years old? That you’d already lived a life? That you’d already been friends with the people across from you a hundred something years in the past?
Perhaps being old twice did your head in?
Dinner was exceptionally quiet and tense. Mr. Lee was curious about the silence and looked at each of the boys from his seat at the head of the table, trying to figure out why they all sat so still and looked so glum. Sunwoo, a bit more animated than the other boys, ate enough for two and then pulled out his handheld game right there at the table.
Chansik and Junghwan took longer to eat their food and Chansik didn’t even finish his plate. Every now and then, they exchanged glances, having entire conversations in the time it took to blink at each other.
Then, just as Mr. Lee stood up to collect dishes, Junghwan fired off a random question: “Dad, do you remember Jinyoung?”
Chansik sat up straight.
Mr. Lee just turned to look over his round shoulder. “The name doesn’t sound familiar.”
A cold chill swept through the room, like a window had been left open and the storm was getting in. Or maybe it was just Junghwan’s nerves. How could the name not sound familiar? He and Jinyoung had been friends since senior year of high school and Jinyoung had spent plenty of nights over at this house, sitting at this dinner table.
“Jung Jinyoung,” Junghwan said calmly, quietly, almost like a squeak. “You know, the kid who lives up in the hills? The kid who stuck his head in red paint last year because he thought that’s how people dyed their hair?”
Mr. Lee grabbed the last of the plates from the table and carried the precarious stack over to the sink. “Oh right, that fellow who broke my car window with a baseball last summer?”
‘No, dad, that was Dongwoo,’ Junghwan wanted to say but instead, he just smiled and nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
He waited for his dad to get preoccupied with the dishes before turning to Chansik with a worried face. Maybe his dad just had poor memory? Or maybe Jinyoung didn’t come over half as often as he’d thought?
Chansik gripped the hem of Junghwan’s shirt in what was probably supposed to be a reassuring manner, and then they both looked across the table to Sunwoo, who had looked up from his game. The blue-white light of the screen of his game, so much like the lightning that flickered outside, made Sunwoo’s eyes look even lighter, almost as if they were glowing.
Sunwoo still didn’t look convinced, though. He seemed to be going through a great deal of effort to not be worried. In fact, if it weren’t for the storm raging outside, he probably would have donned his hat, coat and boots and walked home, even in the dark.
It was just an odd little coincidence, Junghwan told himself. He had probably brought home enough different friends over the past few months that, to his dad, they were all the same kid. Adults were always bad at paying attention to stuff like that, right?
“Did you call your sister or your parents, Chansik?” Junghwan suddenly asked.
Chansik first looked confused, and then gasped when he realized he hadn’t. He’d left school practically as soon as the bell rang. His sister had probably waited who knows how long for him in the parking lot. “No I haven’t,” he stated.
“Let’s go call them, quick,” Junghwan stood up, practically pulling Chansik out of his chair as he went back to the living room, back to the phone. Sunwoo, reluctantly, followed, but only to get away from Mr. Lee’s off-key singing.
The living room seemed even dimmer now than it had an hour before. The floor lamp was in the same place putting off the same amount of heat and yellowish light, but the room seemed darker somehow, colder, stranger… things Junghwan shouldn’t have been feeling in his own home.
Chansik pried his wrist free of the older boy’s grasp and crossed the room to the phone. While he talked, Junghwan confronted Sunwoo, standing almost nose to nose with him. “Everyone’s memories about him are messed up,” he said, keeping his voice low. Sound travelled quite a ways in the small house and he didn’t want his father overhearing.
“By everyone, you just mean your dad,” Sunwoo corrected him, not backing down. “You’re being silly Junghwan. Both of you are being silly and you’re starting to freak me out.”
“I’ll prove something’s wrong here,” Junghwan furrowed his eyebrows. Why couldn’t anyone else see what was so obvious? “I’ll call a few of Jinyoung’s friends and prove it to you… but shouldn’t you call your parents first?”
Sunwoo shrugged. “Mom will just think I’m with dad and dad will just think I’m with mom. It’s alright. Can we watch cartoons or something?”
Chansik clicked off the phone. “My sister had been driving around town looking for me,” his voice was soft and low. “She cursed me out when I told her I was at a friend’s house. She thought I’d been snatched up or something.”
“Did you ask her about Jinyoung?” Junghwan asked.
“His sister was afraid that he’d been abducted but the only thing you can think about is Jinyoung?” Sunwoo snapped.
Junghwan shushed him.
Chansik looked pale, almost transparent. He always seemed a bit insubstantial, more like a ghost than Sunwoo could ever be.
Junghwan went on, “The past couple of days, did Jinyoung act funny? Say anything weird? Do anything out of the ordinary?”
Chansik stiffened beneath the barrage of questions. With a frustrated groan, Sunwoo sank onto the couch, avoiding the side that had been flattened by Mr. Lee over the years.
“It depends on what you mean by weird,” Chansik responded. Even his voice seemed as light as air, vaporous. “Jinyoung was always into odd things. The pictures he had on his phone, the-“
“What kind of pictures?” Junghwan interrupted. Now it was Junghwan who was frantic and Chansik who was looking at him strangely. It was as if it were a virus creeping from one boy to the next. Sunwoo could only hope that he didn’t catch it as he watched the exchange. “Was it pictures of girls? Snapshots up their skirts?”
Chansik’s face flushed. It was the first hint of color to touch his face since he got off the phone. “No, nothing nasty like that. Just pictures of his room, photographs on the walls and the things he collects.”
Junghwan once again felt the crushing blow of betrayal. Jinyoung had never showed such photos to him. In fact, not once had Jinyoung ever invited Junghwan to his house, but Chansik, who he had only been friends with a handful of weeks, had seen pictures of the inside of his room?
It was an insignificant feeling, or at least it should have been, but the pain burned bright in Junghwan’s chest and it took all of his strength not to scream or slap the boy in front of him.
“What does he collect?” Sunwoo asked from the other side of the room.
“I don’t think I should say. It might be a bit embarrassing.”
Junghwan rolled his eyes. “Tell us! It could be an important clue or something.”
“Weird things, like heads and arms and eyes and hair.”
Sunwoo and Junghwan exchanged looks. “He collects parts of people?” Sunwoo asked, his skepticism all but forgotten. “He’s a serial killer?”
“No, they are parts of dolls,” Chansik corrected hastily.
Junghwan scrunched up his face. He would have taken people parts instead. Jinyoung collected dolls? How absurd. He couldn’t even wrap his head around the nonsense.
Sunwoo must have felt the same thing as well, he looked ready to laugh, but when Chansik delivered no punch line or giggled and told them he was kidding, Sunwoo shivered.
Junghwan just continued to feel even more betrayed. He’d been friends with Jinyoung for so long but the guy hadn’t mentioned a single word about his strange hobby. “So he’s got like this creepy collection of dolls in his room?” He asked.
“No, just the parts,” Chansik said. “He has these big old bins all around his room, labeled with stickers. I think the bin full of eyes is the creepiest.”
“I would imagine,” Junghwan shook his head, starting to think that perhaps losing his best friend was a blessing in disguise. The guy was a creep. “What about the pictures he has; the photographs you were talking about?”
Chansik paled again, pacing back and forth. He seemed to be regretting ever bringing any of this up. He’d broken Jinyoung’s trust. He’d told people. Now what?
Junghwan propped a hand on his hip. “Come on, we need to know, Chansik.”
“Pictures of us,” Chansik blurted out. “He’s got photographs of us all together that I don’t remember taking. We’re like high school age and smiling and laughing like we’ve known each other forever.”
They fell into silence.
“Together? Like a group?” Junghwan needed to know.
Chansik didn’t answer verbally, but the look on his face was enough. The idea was absurd. Jinyoung and Sunwoo had probably never had a conversation in their entire lives and Junghwan knew that he never would have given Chansik the time of day if it weren’t for him plopping down at their lunch table a few hours ago.
Under no circumstances would they have all been photographed together.
“So he collects weird things,” Sunwoo said, waving a hand dismissively. It seemed like he’d remain the voice of reason to the very end. “A girl in my class goes to the bathrooms between classes and collects other girl’s hair ties they left behind. The guy who sits in front of me in homeroom collects broken pencil lead off the classroom floor.”
Chansik ran a hand through his tangled, curly hair, his stubby fingers catching in the dark locks.
Junghwan, for once, wanted to side with Sunwoo. When he was younger, he collected crickets and other little bugs in jars until the top of his dresser was a mortuary of insects. He’d still have the collection today if his aunt hadn’t come over, been drawn to his room by the horrific stench and tossed every last jar out while Junghwan had been away at school.
Yet something seemed strange about Jinyoung’s collection. A collection of dolls he could somewhat understand, but why dismantle them and organize them by part? What value were they then? What did he plan to do with it all?
He didn’t even want to go into the photographs.
Talk of dolls had distracted him from his original goal. He brushed past Chansik and made his way to the phone. He still had a few of Jinyoung’s friends to call.
“Now do you think something weird is going on,” Junghwan asked later that night.
The boys had honestly attempted to sleep to get their energy up, but they were all too full of nervous energy to even lie still on the blankets Junghwan had laid out on the floor.
“I bet it’s some joke,” Sunwoo still clung to his belief. “Jinyoung just got a whole bunch of people in on some sick joke.”
“That would make it one elaborate prank,” Chansik mumbled, his voice hardly audible over the storm.
The rain had lessened, leaving mainly a wicked wind behind. Junghwan lay sprawled on the floor by his bedroom door so that he could peep out the crack to check for the tell-tale signs of his dad retiring to bed for the night.
Chansik stayed by the window, listening to it and the rest of the old house rattle.
Sunwoo was the only one who seemed calm, tangled up in a blanket and staring up at the ceiling.
“I mean, Jinyoung would have had to have gotten his mom in on it… the principal had to have let him stay out of school… Junghwan’s dad… and what about all of the people we asked from school? There’s no way Jinyoung got everyone together just to mess with us.”
Now that Chansik had said it in so many words, even Sunwoo’s desire to cling to normalcy was starting to falter. He swallowed. “So you’re going to tell me everyone just forgot Jinyoung existed? Like collective amnesia or something? That only works in video games and even then it’s cheesy.”
Junghwan shushed them from the door. “Keep your voices down or my dad will hear you guys.”
Chansik and Sunwoo glared at each other, barely able to see in the near-dark of the bedroom.
This is a crazy plan, Sunwoo thought. Are they really thinking about trekking around not only at two in the morning but in the middle of a winter storm? They’d probably turn into frozen statues the second they got up the block!
Chansik, who probably should have been trembling as bad as the leaves outside, seemed the most eager to go.
Sunwoo glanced from Chansik to Junghwan, who still gazed out into the hallway, waiting for the light beneath his dad’s door to go out as the television was turned off for the night. To Sunwoo, Junghwan seemed more interested in solving a mystery that probably wasn’t there, in going on some dangerous and foolish adventure just for the sake of having fun. Especially over the last few hours, Junghwan seemed to be less and less concerned about actually making sure his friend was ok.
Sunwoo realized that he was just an innocent bystander in all of this. He didn’t even know Jinyoung and hardly liked the boy. The kid’s arrogance was annoying and it made Sunwoo really mad how much Jinyoung could get away with just because everyone thought he was hot.
Maybe the main reason why he didn’t want to go was jealousy? He couldn’t help how he looked. He probably tried harder than anyone else, to pass his classes, to make friends, but Jinyoung effortlessly blew through everything. Life was a game to him, a popularity contest, while to Sunwoo it was a struggle just to get to school some mornings.
A thud on the roof made all the boys jump.
There was an eerie silence for a few short seconds and then something fell right past the window. Chansik looked like he’d nearly pissed himself in fright as he flung himself to the floor.
Another few seconds passed, all three of them lying still as they waited. They weren’t sure what they waited for, but they did, holding their breaths and staring wide-eyed at each other.
Finally, Chansik stood up and gazed outside the window and he visibly slumped and relaxed. “It’s just a big ole tree branch,” he announced.
Sunwoo let out a sigh of relief, and then realized just how much he’d bought into this nonsense. He huffed and rolled over onto his side and Junghwan got to his feet and pulled the door open. “If a tree or something fell over the roof, it might have knocked a hole in something. I gotta tell my dad so he can check it once its daylight.”
He stepped out into the hall and Chansik relaxed even further. Their mission of secrecy had been foiled. There was no need to hide anymore because there was a good chance they wouldn’t even be able to sneak out now.
They’d intended to go out the back door off the covered porch. If they tried to go out the window, the wind would probably stir up everything in Junghwans’ room and make enough noise to alert his dad. It would make a mess if they left it open and there was a chance they wouldn’t be able to get back in if they shut it behind them. The door was the safest bet, the quietest bet, but Chansik realized none of that mattered if they were about to brave a storm to… to what? Break into someone’s house in the middle of the night? If they were going to be so bold, they should have asked Mr. Lee for permission at dinner or something.
“Guys,” Junghwan stated from the door, his voice sounding so strange and high-pitched that both of the other boys jumped to their feet.
“What is it?” Sunwoo asked.
“My dad’s not in the house.”
“What do you mean he’s-” Sunwoo began.
“He’s not in the house,” Junghwan repeated, sternly enough that even Chansik clamped his mouth shut.
Sunwoo rolled his eyes. This was either an elaborate ploy or Junghwan had just somehow missed his dad in the small house. “He probably just went out.”
“Who would leave their house in this weather?” Chansik asked, but no one answered because they’d all been planning to do that exact same thing.
Sunwoo was the first to move, brushing past Junghwan and stepping out into the hallway, muttering to himself about people acting crazy and not looking at facts. “See? Look. Your dad’s car is still in-” He stopped short and the other two boys could hear his surprised intake of breath even from down the hall. “-the driveway,” Sunwoo finished dumbly.
Chansik and Junghwan wandered up the narrow and dark hallway, the house creaked in the wind all around them, to the point where it felt like it was shifting and writhing like something living beneath their feet.
Sunwoo stood near the front of the house, gazing out a window. The stormy light spilled in through the glass and cut deep shadows across his round face. “What’s going on?” Chansik asked, joining Sunwoo at the window but not immediately seeing what the older boy was looking at.
Junghwan hung back, as if he were afraid of what was outside or, more likely, as if he already knew.
Chansik walked in front with the big flashlight, the bright beam seemed like it was the only source of light in the whole town. As rain fell at ridiculous angles in front of them, Chansik shifted the light this way and that, sending the beam over bushes and cracked sidewalk and tree limbs lying in the street.
They had trusted Junghwan with the umbrella but the wind had snapped it back and bent the handle like a broken bone before they’d even got to the end of the block. It’s not like it helped much. The three of them were soaked to the bone by the cold rain before they’d even stepped foot off Mr. Lee’s property.
“What happened to him?” Chansik asked.
It was the first thing any of them had said since they’d left Mr. Lee behind in the middle of the front lawn where they’d found him.
The man had aged... the wrong way. His hair had turned stark white and his face had become spotted and wrinkled and bare. Whatever had happened to him, it made him lay flat on his back, staring unblinking and unseeing into the raging storm.
Junghwan had screamed, but every sound had been snatched away by the wind. He’d beat on his father’s chest but it was like he was hitting a brick wall.
Sunwoo had stayed quiet. He knew what had happened. The man had died.
He’d aged and his body had failed him and now he was gone. Death wasn’t exactly a concept that was easy to wrap your head around when you’ve gone as long as you can remember knowing that you’d continue living as a possibility, a chance, a collection of genetic material that needed that extra little something to be something.
However, the main reason why he stayed so quiet was because he was finally starting to accept that something was wrong here, that reality had been knocked just slightly askew. Even a lover of video games like himself was having difficulty wrapping his head around what was possibly going on.
However, they were doing well by going back to Jinyoung’s house. Even from this distance, Sunwoo felt like he could see it through the hills and the trees and the darkness of the storm. In a way, it felt like he could feel the house looking right back at him, so impossibly far yet so impossibly close.
“We have to get him back,” Junghwan stated simply.
Chansik and, far more reluctantly, Sunwoo nodded.
Jinyoung’s house was just like it had been a few hours ago, but Chansik didn’t really know why he’d expected it to turn nightmarish. The walls were still made of the same stone, the gate was still red, but to three sniffling and sneezing and freezing boys, even the promise of warmth inside the house’s walls wasn’t all that appealing.
There was just something about the house that all three of them didn’t like.
Junghwan didn’t bother with the intercom. He just dropped the umbrella (he’d still been carrying it) onto the ground and clambered over the wet stone wall. Chansik was next to follow. Being less athletic, Junghwan had to rather unceremoniously hoist him up from the top of the wall.
Sunwoo eventually followed, swinging himself over into the Jung’s front lawn and following the other two boys up to the side of the house. The three of them stood with their noses to one of the windows, trying to peer inside.
The lights were off in this room, only the glow from a room further down the hall gave the furniture any definition in the darkness. Chansik was the first to identify the room as a study or an office, the computer state-of-the-art but the bookcase filled to the brim with old books.
“We have to find Jinyoung’s room,” Chansik stated, not sure where this feeling of bravery was coming from. The other boys were older than him, but Junghwan seemed too grief-stricken and Sunwoo too indifferent for anyone but him to get them moving.
“Is it upstairs or downstairs,” Junghwan half-whispered, moving away from the window to continue around the house, eyes darting around the yard for any sign of a dog.
Chansik frowned. “How would I know?”
“You’re his best friend, remember?” Junghwan spat, voice full of anger.
“So that’s what this is about,” Chansik furrowed his eyebrows, but the expression looked foreign on his face, like he’d borrowed it from someone else.
“You stole my best friend,” Junghwan continued, following after Chansik, hands clenched into fists.
“He was the one who sat with me,” Chansik defended himself, stopping in his tracks and whirling around to face the shorter boy.
“Both of you, shut up,” Sunwoo stepped between them, a hand on either boy’s chest so he could push them apart. “Let’s just find out if he’s okay. I feel like I’m being watched.”
First Chansik and then Junghwan loosened their fists and continued around the house. They peered into every window, but only one room was illuminate, the curtains were pulled tightly shut. Junghwan eyed a narrow balcony on the second floor, but by now, he was too cold and stiff to even think about climbing. He was tempted to give up on the rescue mission, convincing himself that Jinyoung, indeed, was just out of town being punished.
They had circled all the way back to the front of the house with no success.
Junghwan was a split-second away from telling the boys that they all just had overactive imaginations when a high-pitched sound filled all of their eyes, loud and clear over the low rumblings of thunder.
The sound was unmistakable: a scream.
Not just any scream.
It was Jinyoung’s. It had to be.
Chansik’s courage fled his body and he trembled at the sound, knees threatening to give out from beneath him. Even Sunwoo looked shaken.
The scream had been filled with such anguish, such pain. It was as if the sound had turned into a knife and sliced at their chests.
“Where is he?” Junghwan asked frantically, running back towards the house.
Sunwoo’s eyes were wide, disbelief still trying to dominate his features. Nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong, he repeated to himself like a mantra, but Jinyoung’s scream echoed in his ears.
“We have to get inside,” Chansik already had his stubby little fingers on one of the windows, pulling on it in an attempt to get it open. Junghwan squatted to pick up a heavy stone. Sunwoo had to grab him by both his elbows to stop him from hurling it. “It sounds like he’s dying,” Chansik tried to justify their actions, giving the window another tug but it was obvious it was locked.
Junghwan shoved Sunwoo away from him, knocking the boy on his back in the cold mud.
“You can’t just break into someone’s house,” Sunwoo shouted. “You can’t just take a rock to someone’s window!”
Neither of the boys seemed to hear him. They were amped up on adrenaline and delirium, both of them pushing on the window now, using shoulders and elbows to try to muscle the thing open on its hinges.
Before Sunwoo could even get himself back onto his feet, the yard was flooded with light.
Not the color-leeching glow of lightning, but the yellow illumination of an interior light.
The other two boys dropped to their knees, trying not to get caught by whoever had turned on the light. Sunwoo scrambled on his hands and knees, pressing himself between the two boys as they held themselves flat against the side of the house.
“I’m getting too young for this,” Chansik muttered to himself, but Junghwan shushed them as they held their breaths.
The window above them opened and something was thrown out of it. Then, just as quickly, the window was slammed shut and the light turned off. Darkness fell over them too quickly for them to identify the new object on the ground in front of them. It was a lumpy shape right next to Chansik’s foot. He slid away from it.
“Was that Jinyoung’s mom?” It was the question on all three boy’s minds so it wasn’t obvious at first who had spoken. “She knows we’re here, no thanks to you two beating on the window like eight year olds.” Sunwoo.
“It’s Jinyoung,” this was Junghwan’s voice, hesitant and shaky and threatening to crack in half.
Chansik still had his eyes towards the window, but dropped his gaze to Junghwan in confusion. “What?” He asked, his teeth chattering, his dark hair plastered to the side of his face by rain, a leaf lodged in his curly locks right above his ear.
“She threw Jinyoung out at us,” Junghwan had to clarify, crawling forward over the earth. His hands sank into the muddy ground and he swore he could feel the worms and bugs crawling and squirming beneath his palm, but it was just his frantic heartbeat rattling him from his head to his toes.
“What?” Chansik repeated dumbly, following after him.
Sunwoo stayed where he was, paying careful attention to the movement he saw behind a second story window.
“It is Jinyoung,” Chansik suddenly exclaimed, crawling away like something was after him.
Junghwan stayed near the tangled mass, pulling at it, repositioning it. Then it became clear: it really was Jinyoung. Or at least it used to be.
His hair was still perfectly straight; his skin was still pale and smooth, unmarred by acne scars… but now he was just a puppet, a doll. He was made entirely of wood, carefully crafted. Every part of him was pieced together so that he looked real, human. However, the lifelessness to his eyes gave it away, the way his jaw was hinged, the metal screws in his wrists and elbows, the heavy black cord attached to his hands and feet.
JInyoung was a life-sized marionette, hollow and wooden, like how his voice had sounded on the phone.
“What did she do to him,” Chansik squeaked out. It had felt like hours or maybe days since any of them had spoken, but it could have only been the shortest of seconds.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sunwoo strongly suggested, climbing up onto his feet. The wind whipped around his hood and yanked it right off his head. “Come on!”
Chansik tried to stand. Sunwoo had to help him.
Junghwan looked horrified. “We can’t just leave him,” He snapped, watching the other two boys start across the yard. “We came all this way for him.”
“What are we going to do with him, Junghwan?” Sunwoo yelled over the wind, but Chansik was already turning back around.
Sunwoo rolled his eyes, watching as they struggled to hoist Jinyoung up off the ground, their progress halted at every step by the tangled knots in the cords, the inhuman twists of his limbs.
“Let’s just leave him,” Sunwoo insisted, ready to get back to Junghwan’s house or, better yet, his own home and spend the rest of the night convincing himself he’d dreamed this all up.
“We can’t,” Junghwan sounded frantic, crazed.
Chansik was having second thoughts. His fingers lost their speed over the knots, his gaze travelled the yard, suddenly aware that most of the shadows appeared to be moving.
Sunwoo had seen it too.
They weren’t alone.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sunwoo was tempted to just leave them. He didn’t know Chansik. He hardly knew Junghwan. He was sure he wouldn’t feel guilty.
He waited a moment too late.
They were surrounded by light again, a light in the upstairs window turning on. All the boys froze like they were statues.
The window flew open and another mass was thrown out of it. Then another and another and, in a matter of seconds, wooden mannequins lay around them in twisted lumps. Lightning flashed, showing off their features. Junghwan recognized a face or two, kids he’d gone to school with, kids he’d completely forgotten about until right this second.
“What is going on here,” Sunwoo rubbed at his eyes.
“Are we all puppets?” Chansik asked; his voice breaking.
Another one was thrown out of the window, but instead of hitting the mud with a heavy thump like all the rest, it remained suspended in the air for a moment. One of its cords had snagged on the windowsill, stopping its descent.
The mannequin, a pretty girl that Junghwan had a crush on a few months back, now hung from the house like she was on a noose, the black cord wrapped tightly around her head and neck.
It was a gruesome sight, her glass eyes with rain, hairline cracks in her cheeks, arms tangled in the cord above her head.
Chansik screamed.
“Can we go now, please?” Sunwoo begged, but he couldn’t even hear himself over Chansik’s wailing and the howling of the wind.
Puppets were everywhere, piling up like corpses in the yard.
Some had been out here before, Junghwan now realized. Half-hidden by bushes, dangling from trees, propped up against the fence, huddled under the porch like children playing hide and seek. He knew them all. Junghwan knew them all. Teachers, friends, parents he had to impress at dinners… wait, wasn’t that Shinwoo?
Before he even noticed it, Junghwan had stood up and ran towards him.
Sunwoo shouted at his back but Junghwan ignored him.
Shinwoo’s puppet lay next to the fence, his long hair as glossy and girlish as it had always been. “What has she done?” He asked his friend’s wooden face. “Has she turned us all into her playthings or have we been wooden all this time?”
He suddenly remembered what Chansik had said earlier: are we all puppets?
Had everyone in town been under some kind of spell?
Junghwan stood up, rushing back across the yard. He had seen too much. His senses were overloaded. He felt numb, rigid, out of touch. He walked right past Chansik without even registering the fact that the boy had stopped screaming, had never been screaming in the first place because he’d been made of wood.
“I want to go home,” he begged, prayed. “I want my dad back, I want my friends back.”
Where did Sunwoo go?
H e wandered around the yard, aware that it was now far larger than it had been only minutes earlier.
The house was now forever away, a towering, modern structure that must have gotten up and walked away when he hadn’t been looking. The yard was now overcrowded with trees, every limb weighed down by tangled webs of hanging mannequins.
The rain was still falling, freezing and hard against his skin. Thunder boomed and lightning flickered, but it all seemed to be coming from very far away.
With each step Junghwan took, it became just that much harder to walk, his joints stiffening. Every sensation felt dull, very far away.
Junghwan didn’t even know he’d fallen to the ground.
He may have dissolved into possibility, but he’d left nothing but wood behind.
Poll Round 21: Possibility
He had his own smart phone for one. It was brand spanking new and he got it for his birthday and he’d earned the quiet awe and respect of his classmates for a whole week.
On top of that, he was always getting perfect scores on his quizzes and tests, had amassed 250 signatures in last grade’s yearbook and could walk right by the hall monitors without a pass. He did all of this while still managing to spend all of his spare time talking about girls.
Yeah, Jung Jinyoung was pretty amazing.
That might be why it came as a shock that he would choose scrawny little Gong Chansik as his new lunch buddy. It was a Tuesday, everyone recalled. Jinyoung had walked right past his usual table to sit in front of Chansik who’d been trembling like a leaf at his approach. The whole cafeteria had gone quiet for exactly eight seconds, long enough for a lunch lady to come out of the kitchen and stare suspiciously at the kids.
Even now, a whole month after it had happened, Jinyoung and Chansik still sat together, but no one had any clue why. It couldn’t be to tutor him, Chansik had pretty decent grades. It couldn’t be because they were neighbors or anything like that because Chansik lived way on the edge of town and had to be driven in by his older sister. It definitely couldn’t be to make himself look better by association because Chansik, as the girls were now starting to discover, was quite cute.
Whatever the reason was, the two boys got along well, spending the lunch period whispering back and forth, smiling excitedly and sometimes huddling over Jinyoung’s cell phone gaping at something he’d pulled up on the screen.
Everyone had accepted this new development.
Everyone except Lee Junghwan, that is. He felt utterly betrayed by the fact that Jinyoung had found someone else to sit with at lunch without so much as a goodbye or an explanation. Jinyoung had ditched him completely and Junghwan had gotten back at him by sitting out of safe note-passing range during class and giving the monkey bars a wide berth on the playground. Jinyoung hadn’t seemed to notice, though. He was too enamored with Chansik’s dark and naturally curly hair or his skinny little nose or his stubby little fingers or whatever. Junghwan rolled his eyes.
It was never a fun thing to be the friend who got left behind, especially at a school so small where you couldn’t even fart in class without the girl three classrooms down finding out by the end of the day.
So two can play that game, Junghwan had declared and he’d found himself someone new to sit with, too.
Unfortunately, his migration caused no silence in the cafeteria and no eyes had watched him as he passed. He just got up from his lonely island of a table, walked to the row of tables by the windows that faced the playground and sat down at someone else’s lonely island of a table.
Cha Sunwoo was weird, which was why he always sat alone. He was a little chubby with two big crooked rabbit teeth and an oddly light hue to his brown hair and eyes.
A rumor had gone around school that he was actually a ghost, but this idea was quickly dispelled because everyone could see him. Now, though, everyone sort of went out of their way to avoid him, as if trying their hardest to actually turn him into a ghost just by sheer force of will. He didn’t seem too bothered by it. He was always attached to his handheld games, tapping away at the screen with his stylus. Sometimes, he pulled it out in the middle of class and none of the teachers said anything, but this may be because a few of them may have also been trying to ignore him, too.
Sunwoo glanced up; he was obviously startled that someone had acknowledged his presence.
It was easy to see the skepticism on his face, the wariness. He stared at Junghwan as if half-expecting the boy to jump at him or make some kind of joke at his expense, but Junghwan just smiled. He’d lost his best friend and was only trying to make another.
“We’re friends now,” Junghwan stated and then went back to eating.
Sunwoo nodded but then returned Junghwan’s smile, slowly and unsurely.
That was how it began.
Actually, it really began about two and a half weeks later when Jinyoung stopped showing up at school.
It was a rainy and windy Friday when Chansik sat his tray of food down on the edge of Junghwan’s and Sunwoo’s table. Their three trays barely managed to fit on the small thing, but Chansik dragged a chair from a nearby table and stared at each of the boy’s in turn, too nervous to do anything but make his bottom lip quiver.
Junghwan was the one who asked, “What’s your problem?” He narrowed his eyes, not exactly in the mood for being so close to the person who stole his friend.
“I think Jinyoung’s hurt,” Chansik explained. Sunwoo glanced up from his game and Junghwan just rolled his eyes again. “I stopped by his house but his parents wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
“Maybe he’s sick,” Sunwoo suggested without giving the boy’s concern much thought.
“Maybe he’s grounded,” Junghwan piped up. It was possible. Jinyoung was always acting like the world revolved around him. Junghwan wouldn’t put it past the guy to stir up some kind of trouble and get suspended from school.
However, Jinyoung was a bragger and if he’d gotten in trouble, he would have told everyone. Junghwan remembered that one time back in high school, their last year, freshman year, where Jinyoung had gotten suspended from school and hung out in the candy shop during afternoons to tell his buddies how it all went down before they made their ways home.
No, Junghwan realized, there’s no way Jinyoung could have been suspended for three days without anyone else knowing what he’d did wrong. Just as quickly as the thought entered his head, Junghwan abandoned it. “Maybe he’s sick,” he changed his story and went back to his food, hoping that would put an end to the conversation.
It didn’t.
Chansik still sat there, worrying his bottom lip with a stubby finger. “I think something happened to him.”
Sunwoo gulped, his handheld game still making blips and beeps and other noises. It sounded like his character was dying.
Junghwan rolled his eyes again, certain that Chansik was just being dumb, but he also had a feeling that the boy wouldn’t leave them alone until they believed (or at least acted like they believed) something was amiss. “What do you want us to do?”
“Come with me to his house after school,” Chansik stated; more like pleaded. “Maybe his parents will actually listen if there are three of us.”
“We’re only kids now, though,” Junghwan huffed. “If we were still teenagers, maybe… we’re only a couple of years away from being toddlers and infants and dissolving into genetic matter and spending the rest of eternity being a possibility.”
The other boys grew quiet. Sunwoo lost in thought but Chansik statue-still in his awe of Junghwan’s realism.
“Meet us by the flag pole after the last bell,” Junghwan said when the silence had stretched awkwardly thin.
Chansik spent the rest of the day wondering if it would hurt to be a possibility.
The weather didn’t let up by the time school let out.
In fact, the wind seemed to have picked up even more, making the trees violently dance on either side of the street. The rain wasn’t as bad, just a light misty drizzle that got blown every which way in the gale, but based on the nasty-looking dark clouds on the horizon, the three boys didn’t have a lot of time to be walking around so far from home.
The street Jinyoung lived on, some multi-syllable word that only Sunwoo could pronounce properly, weaved its way over the sweeping hills that stood to the west of the town.
If one were to look behind them as they made their way up the hills, one could see the hundreds of skeletal trees that lined the streets, the rows of houses, the farmland, and everything else clear to the lake by Sunwoo’s house.
It would have been a pretty sight in summer, but it was the dead middle of winter and with the sky darkening above them, the scenery looked nightmarish despite the expensive houses that surrounded them.
Chansik led them almost all the way to the end of the street, stopping in front of a brilliant red gate.
“Shouldn’t we be heading home?” Sunwoo had to half-shout over the noise of the wind. It would take him half an hour to walk back home from here and he doubted he would make it before the rain hit. Chansik, who lived even farther away, on the other side of the lake, probably should have been concerned about how he’d make it back home in this weather.
“We’re already here, Sunwoo,” Junghwan chided him. “We didn’t walk all of this way for no reason. Right, Chansik?” He gave the boy in question a none-too-gentle shove and the younger boy paled as he pressed the buzzer on the intercom.
They waited several seconds before a voice came through the speaker, light and calm and musical; a beautiful beacon in the murkiness of the weather.
It was Jinyoung’s mother.
Chansik interrupted her ‘who is it’ to demand to see Jinyoung, to just needing to know if he was alright.
“He’s out of town visiting family,” Jinyoung’s mother replied, immediately recognizing the voice. The musical quality left her voice, leaving nothing but steel and ice behind and even Junghwan stood up straight like he was being reprimanded.
“I’m his best friend,” Chansik insisted, getting shrill and panicky. “Why didn’t he tell me he was leaving?”
“He’s being punished,” Jinyoung’s mother said and it was like a hammer coming down on Chansik’s chest. She said nothing else, but the slight static of the speaker stopped. She’d disconnected the intercom and wouldn’t answer no matter how many more times Chansik rang the buzzer.
Sunwoo mildly suggested they climb over the white stone wall and go straight for the door but Junghwan knew there was no reason for them to be out here so he wanted to leave.
Chansik was half-crying now and Junghwan had to drag him away from the buzzer so they could make their way back down the sloping street.
“What’s he being punished for?” Sunwoo asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he ran up a high phone bill?” Junghwan spat out.
Chansik wasn’t convinced. He was as pale as a sheet and looked so fragile and thin, even in his heavy jacket, that the wind probably could have picked him up and carried him away.
“Doesn’t he have a cell phone?” Sunwoo stated the obvious. “Why don’t you call him?”
It made so much sense that it almost didn’t make any sense, but most of the boys had grown too young to keep their cell phones. ‘Now that you’re no longer in high school,’ had been Junghwan’s father’s response, but high school seemed like a lifetime away and not just a few short years.
Sunwoo had gotten the opportunity to keep his but he’d passed it up for a 3DS instead.
They’d have to go to someone’s house to make the call.
“Let’s go back to my place,” Junghwan suggested. He was finally starting to get interested in the whole situation, if only for the chance to play detective. “Maybe you guys can stay for dinner and wait the storm out?”
Sunwoo immediately agreed. The wind sounded like a massive train barreling towards them as it whistled through the branches of the evergreens. Even though he could probably see it from here, home seemed impossibly far away.
Chansik still seemed too hung up on the conversation with Jinyoung’s mother to properly respond.
“That settles it,” Junghwan went on, his dark blue scarf whipping in the wind behind him. He didn’t want to tell either of his friends how wrong all of this was starting to feel. He didn’t know Jinyoung’s mother, but it was more than a little eerie how quickly the tone of her voice had changed once Jinyoung had been mentioned. It was almost like she’d been two different people. “After we call Jinyoung, let’s play video games and laugh at how crazy we’ve been acting about this whole thing.”
Junghwan’s house was small and old and sat on a street with other small and old houses. In stark contrast to his house, Junghwan’s dad was fat and young. Surprisingly young, Chansik considered. He could remember being that age. Forty had been a good age.
“Why are you home so late?” Mr. Lee bellowed as he opened the front door for the kids. “Why would you take your time coming home in such weather?”
At first, Sunwoo was frightened at the red-faced and yelling man, but he quickly figured out that Junghwan’s dad just spoke loud and always seemed to be a little red in the face.
“I just turned the stove on so dinner will be in a while,” Mr. Lee continued, ushering the boys past the kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting company so I’ll have to see what I can do, but I’m just glad you got here before the rain hit. You might have caught colds out there.”
Once they’d been corralled into the family room, Junghwan smiled apologetically at his friends (correction: precisely one friend and precisely one unwanted guest.) “The phone is over there,” he pointed to the rickety old table by the sagging couch. “Hurry up and call Jinyoung before the wind knocks the power out.”
Chansik nodded and crossed the room obediently. When he was out of earshot, Junghwan grabbed Sunwoo by the shoulder and leaned forward to whisper into his ear. “Am I the only one getting chills?”
Sunwoo just shrugged. “It is cold outside.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, dummy. I mean this whole Jinyoung thing. Don’t you think something freaky is happening?”
Sunwoo raised an eyebrow. “His parents said he’s out of town. What’s freaky about that?”
So Sunwoo hadn’t noticed the 180 degree change in Jinyoung’s mother’s voice. Junghwan sighed, thinking that perhaps Chansik’s hysteria was just rubbing off on him. He decided it wasn’t worth thinking about and followed after Chansik. “Put it on speakerphone,” he said.
Chansik stared blankly at the phone’s cradle with its myriad buttons before Junghwan elbowed him out of the way and pressed the right one.
The familiar hollow ringing sound flooded the room, sounding even more eerie with the wind rattling the windows. Sunwoo tugged at the curtains, revealing the strangeness of the outdoors. The sky had taken on a muted, stormy green haze, rain slanted through the air almost horizontally as debris went skittering across the street.
Junghwan hated storms. He hated all the noise they made and all of the wicked ways the shadows moved outside. He gulped, ready to shout at Sunwoo to leave the curtains alone when Jinyoung’s voice filled the room.
All three boys stood rigid in their places, their eyes focused on the phone as if it had done them wrong by actually connecting them to Jinyoung.
“Jinyoung, is that you?” Chansik asked dumbly, still holding the phone’s receiver to his ear even though it was on speaker. “Your mom said you’re being punished. What did you do?”
“Something really bad,” Jinyoung stated. There was something different about his voice. All of the confidence and self-importance he usually spoke with was missing from his voice, like they were physical things that could be taken from him.
“Come on, what did you do?” Chansik pressed. “You’ve been gone from school and everyone is worried.”
Junghwan perked up at that. It wasn’t until that very second that he realized that, no, not everyone was worried. At school, people acted like there wasn’t a single thing out of place. Only Chansik had seemed frantic and it was only when he’d sat by them at lunch that Junghwan and Sunwoo had even paid attention to Jinyoung’s absence.
It was as if they had forgotten about him or as if he’d never been around in the first place.
“I didn’t mean to worry you guys. I just have to take responsibility.” Jinyoung said, snapping Junghwan out of his thoughts.
It sounded like Jinyoung, it really did, but it also didn’t sound like him. The Jinyoung everyone knew wouldn’t dare sound the least bit apologetic.
Chansik must have noticed it, too, because he slowly turned around to look over his shoulder at Junghwan, his eyes wide and vacant. “Your mom got mad at us for asking about you.”
“What do you mean ‘us’?” Jinyoung asked.
“Me and Junghwan and…” Chansik hesitated.
“Sunwoo,” Sunwoo prompted.
“Sunwoo,” Chansik said into the phone.
Jinyoung took a second to process this, as if recalling faces. “I’m fine where I am. You guys don’t have to worry about me.”
“Of course we do,” Junghwan took a few bold strides towards the phone. “We’re your friends, Jinyoung,” and as soon as he said it, it felt weird. He’d been going out of his way to ignore Jinyoung for nearly an entire month now. This was the first time in a while that he’d even put Jinyoung and the word friend in the same sentence, let alone thought.
“I don’t need friends where I am,” Jinyoung said and promptly hung up.
A rumble of thunder punctuated the end of the conversation and the three boys stood as still as frozen water.
“Something’s not right,” Chansik whimpered, still cradling the phone to his ear.
“He didn’t sound like himself,” Junghwan agreed.
Sunwoo looked from one boy to the other, his light eyes wide. “What’s gotten into you guys? We wanted to talk to Jinyoung so we talked to Jinyoung. I don’t see what’s weird about that. He sounded fine.”
“You don’t know him,” Chansik and Junghwan said at the exact same moment, their gazes first focused on Sunwoo and then on each other.
Sunwoo looked at both of them like they’d gone crazy.
“We have to find out where he is,” Junghwan reached forward to snatch the phone away from Chansik’s ear and put it back on the charger. “I think his parents may have hurt him somehow.”
“Are you kidding?” Sunwoo asked in disbelief.
Chansik nodded furiously in agreement with Junghwan. “It’s like they don’t want anyone to think something’s wrong.”
“Which just means something is wrong,” Junghwan agreed. He once again recalled how quickly Mrs. Jung’s voice had changed once her son had been brought up. He also thought about how wooden Jinyoung’s voice sounded, almost like he was reading what to say or like he was repeating what someone else told him to say. “I bet he’s not even out of town,” Junghwan sounded a whole lot more certain than he felt. “I bet he’s still at that house.”
Chansik, so unsure about what to believe that he was willing to believe anything, nodded quickly. “We have to go back.”
“You’ve both gone crazy,” Sunwoo took a step back, as if the crazy were contagious. “You’ve both completely lost it.”
Lightning flickered outside; sharp blue-white light flooding the dimly-lit room and leeching it of its color for a split-second.
“We go once my dad’s asleep,” Junghwan stated, right as booming thunder followed.
Time seemed to be malfunctioning. Minutes felt like hours only to turn around and feel like seconds. Time seemed to do that a lot. It seemed to ebb and flow however it pleased, stretching thin one moment and condensing thickly the next. There were days where it was almost like a physical thing in the air, warping and shifting and making things complicated for everyone.
Oddly enough, it had been moving in the same general direction lately: backwards. They’d all aged once before, their skin wrinkly and dry, their eyesight failing, their breath coming in wheezes… but then time hiccupped and, over the years, skin tightened, hair darkened and everyone grew spritely and young again.
There was no explanation for it. It just happened and had been happening for decades so no one talked about it anymore.
All those screwed up years could mess with memories and dreams, however, because wouldn’t it be odd to remember that you had already been fourteen years old? That you’d already lived a life? That you’d already been friends with the people across from you a hundred something years in the past?
Perhaps being old twice did your head in?
Dinner was exceptionally quiet and tense. Mr. Lee was curious about the silence and looked at each of the boys from his seat at the head of the table, trying to figure out why they all sat so still and looked so glum. Sunwoo, a bit more animated than the other boys, ate enough for two and then pulled out his handheld game right there at the table.
Chansik and Junghwan took longer to eat their food and Chansik didn’t even finish his plate. Every now and then, they exchanged glances, having entire conversations in the time it took to blink at each other.
Then, just as Mr. Lee stood up to collect dishes, Junghwan fired off a random question: “Dad, do you remember Jinyoung?”
Chansik sat up straight.
Mr. Lee just turned to look over his round shoulder. “The name doesn’t sound familiar.”
A cold chill swept through the room, like a window had been left open and the storm was getting in. Or maybe it was just Junghwan’s nerves. How could the name not sound familiar? He and Jinyoung had been friends since senior year of high school and Jinyoung had spent plenty of nights over at this house, sitting at this dinner table.
“Jung Jinyoung,” Junghwan said calmly, quietly, almost like a squeak. “You know, the kid who lives up in the hills? The kid who stuck his head in red paint last year because he thought that’s how people dyed their hair?”
Mr. Lee grabbed the last of the plates from the table and carried the precarious stack over to the sink. “Oh right, that fellow who broke my car window with a baseball last summer?”
‘No, dad, that was Dongwoo,’ Junghwan wanted to say but instead, he just smiled and nodded. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
He waited for his dad to get preoccupied with the dishes before turning to Chansik with a worried face. Maybe his dad just had poor memory? Or maybe Jinyoung didn’t come over half as often as he’d thought?
Chansik gripped the hem of Junghwan’s shirt in what was probably supposed to be a reassuring manner, and then they both looked across the table to Sunwoo, who had looked up from his game. The blue-white light of the screen of his game, so much like the lightning that flickered outside, made Sunwoo’s eyes look even lighter, almost as if they were glowing.
Sunwoo still didn’t look convinced, though. He seemed to be going through a great deal of effort to not be worried. In fact, if it weren’t for the storm raging outside, he probably would have donned his hat, coat and boots and walked home, even in the dark.
It was just an odd little coincidence, Junghwan told himself. He had probably brought home enough different friends over the past few months that, to his dad, they were all the same kid. Adults were always bad at paying attention to stuff like that, right?
“Did you call your sister or your parents, Chansik?” Junghwan suddenly asked.
Chansik first looked confused, and then gasped when he realized he hadn’t. He’d left school practically as soon as the bell rang. His sister had probably waited who knows how long for him in the parking lot. “No I haven’t,” he stated.
“Let’s go call them, quick,” Junghwan stood up, practically pulling Chansik out of his chair as he went back to the living room, back to the phone. Sunwoo, reluctantly, followed, but only to get away from Mr. Lee’s off-key singing.
The living room seemed even dimmer now than it had an hour before. The floor lamp was in the same place putting off the same amount of heat and yellowish light, but the room seemed darker somehow, colder, stranger… things Junghwan shouldn’t have been feeling in his own home.
Chansik pried his wrist free of the older boy’s grasp and crossed the room to the phone. While he talked, Junghwan confronted Sunwoo, standing almost nose to nose with him. “Everyone’s memories about him are messed up,” he said, keeping his voice low. Sound travelled quite a ways in the small house and he didn’t want his father overhearing.
“By everyone, you just mean your dad,” Sunwoo corrected him, not backing down. “You’re being silly Junghwan. Both of you are being silly and you’re starting to freak me out.”
“I’ll prove something’s wrong here,” Junghwan furrowed his eyebrows. Why couldn’t anyone else see what was so obvious? “I’ll call a few of Jinyoung’s friends and prove it to you… but shouldn’t you call your parents first?”
Sunwoo shrugged. “Mom will just think I’m with dad and dad will just think I’m with mom. It’s alright. Can we watch cartoons or something?”
Chansik clicked off the phone. “My sister had been driving around town looking for me,” his voice was soft and low. “She cursed me out when I told her I was at a friend’s house. She thought I’d been snatched up or something.”
“Did you ask her about Jinyoung?” Junghwan asked.
“His sister was afraid that he’d been abducted but the only thing you can think about is Jinyoung?” Sunwoo snapped.
Junghwan shushed him.
Chansik looked pale, almost transparent. He always seemed a bit insubstantial, more like a ghost than Sunwoo could ever be.
Junghwan went on, “The past couple of days, did Jinyoung act funny? Say anything weird? Do anything out of the ordinary?”
Chansik stiffened beneath the barrage of questions. With a frustrated groan, Sunwoo sank onto the couch, avoiding the side that had been flattened by Mr. Lee over the years.
“It depends on what you mean by weird,” Chansik responded. Even his voice seemed as light as air, vaporous. “Jinyoung was always into odd things. The pictures he had on his phone, the-“
“What kind of pictures?” Junghwan interrupted. Now it was Junghwan who was frantic and Chansik who was looking at him strangely. It was as if it were a virus creeping from one boy to the next. Sunwoo could only hope that he didn’t catch it as he watched the exchange. “Was it pictures of girls? Snapshots up their skirts?”
Chansik’s face flushed. It was the first hint of color to touch his face since he got off the phone. “No, nothing nasty like that. Just pictures of his room, photographs on the walls and the things he collects.”
Junghwan once again felt the crushing blow of betrayal. Jinyoung had never showed such photos to him. In fact, not once had Jinyoung ever invited Junghwan to his house, but Chansik, who he had only been friends with a handful of weeks, had seen pictures of the inside of his room?
It was an insignificant feeling, or at least it should have been, but the pain burned bright in Junghwan’s chest and it took all of his strength not to scream or slap the boy in front of him.
“What does he collect?” Sunwoo asked from the other side of the room.
“I don’t think I should say. It might be a bit embarrassing.”
Junghwan rolled his eyes. “Tell us! It could be an important clue or something.”
“Weird things, like heads and arms and eyes and hair.”
Sunwoo and Junghwan exchanged looks. “He collects parts of people?” Sunwoo asked, his skepticism all but forgotten. “He’s a serial killer?”
“No, they are parts of dolls,” Chansik corrected hastily.
Junghwan scrunched up his face. He would have taken people parts instead. Jinyoung collected dolls? How absurd. He couldn’t even wrap his head around the nonsense.
Sunwoo must have felt the same thing as well, he looked ready to laugh, but when Chansik delivered no punch line or giggled and told them he was kidding, Sunwoo shivered.
Junghwan just continued to feel even more betrayed. He’d been friends with Jinyoung for so long but the guy hadn’t mentioned a single word about his strange hobby. “So he’s got like this creepy collection of dolls in his room?” He asked.
“No, just the parts,” Chansik said. “He has these big old bins all around his room, labeled with stickers. I think the bin full of eyes is the creepiest.”
“I would imagine,” Junghwan shook his head, starting to think that perhaps losing his best friend was a blessing in disguise. The guy was a creep. “What about the pictures he has; the photographs you were talking about?”
Chansik paled again, pacing back and forth. He seemed to be regretting ever bringing any of this up. He’d broken Jinyoung’s trust. He’d told people. Now what?
Junghwan propped a hand on his hip. “Come on, we need to know, Chansik.”
“Pictures of us,” Chansik blurted out. “He’s got photographs of us all together that I don’t remember taking. We’re like high school age and smiling and laughing like we’ve known each other forever.”
They fell into silence.
“Together? Like a group?” Junghwan needed to know.
Chansik didn’t answer verbally, but the look on his face was enough. The idea was absurd. Jinyoung and Sunwoo had probably never had a conversation in their entire lives and Junghwan knew that he never would have given Chansik the time of day if it weren’t for him plopping down at their lunch table a few hours ago.
Under no circumstances would they have all been photographed together.
“So he collects weird things,” Sunwoo said, waving a hand dismissively. It seemed like he’d remain the voice of reason to the very end. “A girl in my class goes to the bathrooms between classes and collects other girl’s hair ties they left behind. The guy who sits in front of me in homeroom collects broken pencil lead off the classroom floor.”
Chansik ran a hand through his tangled, curly hair, his stubby fingers catching in the dark locks.
Junghwan, for once, wanted to side with Sunwoo. When he was younger, he collected crickets and other little bugs in jars until the top of his dresser was a mortuary of insects. He’d still have the collection today if his aunt hadn’t come over, been drawn to his room by the horrific stench and tossed every last jar out while Junghwan had been away at school.
Yet something seemed strange about Jinyoung’s collection. A collection of dolls he could somewhat understand, but why dismantle them and organize them by part? What value were they then? What did he plan to do with it all?
He didn’t even want to go into the photographs.
Talk of dolls had distracted him from his original goal. He brushed past Chansik and made his way to the phone. He still had a few of Jinyoung’s friends to call.
“Now do you think something weird is going on,” Junghwan asked later that night.
The boys had honestly attempted to sleep to get their energy up, but they were all too full of nervous energy to even lie still on the blankets Junghwan had laid out on the floor.
“I bet it’s some joke,” Sunwoo still clung to his belief. “Jinyoung just got a whole bunch of people in on some sick joke.”
“That would make it one elaborate prank,” Chansik mumbled, his voice hardly audible over the storm.
The rain had lessened, leaving mainly a wicked wind behind. Junghwan lay sprawled on the floor by his bedroom door so that he could peep out the crack to check for the tell-tale signs of his dad retiring to bed for the night.
Chansik stayed by the window, listening to it and the rest of the old house rattle.
Sunwoo was the only one who seemed calm, tangled up in a blanket and staring up at the ceiling.
“I mean, Jinyoung would have had to have gotten his mom in on it… the principal had to have let him stay out of school… Junghwan’s dad… and what about all of the people we asked from school? There’s no way Jinyoung got everyone together just to mess with us.”
Now that Chansik had said it in so many words, even Sunwoo’s desire to cling to normalcy was starting to falter. He swallowed. “So you’re going to tell me everyone just forgot Jinyoung existed? Like collective amnesia or something? That only works in video games and even then it’s cheesy.”
Junghwan shushed them from the door. “Keep your voices down or my dad will hear you guys.”
Chansik and Sunwoo glared at each other, barely able to see in the near-dark of the bedroom.
This is a crazy plan, Sunwoo thought. Are they really thinking about trekking around not only at two in the morning but in the middle of a winter storm? They’d probably turn into frozen statues the second they got up the block!
Chansik, who probably should have been trembling as bad as the leaves outside, seemed the most eager to go.
Sunwoo glanced from Chansik to Junghwan, who still gazed out into the hallway, waiting for the light beneath his dad’s door to go out as the television was turned off for the night. To Sunwoo, Junghwan seemed more interested in solving a mystery that probably wasn’t there, in going on some dangerous and foolish adventure just for the sake of having fun. Especially over the last few hours, Junghwan seemed to be less and less concerned about actually making sure his friend was ok.
Sunwoo realized that he was just an innocent bystander in all of this. He didn’t even know Jinyoung and hardly liked the boy. The kid’s arrogance was annoying and it made Sunwoo really mad how much Jinyoung could get away with just because everyone thought he was hot.
Maybe the main reason why he didn’t want to go was jealousy? He couldn’t help how he looked. He probably tried harder than anyone else, to pass his classes, to make friends, but Jinyoung effortlessly blew through everything. Life was a game to him, a popularity contest, while to Sunwoo it was a struggle just to get to school some mornings.
A thud on the roof made all the boys jump.
There was an eerie silence for a few short seconds and then something fell right past the window. Chansik looked like he’d nearly pissed himself in fright as he flung himself to the floor.
Another few seconds passed, all three of them lying still as they waited. They weren’t sure what they waited for, but they did, holding their breaths and staring wide-eyed at each other.
Finally, Chansik stood up and gazed outside the window and he visibly slumped and relaxed. “It’s just a big ole tree branch,” he announced.
Sunwoo let out a sigh of relief, and then realized just how much he’d bought into this nonsense. He huffed and rolled over onto his side and Junghwan got to his feet and pulled the door open. “If a tree or something fell over the roof, it might have knocked a hole in something. I gotta tell my dad so he can check it once its daylight.”
He stepped out into the hall and Chansik relaxed even further. Their mission of secrecy had been foiled. There was no need to hide anymore because there was a good chance they wouldn’t even be able to sneak out now.
They’d intended to go out the back door off the covered porch. If they tried to go out the window, the wind would probably stir up everything in Junghwans’ room and make enough noise to alert his dad. It would make a mess if they left it open and there was a chance they wouldn’t be able to get back in if they shut it behind them. The door was the safest bet, the quietest bet, but Chansik realized none of that mattered if they were about to brave a storm to… to what? Break into someone’s house in the middle of the night? If they were going to be so bold, they should have asked Mr. Lee for permission at dinner or something.
“Guys,” Junghwan stated from the door, his voice sounding so strange and high-pitched that both of the other boys jumped to their feet.
“What is it?” Sunwoo asked.
“My dad’s not in the house.”
“What do you mean he’s-” Sunwoo began.
“He’s not in the house,” Junghwan repeated, sternly enough that even Chansik clamped his mouth shut.
Sunwoo rolled his eyes. This was either an elaborate ploy or Junghwan had just somehow missed his dad in the small house. “He probably just went out.”
“Who would leave their house in this weather?” Chansik asked, but no one answered because they’d all been planning to do that exact same thing.
Sunwoo was the first to move, brushing past Junghwan and stepping out into the hallway, muttering to himself about people acting crazy and not looking at facts. “See? Look. Your dad’s car is still in-” He stopped short and the other two boys could hear his surprised intake of breath even from down the hall. “-the driveway,” Sunwoo finished dumbly.
Chansik and Junghwan wandered up the narrow and dark hallway, the house creaked in the wind all around them, to the point where it felt like it was shifting and writhing like something living beneath their feet.
Sunwoo stood near the front of the house, gazing out a window. The stormy light spilled in through the glass and cut deep shadows across his round face. “What’s going on?” Chansik asked, joining Sunwoo at the window but not immediately seeing what the older boy was looking at.
Junghwan hung back, as if he were afraid of what was outside or, more likely, as if he already knew.
Chansik walked in front with the big flashlight, the bright beam seemed like it was the only source of light in the whole town. As rain fell at ridiculous angles in front of them, Chansik shifted the light this way and that, sending the beam over bushes and cracked sidewalk and tree limbs lying in the street.
They had trusted Junghwan with the umbrella but the wind had snapped it back and bent the handle like a broken bone before they’d even got to the end of the block. It’s not like it helped much. The three of them were soaked to the bone by the cold rain before they’d even stepped foot off Mr. Lee’s property.
“What happened to him?” Chansik asked.
It was the first thing any of them had said since they’d left Mr. Lee behind in the middle of the front lawn where they’d found him.
The man had aged... the wrong way. His hair had turned stark white and his face had become spotted and wrinkled and bare. Whatever had happened to him, it made him lay flat on his back, staring unblinking and unseeing into the raging storm.
Junghwan had screamed, but every sound had been snatched away by the wind. He’d beat on his father’s chest but it was like he was hitting a brick wall.
Sunwoo had stayed quiet. He knew what had happened. The man had died.
He’d aged and his body had failed him and now he was gone. Death wasn’t exactly a concept that was easy to wrap your head around when you’ve gone as long as you can remember knowing that you’d continue living as a possibility, a chance, a collection of genetic material that needed that extra little something to be something.
However, the main reason why he stayed so quiet was because he was finally starting to accept that something was wrong here, that reality had been knocked just slightly askew. Even a lover of video games like himself was having difficulty wrapping his head around what was possibly going on.
However, they were doing well by going back to Jinyoung’s house. Even from this distance, Sunwoo felt like he could see it through the hills and the trees and the darkness of the storm. In a way, it felt like he could feel the house looking right back at him, so impossibly far yet so impossibly close.
“We have to get him back,” Junghwan stated simply.
Chansik and, far more reluctantly, Sunwoo nodded.
Jinyoung’s house was just like it had been a few hours ago, but Chansik didn’t really know why he’d expected it to turn nightmarish. The walls were still made of the same stone, the gate was still red, but to three sniffling and sneezing and freezing boys, even the promise of warmth inside the house’s walls wasn’t all that appealing.
There was just something about the house that all three of them didn’t like.
Junghwan didn’t bother with the intercom. He just dropped the umbrella (he’d still been carrying it) onto the ground and clambered over the wet stone wall. Chansik was next to follow. Being less athletic, Junghwan had to rather unceremoniously hoist him up from the top of the wall.
Sunwoo eventually followed, swinging himself over into the Jung’s front lawn and following the other two boys up to the side of the house. The three of them stood with their noses to one of the windows, trying to peer inside.
The lights were off in this room, only the glow from a room further down the hall gave the furniture any definition in the darkness. Chansik was the first to identify the room as a study or an office, the computer state-of-the-art but the bookcase filled to the brim with old books.
“We have to find Jinyoung’s room,” Chansik stated, not sure where this feeling of bravery was coming from. The other boys were older than him, but Junghwan seemed too grief-stricken and Sunwoo too indifferent for anyone but him to get them moving.
“Is it upstairs or downstairs,” Junghwan half-whispered, moving away from the window to continue around the house, eyes darting around the yard for any sign of a dog.
Chansik frowned. “How would I know?”
“You’re his best friend, remember?” Junghwan spat, voice full of anger.
“So that’s what this is about,” Chansik furrowed his eyebrows, but the expression looked foreign on his face, like he’d borrowed it from someone else.
“You stole my best friend,” Junghwan continued, following after Chansik, hands clenched into fists.
“He was the one who sat with me,” Chansik defended himself, stopping in his tracks and whirling around to face the shorter boy.
“Both of you, shut up,” Sunwoo stepped between them, a hand on either boy’s chest so he could push them apart. “Let’s just find out if he’s okay. I feel like I’m being watched.”
First Chansik and then Junghwan loosened their fists and continued around the house. They peered into every window, but only one room was illuminate, the curtains were pulled tightly shut. Junghwan eyed a narrow balcony on the second floor, but by now, he was too cold and stiff to even think about climbing. He was tempted to give up on the rescue mission, convincing himself that Jinyoung, indeed, was just out of town being punished.
They had circled all the way back to the front of the house with no success.
Junghwan was a split-second away from telling the boys that they all just had overactive imaginations when a high-pitched sound filled all of their eyes, loud and clear over the low rumblings of thunder.
The sound was unmistakable: a scream.
Not just any scream.
It was Jinyoung’s. It had to be.
Chansik’s courage fled his body and he trembled at the sound, knees threatening to give out from beneath him. Even Sunwoo looked shaken.
The scream had been filled with such anguish, such pain. It was as if the sound had turned into a knife and sliced at their chests.
“Where is he?” Junghwan asked frantically, running back towards the house.
Sunwoo’s eyes were wide, disbelief still trying to dominate his features. Nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong, he repeated to himself like a mantra, but Jinyoung’s scream echoed in his ears.
“We have to get inside,” Chansik already had his stubby little fingers on one of the windows, pulling on it in an attempt to get it open. Junghwan squatted to pick up a heavy stone. Sunwoo had to grab him by both his elbows to stop him from hurling it. “It sounds like he’s dying,” Chansik tried to justify their actions, giving the window another tug but it was obvious it was locked.
Junghwan shoved Sunwoo away from him, knocking the boy on his back in the cold mud.
“You can’t just break into someone’s house,” Sunwoo shouted. “You can’t just take a rock to someone’s window!”
Neither of the boys seemed to hear him. They were amped up on adrenaline and delirium, both of them pushing on the window now, using shoulders and elbows to try to muscle the thing open on its hinges.
Before Sunwoo could even get himself back onto his feet, the yard was flooded with light.
Not the color-leeching glow of lightning, but the yellow illumination of an interior light.
The other two boys dropped to their knees, trying not to get caught by whoever had turned on the light. Sunwoo scrambled on his hands and knees, pressing himself between the two boys as they held themselves flat against the side of the house.
“I’m getting too young for this,” Chansik muttered to himself, but Junghwan shushed them as they held their breaths.
The window above them opened and something was thrown out of it. Then, just as quickly, the window was slammed shut and the light turned off. Darkness fell over them too quickly for them to identify the new object on the ground in front of them. It was a lumpy shape right next to Chansik’s foot. He slid away from it.
“Was that Jinyoung’s mom?” It was the question on all three boy’s minds so it wasn’t obvious at first who had spoken. “She knows we’re here, no thanks to you two beating on the window like eight year olds.” Sunwoo.
“It’s Jinyoung,” this was Junghwan’s voice, hesitant and shaky and threatening to crack in half.
Chansik still had his eyes towards the window, but dropped his gaze to Junghwan in confusion. “What?” He asked, his teeth chattering, his dark hair plastered to the side of his face by rain, a leaf lodged in his curly locks right above his ear.
“She threw Jinyoung out at us,” Junghwan had to clarify, crawling forward over the earth. His hands sank into the muddy ground and he swore he could feel the worms and bugs crawling and squirming beneath his palm, but it was just his frantic heartbeat rattling him from his head to his toes.
“What?” Chansik repeated dumbly, following after him.
Sunwoo stayed where he was, paying careful attention to the movement he saw behind a second story window.
“It is Jinyoung,” Chansik suddenly exclaimed, crawling away like something was after him.
Junghwan stayed near the tangled mass, pulling at it, repositioning it. Then it became clear: it really was Jinyoung. Or at least it used to be.
His hair was still perfectly straight; his skin was still pale and smooth, unmarred by acne scars… but now he was just a puppet, a doll. He was made entirely of wood, carefully crafted. Every part of him was pieced together so that he looked real, human. However, the lifelessness to his eyes gave it away, the way his jaw was hinged, the metal screws in his wrists and elbows, the heavy black cord attached to his hands and feet.
JInyoung was a life-sized marionette, hollow and wooden, like how his voice had sounded on the phone.
“What did she do to him,” Chansik squeaked out. It had felt like hours or maybe days since any of them had spoken, but it could have only been the shortest of seconds.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sunwoo strongly suggested, climbing up onto his feet. The wind whipped around his hood and yanked it right off his head. “Come on!”
Chansik tried to stand. Sunwoo had to help him.
Junghwan looked horrified. “We can’t just leave him,” He snapped, watching the other two boys start across the yard. “We came all this way for him.”
“What are we going to do with him, Junghwan?” Sunwoo yelled over the wind, but Chansik was already turning back around.
Sunwoo rolled his eyes, watching as they struggled to hoist Jinyoung up off the ground, their progress halted at every step by the tangled knots in the cords, the inhuman twists of his limbs.
“Let’s just leave him,” Sunwoo insisted, ready to get back to Junghwan’s house or, better yet, his own home and spend the rest of the night convincing himself he’d dreamed this all up.
“We can’t,” Junghwan sounded frantic, crazed.
Chansik was having second thoughts. His fingers lost their speed over the knots, his gaze travelled the yard, suddenly aware that most of the shadows appeared to be moving.
Sunwoo had seen it too.
They weren’t alone.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sunwoo was tempted to just leave them. He didn’t know Chansik. He hardly knew Junghwan. He was sure he wouldn’t feel guilty.
He waited a moment too late.
They were surrounded by light again, a light in the upstairs window turning on. All the boys froze like they were statues.
The window flew open and another mass was thrown out of it. Then another and another and, in a matter of seconds, wooden mannequins lay around them in twisted lumps. Lightning flashed, showing off their features. Junghwan recognized a face or two, kids he’d gone to school with, kids he’d completely forgotten about until right this second.
“What is going on here,” Sunwoo rubbed at his eyes.
“Are we all puppets?” Chansik asked; his voice breaking.
Another one was thrown out of the window, but instead of hitting the mud with a heavy thump like all the rest, it remained suspended in the air for a moment. One of its cords had snagged on the windowsill, stopping its descent.
The mannequin, a pretty girl that Junghwan had a crush on a few months back, now hung from the house like she was on a noose, the black cord wrapped tightly around her head and neck.
It was a gruesome sight, her glass eyes with rain, hairline cracks in her cheeks, arms tangled in the cord above her head.
Chansik screamed.
“Can we go now, please?” Sunwoo begged, but he couldn’t even hear himself over Chansik’s wailing and the howling of the wind.
Puppets were everywhere, piling up like corpses in the yard.
Some had been out here before, Junghwan now realized. Half-hidden by bushes, dangling from trees, propped up against the fence, huddled under the porch like children playing hide and seek. He knew them all. Junghwan knew them all. Teachers, friends, parents he had to impress at dinners… wait, wasn’t that Shinwoo?
Before he even noticed it, Junghwan had stood up and ran towards him.
Sunwoo shouted at his back but Junghwan ignored him.
Shinwoo’s puppet lay next to the fence, his long hair as glossy and girlish as it had always been. “What has she done?” He asked his friend’s wooden face. “Has she turned us all into her playthings or have we been wooden all this time?”
He suddenly remembered what Chansik had said earlier: are we all puppets?
Had everyone in town been under some kind of spell?
Junghwan stood up, rushing back across the yard. He had seen too much. His senses were overloaded. He felt numb, rigid, out of touch. He walked right past Chansik without even registering the fact that the boy had stopped screaming, had never been screaming in the first place because he’d been made of wood.
“I want to go home,” he begged, prayed. “I want my dad back, I want my friends back.”
Where did Sunwoo go?
H e wandered around the yard, aware that it was now far larger than it had been only minutes earlier.
The house was now forever away, a towering, modern structure that must have gotten up and walked away when he hadn’t been looking. The yard was now overcrowded with trees, every limb weighed down by tangled webs of hanging mannequins.
The rain was still falling, freezing and hard against his skin. Thunder boomed and lightning flickered, but it all seemed to be coming from very far away.
With each step Junghwan took, it became just that much harder to walk, his joints stiffening. Every sensation felt dull, very far away.
Junghwan didn’t even know he’d fallen to the ground.
He may have dissolved into possibility, but he’d left nothing but wood behind.
Poll Round 21: Possibility