The door wouldn't open.
He had twisted the lock so many times that the metal had grown warm under his palms, but it wouldn't budge, wouldn't so much as rattle.
Taejun's breath fogged against the doorframe, his cheek pressed to the wood, listening for the world outside: footsteps, voices, traffic, anything that proved time hadn't stopped around him, but there was nothing, just silence.
The humming had gone quiet for a moment, as if holding its breath, waiting.
He backed away, hands slick with sweat, shoulders tight as wires.
The lightbulb overhead flickered again— once, twice— and on the third blink, the apartment changed.
The hallway behind him had stretched, not physically, not like in some cartoonish distortion, but subtly, just enough that he knew it wasn't the same.
The paint on the walls had cracked and peeled in strips he didn't remember.
The carpet was matted with dark stains that hadn't been there before.
The air smelled different now: not just mold and old wood, but something sweet and rotting, like spoiled fruit left in the sun.
Taejun swallowed the rising sting in his throat.
His mind scrambled for an explanation, hallucination, panic response, trauma echo from the woman's corpse, but the logic didn't stick.
The place had changed.
The air itself had turned on him.
Then he heard it.
Soft, like someone speaking through cotton.
A woman's voice, far down the hall, where the darkness thickened around the corners like a mouth ready to swallow him whole.
"...Taejun?"
He froze.
The name hit him like a blow to the chest.
It wasn't the voice of the landlord, or a neighbor, or someone watching TV behind a paper-thin wall.
It was his mother.
"Taejun," she said again, louder this time, the tone trembling with love and confusion, the way she always said it when waking him up for school, back when mornings were still real, when pancakes were slightly burnt and the only thing he feared was forgetting his homework.
That voice shouldn't be here.
It hadn't been heard in months.
She had disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only the torn wallpaper, the lukewarm coffee, the untouched breakfast on the counter, and silence.
Everyone had said she ran away, some hinted at darker things, but she had never called out like this.
Not once, not even in his dreams.
His chest tightened as he moved forward, slowly, step by uncertain step, the hallway stretching with him.
The air grew thicker, clinging to his skin like humidity made of breath.
The voice continued, softer now, drifting around the corners like smoke.
"Come here, sweetheart. I've been waiting for you. I've been missing you for a while."
He knew this wasn't right.
Every part of his body screamed against it, every nerve lit with warning, but still he walked, drawn by something weird and hollow, something deeper than reason.
Her voice wasn't just familiar, it was needed.
It wrapped around the part of him that had been starving since the day she vanished.
Then he heard another sound, footsteps behind him.
It stopped mid-step.
For a moment, all sound drained again, no more humming, no more voice, no creak of the floor beneath his socks.
Just the dense, crushing quiet.
And then, from behind him, closer than it should've been: "Where are you going?"
Taejun turned sharply.
His brother stood at the far end of the hallway, where the door used to be, though now only a blank wall remained.
His older brother, standing just like he remembered, school uniform slightly rumpled, one sock pulled higher than the other, hands at his sides, but there was something wrong.
His eyes.
They were wide, as if something inside him was trying to crawl out through his pupils.
His mouth hung slightly open, breath shallow, skin pale and drawn tight over his bones, like someone who hadn't eaten or slept in days.
And yet he stood there like nothing had changed, like this was normal.
"You weren't supposed to go there," his brother said flatly, his voice low and warped slightly, as though dragged across a stone wall. "She's not real. Don't listen to her."
"I… I heard her. She, she called me," Taejun whispered, unsure if his voice even left his throat.
His brother tilted his head.
The motion was sharp and sudden, like a puppet's jerk.
He blinked slowly. "No, you didn't. That wasn't her. Mom's gone."
"No, she's not. I heard her."
"You heard what this place wanted you to hear!"
Taejun stepped back, his spine brushing the cracked wall behind him.
The hallway seemed to pulse.
The shadows moved like they had weight now.
He felt the floor breathe beneath his feet.
He tried to look away from his brother's eyes, but they locked him in place, a stare filled with something not quite human.
"But… you're not supposed to be here either," Taejun whispered.
"I know," his brother replied. "Neither are you."
The lights blinked again, and for the briefest second, his brother's form flickered, not disappeared, not vanished, but twisted, distorted, like his skin didn't quite fit.
There was something underneath, something writhing.
And Taejun knew, whatever this place was, it had taken pieces of them both.
Then came a slam, not from the hallway, but from the room behind him.
He turned around, heart seizing in his chest, just in time to hear the door creak open on its own.
The room beyond yawned like a wound, lightless and wet with sound.
The humming returned, louder now, vibrating the walls with unnatural pitch, and the voice that came from within no longer belonged to his mother.
But it still said his name.
"Taejun."
He felt his mind splinter.
Something deep inside clawed against the walls of his skull, trying to get out, trying to run, but his legs didn't move.
His thoughts tangled like a noose.
He didn't understand what was happening.
Was this a flashback?
Was the corpse still haunting him, its trauma leaking into everything?
Was this just shock?
Dissociation?
A psychotic break?
He didn't know. But then hands reached from the room.
And they were cold.
They weren't grabbing him, they were feeling along the doorway, stroking the edges, caressing the wood, slow and gentle like someone waking up after a long, angry sleep.
The skin was pale and glossy, fingers long, nails cracked and yellowed like something that had been buried far too long.
Taejun backed up again, his breath caught in his throat, shaking as the voice rose into a grotesque imitation of maternal care.
"You're just tired, sweetheart. Come lie down on Mama's lap. Mama's waiting."
He couldn't breathe as the air was heavy with rot and warmth, like a fever room that had never cooled down.
He stumbled backward, clutching his backpack to his chest like a lifeline, turning toward his brother for help, only to find him gone.
The hallway was empty again.
And the room behind him creaked wider.
Taejun ran, but the apartment had no end anymore.
He didn't know how far he ran, he only knew that the hallway never ended.
His steps thudded over the same soft, matted carpet that squelched faintly now, as if soaked beneath the surface.
The floral wallpaper, once faded and peeling, was no longer just torn, it pulsed, like skin.
And the lights above him flickered violently, but never fully went out, leaving everything bathed in a jaundiced yellow glow that only made the rot show clearer.
Each door he passed was shut tight.
Some of them breathed.
One of them wept.
Another bled faintly from the bottom crack, a dark fluid that smelled of iron and wet copper and something else, something meatier.
Taejun didn't stop.
His lungs screamed.
His backpack bounced wildly against his shoulders.
He couldn't remember dropping his phone, but it was gone.
The weight of the world had shrunk to this one impossible corridor, this breathing thing that refused to end.
And somewhere behind him, he could still hear her voice, low and crooning, sticky with affection.
"Come back to me, my sweetheart. You know this world won't love you like I do."
His mother's voice, not quite.
Something had taken her voice and made it longer, wetter, filled with syrup and decay.
It slid through his ears like oil.
It smelled like home, but in the way a corpse could still wear perfume.
He turned a corner that he didn't remember being there.
The hallway changed.
The walls widened into a small room, a foyer of sorts, choked with dust and shadows, wallpaper now completely gone, revealing something beneath it that looked too much like flesh.
It stretched beneath where the paper used to be, and if he looked at it too long, it twitched slightly.
Taejun backed away.
His legs trembled.
He pressed his back to the nearest door, intending to slide along it and move forward, but the door behind him clicked.
It wasn't open, but unlocked, slowly and patiently.
He froze.
Then, before he could react, the door swung open with a low, wet sound, like something tearing.
And behind it was a kitchen.
His mother's kitchen, where their old house still stands.
He hadn't seen it since she vanished, but it was perfect, down to the dull yellow tiles she used to clean with vinegar, the wooden cabinets filled with chipped mugs, the half-melted calendar still pinned to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a cat.
"Mom…?"
He whispered it before he could stop himself.
And she was there.
Standing at the counter, humming gently back to him.
She's wearing an apron he remembered, the one with the faded strawberries, stained faintly with old grease.
She was cooking something.
The smell was off, wrong, cloying and thick, like boiling milk mixed with rot, but the sound of the pan was real.
Her movements were familiar.
His knees buckled.
"Mom," he said again, louder, stepping forward.
His throat tightened with something he couldn't name. "Where… where did you go?"
She turned.
But it wasn't her.
The thing that faced him wore her shape, but the skin was too tight on the jaw, and the eyes were wrong, milky and rolled too far up, as if trying to look out from somewhere deep inside the skull.
Her lips stretched in a smile too wide, skin pulling and cracking at the corners.
"Why would I leave you, sweetheart?" it whispered, voice a thick gurgle in her tone. "You're my little boy after all. You belong here with me."
Then her face split.
From the chin to the scalp, like a zipper of wet meat tearing upward, and inside was not a second face, but a tunnel of gristle and twitching nerve.
Veins curled like fingers, twitching as if searching for something, and a long, twitching tongue, gray and moist, slid from within, licking the air.
Taejun screamed.
He turned, bolted out of the kitchen, back into the hallway, nearly vomiting from the stench of what he'd just seen.
The hallway changed again.
It wasn't a hallway now.
It was a staircase.
Each step made of bone, not metaphor, but real, glistening bone, yellowed and rough.
The handrails were spines.
He didn't want to go down, but it was the only direction left.
He descended.
Each step creaked.
Some snapped.
Something behind him slithered out of the kitchen.
He heard the slap of feet, or hands was following him.
The lights above dimmed the further he went.
Soon, there was only the red glow waiting at the bottom.
And when he reached it, he was no longer in the apartment.
He was in a room.
A room just enough to feel buried.
The walls pulsed with heat.
Chains hung from the ceiling, not decorative, but real, rusted chains, some of them hooked with flesh still clinging.
The floor was soaked, not puddled but soaked with something dark that squelched underfoot.
In the center was a chair.
A child sat in it.
His brother.
But not the one from earlier.
This one was smaller, young, vulnerable, no older than seven.
Taejun's brother from years ago.
Wearing his favorite red hoodie, the one he wouldn't take off even in summer.
His head was bowed.
His wrists were bound with wire, not rope.
And his legs had been broken, bent unnaturally backward, knees twisted in opposite directions.
Taejun gasped, stumbling forward. "H-Hey! Hey, are you okay?!"
The boy raised his head.
The face was his brother's, and his own.
A mirror blend, his own eyes stitched onto his brother's skull, mouth sewn shut with black twine.
He whimpered through it, leaking blood from one nostril, eyes pleading.
Behind him, the shadows shifted.
The voice returned.
"You should've left when you had the chance."
Hands erupted from the walls.
Pale, bone-thin and dozens of it, maybe hundreds just to fill the walls in the room.
Each with too many knuckles, fingers bending both ways.
They grabbed Taejun by the arms, the legs, the throat, pinning him down against the slick floor.
He screamed and fought, but they held fast, like roots feeding from his fear.
The creature stepped forward.
His mother's face, but now she wore a crown of broken teeth, and her arms were too long, dragging across the floor, fingers ending in kitchen knives fused to bone.
"You don't get to leave," she whispered sweetly. "Not after you saw what you weren't supposed to."
She brought the knife-hand down.
Taejun screamed.
Everything went black.
The walls pulsed with breath.
His mother's face, no, the thing that wore her like a ruined mask, lunged through the dark, its knife-bone arms stretching out with inhuman reach, dragging behind her a wet smear of blood and hair across the floor as she screamed his name in a voice too sweet, slow, as if savoring the taste of it.
Taejun didn't look back.
He tore free from the hands that clawed his limbs, breaking loose from their grip by sheer terror, the sound of ripping skin echoing through the chamber as he tore his own shirt and left a patch of his back meat behind in their grasp.
He didn't feel the pain.
Not with the red light blinking in his vision, not with the sound of the creature dragging itself across the floor with metal scrapes, not with the impossible geometry of the apartment turning itself against him.
Corridors twisted.
Ceilings dropped low, crushing against his head and shoulders as he ducked and crawled through a narrow throat of wood and wire, floorboards shifting beneath his palms like cartilage.
He gagged as the smell grew stronger, cooked organs, rot turned sweet, the acidic sting of cleaning chemicals that couldn't hide the stench of death.
The hallway wasn't a hallway anymore, it was a birth canal made of ruined furniture and moist wallpaper, pulsing with each frantic breath he took.
He skidded through a doorway that hadn't been there seconds ago, the world behind him howling.
The kitchen returned, but it was burning now, everything blackened and melted, as if the apartment had caught fire years ago and no one noticed.
Furniture hissed with the echoes of flames long gone, and the thing was still behind him, scraping and twisting its bones to fit through the doorway it was far too big for, chunks of scalp peeling from the frame as it squeezed its smiling, slashed face through.
Taejun bolted over the countertop, slipped in the gore-slick fluid staining the tiles, slammed his shoulder against a wall, and kept running, gasping, limbs trembling.
"Don't run from me," the thing purred, voice behind him but also above, below, whispering from inside the walls.
"I made you. I raised you. I know your heart better than you, no, everybody do. I held you when you was small enough to fit in one hand."
He hit another hallway.
This one was different.
The front door.
It was right there.
He sprinted, only for the hallway to stretch again, distorting, the door shrinking like an eye squinting shut, laughing at his hope.
His scream came out choked, a ragged breath of raw panic and despair as his feet slid over blood-polished floorboards, hands reaching out for a knob that refused to stay still.
Behind him, the creature screamed with glee.
Then— The lock clicked.
The door burst inward, light flooding into the hallway in a single, blinding rectangle of salvation.
A figure stood there, small, terrified, his face barely lit by the hallway light behind him.
His brother.
His real brother.
His wide eyes locked onto Taejun's. "H-Hyung…?"
The moment froze.
Then the thing screamed in fury behind Taejun, louder than before, the voice shrieking with betrayal, with rage, with something older than words.
Taejun didn't think; he threw himself forward, past the threshold of the door, just as the hallway behind him collapsed inward like a throat swallowing itself whole.
He landed face-first in the apartment hall, hands scraping against the cold tile, lungs spasming.
He curled forward, sobbing, hands clenched into his hair, body shaking uncontrollably as he pressed his forehead to the ground and cried like he was breaking open from the inside.
The door behind him was gone.
There was just the plain white wall, as if it had never existed.
His brother knelt beside him, too scared to touch him, eyes wide. "Taejun, W-what happened? Why are you— why are you crying like that? You're scaring me…"
Taejun couldn't answer.
He could only weep into the floor, the sound guttural, broken, as somewhere in the depths of his mind, the voice of that thing still echoed in syrupy whispers: "You can leave, but I'll always be with you."