Do Not Put Clothes in the Locker
Click.
The locker door swung open.
"What? There's nothing in here? Nothing but a hanger?"
"Good grief... Well, at least there's nothing strange in it."
An utterly empty interior gaped back at us.
Click.
I tried the locker beside it — identical to No. 26. A single hanger hung from the rod along the top, and beyond that, nothing at all. I stood quietly looking up at it. The first thing to try here was obvious.
"Then what am I supposed to do with it, huh? What?"
Shff, shff.
"Hey, why do you just strip off wherever you please like that! There's a lady present!"
"...I'm only taking off my tie."
"Oh."
The jacket stayed on — my diary was in the inside pocket. The shirt went without saying.
"S-still! Warn me before you do that, at least."
Wasn't it a little absurd, needing permission every time I removed an article of clothing?
Clack.
Thinking that, I draped my tie over the hanger, hung the hanger on the rod, and shut locker 26.
"So it's a place for putting clothes in, and you put clothes in?"
"Yes. Labyrinths respect their rules."
I nodded to Kim Heesook, then pressed my ear to the locker door.
"Can you hear anything...?"
"Nothing in particular. Still, something could be happening inside."
"You don't feel like your hearing's gotten worse than usual or anything...?"
"Hm? No, I'm perfectly fine. I doubt this is the sort of problem that would reach all the way to my hearing."
I regarded Kim Heesook for a moment — she showed not a trace of malice — then opened the locker again.
Click.
"Oh my, it's gone?"
"Huh? What, seriously?"
The tie I'd hung inside had vanished without a sound.
A locker that eats clothes?
What was the point of that...?
Hm?
Crouched down, running my fingers over the locker's interior to check for any other changes, I spotted something round tucked into the far corner.
"What is it? Did you find something?"
At first I took it for a piece of trash — a crumpled ball of chocolate wrapper, maybe.
...
But something was wrong with it.
It was heavy. Unreasonably so.
I set the golden sphere — about the size of a BB pellet — on my palm and studied it in silence.
"Oh my, isn't that cute — nice and round. And gold-colored, too."
"Why are you gawking at it like that? Isn't it just something that dropped off a necklace? Or some kind of clothing ornament?"
"No. When I looked the locker over before putting in the tie, there was nothing like this. This is..."
It really did look like gold?
The surface was even soft.
Soft enough to scratch with a fingernail. Too soft.
"It seems to be... pure gold."
"What?"
"Hm?"
"Feel it for yourself."
"Oh my. What is this thing. Goodness, look how heavy it is. I think it really is gold — what do we do?"
"Me too, let me see! No way, that's insane... This, is this real...? Is it?"
It would be real.
No — it had to be real. That was the labyrinthine way of things.
Even if the labyrinth would struggle to reach beyond itself and tamper with the Bank of Korea's systems, gold itself it could conjure up by the ton.
"Wow, holy... I'm putting mine in next. Ma'am, you should throw something in too! If we just walk out of here alive, this is a straight-up jackpot! Gold prices only keep climbing."
Exactly the sort of stunt a labyrinth would pull.
"Holy crap, another one came out! It's bigger than the last, isn't it? Ah — should I put my jacket in too?"
"Oof, hold on, let me through. My turn."
A locker that paid out pure gold for clothes?
I'd never seen a locker like it.
Suspicious, dangerous contraptions of this stripe, on the other hand, I had seen until I was sick of them.
However small it was, judging by the weight in my hand, the bead had to clear a gram at minimum.
Even valued against the list price I'd paid for my tie, it was worth ten times over.
In a word: the scales didn't balance.
And when the scales tip this far out of true...
It means that someday they may swing the other way.
Toward the side that costs me.
"Oh, that's right — Seon Yuhan, aren't you going to try? Your jacket, come on. Or even your socks."
At some point Kim Heesook had already traded away even her navy cleaning uniform top, leaving only the t-shirt she'd worn beneath it. She looked genuinely dismayed that there was nothing left she could decently shed on the spot.
"I did tell you. We proceed carefully. No getting greedy."
"Ha!"
Yoon Geonmin — likewise reduced to the white tee under his shirt — let out a scornful laugh. Had the rest of us not been there, this man would clearly have fed his trousers and underwear in as well.
"Look who's preaching about greed... That's nothing but you trying to score a moral victory over your own pathetic life. You should know how to grab a chance when it shows up. Or what, can you not take your clothes off without someone else's help?"
"...No. I'll see to my own affairs. You needn't concern yourself with me."
It wasn't that I disliked money.
Money can solve a great many problems.
But the problems it couldn't solve were just as clear.
The Labyrinth.
My eternal shackle — binding me even past death, and letting no one slip free.
"Oh, hold on."
Yoon Geonmin stopped short, as if a thought had struck him, and blinked.
"Nothing says it has to be clothes, right?"
"Hm...? Put in what?"
"This! The gold!"
The little nuggets of gold, clustered bead by bead, threw off light in Yoon Geonmin's palm.
Light with the power to bewitch.
"But then what if it just comes back out as clothes?"
"It might come out as even bigger gold!"
"That's a bit..."
"Ah, it's fine. One little bead — that much we can test."
The man who'd been guarding his hide so warily until moments ago was now about to attempt the height of absurdity.
Without an instant of hesitation. Gladly.
Gold carries a mysterious power all its own — something uncannily like the labyrinth's.
No. It's human belief that carries that power. Because every one of us has agreed, all along, to believe that a lump of mineral is worth exactly that much.
"Come on, please, please, please."
Hands clasped before the closed locker, Yoon Geonmin muttered his prayer under his breath.
At my last job there'd been a coworker who did exactly that — clock in, sit down, start praying — and it turned out to be about his crypto.
Which made what Yoon Geonmin was doing with this labyrinth locker look like an even straighter road to ruin.
"Hoo..."
Clack.
Deep breath finished, the HR man took hold of the handle, slowly — and the instant the door began to open—
"UAAAAAAGH!"
Yoon Geonmin doubled over with a scream.
"Wh-what's wr—"
Kim Heesook, first to check on him, sucked in a sharp breath — then wrenched her face away and stumbled backward as though fleeing for her life.
"My—my... face, ugh... what, why..."
Yoon Geonmin's left cheek had been flayed.
"Don't touch it. His skin is peeling right now."
To be precise, it had stopped partway through peeling.
As if someone had paused mid-fillet, a flap of skin hung dangling, baring a sliver of red flesh beneath.
That had to hurt...
Enough that, set against that time, drowning almost seemed to belong to the quick and merciful category.
"Ah, ughhh... sob..."
"Oh—oh dear, what do we even..."
I turned my gaze back to the locker.
The door had stopped, half open.
Just like the half-flayed cheek.
"...It appears he was peeled exactly as far as the door opened."
Flung wide, it would have stripped the whole hide.
"Hhk... wh-what...?"
Clack.
"Closing it doesn't seem to restore anything, either."
"Wh-why?!"
As a stopgap, I pressed the gauze we'd scavenged on the third floor over the wound.
Frankly, I had no idea what I was supposed to do for him.
"Have any of your parents or siblings ever had skin cancer? Or died of it?"
"Agh, what the hell kind of question is that. No—aaagh. It hurts... What did I even do so wrong...?"
One belief has endured among people for as long as gold has held its worth: that the pain I suffer now is the fruit of what I have done — its punishment.
Sometimes that is truth. Sometimes, mirage.
But that there are hearts which cannot bear it otherwise — that much is always true.
"Mr. Yoon hasn't done anything so terribly wrong."
...But I truly had done wrong.
It was my fault. All of it.
"Then—then why...! Is wanting a little more gold a crime?!"
"Hard to say. I couldn't tell you. Maybe it liked the skin we're wearing better. Maybe clothes simply weren't enough."
Or perhaps, by the labyrinth's standards, there was every room to rule human skin "clothing."
In the end, it's all just a shell, isn't it?
And for all I knew, somewhere on the far side of that locker, something was even now walking around wearing a hide of gold.
"Oh dear, what do we do about this... Let's not just stand here — let's hurry to the hospital side. There might be a doctor or a nurse still around..."
Kim Heesook, who had been shuddering at the sight of that peeled skin and stamping her feet in place, took Yoon Geonmin by the arm.
"It's fine. I can walk..."
Shff.
Half his face hidden behind one hand — as if to conceal his swollen, bloodshot eye, or to keep the gauze from slipping — Yoon Geonmin was the first out of the fitness center.
25. Do not put clothes in the locker.
"You two, wait here a moment. I'll sweep through surgery first, then work my way down."
The medical wing of the 2U Wellness Center comprised five departments: internal medicine, surgery, dentistry, pediatrics, and psychiatry.
I had known about the psychiatry department even before my interview.
"I want people to walk out of the labyrinth not only in body, but in mind as well. Truly. The labyrinth is a place that's very hard to escape completely."
Yuwi Guild was, after all, an organization that flew the banner of mental liberation — though how many of its own employees actually used the place, outsiders aside, I couldn't say.
"Anyone here?"
Surgery was empty.
Shff.
Pediatrics, empty as well.
The remaining departments would rarely have occasion to handle anything surgical.
Still, far better than a layman who had never studied a day of medicine.
"Is anyone in—"
Sff.
The moment I opened the door to internal medicine, I froze.
"...our..."
From a counseling room deeper inside, left just barely ajar, came the sound of someone murmuring.
A human voice, at least.
Whether it truly belonged to a person was another matter — and even if it did, nothing about this was good news.
Whoever it was might prove even less cooperative than Yoon Geonmin.
Holding my breath, I inched closer, one careful step at a time.
"...who..."
A man's voice.
His age was impossible to guess.
The voice was simply too faint — as if he were praying.
"...please, take pity on me..."
Ah.
He really was praying.
At last I reached the counseling room door and stood there, rooted to the spot, ear tilted toward the prayer seeping through the gap.
"...I believe You will deliver me. In Your boundless grace..."
Listening in silence, I felt something stir in me — oddly like nostalgia.
And going by what I remembered, the pairing of labyrinths and faith had never once ended well.