Night of Masks (9)
My fogged consciousness began, little by little, to claw its way back.
I had surrendered my body to an unknown voice, let it take the reins, and simply watched in a daze as it threw me around like a puppet — until, at last, control was returned to me.
The body that voice had commanded slaughtered dozens of people with the effortless ease of a born killer.
And my little sister, who had witnessed every last second of that spectacle, had stared at me with pure terror in her eyes.
"…"
I scanned the surroundings, searching for her.
But she was nowhere to be found. In her place lay three corpses.
One had both arms severed. The cuts were surgically clean, and after massive blood loss the heart had been pierced through with equal precision.
One no longer had eyes in his face. Near the man, two crushed, pulped things had been stomped into the ground; he had twisted and writhed in agony until he bled out and died.
One had the skin of his face flayed clean off. Every muscle of the countenance lay exposed — grotesque enough to turn the stomach. He had gone into shock and died from the pain of having his own face peeled away.
Looking at the discarded strip of facial skin, I recognized the features, if only vaguely. A face I had seen a few times before.
"Professor Park Seongtae…"
The root of all of this.
The man who lured contractors in under the banner of alliance, squeezed their surroundings until they had nowhere left to run, and eventually got them killed.
The one responsible for everything that had been done to my sister.
"…"
I lowered my gaze.
My body was drenched in blood, yet the only thing that remained pristine was Jack the Ripper's blade — a faint silver flame seeming to shimmer along its edge, not a single drop of blood clinging to it. As clean as if it were brand new.
But I knew better.
The sensation still lingering in my right hand.
It may not have been God who did the killing — but the feel of murder was mine all the same.
I flung the silver blade into one of the already-dead corpses and drove it home.
Thud!
The silver knife sank in with unnatural ease, parting flesh that still held a faint trace of warmth.
"Gretchen."
I called her name without any particular intent.
And Gretchen appeared at my side as if she had been waiting for exactly that.
How long had she been here? From the moment that voice led me to slaughter every last one of those contractors? Before that? After?
No. There was no point wondering about it now.
"I… killed people."
"…Yes."
"Quite a lot of them. And I killed them outside of Witch's Time."
"Is that… so."
I lifted my head.
It was dark.
Of course it was. We were inside an abandoned factory.
I turned my eyes back to the corpses.
Writhe, writhe.
Shadow-shaped scavengers — I had no idea when they had arrived — twisted and coiled. Cleaners in the truest sense, devouring the defeated and erasing even the fact that they had ever existed.
"It's still… Witch's Time."
"Yes. It is, for now. But it will end soon."
"I see."
Time passed in silence.
A minute? Two? Ten?
The world rippled, the violet night peeled away, and ordinary black night settled in its place.
At the same instant, the bloody stench of the sins I had committed brushed my nose — and at the heart of it, I saw my little sister, trembling in terror.
I approached her carefully.
"Eek!…"
Frozen with fear, she scrambled backward on hands and knees.
But she couldn't run. The thugs had bound her limbs; she could barely move at all.
"…Gretchen. Erase every memory Seoyun has of what happened here tonight."
"Yes, Doyun."
Gretchen stepped toward my sister.
Seoyun tried to flee just as before, but bound as she was, she didn't get far before Gretchen caught up to her.
"Expunge. Twisted milestones, overpainted colors, scattering promises."
⟨ Afterimage ⟩
"Ah…"
My sister's pupils blew wide.
Then, as if every last thread of strength had left her, her eyes slid shut.
Gretchen undid Seoyun's restraints and spoke in a voice meant to put me at ease.
"She won't remember that you killed anyone, Doyun — or that she was ever caught up in any of this."
"Good. Thank you."
Maybe it was the sheer relief.
The string of tension holding me upright snapped before I could catch it, and I collapsed where I stood.
"Ugh… I don't remember anything…"
"How much did you have to drink to black out like that? Just be grateful you're in one piece, you little brat. Do you have any idea how hard I looked for you?"
"I-I really don't know, okay?"
To cut to the chase: my sister's memories had been wiped clean.
Of course she still felt a vague sense of wrongness for the moment, but apparently, given enough time, that dissonance would quietly rewrite itself into whatever memory seemed most plausible — until even the fact that she had felt anything odd at all would be gone.
At any rate, once the missing-person report was lifted, I walked her to the station to see her off on her way home.
"Hey. And don't come by my place for a while. I won't be there."
"Won't be there? Why not?"
"I'm going on a trip."
"A trip? Where to? Overseas?"
Seoyun looked up at me, ears practically perked.
Seeing her like that, the image of last night — Seoyun staring up at me, paralyzed with fear — overlaid itself on the present, and something twisted uncomfortably in my chest.
So I made a halfhearted motion as if to knuckle her on the head.
"Taebaek. Going to soak up some mountain air in the Gangwon backcountry and train my mind a little."
"Really? Well, yeah — you could definitely use some mental training, Oppa."
"You little—"
"Ow! You actually hit me!"
I glanced at my glaring sister, then pulled a fifty-thousand-won note from my wallet.
"Whoa~! Fifty thousand? Oppa, you're the best~"
"Only the best when there's money involved, huh. Anyway, take care of yourself, and give Mom and Dad my regards. And keep the trip a secret from them."
"Okay~ Got it~! I solemnly swear to keep it secret!"
Seoyun snapped off a crisp salute, fingertips pointed sharp, and boarded the train that had just pulled in.
"Gretchen. You can come out now."
"Yes, Doyun."
At my call, Gretchen appeared almost at once — as if she had never been far.
She stood beside me holding two medium-sized suitcases.
"Everything we needed to prepare here is done."
"Right. Time we headed out too. Taebaek — Jeongseon."
I took one of the carriers Gretchen had brought and stepped forward.
At the sight of me, she broke into a bright little smile.
"Yes! Let's go!"
Together with Gretchen, I boarded the train bound for Taebaek.
Being a weekday, there were fewer passengers than I'd expected, which made for a comfortable ride — quiet enough that we could talk about witches without anyone overhearing.
"By the way, Gretchen. You told me before — if I ever started hearing something like a hallucination, I should tell you."
"Yes, that's right. Doyun… have you been hearing something?"
"…Not right now. But back then… I definitely heard a voice. And I handed my body over to it."
Gretchen listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she spoke carefully.
"You're not hearing anything unusual at the moment, are you?"
"No. Normally I'm fine."
"Then it should be all right. Most likely… it's a kind of defense mechanism triggered by crisis situations."
"A defense mechanism…"
Come to think of it, it had been the same with Kang Seonghun, and the same this time — the moments I managed to overwhelm my enemies only came when I had been beaten half to death and was standing on the edge of dying.
Of course, with Seonghun I hadn't even known how to draw the blade yet…
"But you can't keep relying on a defense mechanism forever. That's when Desire erodes a contractor at its most violent."
"So what then?"
"As I mentioned before, Mount Taebaek carries a powerful current of mana. There, we'll draw out the Desire you inherited. Pull it out physically, then subdue it — and that will suppress the erosion."
"Pull it out physically… and subdue it?"
I echoed the words, struggling to picture it. Gretchen simply nodded.
"Yes. And if we do it that way, you'll grow accustomed to using your abilities in the process."
Beep… beep… beep… beep…
"You said something's off about this patient? I'm not seeing anything particularly unusual."
"Ah — her physical condition hasn't changed at all. What I meant by unusual is this."
"Hm? Patient records?"
The doctor skimmed the chart.
Finding nothing amiss, he looked back at the nurse.
"What's strange about it? Looks like a perfectly ordinary medical record to me."
"If you look carefully… every single entry related to a guardian is missing."
"…What?"
Startled by the nurse's words, the doctor went through the chart again, slowly this time.
And just as she had said — every field for guardian information had been left completely blank.
"How is that possible… some kind of system error?"
"N-no. No one here can even remember anything about this patient's guardian. There was never a guardian registered in the first place."
"Good lord…"
A patient admitted to the hospital with no guardian at all.
Was that even possible?
The thought drifted through the doctor's mind.
The nurse, looking just as lost, spoke with a faintly pained expression.
"And here's the stranger part… according to the ledgers, this patient's hospital fees have been coming in on a regular schedule. Confirmed deposits. But we can't trace where the money is coming from, or who's sending it. Not at all."
"That's… absurd. Like something out of a ghost story."
At the nurse's final remark, the doctor turned an incredulous look toward the patient beyond the door, then dropped his eyes back to the chart.
Name: Park Seong-a. Female. Reduced to a vegetative state by a traffic accident several years prior.
But no guardian.
Admission records, surgical records, payment records for hospital fees — all present and accounted for.
And yet not a single scrap of information about a guardian.
As if…
someone had deliberately, maliciously erased every record connected to this patient.
He checked again. And again. And once more after that. Same result.
He dug deeper still.
Intake forms, surgical consent forms, ward assignment logs — he combed through every scrap of paperwork he could find. Nothing resolved the mystery.
"No CCTV of whoever came in with her?"
"Well… the admission was years ago. Apparently there's no surviving footage from back then."
"This is insane."
What on earth was going on?
Brow deeply furrowed, the doctor turned it over in his mind for a long moment before finally shaking his head.
"For now, do everything you can to track down a guardian. And… hah. I'll figure out what to do about the rest."