The Dummy Doll
There was no time to answer Hyemi noona’s greeting. One look at the heavy atmosphere and I shut the door behind me, locking it with a click. I tossed my bag aside and hurried over to her, voice low and urgent. “Noona, what the hell is going on this time…!”
“Keurgh…! Glurk, gulp…!”
The woman clutched her throat with both hands, desperately trying to vomit up the mucus that was blocking her airway. Hyemi noona, the clear culprit behind all this, licked the slime from the corner of her mouth and stared at the woman with icy contempt.
“Wooju, this isn’t your problem. It’s just… a little personal revenge.”
Noona’s pupils were sharp as blades. This expression was one I had never seen before, even though I had known her for a long time. The same Hyemi noona who never got angry, who always laughed and let everything slide, was now radiating quiet fury.
I pulled away from the sight of her calmly watching the woman suffocate and rushed to the girl who had collapsed on the floor. Noona really intended to kill her. If I didn’t do something, a person was going to die right here.
“Hey, are you okay?! Hold on, just hold on a second…!”
“Glurk… ugh…!”
I looked into her mouth. Her eyes had gone pale and lifeless, tears streaming down her face. A lake of mucus pooled past her uvula. I leaned close to the woman who already seemed out of her mind and muttered, “Excuse me,” before slipping my fingers between her lips. I planned to scoop out the sticky fluid.
The liquid looked viscous enough to pass for a solid, so I thought I could pull it out. But…
“…Ugh…!”
I carefully, desperately reached in, trying to scrape the mucus out, but it didn’t work. My fingers simply sank into it. No matter how I tried to grab hold, it slipped away like the very part I was targeting had turned back into liquid. Even so, I refused to give up and kept searching for another way when Hyemi noona, who had been watching silently, bent down and brought her lips to my ear.
“As expected of Choi Wooju~ Always acting all tsun, but deep down you’re just a total dere. Trying to save even a filthy rag like her.”
“Noona, why the hell are you—!”
“Ahaha… Don’t worry. I hate her enough to kill her, but…”
The voice she used while smiling at me carried her usual playful brightness, yet the way she looked down at the woman whose breathing had grown faint, chewing on cold contempt, felt utterly foreign.
“I’m not going to kill her. I’ll just play with her until she’s on the brink of death and then…”
“Huh…?”
Noona trailed off, patted my shoulder, and nodded toward the kneeling woman. Splash—!
“Haa…!! Cough! Cough!!”
Following noona’s gaze, I turned to see the woman violently coughing up blue-green fluid. She gulped down air until her chest swelled, then coughed again, repeating the cycle until she finally seemed to regain some awareness and lifted her head.
“Ugh… H-hiik…!!”
The moment she saw Hyemi noona standing in front of her, her face drained of all color and she scrambled backward.
“H-Hyemi unnie, I-I’m sorry…! I really didn’t mean to—!! I swear I didn’t know Taejun oppa’s girlfriend was you!!”
“Minji. You really didn’t know?”
Hyemi noona’s gentle tone lashed out at the girl called Minji.
“W-well, that is… Kyaa?!”
Noona had already closed the distance to Minji, who had tried to flee quite far, and yanked her by her pretty hair. She forced the terrified girl to meet her eyes.
“I asked if you really didn’t know.”
“H-hii…! I-I’m sorry… P-please spare me…”
“I understand. You’ve only just become an adult, and from your perspective Taejun must seem perfect, right? Handsome, tall, good at sports, smart, and his family is loaded. I can understand why you’d fall for that.”
The scattered conversation between the two women finally let me piece together what had happened. The rumor I had heard since this morning—that Hyemi noona had broken up with her boyfriend of over two years. And what Jaehyuk had told me yesterday about hearing her fighting with her boyfriend in the bathroom. Those two decisive clues told me exactly what had gone down.
“But I don’t give a damn what happens to that trash anymore. I’ve met someone far kinder than that piece of garbage. So I honestly couldn’t care less if you and Taejun keep fucking and rolling around in bed.”
Noona brushed her disheveled hair behind her ear, glanced at me with a smile, then narrowed her eyes at the trembling Minji once more.
“The problem is, a bitch like you might try to sink your claws into my man again. I hate that idea.”
“N-no!! I-I absolutely won’t! I’ll never appear in front of you again! I swear! I promise!!”
“Really?”
Hyemi noona beamed. Minji’s face flickered with hope at that bright smile.
“Y-yes! If you want, I’ll break up with Taejun oppa too! So please…”
“That’s not something you can guarantee.”
“…Pardon?”
“—?!”
It happened in an instant. The puddle of emerald liquid Minji had vomited began to vibrate, sending ripples across its surface. Then, like a spring releasing, the fluid leaped up, flew past Hyemi noona’s shoulder, and slammed over Minji’s face.
This time it wasn’t her airway—it covered her entire head. Through the mucus I could see Minji’s expression twisting in agony.
“….!!, O…!! Kk!!”
“I just can’t stand the sight of filthy whores like you spreading your legs for my man.”
Minji frantically clawed at the mucus covering her face, muffled screams rising from her throat. Hyemi noona released the handful of hair she’d been holding, shook her hand clean, and stepped back with a cold, frozen smile.
“….! …! ……”
The mucus wrapped around Minji’s head writhed in a grotesque, unnatural way. It must have sealed her throat again, because not even the smallest whimper escaped anymore. Still, she kept desperately trying to peel it off, hands moving without pause…
“…….Mmph….”
Soon her arms dropped limply to her sides. At the same time the mucus, which had gradually slowed its movements, began to harden exactly as it was. It shrank until it perfectly fit the shape of Minji’s head. The translucent emerald color turned pure white. The faint silhouette of her features vanished completely.
“…This is…”
A familiar chill crawled down my spine. The way her arms hung lifelessly, the way her head drooped—she seemed completely unconscious, yet something felt different. More than anything, the pure white substance completely encasing her head reminded me of something I already knew.
A mask.
The same eerie feeling I got from the mask still sitting in my bag. No, this felt even more disturbing. It was similar to what happened when Hyemi noona and Yunsol had worn the masks and frozen like mannequins, yet somehow different. At least with them I could tell they were “wearing a mask.” With Minji in front of me, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was even still human.
It was as if her very existence had been rewritten along with her head, transformed into some inorganic object. I stared hard at what used to be her face.
“What are you looking at, Wooju? Curious about ‘that’?”
“…Noona, she’s not… dead, right?”
I swallowed hard, tension rising, and looked up at her sharply.
“Aww, I told you already. I said I’d only play with her until she was on the brink of death. She’s not dead, so you can relax.”
“Then what did you do to her? Did you turn her into something like Yunsol?!”
Hair, eyes, nose, mouth—every part above her neck was completely covered by a pure white shell. No matter how many times I looked, it gave off the exact same bizarre feeling as the white masks.
Hyemi noona tilted her head for a moment, then burst out laughing at the sight of Minji slumped on her knees like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Ah~ Ahaha, it’s not like that. There’s no way I’d give something this dirty to you, right? So I cleaned her up nicely. From the inside of her head to the rest of her body. She’ll never be able to think again. ‘That’ is different from me and Yunsol. Hmm… just think of it as a convenient ‘Dummy Doll’ that’s easy to order around. Oh, and the inside’s been cleaned out too, so feel free to use her whenever you’re in a hurry♡”
“Noona, wait…!”
Hyemi noona walked over to me as if nothing had happened, slipped her arm through mine, and stroked my crotch while giving me an adorable smile.
“But you were worried about me? That makes me a little happy…”
When our eyes met as she grinned at me, a complicated feeling washed over me. It was already far too late to save the girl named Minji lying over there. If that was the case, the only thing left was to move up what I had planned to do today.
“…Noona, we need to talk.”
“Sure, I’d love to~ But can you wait just a second?”
Hyemi noona pushed me toward the locked door, then turned back to the slumped Minji.
“Don’t just lie there. Go wait in the reading club room. I’ll use you once I decide where.”
“──”
Without any reply, the woman named Minji stood up with stiff, mechanical movements and walked out of the lounge.
“See? She’s a convenient tool that listens not only to my orders but to yours too. Her head’s been swallowed, so right now she looks like some plaster statue… but once she’s fully finished, her original face will come back. Though the contents of her mind will never return.”
“…Did the mask teach you that too?”
“Ehehe, I’ll tell you everything. Want to go to the café? Noona will buy you coffee!”
Hyemi noona laughed innocently and intertwined her fingers with mine. Just moments ago she had changed another person into something else. I glanced once more at the hallway where the girl named Minji—someone whose name and face I had never known before—was walking away, then looked forward again and headed to the café with Hyemi noona, who was already chatting excitedly.
4. Those transformed by wearing the mask can cover a human’s head with the mucus spewed from their mouth to create a ‘Dummy Doll’.
—The mucus swallows the human head and writhes in a bizarre shape for 10 seconds. (As if trying to digest it…)
—After roughly 20 seconds, the once-translucent mucus turns pure white and hardens completely.
—The Dummy Doll whose head has become ‘plaster’ appears to obey every command from the one who changed it without question.
—But why does it listen to my orders too…?