The Ghost I Created Is Outside the Door
There was a ghost I had created standing outside my door.
“You’re in there, aren’t you?”
The voice that seeped through the crack was thin and damp, like wet leather being scraped across a steel plate.
I stood frozen between the bed and the desk, swallowing my breath. My heart hammered against my ribs as if it meant to smash them to pieces.
A prank? Some drunk mistaking the lake for my apartment, or a delivery driver filming people’s reactions for laughs.
Or maybe the landlord had come in person after threatening to change the door-lock code if I didn’t deposit this month’s three hundred fifty thousand won rent by today.
I clung to every realistic explanation I could invent.
But the voice outside the door was unmistakably a woman’s.
“You’re in there, aren’t you?”
Click. Click.
The front-door handle and the manual deadbolt rattled slowly. Then something sharp dragged down the steel door from top to bottom, the sound stretching long and thin.
I clamped a hand over my mouth and flicked my eyes toward the video phone mounted on the wall beside the shoe rack. The black-and-white screen crackled and smeared, but a dark shape was clearly caught on it.
Black clothes that hung all the way to the floor. Hair plastered wet and limp below the waist.
And where a face should have been there were no eyes, no nose, no mouth—only smooth skin blotched with black stains.
The woman on the screen slowly lifted her head. The featureless face looked straight up into the camera.
Static.
The screen went dead. A scream surged up my throat, but I clenched my teeth before any sound could escape.
I must not answer. I must not make a sound.
Only moments earlier my own voice, the one I had poured into the broadcast mic, came flooding back into my ears.
If the Black Woman knocks on your door, never answer. Answer or open the door and she will take your face.
Just then the gap beneath the front door darkened. Wet black hair thinner than a centimeter forced its way through the crack.
Hundreds of strands crawled across the linoleum like living veins. I recoiled in horror, stepped on a pile of clothes beside the bed, and landed hard on my backside.
Thud.
Pain shot up my tailbone; tears sprang to my eyes. Snot threatened to run, but I had no time to wipe it.
The wet hair scraped across the floor and bent toward my feet. Something snagged on my flailing right foot.
Only moments ago I had checked that spot myself and found nothing but gray, black, and white socks. Yet now a single red sock lay on top of the clothes.
Inside out.
Why is this here?
I had no memory of ever buying a sock like that. But this was no time to question its origin.
The moment I saw it, the chill only deepened. The very item required by the safety rule had appeared exactly when I needed it.
If I stopped to wonder why, the hair would reach me first.
Safety rule two. Wear red socks turned inside out.
It was pure nonsense I had made up on the spot to farm engagement. Still, if the thing outside the door was real, the safety rule might be real too.
Both hands still clamped over my mouth, I wriggled my toes in desperation. Tears and cold sweat blurred my vision, but I forced my right foot into the inside-out red sock.
Please. Please just pass by.
The heel snagged; the fabric twisted.
I got it on anyway.
Right after that.
The wet hair crawling toward my toes stopped barely ten centimeters away.
Ssssk.
Sssssk.
The strands swayed left and right as if they had lost their bearings. They groped around me yet never touched the foot wearing the red sock.
As though they could no longer sense my presence—or as though some constraint now barred them from coming any closer—they only scraped the floor. The front door shook violently.
Bang!
The deadbolt rattled as if it would fly free, but the door stayed shut.
“You’re in there, aren’t you?”
I curled into a ball, barely able to breathe.
I did not answer.
For a long while the scraping continued, then stopped. The hair that had entered the room slowly withdrew through the crack.
Damp footsteps receded down the corridor.
Thud.
Thud.
The sensor light went out and silence settled over the studio apartment.
I stayed face-down on the cold floor for a long time, mouth still covered.
I was alive.
I had actually survived.
But the relief did not last. The ghost story I had invented for the stream and the safety rule I had tacked on in the moment had both worked exactly as described in reality.
The timing, the question, the effect of the red sock—everything matched too perfectly to call coincidence. I crawled to the desk and grabbed my smartphone.
With trembling hands I opened the community app. The real-time popular board was already buried under ghost-story posts.
Posts and comments multiplied by the second.
The hand holding the phone shook hard enough to rattle. Reports were pouring in from all over the country: exactly 2:44 a.m., three knocks, the same question.
Mixed among them were posts about families vanishing after answering, complete with screenshots of missing-person reports. Concurrent viewers on my stream had been only thirty-seven.
Plus one nameless, profile-less black account that might not even have registered as a real number. Yet the nonsense that had left my mouth was making people disappear.
Did I kill them?
I had put on the red socks because I wanted to live. But some people never saw the stream, some refused to believe the rule, and some opened the door.
Even if I had spoken without knowing, I was the one who had made those words. My stomach turned over.
Sensation seemed to drain from my fingertips all the way to my elbows.
“Should I turn the stream back on…?”
The voice that slipped out startled me; I spun toward the front door.
Nothing.
“If I say it was all a lie, will it stop?”
I had no confidence. Restarting the stream might create even more terrible rules.
What if denying the ghost story erased the only safety rule we had? Would deleting the video end it?
If I erased the recording, would this whole disaster vanish with it? There was no evidence anywhere that I could take back words already spoken.
The “Go Live” button floated on the screen. One tap would do it.
In the end I could not press it. Scenes of the police, the Hunter Association, or the NIS learning my identity flashed through my mind.
I might be branded a terrorist who had known about the disaster in advance, or locked in a lab for the rest of my life. Fear crushed the guilt.
I set the phone down, hugged the red-socked right foot to my chest, and crawled into the corner of the bed. I did not close my eyes for a single second until dawn.
Even the sound of wind in the hallway made my body lock up. Only after morning light spilled through the window and the clock passed seven did my exhausted mind finally snap and drop me into sleep.
“Mm…”
The first thing I felt when I opened my eyes was a profound wrongness. My body was absurdly light.
My field of vision sat lower. It was the same studio apartment I always saw, yet the ceiling seemed higher and the desk and monitor loomed like massive structures.
Even the feel of the blanket against my skin was alien—far more sensitive and soft than usual.
“Uh… what time is it?”
The sleep-mumbled words froze me solid. It was not the low, rough voice of a twenty-seven-year-old man.
A thin, clear woman’s voice rang through the room.
“Wh-what…?”
I raised a hand to my throat. The hand that appeared before my eyes was not the thick-knuckled, rough hand I knew.
It was a small, white, slender adult woman’s hand—far smaller than before. Something soft spilled over my shoulder.
Silver hair. Long enough to reach my waist.
Am I still half-stuck in a nightmare?
“What is this?”
I scrambled to get up. The oversized boxy T-shirt and shorts slid off my body and tangled my movements.
The red sock still on my right foot had half slipped down past the ankle. Even my center of gravity had changed.
I stepped the way I always had and my body tipped sideways. Grabbing the wall and the shoe rack for support, I ran to the full-length mirror.
The instant I saw the reflection, not even a scream came out. A petite, delicate adult woman roughly 155 cm tall.
Silver hair cascading to the waist. White skin and red eyes wide with terror.
The cheap V-Tuber avatar I had bought for thirty thousand won on a freelance site. Completely identical to Hachiko.
“This can’t be real…”
With a trembling hand I touched my cheek. The Hachiko in the mirror cupped her white cheek in exactly the same motion.
The ghost story I invented had become real and knocked on my door—and now I had become the body of the avatar I bought. Inside the mirror, the Hachiko who until last night had existed only on a screen stood with a face that looked ready to cry.