Escape (2)
A merciless stream of cold water crashed down over the crown of her head.
Water gushed roughly from the sink faucet, slapping against her palms. She cupped her hands in a frantic hurry, catching the flow and dousing her face and body with it. With every rivulet that ran down her skin, the whitish foreign matter spreading across her flesh caught her eye.
A viscous, repulsive liquid. Those nauseating traces dissolved into the cold stream and slid down her thighs and calves. The residue she saw with her own eyes was far more wretched than anything she had imagined in her head.
Her chin trembled without restraint. Hot droplets welled up beyond her blurred vision. The world in front of her warped.
Drip.
Drip.
Tears streamed endlessly down her cheek, where a scab had already formed over the wound. The tears stung the raw abrasion, then slipped past her jawline and mixed with the water falling from the faucet. Transparent droplets plummeted limply onto the worn bathroom tiles.
Her throat was locked tight. No matter how hard she tried to force out the breath crushed inside her, not a single sob escaped. A body thoroughly trampled. A frame forced into grotesque reproduction. Simply confronting that ruined state with her own eyes was already a punishment beyond endurance.
Inside the narrow, sealed toilet stall, even the act of crying aloud was forbidden. Only the harsh slap of water against the floor filled the air.
She moved both hands. With force enough to turn her fingertips white, she scrubbed her thighs and legs raw. She did not care if the skin peeled away. She wanted to tear every last trace of contamination from this fragile flesh even one second sooner.
It was a desperate thrashing. Fingers stiffened by the cold water crushed the swollen, reddened flesh of her inner thighs without mercy. The skin scraped raw, a stinging pain stabbing her nerves, yet her hands never stopped. She only rubbed harder.
But no amount of washing the surface made any difference. A sticky warmth kept seeping up from deep inside her womb. A grotesque foreign sensation that filled her entrails. That feeling had soaked into the marrow of her bones and would never rinse away.
As she kneaded and scrubbed her thighs with both hands, the skin flushed so red it looked ready to bleed. Her fingertips began to tremble faintly. Only then did she finally stop, steadying her reeling body as she twisted the faucet valve shut all the way.
The thick stream of water cut off at the spout with a final drop. The moment the noise filling the bathroom vanished, a cold, heavy silence pressed in from every side once more.
She withdrew her shaking hands. With great effort she hauled up the waistband of her pants, which hung limp and soaked through with water and filth. Her eyes fell on the front of her uniform shirt, completely torn and hanging in tatters. She clutched those shredded edges with both hands as if they were a lifeline.
She staggered to her feet. Unable to keep her balance, she slammed her body against the side wall. A dull pain flared through the fingertips braced against the tile, as if her nails were being forced backward. The sensation of flesh about to tear raced up her wrist.
Unidentifiable yellow stains had dried onto the cold, damp tile surface. Every time she braced against the wall, a gritty, unpleasant grit scraped across her palm. Through the rips in her uniform, the chill underground air slipped past. Goosebumps prickled across her bare skin wherever the breeze touched.
She carefully lifted one foot and stepped forward. Deep inside her pelvis, something like a scream rang out—bones forced to mesh while still misaligned. Her knees buckled and she nearly collapsed. She dragged her shoulder down the wall and barely managed to stay upright.
Her lips had already drained of all color, gone pure white. She bit them until they nearly split, swallowing the moan that tried to escape back down her throat. With every step, a wet squelch rose from the cold floor. Whether it was standing water or some viscous fluid, the sticky liquid clung to the soles of her bare feet and then peeled away again and again.
Squelch. Squelch.
Between her toes, thread-thin strands of mucus stretched like spider silk before snapping, an unpleasant sensation crawling up the tops of her feet. A stench stabbed at her nose. The air in the corridor hung heavy with the mingled reek of rotting flesh and thick iron.
Every deep breath she took made the inside of her esophagus sting and burn. The bathroom doorframe caught at the edge of her blurred vision.
One step.
Another step.
The muscles of her inner thighs quivered and nearly gave out, but the strength in the fingertips gripping the corner of the doorframe was all that held her upright. Breathing hard, she stepped out into the corridor. The darkness of the bathroom she had left behind trailed after her like a long tail.
She stretched out a trembling hand and fumbled inside the torn inner pocket of her coat. That was where the radio and her phone should have been sitting side by side. But the sensation that met her fingertips deep in the pocket was not the familiar smooth shape of metal.
Shards of glass, finely crushed, grated and scattered between her fingers. A sharp edge of twisted plastic scrap lightly scored her palm. A cold bead of blood welled and trickled free.
She pulled the mass of fragments out and held it under the faint light of the dark corridor. The screen had gone far beyond spiderweb cracks; it was shattered past any recognition of form. The back case was snapped clean in half at the center. Through the gap, the sharp cross-section of a green circuit board jutted out at an angle.
When she carefully touched a broken piece with her fingertip, a flake of shattered glass dropped free and rolled across the corridor floor. She could not even remember when it had been smashed like this. Had it struck the wall when she was strangled and hoisted into the air like a sack? Or had it been quietly crushed under that overwhelming weight while she lay flung on the floor?
She pressed her thumb again and again into the place where the power button had been.
Click.
Click.
Only the hollow friction of a completely crushed internal spring reached her fingertip. The pulverized screen gave off not a single glimmer of light. A perfectly dead black liquid crystal. On that mirror-like dark surface, a blurred and ruined shape reflected like a ghost.
It was her own wretched face. Eyes sunken deep, cheeks filthy with dirt and bloodstains. In that instant, a single strand of hair near her forehead, reflected on the screen, caught her eye. Her brow furrowed of its own accord.
She craned her neck and pulled the broken screen close enough that her eyes nearly touched it.
Huh…?
The tip of a lock that should have been pure black was giving off a subtly different hue. It was not complete black. Deep within the strands, a dense indigo light clung and shimmered—like the abyssal depths of midnight, or an old bruise that had turned black-blue with age.
She shook her head, thinking it must be an optical illusion caused by the refraction of the shattered screen. She shifted her reeling steps. Slowly she approached the old sink standing in one corner of the corridor. With every footfall, an unpleasant squelch echoed from the wet corridor tiles.
The mirror, thick with the grime of years, had its silver coating peeling away in black blotches. Yet it still barely retained its function of reflecting what stood before it. She gripped the edges of the sink with both hands and thrust her face close to the glass.
The breath she had been drawing locked solid in her lungs.
Bangs plastered messily to her forehead and cheeks with cold sweat. And all the way down to the ends that spilled past her shoulders. Her entire head of hair was steeped in a faint, uncanny blue aura—like a cold indigo gas flame burning in the dark. That alien, dense navy color had soaked perfectly into every black strand.
She raised a trembling hand and seized a fistful of her bangs. She pulled them right up to her eyes to confirm. The color of the hair sliding between her fingers. It was no illusion, no mere trick of the light.
From root to tip, every lock had been dyed completely in that ominous indigo.
She could not even begin to guess when the change had begun. Had it started in that terrible moment just now, when she had fought the massive beast’s flesh and been contaminated by its fluids inside the bathroom? Or far earlier—when she had cut down and torn apart the vengeful spirits packing the corridors, endlessly inhaling their black smoke through mouth and nose?
The contamination had already passed beyond the surface of her skin and was invading the fundamental components of her body itself.
She stared, dazed, at the unfamiliar pale face framed by blue hair in the mirror.
That was when it happened.
A vast sense of wrongness swept cold down her spine and pressed hard against the nape of her neck. She turned her head slowly. She looked down the length of the corridor. Beyond the central hall, a large glass window opening toward the outside came into view.
The landscape beyond the glass was nothing but pitch-black darkness. It was no different from the moment she had first pushed open the heavy school gate and stepped into this bizarre school domain. The dense, heavy abyss of night stood frozen exactly as it had been.
Her breathing roughened. She dragged her feet by force toward the window. When she pressed her face close against the glass surface, the ice-cold touch of the pane sank deep into her cheek. She lifted her gaze and desperately searched the horizon where the mountain ridge should have been. She strained her eyes for even the faintest blue hint of dawn that ought to have been spreading. She searched for any sign that the sky’s color had lightened, or that the stars had shifted position.
There was nothing.
From the moment she first entered the Security Office. Through the bloody battles with countless ghosts as she climbed from the first floor to the third. And through the long hours of violation and violence she had just endured inside the sealed toilet stall. Even if she could not measure the exact minutes and seconds, an enormous span of time had passed—physically at least five or six hours, easily more.
This was the season when the sun rose early. Even allowing for winter’s long nights, it was a time when at least some sign of dawn should have appeared, or some change in the color of the air should have begun. Yet the darkness outside the window remained frozen exactly as it had been the instant she crossed the school gate. The density of the dark had not thinned. Even the faint drift of clouds in the sky had stopped completely.
An absolute stillness, as if the very axis of time had frozen solid, ruled the world.
No watch was strapped to her wrist. The shattered phone in her pocket had already become useless plastic trash that could not even tell her the hour. Cold sweat beaded on her forehead and slid down her temple. With every breath she drew, her heartbeat began to thrash wildly. Her ragged breathing fogged the windowpane white, then vanished.
She tried to swallow, but the inside of her throat had gone bone-dry; only a rough metallic scrape escaped.
From the very moment she had crossed the cursed school gate—perhaps the normal flow of time belonging to the outside world had never applied inside this isolated space at all.
An absolute otherworld where time and space were completely severed.
Dawn would not come.
This terrible blood-red night that held her captive would never end.