Fourth Ghost Story: Bath Bomb (1)
It had been four days since Suyeon saw the vision in the mirror.
For four full days, she had opened her mouth and closed it again.
Every evening when Yujin spread open her notebook, every time they gathered around the table, she had meant to speak. Look at that mirror. It isn't just a mirror. What I saw was… But the words stuck in her throat.
What was she supposed to say she had seen? A future of herself having sex with Minjun.
The mirror had shown her that, and then it had actually happened.
Saying it aloud would mean laying everything bare. It would mean using the mirror as an excuse. That was what frightened her most — that the moment she blamed the mirror, every step she had taken toward Minjun, every touch of her hands, would become the fault of some uncanny object. That it would stop being her own desire and turn into something the house had made her do.
And yet, on the other side of the same thought: wasn't this exactly the kind of information the family needed to know? The milk cartons had already done this to two of them, and hadn't everyone agreed that every object in this house was dangerous?
The two thoughts flipped back and forth several times a day. In the morning she resolved to speak; by evening she kept her mouth shut.
The table was quiet. Not the old quiet of people simply eating without conversation, but the kind of quiet that came from having things to say and choosing not to say them.
The clink of spoons against bowls sounded unnaturally loud. Seoyeon sat not beside Suyeon but at the farthest end of the table.
Suyeon scooped rice as if she didn't notice. Her milk was still flowing. Beneath the table, the towel she had tucked inside her hoodie was growing damp.
Yujin's notebook grew thicker by the day. On the page labeled Changes in Family Dynamics, small notes now clustered densely alongside the arrows.
She never showed those notes to anyone. When she opened the notebook, she turned her body slightly, presenting her back.
Jiwoo was at the margins — a half-place that belonged neither to Suyeon nor to Seoyeon. She went to Minjun's room when it was time to nurse, but after that she shut herself in her own room. Even at the table she managed only a single spoonful of soup.
Everyone avoided looking at Jiwoo. Jiwoo avoided looking at everyone.
And at night she lay staring at the ceiling, pretending to sleep. She pulled a pillow over her head so she wouldn't hear the sounds coming through the wall from the master bedroom.
She heard them anyway.
On the morning of the fifth day, Yujin spoke.
"We're out of food. Let's cross to the next house."
Packing took no time at all. Three months trapped in this place, and moving had become routine.
Seoyeon crossed the front threshold first, Jiwoo close behind. Yujin slid her notebook into her bag and stepped over the sill.
Minjun was last, gathering up his bag.
Suyeon did not go.
She stood at the entrance and looked back — down the hall, toward the master bedroom. The door was closed. Beyond it, the mirror would still be sitting on the vanity.
That glass that had glowed faintly even with the lights off. The version of herself inside it that had moved before her own body did. The one who had rocked her hips atop Minjun and smiled toward this side with laughing eyes.
And afterward, the one that had gone ordinary again, as if nothing had happened.
I won't see it again.
The thought flickered through her, neither relief nor regret, something she couldn't quite sort. That the mirror no longer glowed might mean the future inside it had already become reality.
"Mom?"
Minjun was waiting outside the door. Suyeon turned her head.
"…Let's go. There's nothing left to see here."
She crossed the threshold. The door shut behind her. The fourteenth house vanished that way.
The fifteenth house.
The moment they stepped through the front door, everyone noticed. The air was different.
Humid, heavy, with a faint sweetness that brushed the tip of the tongue with every breath — as if something had dissolved into the air itself.
Outside the windows, the fog was now seeping past the glass, threading through the gaps in the balcony door. Thin as thread, almost invisible.
Suyeon set down her bags and went straight to the master bedroom.
The mirror on the vanity. It sat in the exact same place in this house too.
She pressed a fingertip to the glass. Cold. The temperature of an ordinary mirror. She turned off the lights and waited.
No light came. The mirror was just a mirror.
That night, and the night after, Suyeon stood before the vanity again and again. The mirror never glowed.
A one-time phenomenon. Something that had manifested only in the previous house. She reached that conclusion and slowly let out a breath.
She would not speak of it. She would bury it.
The moment for telling the family had already passed. Bringing it up now would only fracture what trust remained.
With the milk cartons, no one had known in advance, and so the logic held that everyone had been victims together. The mirror was different. The fact that she had known and said nothing would cast a different light over every moment she had shared with Minjun since.
And honestly, even she no longer knew. Whether that first night she had gone to Minjun had truly been because of the mirror.
She decided not to ask that question anymore.
Just as the mirror had become ordinary, she would become ordinary too.
Yujin went into the bathroom first. There were things that needed checking in a new house.
Towel count, toiletries, and anything that hadn't been there before.
On the shelf sat a small basket — a round one woven from bamboo. Inside it, five spherical bath bombs, each about three centimeters across. A handwritten tag hung from a string: Lavender scent.
Each one was wrapped in paper, pale purple stains blooming across the surface.
Quantity: 5
Scent: Lavender (handwritten tag)
Appearance: Spherical, ~3 cm diameter, paper-wrapped with pale purple staining
Something else lingers beneath the lavender — faint, unidentifiable.
Yujin stared down at the basket for a long time. She sniffed it.
Definitely lavender. The ordinary smell of bath bombs.
But underneath it, very faintly, another scent was mixed in. She couldn't tell what it was. Just a sensation, as if something deep inside her body had been tugged, ever so slightly.
"…Another new object."
She set the basket down. The memory of the milk cartons flickered through her. No one had known anything until they read the instructions. Yujin pushed the basket into the corner of the shelf and closed the bathroom door.
"We already agreed to throw new things away."
It was to herself. No one heard. Or so Yujin believed.
The afternoon stretched long.
In a house with nothing to do, afternoons dragged with particular cruelty. They scattered to their own rooms, but "their own rooms" meant the same duplicated furniture and the same wallpaper. The only things different from the previous house were the pink fluorescent lights and the basket on the bathroom shelf.
Seoyeon was stretching in the middle of the living room.
It was the routine she had kept since high school — splits, sit-ups, push-ups. Before they were trapped she had gone to the neighborhood gym and run on weekends. Now the living room floor was all she had.
Still, if she didn't move her body she thought she would go insane.
One, two, three…
She counted push-ups, sweat beading on her skin. Minjun passed down the hallway and stopped. Seoyeon kept bending and straightening her arms without looking up. He stood there a moment, then went into his room.
A little later, Yujin came out into the living room.
"Seoyeon, mind if I work out with you?"
"Auntie… doing yoga?" Seoyeon paused mid-motion and looked back.
"If I don't move, my body stiffens up. I used to do yoga."
Yujin settled in beside her. Against her usual rigid impression, her body was surprisingly flexible.
The two of them stretched side by side without speaking. The silence was different from the silence at the table — just the quiet of people exercising.
Jiwoo crouched at the far end of the hallway, watching.
No one saw her. She was half-hidden against the corner of the wall. For a while she followed Seoyeon and Yujin's movements with her eyes. Her aunt's yoga form was more solid than she would have expected. Seoyeon's push-up form was clean. She hadn't seen much of this before.
Back in the old house, everyone had been busy; they never exercised together.
Jiwoo quietly returned to her room.
She opened a drawer. Between her underwear and socks, a small notebook was hidden.
About a week after they had been trapped here, Jiwoo had found unused memo paper in a kitchen drawer and taken it in secret. From that day on, she wrote something every night.
Too short to be a diary, too long to be a memo.
Today is the fifteenth house.
Looks like Auntie found something again. She was in the bathroom a long time.
Unnie is working out in the living room.
I almost joined and then didn't. Not because I was lazy — because being all together feels awkward.
Oppa just stays in his room.
Or Mom's room.
Last night there were sounds from the master bedroom again. I pretended I didn't hear.
I heard, but I pretended I didn't.
That's the thing I'm best at these days.
She set down the pencil and hid the notebook between her underwear again.
No one was going to find it. No one searched Jiwoo's room. No one asked her how her day had been. While everyone spent their nights alone in their own rooms, Jiwoo quietly observed, and quietly recorded.
Yujin was crouched in front of the living room cabinet.
Even after finishing her workout, curiosity had taken hold. She opened the drawers one by one.
First compartment: nothing. Second: a remote control with no manual. The TV didn't work. Third: a single blank notebook.
On the front cover, small printed letters read Fifteenth House.
Yujin picked it up and flipped through the pages. All empty. After a brief hesitation, she hugged it to her chest along with her own notebook.
It might prove useful. Or maybe she just felt the urge to fill something when she saw a blank notebook.
And then the balcony window.
As Yujin approached, something moved in the fog — a faint silhouette. Whether it was a person, an animal, or merely a denser fold of mist, she couldn't tell. The glass was cold.
She tapped it with a finger. The silhouette did not move.
Or perhaps it did. The fog thickened by another layer, pressing right up against the glass.
Yujin slowly drew the curtains shut.