Escape Room ■■ — Escape Fin
It was suffocating.
..
...
Huh? Suffocating?
Where... am I?
The moment my consciousness rose from the deep, submerged unconsciousness where it had been sinking, I woke from my faint and began to feel my body again. The pitch-black field of my vision gradually sharpened with the passage of time, the blur resolving into clear focus. It felt like surfacing after a long stretch underwater — everything muffled and heavy.
I waited, still, and the sensation of having lain down for ages only to stand up too fast — that throbbing, dizzying pressure in my skull — slowly subsided, and the scenery around me began to take shape. Clutching my aching forehead, I looked left and right and confirmed that I was standing in the commercial corridor we had come to for the escape room, the club members with me.
The only difference from before we had opened that door and gone inside was that the hallway lights were on bright, and the various shops and storefronts lining the corridor were open for business as if nothing were wrong.
I turned my head and looked behind me. There it was — the enormous, old-fashioned wooden door we had walked through of our own free will only a few hours earlier.
Only...
The lamps hanging on either side of that massive wooden door, the ones that had glowed in the darkness and lured us in, now hung cold and dark, as if they had never been lit at all.
How long I waited for body and mind to fully wake, I couldn't say. Around me, the club members stood dazed, or else kneaded their own arms with vacant eyes.
"Ugh..."
"Uh..."
"Mmm..."
Each of them made their own sounds, calling their minds back. Among the club members still murmuring through hazy pupils, the president suddenly seemed to snap to, stretching his arms wide.
"Aah — well, club activity went pretty well, right?"
"Yeah, yeah, it did."
"Why am I so tired, though?"
The president's stretch and the sound of his voice became the signal, and the members started chattering away.
"Anyway, I think it took so long because the vice president picked such a hard escape-room concept!"
"Sorry..."
"What are you apologizing for? I was just kidding."
They laughed and talked as if nothing had happened at all. The scene was so alien that even I nearly fell for the illusion that everything had been a dream.
Listening to what they were laughing about, they seemed to be saying they'd had a good time among themselves — and yet something kept feeling off. From the conversation alone, it sounded as if they had just finished an escape room and stepped out of the shop, but no one ever brought up the concept or anything they had actually experienced. It was as if they couldn't even perceive those things — their words would flow fine and then suddenly cut off mid-sentence, as though a stretch of speech had been deleted, or they would abruptly change the subject.
What made the whole situation even stranger was that none of them found their own conversation odd. They simply accepted it.
"But for real, the concept we picked was pretty wild, right? Like, we went in and — good thing we escaped when we did."
"Right, so we went into the escape room and looked around the rooms, and then — man, I'm hungry now that we're out."
"I honestly had no idea an escape room could take this long. How long was it, anyway?"
"You can't even check the time? It was almost — so what should we eat?"
...Just listening to them talk was enough to drive a person insane. They were slicing the middle out of every conversation and no one felt the slightest unease about it.
Is this the blessing of oblivion?
I shook my head alone, trying to shake off the headache building from the back-and-forth, when I suddenly spotted Yeom Sang-hyeon gripping the handle of that wooden door — the one with both lamps dark — and rattling it hard.
The sight alone made me jump out of my skin. I smacked him across the back.
Has this bastard lost his mind?!
"Hey! What are you doing?!"
Yeom Sang-hyeon rubbed his back as if it stung and said,
"Ah, I just... I feel like I left something behind... or maybe I just can't remember?"
He was rambling, but his eyes were clear. Of course — Yeom Sang-hyeon had received the blessing of oblivion too.
Just in case the door might open again, I carefully pulled him away from the handle. At a glance it already looked locked, or sealed for some other reason, radiating an absolute refusal to open — but there was always the one-in-a-million chance.
...If someone told me to do it again, I absolutely could not.
Beat me to death and I still couldn't...
Cold sweat running down me, I forced a nothing-to-see-here face and pivoted the subject as fast as I could.
"Then! We should... food! Yeah, how about we go eat?!"
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
Every single club member turned to look at me. Then the vice president broke the silence with a laugh.
"Whoa! I've never seen you put your foot down like that, sunbae!"
"Me neither! But somehow I feel like sunbae hard-carried us in the escape room?"
"Man, I'm starving."
Watching the members chatter noisily, the president smiled too.
"Sounds good! Everyone seems hungry, so let's go eat already!"
I started to take the lead before anyone could say anything else — then stopped short and spun back around.
Sure enough, there was Yeom Sang-hyeon with his hand on the door handle again. Before I could stop him, the handle rattled a few times in his grip, but thankfully the door did not open.
Aargh! What is wrong with that guy?!
When he's reliable he's endlessly reliable, and then he does this!
In the end I all but kicked him into line, scolding him for standing there when we were all going to eat, and shoved him out in front.
"No, but seriously, what was it? Hyung, do you remember anything from going into the Escape Room Horror Cafe until we got out?"
I don't know! I don't fucking want to remember!
Why would I want to remember blood spraying, guts grinding, and pure madness?!
I kept cuffing Yeom Sang-hyeon as he clung to me with those relentless questions, and together with the club members I walked out of the commercial building.
Coming in, the corridor had been pitch dark.
Going out, we passed through a hallway bright beyond measure.
The place that had twisted and turned and wound us around as if we were lost in a labyrinth — that had felt like tunneling deeper and deeper into absolute darkness —
Going out, we found the elevator in no time at all and rode it to the first floor.
Spaces that had somehow felt endlessly vast on the way in now looked small behind us.
I traded empty jokes with Yeom Sang-hyeon, walked the corridors with the club members, never once looked back,
as if we had noticed nothing.
As if, even knowing, we pretended not to.
We walked, and walked,
and those footsteps
that had been so heavy
on the way in
from this moment
outward
at last
opened
the door
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
We were out!
The fear that had soaked into me right up until the moment of exit uncurled at last, and the emotions that had been clenched tight flung themselves wide open. The gloomy sky must already have poured out a full rain; over the wet streets, under a blue so sharp it almost hurt the eyes, I drew an unnecessarily deep breath for no reason at all.
With a lightness of heart I had never felt before, I walked into the crowd with the club members.
We all went out for a club dinner together.
Once we arrived and it came time to order, the president checked his wallet, then suddenly cried out as if something were wrong.
"Huh? Why is there so much mon—"
I had been sitting quietly, not knowing what was going on, when it hit me. Before the president could finish the thought, I shouted over him.
"We're ready to order over here!"
"Yes~ coming!"
While I noisily discussed and settled on dishes with the waiter who came over, I snuck a glance at the president. He seemed about to puzzle over why he still had so much money, then got swept up in the members' food recommendations, abandoned the thought, and started picking dishes himself.
Of course — we hadn't spent any club funds on the escape room today, so every won was still sitting in his wallet. If everyone had kept turning that question over, I had no idea what might have happened to the veil of oblivion that had been covering their memories. At least once today was over, no one would think about it and it would fade naturally — so with the resolve to just get through today, I threw myself into choosing food as well.
Fortunately, picking dishes made them all forget about the money. Once the food arrived, the members chattered on, and I spent a pleasant enough time talking with Yeom Sang-hyeon in my own way.
Every so often while eating, Yeom Sang-hyeon would stroke his fingers as if something felt off, and the other members would knead their shoulders or tilt their heads and stretch. Especially whenever someone moved a part of their body that had been deeply wounded during the "escape room," looking stiff and sore, I found myself growing busier for no clear reason — eating faster, moving more.
...And every time the president rubbed his forehead and cheek as if his head hurt, I could almost hear the sound of his skull cracking properly against the stairs, and my chest felt like it was being pricked with needles — but I kept eating with a straight face all the same.
They couldn't even remember it anymore. It was already past.
...Besides, honestly, the president had made me suffer more than anyone.
Luckily, no one brought up the escape room again, and the dinner wrapped up without incident.
After the meal we all went to the bus stop together, said our goodbyes, and split up onto our respective buses and subway lines home.
Yeom Sang-hyeon in particular kept throwing questions at me before boarding with the other members, as if he were trying to dig something out — but I played dumb to the end.
I figured Yeom Sang-hyeon had wandered the village with the single-minded will to save everyone, had shown more courage and taken more action than anyone else, and so those intense memories had not been fully covered yet — leaving him with that almost-remembering, almost-not frustration.
But I, who knew everything, thought it was far better for Yeom Sang-hyeon to simply forget. Better to live as an ordinary high school student than to dig those memories back up and spend the rest of his life with a madness that stabbed through his skull every day.
Yeom Sang-hyeon kept talking to me as if searching for something, but when the bus finally arrived, he boarded with the president and the other members.
I saw them all off and came home.
It was the same house I had left only a few hours earlier, and yet the room felt unfamiliar, as if I had been gone for months or years. With the tension draining out of me I nearly collapsed straight onto the bed, then forced myself with great effort to change course, dragged my feet into the bathroom, and started a shower.
As I showered, I sorted through everything that had happened today in my head. Some of it rose into memory well enough, but the stretches of time when I had been transforming into that uncanny existence, and the moments I had encountered that inexpressibly ominous being, were blurred as if under static — I couldn't recall them clearly.
Probably, returning to an ordinary human, my mind was unconsciously hiding the memories that would summon madness, or the moments my spirit simply could not bear.
With those fading memories, and the way the club members after the escape never brought any of it up — or if they did, only in vague, evasive terms — it almost felt as if the whole thing might have been a dream.
But when I finished showering and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, unease and dread, grotesquerie and fear all bloomed in my chest, and I could feel with absolute certainty that it had not been a dream.
On my shoulder, a pitch-black shape was etched — a jumble of unknown languages tangled together into a great W.
...Or was it an M?
..A 3?
.An E?
I touched the mark uneasily for a moment, then quickly dried off, pulled on clothes, and threw myself onto the bed.
I was certain that ominous, terrible, grueling days lay in wait ahead — but measured against the memories growing fainter, I hoped that for tonight, at least, I could sleep deeply without a single worry.
Fortunately, I did not wake even once, and took a long, long rest.