They Call Them Monsters
They are commonly called monsters, but they do not look like monsters at all.
They look astonishingly ordinary. Sometimes they are even beautiful.
Their defining trait is the absence of emotion. The capacity to feel another person's pain, the switches for guilt and shame — none of it is there. It is as if the part of the brain that governs feeling was simply never installed. Their world is cold, calculated, and revolves entirely around themselves.
Among them, the psychopath is born that way. To them the world is a chessboard, and other people are nothing but pieces to be moved. They cannot understand another person's feelings, but they can learn to imitate them. When it serves them, they laugh and cry and perform empathy with practiced ease. Their actions are impulsive, unpredictable, and they conceal an extreme capacity for violence. Their eyes are sometimes as cold as ice, holding a depthless vacancy in which no human regret or sentiment can be found. They are predators wearing human skin.
The sociopath, by contrast, is more often made than born — forged in a wretched upbringing or some crushing trauma. They do not so much fail to feel as become expert at suppressing and ignoring particular emotions. That makes them more calculating and more cunning than the psychopath, and they will use any means necessary to get what they want. Their rage does not burn hot; it condenses into something cold, and their need for revenge can wait years, even decades, without making a sound. They know society's rules better than anyone, and they use those rules only when it benefits them. When they need to, they put on a mask and disappear perfectly into the crowd. Their eyes are sometimes deceitful, hiding a chilling ambition beneath a flash of intellect. They are the cancer cells of society.
The people who fall into these two categories are the ones who commit atrocities ordinary people cannot even imagine — and do it as if it were nothing.
...Or so they say. Which of the two I belong to, I honestly couldn't tell you.
Psychopath? Sociopath?
I don't know, and I don't care. The thought occupying my skull right now had nothing to do with any of that.
It was this bitch.
This nameless slut who had somehow ended up as my assistant, helping me dispose of a corpse — and the fact that her pussy felt so fucking good.
"Hah, fuck... hey. Your pussy's insanely tight."
At the sound of my ragged breathing, the woman pinned beneath me lifted her head and looked up at me, her voice utterly flat.
"Feel good? You crazy bastard?"
Holy shit... if it feels this good with a condom on, going in raw would melt my dick right off.
A sharp, artificial shutter-click swallowed every other sound in the room.
Click.
I checked the photo I had just taken. The flash had gone off in the dark room, and the woman's pale skin gleamed with it. Her eyes were unfocused, hovering somewhere between terror and resignation, and perched conspicuously on the swell of her breasts was a little white rubber pouch — the condom I had been using until a moment ago.
I checked the composition the way an art photographer might, then nodded, satisfied.
The second the sex ended, the excitement that had flooded my head receded like a tide, and a vague, crawling anxiety crept into the space it left behind. What now?
Maybe that was why. A line I must have heard in some movie came tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop it.
"Give me your ID."
The moment I said it I thought, ah, that's a bit much — but it was already too late. The woman looked at me and let out a sigh mixed with contempt and resignation.
"...What for?"
"Blackmail."
The words got out ahead of me again. It just felt like the thing you were supposed to say. Wasn't that what the villains in web novels and movies always did?
"...You crazy fuck."
What, securing the ID of a witness to a murder is that outrageous? This was practically a survival instinct.
Caught between my own common sense and her reaction, I didn't know what to do with myself. I wriggled my fingers awkwardly, prompting her for the card. She stared at me for a moment as if she wanted to kill me, then sighed like someone who had given up on everything and pulled a wallet from the heap of clothes. Her thin fingers trembled as she slid the ID free and held it out.
I took it and met the eyes of the girl preserved inside. Her lips were pressed shut per the photo regulations, staring straight into the lens — but the look in those eyes still held a light she couldn't hide, the light of someone who didn't yet know how the world worked. A young face without a trace of makeup. Not the contempt and terror she wore now, but a bland expression touched only by the faint awkwardness of having her picture taken.
I raised my phone camera to that face once more. Address, name, resident registration number — all of it burned clear onto the screen.
Park Ajeong.
The name was surprisingly ordinary. And she was twenty-three. Three years older than me.
Not that it mattered, I supposed.
"Get dressed. We need to leave."
I jerked my chin at the clothes scattered across the floor. We were out of time to linger. Her hands, gathering the clothes with mechanical motions, faltered. For a fraction of a second, a faint hope — a maybe — flickered through her eyes.
"Me... too?"
"Yeah."
She stared at me as if that made no sense at all.
"Why?"
The question itself was what struck me as strange. Why would she even ask? Wasn't it obvious?
"What kind of psycho just leaves a witness behind?"
Whatever hope she had left shattered. She couldn't string another word together. Her lips moved soundlessly, and then, like someone surrendering everything, she spat a quiet curse.
"Fuck..."
She dressed in silence, without another word.
Somehow I had ended up getting my dick sucked and having sex on top of it. First murder of my life. First time having sex. The two of them, barely a couple of hours apart, on the same day, in the same place.
The hell?
I was the one who had done it, and I still couldn't feel any of it as real. In a daze, I dragged the suitcase that held the body of that piece of shit whose name I didn't even want to say. It was far heavier than I had expected. The rattling of the wheels echoed down the dingy hallway. The stairs were even worse. The weight of a hundred-and-eighty-five-centimeter slab of muscle was more than my scrawny arms could handle, and I had to drop the suitcase down one step at a time — thud, thud — all the way to the bottom. By the time I was done I was soaked in sweat.
We finally reached the ground floor, the entrance thick with the sour smell of mold. Park Ajeong had come down ahead of me. With the ease of long habit she shook out a cigarette and put it between her lips.
"...You're not going to run?"
She didn't answer. She just looked at me. Her eyes were empty.
Honestly, I had been sure that the second we hit the ground floor she would bolt for the street like a madwoman. Wouldn't that be the normal thing to do? She was standing next to a murderer. Instead she just stood there, perfectly calm, like someone waiting for the next bus.
"And if I run? You'll come to my house and kill me?"
Her voice was hoarse, but strangely even — the voice of someone stating a conclusion she had already turned over a hundred times.
"Ah..."
I had nothing to say to that. She wasn't wrong about a single thing. I had photographed her ID. I knew her home address. The truth was I had done it without thinking at all. I had just copied a scene from some gangster movie.
She seemed to take my silence as a yes. She shrugged with a look that said she had figured as much. Run, and someday I would find her and kill her — or stay glued to my side right now and try to survive. She had chosen the latter.
She didn't say anything else. She just chewed slowly on the unlit end of the cigarette in her mouth.
I dug through my pockets and found the cheap lighter I had used right before walking into that bastard's apartment. A metallic click, and a small flame rose. I lit her cigarette without a word. She glanced at me, startled for a second, then ducked her head and drew the fire in. A long breath — and the harsh smoke left her mouth and scattered into the air, taking the tangle of thoughts in my head with it.
Late as it was, the streets were empty. I started walking, dragging the suitcase, and she walked with me. I knew perfectly well that the camera at the building entrance had gotten a clean shot of my face, but my feet moved on their own, following the escape route I had drawn and redrawn inside my skull a hundred times.
One more day. That pathetic little desire was what kept this meaningless thrashing going.
We turned our backs on the main road with its flashing neon and slipped into the back alleys behind it, where the commercial buildings tangled together like a spider's web. This was not the city's face. It was the city's bowels. Greasy steam boiled out of restaurant vents, and the sour stench of overflowing trash bins punched us in the nose. The ground underfoot was slick. The suitcase wheels labored over a film of sticky filth. The path was too narrow to walk side by side. I pulled the suitcase in front, and she followed behind me like a shadow, saying nothing. The only light came from the faint orange of an old security lamp and the smoke-thick glow leaking from a second-floor bar window. There were no cameras — but in the dark it felt like dozens of rat-eyes were watching us.
We abandoned the familiar streets and headed for a damp underpass that cut beneath an iron railway bridge. Overhead, roughly once every ten minutes, the last subway train roared past. Each time the whole tunnel shuddered and dust sifted down from the ceiling. Unidentifiable graffiti twisted together with grotesque scrawls across the walls, and the air was cold and wet. The rumble of the suitcase wheels over gravel multiplied inside the tunnel, as if it were advertising our crime to the entire world.
We came out onto the embankment of a small stream that carried the city's wastewater. The lights of the industrial complex and the apartment blocks shimmered on the surface like an oil slick. No camera covered this path. No one would even remember it existed.
We entered a neighborhood of old multi-family buildings packed together like matchboxes. The alleys here were a labyrinth; one wrong turn and you were lost. We walked and walked, choosing only the blind spots the streetlights never reached. Identical buildings. Identical parking lots. Identical recycling bins. My sense of direction dissolved. In the light of a second-floor window someone had left on, a human silhouette appeared for a moment and vanished. A dog barked sharply from behind a wall, and my heart dropped. There were no surveillance cameras here — but hundreds of eyes and ears were breathing on the other side of every wall.
I don't know how long we walked. The damp, sour smell of earth gradually thinned, and then all at once a briny sea-smell came rolling in — Ansan's particular mudflat reek, tangled up with the chemical stink of the industrial parks. The narrow, winding stream path opened onto the shoulder of a coastal road, and the view broke wide. Ahead of us the West Sea lay in darkness, spread like an enormous open maw. Far off, the lights of the Sihwa Industrial Complex glittered along the horizon like a monster's teeth.
Without a word we turned down a narrow side path running alongside the road. No car could have managed it — an unpaved track that only fishermen would know. The suitcase wheels rolled over dirt and gravel, louder and more unsteady than before. We walked like that for another ten minutes. Around us there was nothing but our own footsteps, the wind, and the distant sound of waves.
Park Ajeong was the one who broke the silence — the woman who had, somehow, taken my first time.
"...You gonna dump it here?"
Her voice was dry, the voice of someone who had already given up on everything. I didn't break stride.
"Yeah. This is the quietest spot."
In every simulation I had run inside my head, this place had always been the ending.
I passed a heap of trash the fishermen had left behind and headed for where the massive tetrapods were piled, forming the breakwater below the road. The heavy concrete hulks lay tangled over one another, creating countless dark gaps and caves. In front of the deepest, blackest crevice I could see, I finally set down the suitcase I had been dragging for what felt like forever. The plastic handle retracted with a clack — a starter pistol announcing that we had arrived.
For a moment neither of us spoke. We just looked at the view in front of us. The incoming tide was soaking the vast mudflat in silver under the faint moonlight. It was a landscape you could have called beautiful. Right now, to me, it looked like nothing but an enormous grave.
The urge to break the silence made me open my mouth without thinking.
"I mean, it's just some internet rumor, but..."
My voice scattered on the night wind.
"...They say there's no end of corpses buried in this mudflat."
Park Ajeong's head turned toward me, slow as a rusted machine. She didn't say a word. She just stared at me with a look that said, that's what you choose to say right now, you crazy fuck?
Under that stare, I realized what I had just spouted. An awkward silence settled. I cleared my throat, looked away, and reached for the suitcase's lock. This was the last step.
Click.
The lock sprang open with a cheerful little sound. I took the zipper and peeled the suitcase open — a long zzzip. The instant it gave, the concentrated smell of blood and bleach rolled out in a wave.
Inside, the thing that had been a piece of human garbage I didn't even want to name was now a perfect collection of meat, arranged with orderly care. The head, wrapped in a plastic bag, sat at the center; the arms and legs and torso were packed around it without a gap, like Tetris blocks. Just like I had seen online. A damn clean job. I was about to nod in satisfaction when a wet, nauseated sound came from beside me.
I turned. Park Ajeong was staggering, one hand over her mouth, leaning against a tetrapod. Her shoulders shook. Her face had gone pale enough to vomit.
I couldn't understand it. We had sawed through the neck together in the bathroom. We had cut off the arms and legs. What was so disgusting now? She had already seen all of it.
I ignored her weakness and picked up the plastic-wrapped head first. It was heavy, and damp. Without hesitating I stepped down off the tetrapods into the black, sucking mud.
The moment my foot came down, the mudflat took my shoe like a vacuum. Even one step took effort all the way up through my thighs. Every time I pulled free there was a nauseating shluck, shluck. I pushed out to near the waterline, tore open the bag in my hand, and shoved the contents deep into the mud, stamping them down with my foot.
First piece of trash, successfully dumped. I looked back. Park Ajeong was still standing beside the tetrapods as if she had been nailed there, just watching.
"What are you doing."
My voice carried cold on the night wind.
"Get over here. Bring me the next one."
She didn't move. I stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the suitcase. The heaviest parts were still in there — the torso, the arms and legs.
"I don't want to..."
Her voice crawled out, thin as a mosquito.
Great. Now I looked like I was bullying her. A murderer who didn't want to be the kind of asshole who picked on people. Was I actually insane?
I left her there gagging and went back to the suitcase without a word. This time I grunted and wrestled out the heaviest piece, the torso. It was more than I could comfortably lift alone, but there was no other option. With a strained groan I slung it over my shoulder and waded deeper into the mud than before.
Shluck. Squelch. Shluck.
Only my footsteps and my rough breathing cut the night's silence. I dumped the torso in the deep mud and came back. By then she had stopped retching and was watching me. Arms. Legs. I made the trip across that sucking mudflat dozens of times. My shoes were so saturated with clay they might as well have been part of the flat itself, and my whole body had gone stiff with salt, sweat and seawater mixed together.
When I came back from putting the last of it down, she was staring at me without moving a muscle, like a ghost.
In that moment, a post I had seen online flickered through my head — one of those cheap-titled writeups, something like True Horror Story: Bodies Dumped in the Ansan Mudflat. According to that post, the mudflat was a perfect disposal site. Once a body was left there, the first things to catch the scent were the crabs — fiddler crabs, shore crabs — and they would swarm in and greedily strip away the soft flesh. Then night would come and the tide would rise, and the real party would start. Tiny things you couldn't even see, side-shrimps and sea slaters, would carpet the corpse like a shroud of death. Thousands, tens of thousands of invisible teeth, chewing flesh and organs without rest, and in a matter of days they would pick the bones clean, not a scrap of meat left. Finally the lugworms and the bacteria would break down even the remaining bone and organic matter, and what had once been a human being would be returned, without a single trace, to the sucking mud. That was the rumor — that the bones of the disappeared lay in this mudflat beyond counting.
I shoved the last remaining chunk into the mud and hoped that post was true. I hoped those countless nameless living things would erase my first murder completely.
At last the huge suitcase was empty. The thought that it was over drained the strength from my body as if someone had pulled a plug. The adrenaline receded, and the muscles in my back and legs — abused by all those trips across the mud — started screaming. The night wind of the West Sea hit my sweat-soaked clothes, and I shivered.
Dripping, I looked from the empty suitcase to Park Ajeong, standing beside it like a stone sentinel. She was staring at the dark mudflat where we had just dumped a body, not moving at all. Moonlight made her face pale. I couldn't read a single thing she was thinking.
"Let's go."
I tapped her arm with a hand caked in mudflat clay.
"There's a place to wash up ahead."
She didn't answer. As if my words weren't reaching her at all. I sighed, picked up the empty suitcase in one hand, and started walking. A moment later I heard her footsteps, quiet, falling in behind me.
The place I had meant was an old public restroom built for the fishermen. It stood by itself a little way off the coastal road, like a deserted island — abandoned in all but name. The tiles were cracked. The fluorescent light over the entrance flickered with a dying buzz, as if it had one hour of life left. At this hour, no one came here but us.
In the corner, among the cleaning supplies, I found a battered rubber hose and fitted it to the tap. A hard stream of ice-cold water hammered the cement floor. I put the hose to my own body without a word and soaked myself without mercy — clothes, hair, everything. The mud caked on my clothes and shoes sluiced away, and the floor turned to filthy water in seconds. The cold cleared my head a little. I wanted it to wash off more than the dirt. I wanted it to wash off the murder, the dumping, all of it.
I had been standing under the water for a while when I felt a gaze on my back. I turned. Park Ajeong was leaning in the doorway, staring at me blankly. She looked like someone whose soul had left her body.
I shut the tap. Inside the restroom there was nothing left but the drip of water and the buzz of the fluorescent light. Soaking wet, I walked over to her. I don't know what I was thinking. It just felt like the thing to do.
"Hey. So."
"...What."
Her voice was wrecked. I hesitated a second, then said it.
"Can we have sex one more time?"
".........Hah?"
What came out of her mouth wasn't an answer. It was the sound of the air leaving her, incredulity and disbelief tangled together. For the first time, a clear feeling surfaced in those vacant eyes: what the fuck is this guy?
I knew I sounded insane. But how do I put this. After killing someone, my sex drive was through the roof. Standing right next to death, the feeling of being alive was running wild, completely out of control. I followed that instinct and pushed her again.
"Just once more. Come on."
I said it with shameless confidence. Park Ajeong didn't bother answering. She just let out a short breath, hhh, loaded with every kind of exhaustion and disgust in the world. She didn't even look at me. She walked into the men's room, her steps heavy, picked a spot where the tiles weren't broken so she could avoid the muddy water, and indifferently hooked her thumbs into her panties and pulled them down from under her short skirt. She planted both hands on the sink and bent at the waist, the motion empty of any feeling at all. Under the flickering fluorescent light, the tattoo across her back seemed to twitch. She didn't turn her head. Her voice was hollow.
"Don't come inside."
It wasn't a plea. It wasn't a request. It was a notice — the minimum damage control, a condition of survival. The terms of a transaction.
"...Okay."
I answered shortly and stepped in behind her. My wet clothes clung and made it hard to move. I didn't care. The air was a nauseating mix of sour mold, disinfectant, and the mud-smell coming off our soaked bodies. In that place, we had sex for the second time.
The cold tile floor. The groaning sink. The flickering light. The murder and the body dump. The smell of the mudflat. The empty suitcase. Every ugly shard of what was real vanished from my head the instant I pushed into her, as if none of it had ever happened.
And Park Ajeong's pussy, with no condom in the way...
Hot. Soft. Slick. It pulled me in. The raw sensation, nothing but a sheet of rubber between us stripped away, climbed my spine and put its hands directly on my brain.
Ah, fuck.
That felt so fucking good.
For a while I forgot everything. That I was a murderer who had just killed a man. That the suitcase which had held a corpse was sitting right there. I just gave myself over to that primitive, overwhelming pleasure and rolled my hips like an animal. Her back, braced against the sink, seemed to tremble faintly. I didn't give a damn.
