The Secrets of the Abandoned Hospital
The gazes pouring down on me in the silence were so intense I half-expected to find holes burned into my body.
"If you stare like that, I'll get shy."
Perhaps finding my joke absurd, a low voice drifted through the ominous atmosphere.
"I... I can't do this."
The first to speak was the female streamer, Yarina. She spoke toward her camera with trembling hands, on the verge of tears.
"Viewers, I'm so sorry. I... I'm dropping out! I'm sorry!"
"Yarina-ssi! We haven't even started yet!"
Park Junsu tried to stop her in a panic, but the color had already drained from Yarina's face.
Just then, I felt a sharp poke in my side.
"Are you actually insane, Oppa?"
I thought I was being the mood maker, but judging by Jina's reaction, that didn't seem to be the case.
Meanwhile, Yarina, who had been sniffling, pointed a finger at me.
"I'm just leaving! You said this place was incredibly dangerous!"
Having reached her conclusion, Yarina turned toward the entrance.
"You won't be able to leave."
"What? I, I can just walk out! There's the door right there!"
Yarina hurried toward the entrance we had come through. It looked as if taking just one step outside would end this whole farce.
However.
"Huh?"
Yarina stopped dead in her tracks right in front of the door. She began to grope the wall next to it.
"Wh-what? Why is the door... Where did we come in from?"
"Yarina-ssi, it's right in front of you. Don't play games."
"It's not there! There's no door!"
"It's right there next to you!"
A male streamer who had been pointing out the direction of the door, frustrated, ran toward the entrance. But he, too, could only grope the wall, unable to find the door.
"Sh, shit. What is this?"
"Le, let me out."
As the two continued to grope at the wall and empty air, the other streamers hurried over to the entrance as well.
"What the, it's really gone?"
"It's blocked by a wall!"
"FearKing! What is this! Wasn't this supposed to be staged!"
Of course, they experienced the same phenomenon as they neared the entrance. The lobby turned into a scene of chaos in an instant as they clawed at the walls like madmen and shouted at each other.
"Oppa, it's right in front of the door, why are they acting like that?"
"Beats me. I'm curious, shall we go check?"
I walked slowly toward the entrance to see if my own perception was being twisted like theirs.
One step, two steps.
The very moment I neared the entrance.
Swoosh—!
A sticky, viscous liquid, like crude oil, wrapped around my head in an instant. Then, the door I had been seeing began to ripple like water, its presence fading away.
'So this is the cause.'
It seemed I wasn't free from it either.
"Th, the door disappeared!"
Jina's face turned deathly pale as she, too, could no longer see the door.
In short, Jina and I were also bound by the rulebook Park Junsu had created.
Of course, being dragged around by a game someone else set up isn't my style.
"Oppa!"
"Stop shaking me, you're rattling my brain."
I calmed the panicked Jina and took a deep breath.
Crack-crack—!
For a moment, the sticky liquid wrapped around my head tightened like a vice.
'I've had my brain melted before; this is child's play.'
This wasn't physical restraint; it was a distortion of perception.
If so, I could break through it with my own will.
"What is seen is not everything, and what is named is not reality. The dead whisper lies to cloud the eyes, but the living truth is inherently silent. All things return to the nameless embrace; forms shall scatter, and only the essence shall remain. The veil of lies shall be torn, and the original path shall open."
Whoosh—!
As I drew upon my power, the door reappeared before my eyes.
I had a rough estimate now. Judging by the power consumed, taking one person like Jina out would be possible if I pushed myself a little.
The problem was that wasn't all there was to it.
If I forced the door open and escaped, I might be able to save my sister, but I couldn't guarantee the safety of the others. Besides, I didn't know what else had been twisted besides the entrance.
In the end, there was only one choice left.
"Everyone."
As I spoke, the man who had been the first to rush the door pointed a finger at me with a reddened face.
"Yo, you planned this, didn't you? Everything got weird after you said this place was dangerous!"
"Then keep blaming me and die."
"......What?"
"If you don't want to die here, stop interrupting and listen to the explanation."
Speaking kindly had a definite effect. The noisy lobby fell silent in an instant, and everyone's eyes turned toward me.
"First of all, you cannot simply escape this place. I already explained that, so don't ask why."
I continued, glancing at Yarina, who was secretly lowering her hand.
"Isn't our ultimate goal to get out of here safely? Keep what I say in mind from now on. Whatever you see, whatever you hear here, don't think it's real. The moment you get caught up in that thought, you'll truly be devoured."
Having finished my explanation, I turned my head toward Park Junsu, who was frozen and bloodless.
"FearKing. Let's proceed with the original plan."
"Ri, right now? In this situation?"
Park Junsu answered in a trembling voice, looking down at the cue sheet in his hand.
"Grasping the true nature of this place. That is the only condition for escape."
I walked past him and looked at Lee Junhyeok, who was still unable to recover from the shock.
"Hyung, come with us."
It was a notification of sorts. Perhaps a reward for his goodwill.
"...Alright."
Lee Junhyeok hesitated for a moment before nodding. He seemed to have realized that in this situation, I, the most unscientific person here, was paradoxically the most reliable one.
I gestured toward the remaining streamers with my chin.
"The rest of you, pair up yourselves. But absolutely do not stay alone."
And I added nonchalantly.
"And don't die."
Cleaning up corpses was more annoying than I thought.
I had done my part, so the rest was up to them.
"Let's go."
I took Jina and Lee Junhyeok and started walking.
Walking through the empty hallways from the lobby, I felt that there was more than one strange thing about this building.
Jina seemed to have noticed this too, as she looked around and asked.
"Oppa, hasn't this place been abandoned for quite a while?"
"At least 20 years, I'd bet?"
"That's strange."
"What's strange?"
Meanwhile, Lee Junhyeok joined the conversation with a puzzled expression.
"Hyung, have you ever been to a haunted house or an abandoned building?"
"Hm? No."
"Usually, abandoned buildings left alone for a long time are filthy and reek of mold, but isn't this place too clean?"
Only then did Lee Junhyeok examine his surroundings again.
"Now that you mention it, there isn't a speck of dust... Is that even possible?"
"Maybe there's a cleaning ghost."
"Yo, you're joking, right?"
I left the pale Lee Junhyeok behind and examined the inside of the hospital again.
By the time we had almost finished circling the first floor, we reached a conclusion.
"Oppa, is this really a hospital? Why is it like this?"
Jina asked in an anxious voice, and it was a natural question.
Only the lobby had the appearance of a plausible hospital; the inside was completely different.
The rooms lining both sides of the hallway were all narrow isolation cells with iron bars, and the walls were plastered with what looked like soundproofing pads.
"...It looks like a psychiatric ward?"
Lee Junhyeok was right. This wasn't a general hospital; it was the structure of a psychiatric ward.
"Did they hide the fact that it was a psychiatric ward? No, even so, there are too many strange things."
Besides, if it were a psychiatric hospital, wouldn't it be normal to have textbooks related to psychiatry or psychology on the shelves in the examination rooms?
But all that was in the examination rooms here was a single desk and chair for the doctor to sit at.
There wasn't even a stethoscope, which could be called an essential piece of equipment for doctors. And yet, restraints were left inside the examination rooms.
'No emergency room, either.'
Furthermore, despite having toured the entire first floor, there was no emergency room.
Even if this were a psychiatric ward, it made no sense for a hospital to have no emergency room.
Unless they had built the building without considering an emergency room from the very beginning.
So, when we finished exploring the first floor, our conclusion was clear.
This is not a hospital.
Correction. At the very least, it wasn't built to treat people.
Lee Junhyeok summarized his deduction for the camera in a trembling voice.
"The cleanliness without a speck of dust, the absence of an emergency room, the lack of treatment equipment, and only restraint equipment left in the examination rooms... All of this points to one hypothesis. This place wasn't a place to receive patients, but a place to contain people."
"Oh, you summarize well."
"...Aren't you turning on your broadcast? The stream is going crazy right now."
"As you can see, it says 'out of service,' so I can't turn it on. It seems I can't broadcast inside the hospital."
When I showed him my phone, he muttered like a man who had given up on everything.
"...What horizontal coordinate system."
Anyway, just touring the first floor had taken quite a bit of time. I didn't know if the other streamers had started their exploration, but nothing good would come from further delay.
"We know roughly what purpose it was built for, so let's check the second floor."
Soon, we arrived at the second floor.
"Wow. I didn't know a place like this existed in Korea."
The second floor was different from the structure of the hallway itself.
If the first floor had at least imitated the appearance of a hospital, the second floor was blatantly in the form of a detention center.
"Hic...!"
As I shone my flashlight inside the prison-like iron door, Jina gasped, and Lee Junhyeok froze in place, unable to say a word.
The rooms on the second floor were cages for beasts, only in the shape of rooms.
On top of that, the countless fingernail marks covering the walls were a spectacle.
They had scratched so desperately that the pads on the walls had been torn away, revealing the cement walls in some places. Between the marks where blood from broken fingernails had dried black, barely recognizable letters were carved.
[Save me]
[Hell]
[Please kill me]
And in the middle of that hellscape.
Rusty, blood-caked restraints, seemingly used to secure a human body, were fixed to the floor.
After looking around the room, I turned off my flashlight without a word. Shortly after, Lee Junhyeok opened his mouth with difficulty.
"...This isn't a place that treats people."
I corrected his statement.
"Treat? This is a place where people were broken."
That was when it happened.
Screeeech!
A faint sound of metal scraping came from the other side of the hallway.
It seemed they wanted to offer us a welcome greeting.
Screeeech—!
Scritch-scratch!
Sure enough, the sound grew closer.
From the end of the hallway, from the room right next to us, from inside every locked iron door.
Scritch-scratch! Scritch-scratch! Scritch-scratch!
The sound of metal scraping came from all directions.
And it began to be visible to me as well.
"Found you."
I could see where the flow of all that resentment echoing from dozens of rooms began and where it was headed.
Until now, there were too many vengeful spirits to see, but now it was visible to my eyes.
"You son of a bitch. So that's where you are."