Don't Turn Your Head
Han Ji-su had simply assumed her forgetfulness had gotten worse these past few days.
Food kept going missing. Yogurt she was sure she'd had two of left yesterday would be gone, and the multipack of instant rice she'd only just opened would already feel loose in its sleeve. The ramen shelf always looked emptier than she remembered, and the shampoo she'd only recently started would give one thin squirt from the pump and then nothing.
The food-waste bin, even though she lived alone, was always a little fuller than she remembered filling it. Every time, Ji-su doubted her memory rather than the objects themselves.
I must have forgotten again. Why am I like this lately?
She always blamed herself. It was probably stress. Work had been busy.
The problem was that cases like that were countless.
The mug handle would be facing the wrong way. She always set it down so the handle pointed right, but one morning it was on the left. The front-door slippers had their toes pointed inward, too. She always turned them outward so she could slip them on when leaving—that was her habit.
Recently, one slot in the kitchen knife block had been empty. She'd had two chef's knives, and one was gone. Maybe she'd lost it when she moved. Ji-su let it go at that.
And she blamed it all on herself. Forgetfulness. She'd been spacing out a lot lately. Was it because she couldn't sleep? At work she'd zone out and repeat things she'd just said.
It was true she couldn't sleep. Without fail, her eyes would open at three or four in the morning. No alarm had gone off, and she hadn't been dreaming. It was as if someone had called her name right beside her—her consciousness would surface abruptly from sleep. And afterward, something felt cold. As if someone were watching her.
When she turned her head, of course there was nothing. The wall was beside her, and beyond the wall was the neighbor's apartment. And yet after she turned, there was always that feeling that something had been there until just a moment before, and had only just looked away.
Once she found a hair beside her pillow. At first she thought it was her own, but it was too short. Ji-su had long hair. When she rubbed it between her fingertips, it was coarse and stiff. Still, she figured it had just clung to her at work or on the commute. She let it go.
There was an unpleasant smell, too. Like spoiled food. Wondering if it was the drain, she poured boiling water down it, but within a few days the smell seeped back. It was especially thick near the built-in closet. The door had grown stiff, and at some point she'd stopped opening it much. Before she knew it, her hands naturally avoided it. Looking back, she hadn't even wanted to look that way.
That night, too, sleep wouldn't come. Ji-su lay on her side in bed, put in her earbuds, and turned on her phone. Lately she'd found a stream she watched before sleep.
A shaman VTuber. A channel with a ridiculous name to begin with—Unryong Daepalsik or something like that. A friend had sent her the link, and after watching once, she'd felt strangely at ease and kept coming back.
He told scary stories, but they didn't feel scary. Instead it felt as if someone were sitting beside her, solidly watching her back. Ji-su liked that. It seemed to block the chill behind her.
Today the chat had been loud from the start about the bokchae. Someone had declared a hundred thousand won the going rate, and everyone had been lining up to pay it.
A hundred thousand won. Not a small sum. And yet her fingers moved first. She wanted to hear, just once, what that VTuber would say to her.
She just wanted a single straight answer so her mind could settle.
Chat laughed. A hundred thousand for a story that minor. Ji-su huffed a quiet laugh herself. Guess she'd been taking a silly thing too seriously on her own.
But the streamer, who had been scrolling through other donations for a while, suddenly called a name.
Her heart dropped.
"You haven't been sleeping properly lately."
Yes. Ji-su typed quickly. That was why she'd chosen the username.
"When you're home, you keep feeling like someone's watching you."
Ji-su's fingers paused. She hadn't… written that in chat.
She typed yes. That she lived alone but kept getting that feeling.
"Things are slightly out of place, or you were sure you had five ramen packs left but when you count there's four. Shampoo you haven't finished suddenly shows the bottom."
Ji-su's hands stopped.
She hadn't said any of that. She was certain. She'd only written that she kept forgetting things—those were things no one else knew, things only she knew.
The smile vanished. And the chill behind her back felt especially thick today. A sour smell drifted past the tip of her nose from somewhere.
Beyond the blank avatar on the screen, the voice dropped another notch.
"It's not forgetfulness."
Ji-su's grip on the phone tightened.
"You're home right now."
Yes. Lying in bed with earbuds in.
"You live alone."
Yes.
The other side of the screen went quiet for a moment. The blank avatar's empty eyes seemed to be aimed precisely somewhere outside the screen—somewhere behind Ji-su's back.
In that instant her mind went white.
In Ji-su's ears, only the sound of her own heart pounded. And beside it, as if layered over the earbuds, the sounds of reality. Slow breathing mixed with a sour smell.
Without thinking, Ji-su started to turn her head that way.
Un closed his eyes.
Fragments flooded in behind his closed lids. Scattered pieces that didn't connect. Cut-off letters from a sign that had brushed past a window. An old water tank on the roof of the building across the way. The angle where the road gently curved beyond the veranda. The shoulder height and stride of someone who had just passed. Information scattered without meaning or context.
Un hadn't deliberately called them up. And yet they rose clearly. As if the world were organizing what it had seen and handing it over unasked.
Un fitted the pieces together in his mind. Like turning mismatched puzzle pieces one by one until a rough placement took shape. Not the exact address, but roughly where.
He opened his eyes. He picked up the phone lying face-down beside the desk and typed a few characters.
The screen light flickered a few times and went out.
Un lifted his head back toward the stream.
"Don't turn your head."
Un said it in a low voice.
A chill seeped into the laughing chat.
While two thousand people converged on the same conclusion, the avatar on screen kept the same blank face.
Un cut through it.
"It's not a ghost."
His voice was still low. But he didn't draw it out the way he usually did.
"Listen carefully. Get up slowly, like normal. Don't show that you're startled. Don't turn off the screen. Take your phone, and just act like you're going to the bathroom. Got it?"
"It's okay. Just move slowly. Are you up?"
"Don't look toward the built-in closet. Walk slowly to the front door."
Chat froze. In Ji-su's mind, everything from the past days clicked into place at once. Waking for no reason every dawn, the feeling that someone had just looked away every time she turned her head—none of it had been imagination.
It meant that even in this moment, something was watching her from the darkness close enough that if she reached out she could touch it.
The urge to look back rose to her throat, but Ji-su clung to Un's voice calmly giving the next instructions through the earbuds and moved her body one motion at a time as told.
The stairs felt like traps, step by step. Ji-su set her feet down carefully from the outer edge of the sole. Stairs she never paid attention to normally—today it felt as if the darkness from the upper floor were quietly following down her back with every step.
Only when her foot touched the last step did she let out a little of the breath she'd been holding. And then, like someone heading to the bathroom, slowly but one step at a time, she crossed the dim living room toward the front door.
"At the door?"
"The moment you press the door lock, once you've pressed it, don't look back—just run. Toward where there are people. Got it?"
Un closed his mouth briefly.
Something else appeared. From deep within, folded darkness was just unfolding its knees.
It had noticed. That the woman was acting differently than usual.
Un's voice quickened.
"Now. Get out fast."
Ji-su's fingertips touched the door lock.
It seemed she could hear the door-lock melody.
In that moment, darkness surged up from behind her back.
And a scream. Footsteps. The sound of something crashing and pouring down in succession.
Whether the phone had fallen to the floor, light from the screen lit the ceiling, shook, and the hallway lights stretched long—
Un's vision cut out.
Like an anchor released, he was flung out of that room.