# Chapter 154
Unlike his initial reluctance, Jaekyung was quite enjoying himself. Despite being thoroughly scared, it was always Jaekyung’s role to ask if there were any more stories when silence began to fall. Iyeon, though startled occasionally, was fine with listening to the stories themselves. After all, being startled was proof of how immersed he was in the storytelling. Whenever Hyegang faced the two listeners’ sparkling eyes, he would unfold a new story like Scheherazade.
“Ah, I just remembered another one.”
Hyegang said, putting down his beer. Iyeon, sitting directly across from him, unconsciously leaned his upper body closer to the table, but when his arm touched Sano’s beside him, he jumped in surprise and moved away. Sano looked at him with contemptuous eyes and placed his arm on the back of the sofa behind Iyeon. That movement startled him once more.
“This happened in the neighborhood next to ours.”
“…That close?”
“Yes. Hyung, you know that place, right? The big building near Dongno Station that has a lot of hospitals.”
“Ah… there.”
Iyeon responded glumly. It was a familiar place he’d visited a few times for work. Why is there an urban legend in a place so close? What happened there…? Iyeon’s brain dutifully began to empathize.
“If you go deep into the alleys behind that building, there’s a three-story building. It’s probably not in business now… Anyway, there was a self-employed office on the second floor.”
“Don’t urban legends usually avoid giving such detailed locations? The building owner would hate it. Oh, is it abandoned so it doesn’t matter?”
Jaekyung asked curiously. Hyegang nodded.
“That’s right. In the post I read, there was no mention of exactly where it was, but I just heard it was around our neighborhood and got curious personally, so I looked into it. There weren’t many places that matched the conditions, so I figured it out right away.”
Useless curiosity blossomed spectacularly when met with skilled manpower. Now that a specific location was mentioned, the psychological distance felt even closer. The tension rose again. Iyeon stared at Hyegang’s face with a serious expression. With only his chin and cheeks visible in the focused light, his speaking lips caught the eye particularly.
“An employee was leaving the office around midnight to go home, when something felt off.”
Hyegang’s nonchalant tone seemed especially eerie today. Unknowingly, Iyeon pressed close to the warmth beside him. Sano, looking with a strange expression at the body burrowing into his side as if for protection, muttered quietly.
“Is this intentional?”
“Huh?”
Lifting his head at the tiny voice that sounded like a whisper, Iyeon realized a beat late what the obvious gaze meant. Ah, crap. Iyeon moved away from him again in dismay.
He wasn’t a kangaroo seeking its mother’s pouch, what was he doing clinging to Je Sano? Then again, his large, firm body did give a sense of security… Jung Iyeon, are you crazy? Iyeon straightened his posture with a stern face. Having such ridiculous thoughts—he wondered if he had indeed become more comfortable with Sano.
An arm that had come down from the backrest lightly pulled his body.
“What.”
A slight chill ran down his spine as the strong hand gripped his waist. Instinctively, he twisted his body to escape, but Sano seemed to have no intention of letting go easily—rather, his grip tightened. Frozen in place, now pressed right against Sano, Iyeon looked at him with eyes demanding an explanation. What is this? Why are you doing this…?
“Continue.”
Sano looked genuinely interested. That was even more frightening.
“C-continue what?”
“What you were doing.”
The strength was so overwhelming that even a slight imbalance would make him collapse right onto Sano’s thigh. Iyeon’s brain began working desperately. What’s his ulterior motive? Is he going to say later, “Your audacity to steal my body heat is impressive,” and then kill me? Will I turn into a hedgehog? Iyeon’s distrust of Sano ran deeper than expected. The attack right after regaining consciousness had left a particularly strong impression.
Just because Iyeon liked Sano didn’t mean his image of Sano had suddenly changed. Despite glaring with suspicious eyes, unable to erase the doubt proportional to his affection, Sano paid no attention. Iyeon struggled to remove the large hand resting on his waist, but predictably failed.
“You two, can you stop whispering and pay attention?”
“S-sorry.”
There was a limit to how much they could squabble in hushed voices. Not wanting to disturb Hyegang’s carefully crafted atmosphere, Iyeon straightened his back with a small groan. Only then did Sano loosen his grip. The hand that had rested on his waist fell away lightly and returned to the top of the sofa backrest, but where the warmth had touched felt hot as if burned.
“Anyway. Originally, that building had only three offices per floor, right? So including the men’s and women’s bathroom doors and the stairway entrance, there should be a total of six doors.”
His voice gradually lowered. Since Hyegang was quite a good storyteller, by concentrating on his words, Iyeon was able to somewhat ignore Sano’s presence. Everyone except Sano leaned toward Hyegang. Looking at the people gathered cozily, Hyegang subtly whispered.
“But there was an extra door where there should have been a wall.”
“What door?”
“Who knows. But since it was late and all the corridor lights were off, the employee thought they had seen wrong. So they just went home.”
How fortunate it would have been if it ended there, but Hyegang’s story was just beginning.
“The next day, they had to leave the office around midnight again due to heavy workload, and they saw the same door as yesterday. But this employee had felt uneasy about yesterday’s memory, so they had checked if the door existed when arriving at work. There was definitely nothing in the morning. There was only a wall, but when leaving work, that door had appeared again. Moreover, there was a slight difference from yesterday. Do you know what it was?”
After a beat, Hyegang continued.
“The door was slightly open.”
Iyeon, who was fully absorbed, grimaced and shrunk his body. Sano’s gaze briefly touched the back of the oblivious head seriously listening to the story, then moved away.
“It was just barely open, not enough to see inside, but it was definitely closed yesterday. That’s kind of scary, right? So the employee left work again without looking back.”
“Right. In horror movies, the people who get curious about such things are always the first to die.”
Jaekyung muttered seriously. Is that so? Iyeon didn’t know because he didn’t watch horror movies, but seeing Hyegang nod as well, it seemed like such a formula really existed.
“But you can’t just quit your job overnight, and it’s awkward to give ‘seeing things at midnight’ as a reason for resignation. So to be cautious, the employee left work on time for a while, but being such a small business, there was a limit to how much they could adjust their working hours. We work overtime occasionally too, right?”
“Y-yeah, that’s right.”
Jaekyung asked with surprise to Iyeon, who had nodded reflexively.
“Wow, you guys work overtime too? You always seemed to be playing around.”
“We’re busy when we have Jeong-Yeon missions. There’s a lot of paperwork we have to submit together.”
“When you put it like that, you really sound like hunters.”
“…We are hunters?”
Iyeon responded grumpily, finding it ridiculous that Jaekyung was suddenly impressed, to which Jaekyung patted his thigh saying it was a joke. Since that touch wasn’t entirely unpleasant, Iyeon just pouted, but when Sano suddenly changed his posture, Jaekyung’s hand naturally fell away.
“Anyway, after a long time, they had to work until midnight again. But since it was scary to leave right at midnight, the employee came up with a plan. They deliberately did non-urgent tasks to leave work after 1 AM. They thought if they left much later, it wouldn’t be there.”
Everyone was holding their breath listening to the story, and when Hyegang paused briefly, the office quickly became as quiet as death. That gap strangely intensified the creepiness, causing bodies to tense involuntarily.
“Even while carefully leaving the office, they tried hard not to look in the direction where the strange door had been, but you know how the human mind works, right? That contrarian impulse where you want to do something more when told not to. They were also curious whether it was really gone today. So they just slightly moved their eyeballs to check if the door was there or not.”
Someone made a sound like closing their mouth tightly.
“But the door was wide open.”
Thump, thump. Heartbeats gradually accelerated.
“And from there…”
Ding-dong!
“Ah!”
“Eek!”
The doorbell sound resonated loudly throughout the office, and screams erupted from here and there without anyone being first. Iyeon, who jumped up and instinctively clutched whatever was in his hands, drooped his eyebrows and looked toward the door. What is it? What’s going on?
