The address led to an old commercial building in Yeoksam-dong.
The narrow one-way street held nothing but shuttered shops and rows of garbage bags.
Barely a hundred meters off, the signs of bars and restaurants blazed day and night, yet hardly any of that light trickled this far in.
Iheon took in the surroundings, then turned back to study the building.
Five stories of worn-out retail. Most of the signboards that had once plastered the exterior had been stripped away, leaving only their outlines behind, and through the dust-filmed windows the gutted interior lay plainly exposed.
The banner strung across the front of the building snapped in the hot wind.
The main doors were sealed with a thick chain and a padlock. Behind the glass, fixtures abandoned ahead of demolition lay heaped any which way.
Jei checked her phone screen.
“The address is basement level one of this building, though.”
From the front, there was no sign of any entrance leading down.
While Iheon looked over the facade, Jei walked up to the battered directory board standing beside the main doors.
Every tenant’s name had been peeled off, but the marks they left were still faintly legible.
Jei stared at the board for a while, then turned her head toward the right side of the building.
“I think it’s over this way.”
“What is?”
“Basement places usually put in a separate entrance of their own, for the customers.”
Jei didn’t wait for a reply. She slipped into the narrow alley on the right and rounded to the back of the building as though she’d done it a hundred times.
“See? Told you I was right.”
Behind the building, a staircase ran down into the basement.
A long black awning hung over the steps, and the wall still bore the ghost of a sign that had been torn off.
The entrance was tucked away at the rear, in a spot you’d never stumble across unless you came looking for it on purpose.
The staircase was fairly wide, but it curved, so the door at the bottom wasn’t visible in a single glance. The lights mounted along the wall were all dead.
Jei pulled out her pocket camera at once and started filming. She was angling the screen down the stairwell, about to take her first step, when Iheon caught her by the forearm.
“Are you insane?”
“Huh?”
Jei looked back at him with absolutely no idea what she’d done wrong.
Either she had no fear in her at all, or she simply couldn’t register danger as danger.
Dumbfounded, Iheon hauled her back up off the steps.
“You have no idea what’s down there and you’re not even scared.”
“I only wanted to get a shot of the entrance first...”
“Haa...”
The address had come straight from the killer. There was no telling what was waiting down there, or who. And still Jei had shoved a camera out in front of her like a reporter arriving on scene.
“Get behind me.”
“Don’t worry about me. On a story I end up in places way worse than this all the time, you know? Honestly, people don’t scare me one bit. It’s ghosts that scare me.”
“...”
“Why are you looking at me like that? It’s true, isn’t it? With a person you can at least run away, but a ghost isn’t something I can do anything abou-”
Ghosts, his foot. Standing in front of a woman who didn’t grasp what the problem actually was, Iheon felt the air press in on him until nothing came out but a sigh.
“Lee Jei.”
“Mm.”
There was no helping it. This one thing had to be driven into that small brain of hers so deep she could never forget it.
“If you think of me as your husband, even a little, then I have a duty to protect you. Because you’re my wife.”
His face had gone hard, and the words came out like a warning. Jei opened her mouth to protest that that wasn’t what she’d meant, then met the ferocity in his eyes and shut it again, tight.
“If you don’t understand it, memorize it.”
Iheon turned his back to her, switched on his phone’s flashlight and swept it down the stairwell. Odds and ends of household trash lay abandoned on the steps, every piece coated in dust.
“Hold on.”
Jei took his hand without a word of complaint. Beside his, with its long fingers and thick knuckles, hers was slender and thin, but she threaded her fingers through his and laced them tight so she wouldn’t lose her grip.
He kept the light on the ground at her feet and took the steps slowly, one at a time.
Past the bend in the staircase, the basement door came into view. A soundproof door, nothing of the inside visible through it.
Iheon stopped in front of it and turned the light on the floor this time. Footprints were pressed into the thick layer of settled dust.
“You see the footprints here?”
“Could they be the workers’? They look recent.”
The prints were sharp enough to bare the floor underneath. Judging by the differing sizes and strides, more than one person had passed through here. Jei’s pocket camera caught every one of them, stamped into the dust.
“Just in case, don’t get more than a step behind me.”
Having drilled it into Jei one more time, Iheon pulled the firmly shut door open.
The instant a gap opened, the air that had been sealed inside came shoving out. Damp and acrid, it was thick with old cigarette smoke and the sour reek of spilled liquor.
With the power cut, the inside was dark enough that he could barely see an inch ahead. Without crossing the threshold, he ran the phone’s light over the interior, starting from the near end.
Near the entrance stood what looked like it had served as a register counter. Beyond it, numbered doors stretched away in a long line down either side of a corridor.
He searched the depths of the place with his hearing strained for anyone who might be inside. Not a sound of another living soul.
“Let’s go in. Watch your step.”
Iheon spread the flashlight beam wide, and Jei fell in right behind him.
Air that hadn’t been aired out in ages sat heavy and stale. Every breath out felt like it left more dust clinging inside his nose.
Iheon swept the light along one side of the corridor, then the other.
The wallpaper, blotched dark with mold, had peeled and bubbled away from the wall in places.
“Iheon, do you see that?”
They were about halfway down the corridor when a pale glimmer caught at the edge of her vision.
Through the narrow gap of the furthest door, a yellowish light wavered at uneven intervals.
Iheon raised an index finger to his lips, then killed the flashlight.
The moment everything around them sank into darkness, the light leaking through the crack of the door grew that much clearer.
It was candlelight.
Iheon and Jei muffled their footsteps and moved slowly up to the door the light was seeping out of.
Just in case, he listened for any sign of life inside. Not a sound.
Iheon gave the bottom of the door a light shove with the toe of his shoe. Already ajar, it let out a long creak, hinges grinding, and slowly opened its maw.
The wider the gap grew, the further the wavering yellowish light inside spilled out into the corridor.
The room had kept the look of a typical hostess bar exactly as it had been.
Leather sofas ran along the walls, and in the middle of them sat a square table. Cobwebs trailed from the light fixture hanging off the ceiling.
In a room barely a hundred and seventy square feet, there was nowhere anyone could have been hiding. And yet the lit candle wavered, unsteady.
And there was something set on the table where the candle burned. Looking closer, it was a black box tied with a red ribbon.
The ribbon caught the candlelight with an unnatural sheen. It didn’t belong here, not for a second, not in all this shabby, dingy gloom.
“This was left here for us, don’t you think?”
“Modest, for a present. I was expecting a body at least.”
Iheon’s lips twisted, his eyes never leaving the box.
Muerte had most likely sketched the whole thing out in advance, right down to the two of them coming here and finding that box.
Strung tight with nerves, smothering their breathing and their footsteps, walking onto the stage he had built for them.
It galled him, being toyed with like this. But there was no way he could let Jei go wandering into a place like this on her own.
“Let’s get out of here first.”
“Without even checking what’s inside?”
“There’s no reason it has to be here.”
“True, but still...”
“Just take the box. I don’t think there’s anything else here worth looking at.”
“What about the other rooms?”
“I checked the footprints on the way in. Apart from this room, there was nothing that stood out. And.”
His chin tipped toward the candle, its wick burning black.
“More than half of it is still left, which means it wasn’t lit long ago.”
“...”
“If he lit it right before we got here, we can’t rule out that he’s still somewhere in this building.”
Neither of them said much on the way out of the basement bar and back to the paid lot.
Iheon scanned their surroundings before getting in. It was late enough that a good number of spaces stood empty, but there was no one in sight, and no car sitting there with its engine running.
Only once he had Jei settled in the passenger seat did he climb in behind the wheel.
Iheon switched on the dome light, and the yellow glow fell across the black box sitting on Jei’s knees.
