Scene 1. The Broken Tin Can
He stepped out.
The smell followed him — perfume tangled with urine. It thinned with every step. One step. Two steps. Three steps. At the fourth, it cut off entirely. Done.
He walked the corridor. Bare feet pressed into carpet. Dark red prints stamped behind him. Violin music still drifted up from the first floor. No one had turned off the phonograph. No one was left to turn it off.
His stomach was quiet.
Still warm. Still full. The satiation pressed softly against the inside of his ribs. He could walk. He could breathe. He was fine.
A sound.
Not the violin.
Skree—
Metal grinding against metal. The sound of an ungreased hinge turning. No — not a hinge. A joint. A sound that could not come from a human joint was crawling out of the darkness at the end of the corridor.
Skree. Skree.
His steps stopped.
The chandelier's light reached only halfway down the corridor. Beyond that: darkness. Something moved along the darkness's edge. No silhouette. Only sound. The friction of joints rotating. Footsteps that pressed into carpet and made no noise. Not a human walking rhythm. Uneven. One step long, the next step short. The tempo of a broken clockwork unwinding.
The smell hit him.
Not blood. Not the sweat of something alive. Dry. Desiccated. Something that had body heat but no living smell. Close to the oil-stench of machinery. And beneath that — medicine. The bitter, acrid smell of a compound. The smell of what had been pumped into veins seeping through skin.
Ah.
He had smelled this before. In Yeon-hwa's room. From the shadow that had seeped through the window. From the hand that had wrenched her shoulder and driven her into the floor.
A shape surfaced from the darkness.
Black clothes. A mask. Only the eyes showed. Cold, still, empty eyes. The most vacant expression a human iris could hold. Nothing inside them. No fear, no rage, no will. Two glass marbles pressed into a face.
It stopped at the border where the chandelier's light ended. The seam between light and darkness. One foot in light, the other in shadow. Lee Kang stood in the light. The shadow stood in the dark.
Skree.
The shadow's right shoulder rotated. The joint swung past the range of human motion, swinging the arm back. What was gripped in that extended hand caught the light and flashed. A dagger.
His stomach was quiet.
The dry compound smell snagging at the tip of his nose was unpleasant. Something with no blood, no sweat, no living smell was standing there in the shape of a person. Not flesh. Not something that could be eaten. A tin can caked in grease.
He stepped forward.
Toward the shadow.
Scene 2. Shallow
The shadow moved first.
It erased the line between light and dark and shot forward. No sound. No footfall on carpet, no whisper of cloth through air. Only the joints skreeing. The shoulder twisted and the arm with the dagger punched forward.
It caught him in the solar plexus.
The dagger tip punctured his uniform, parted flesh. The blade went in. Deep. Until the hilt touched skin. Somewhere inside his stomach, something hot and something cold detonated at once. The hot thing was blood. The cold thing was the dark red compound.
He didn't dodge.
Didn't step back. He looked down at the dagger buried in his solar plexus. The black hilt jutted out between the folds of his uniform. A hand held that hilt. The shadow's hand. Black gloves. Knuckles tight with tension. It was going to twist. The trained follow-through — plant the blade, twist, widen the wound.
Before it could twist, he caught the wrist.
His right hand wrapped around the shadow's wrist. Five fingers closed over the black glove. He squeezed. Inside the wrist, he felt two bones. Thin. Thinner than his own forearm had been when the wire was wound around it.
Around the blade, his flesh was moving.
The dark red compound flooded the torn site. Cold. Like ice water washing the inside of a wound. Flesh closed in on either side of the blade, squeezing like it was pushing steel out. The knife was trapped. The shadow pulled, trying to rip it free. It wouldn't come. New tissue had fused around the blade and locked onto it.
The shadow's eyes shifted.
What had been glass-marble eyes cracked — barely. The pupil shuddered, once. Not fear. Eyes that had had fear excised could not feel it. This was error. A machine-error signal, firing because the sequence — stab and it dies, twist and it ruptures, pull and it collapses — was not executing.
Still holding the wrist, he opened his mouth.
"...Shallow."
A fractured voice. One word. One word, exhaled with a knife buried in his solar plexus.
The pain around the blade was dissolving. The cold was smothering it. The dark red compound was knitting torn muscle, filling burst vessels. The knife was inside him and the bleeding had stopped. The wound had classified the blade as a foreign object and begun to expel it. Flesh pushed the blade. Inward to outward. The knife was being forced back — not by the shadow's hand, but by Lee Kang's body. The blade that had gone in a full palm's length was being reverse-pressured out by living tissue.
Skritch—
The blade screamed as flesh scraped against it, pushing it out. The shadow's grip on the hilt didn't release. It was trying to hold on as the knife came out — so the shadow's body was dragged forward with it. Arm extended. Shoulder pulled taut.
He torqued the captured wrist.
Further. The shadow's arm stretched drum-tight. The shoulder joint spread to its limit. The shadow's other hand came up. A fist struck Lee Kang's jaw. It connected. His head snapped sideways. Inside his mouth, his cheek caught against his teeth and bled. His own blood. Not sweet.
He turned his head back.
Looked down at the shadow. A black shape standing there with its wrist in his grip. The glass-marble eyes stared up at his face. An upward angle. It was half a hand shorter than him.
The knife finished its expulsion from his solar plexus. Out through the surface. Click. The tip cleared the fabric of his uniform. The shadow held the knife in its hand — the knife that had been ejected by Lee Kang's flesh. The blade was clean of blood. The dark red compound had consumed the blood and sealed the wound. A clean blade caught the chandelier's light and flashed.
He pressed his palm to his solar plexus. Where it had been pierced. Not smooth — rough new tissue, uneven beneath his fingers through the torn fabric. Closed. Completely.
The inside of his stomach was cold. The cost of burning through that much dark red compound at once. The warmth of satiation had dropped one degree. He wasn't hungry yet. Not yet.
He didn't release the wrist.
The shadow tried to re-grip the dagger — reverse hold. Transitioning from thrust to slash. Its fingers were rotating on the hilt.
Slow.
He wrenched the captive wrist.
Scene 3. Butchery
The wrist turned.
Crack.
Not the sound of bone breaking. The sound of a joint dislocating. The two bones of the wrist shifted against each other, torquing beneath the skin. The dagger fell from the hand. Dropped to the carpet. Silently. The carpet swallowed it.
The shadow's mouth didn't open. No scream. No pain reception. The wrist was bent at a grotesque angle, and the expression didn't change. Glass-marble eyes looked up at Lee Kang's face. Eyes with nothing in them.
The left hand came up. The shadow's remaining arm. A fist flew toward his temple. Fast. A trained trajectory.
It connected.
His head was shoved sideways. His vision lurched once. It righted itself. Where he'd been hit went hot, then cold. The dark red compound was filling burst capillaries. A fly landing and leaving.
He caught the left hand.
The shadow's remaining arm. He gripped above the elbow. Gripped it and yanked down. The shadow's upper body pitched forward. Into the center of that pitching body — he drove his knee up.
His knee buried itself in the shadow's stomach.
Thud.
The torso folded like it had been hinged. The moment the body bent into an L, he put more force into the arm he was gripping. Twisted. In the opposite direction. The arm rotated to an angle arms should not reach.
Crack.
The sound came from the shoulder. Joint dislocated. The arm went slack. Both arms useless now. Both hanging at grotesque angles. Like wet rope.
The shadow tried to step back. Legs still worked. The left foot pushed against the carpet, trying to withdraw.
He raised his foot.
Kicked the shadow's knee.
From the front. Head-on. Not the direction a knee bends backward — the direction it gets shoved sideways. The sole of his foot met the lateral face of the knee. He pushed.
Snap.
Not bone — the sound of connective tissue tearing. Everything holding the knee together severed simultaneously, and the leg folded inward. An impossible angle. The knee bent sideways, and the shadow's body crumpled onto the carpet. Thud. The sound of a heavy piece of meat hitting the floor.
The shadow's remaining leg moved. From the ground, it tried to raise its foot and kick Lee Kang's shin. Training. Even with both arms shattered and one leg snapped, attack with what remains — mechanical repetition. No pain to make it stop. No screaming when broken. No convulsions when snapped. A broken clockwork going skree-skree-skree, repeating the same motion.
The foot found his shin. Weak. The force of an upward kick from a prone position. A fly. He registered it and forgot it.
He raised his foot and set it on the shadow's shoulder.
Shifted his weight down. The shoulder blade pressed into the carpet below. From beneath the pinned shoulder came a crunch. Something ground between bone and carpet.
He looked down.
What lay beneath his foot. Black clothes. A mask. Both arms folded in useless directions, spread across the floor. One leg rotated sideways at an angle a human knee must never reach. The remaining leg still clawed at the air. Slowly. Without force. The clockwork running out.
The glass-marble eyes looked up. From beneath Lee Kang's foot. Toward the ceiling. Eyes with nothing inside them. Before broken and after broken — the same eyes. No pain. No fear. No defeat.
The violin flowed from the first floor. A slow passage. A soft melody. Layered over that melody, the skree of the thing beneath his foot — the last leg's joints scraping at empty air. The violin and the broken machine, a duet.
He pressed down harder on the shoulder beneath his foot.
Crunch.
Something beneath the shoulder blade collapsed. Went flat. What was pinned sank into the carpet, and the remaining leg's movement stopped. The clockwork was fully unwound.
He lifted his foot.
A footprint remained pressed into the shoulder. A dark red sole-print stamped onto black cloth.
The thing beneath him no longer moved.
Scene 4. Silver Bell
He looked down.
A smell rose from what lay beneath his foot. Blood. Blood that had burst free from torn flesh and broken bone. It reached the tip of his nose. The underside of his tongue wet reflexively. Saliva started to rise—
And stopped.
Not sweet. This blood. The moment it reached his nose, his tongue refused. Under the raw iron smell — the dregs of something bitter and acrid. What had been pumped into the blood was seeping out with it. Not human blood. A tube that ran with medicine. Wastewater leaking from a grease-caked tin can.
His stomach rejected it. The reflex that wanted to inhale was blocked by his gut. This was not food. This was poison.
He lifted his foot. Set it on the shadow's throat. Through the sole, he felt the cervical vertebrae. His toes found the larynx. Soft. He pressed. Down.
Snap.
Brief. The sensation of something inside the throat crumpling and folding traveled up through the sole of his foot. The thing beneath him shuddered once, finally. That was all.
He stepped back.
He stood on the carpet. Beneath him was something crushed. Around it, blood was spreading — soaking the purple carpet dark red. Blood that couldn't be eaten. Something that couldn't be drunk.
His stomach called out.
Grrrr.
Back. While the knife had been buried in his solar plexus and flesh was sealing it and a shoulder was being pressed flat, the dark red compound had burned through in volume. The cold satiation was draining away. The sensation of something adhering to his spine was starting again. The feeling of an empty pocket beginning to fold.
Hungry.
He looked around. Things that had fallen in the corridor. Things broken at the foot of the stairs. All cold. All stiff. Nothing that could be eaten.
He raised his nose.
He read the corridor's smell. Perfume. Blood. Furniture polish. Beeswax. He sorted through them. Something edible. Something alive.
Nothing.
The violin melody climbed from the first floor. The phonograph's needle still scraped the record. In the silence between one passage ending and the next beginning, an empty beat filled the corridor.
Inside that empty beat.
Jingle.
A sound.
Not the violin. Not the phonograph. A sound that came from nowhere in the corridor. Far. Very far. Not from inside this mansion. Past the walls, past the garden, past the outer wing — that's where it seemed to come from. No — it was impossible to know where it came from. It didn't reach his eardrums. It resonated inside his bones.
Jingle.
A silver bell.
A clear, thin, cold ringing vibrated inside his skull. Not his ears hearing it — his bones. The vibration spread through the gaps between his ribs. From inside his chest. Not from his stomach.
A scent brushed past.
Not blood, not perfume, not compound. Soap. Lily of the valley soap. A smell that existed nowhere here touched the tip of his nose and vanished. Not because a wind had carried it. Because his nose had manufactured it. His brain had manufactured it. His brain had pulled out, without permission, the smell of a person who wasn't here.
His stomach called out. Grrrr. Give me food. Give me the blood of something alive.
But his feet turned toward somewhere that had no food.
He looked. The end of the corridor. A window. The curtain was drawn back. Moonlight poured through the glass. Beneath the moonlight, past the garden, the outer wing's silhouette was visible. A low roof. White plaster walls. Somewhere inside—
He stepped forward.
Bloodied bare feet pressed into the carpet. Leaving the crushed thing behind. Stepping past the blood that couldn't be eaten. Toward the window. Toward the outer wing. Toward the smell of lily of the valley.
His stomach called out.
Grrrr.
His feet didn't stop.