Parent-child relationships are, more often than not, complicated. Even blood-related family members inevitably develop conflicts if they live under the same roof long enough. A family without conflict would be more of an anomaly than an anomaly itself, wouldn’t it?
That’s why one of the phrases Koreans hate hearing is, “Just wait until you have a kid like yourself.” Personally, I think that one’s going too far. If I had a kid like me, I’d have collapsed from high blood pressure ages ago.
Apparently, that applied just as well to the parent entity screaming “Our precious son!”—the lump, presumed to be the parent, was deeply shaken by my remark, “Your kid takes after you.” Countless inverted triangles surfaced between the clumped flesh.
The enraged lump collapsed its form and flowed down the emergency stairs like liquid, soaking everything in its path. The sight was revolting enough to turn my stomach, but if I wanted to draw out “the caretaker,” I had to cause as much of a disturbance as possible.
How do I make him come running like, “What on earth is happening in our apartment?”
I was getting ready to bolt when I felt Minsu watching me carefully.
“Wait, you—”
Before I could shout, “Don’t!”, Minsu’s body swelled. The already large black dog expanded monstrously, opened its jaws wide, and tore away about half of the lump that had been pouring down like liquid.
“What the hell—why are you eating that?!”
{It was trying to harm you, Iru…}
“That’s disgusting! Spit it out, now!”
They say that when dog owners take their dogs out for a walk, they get intensely anxious when the dog starts chewing on something for no reason. I’d never even owned a dog, yet here I was, feeling exactly the same.
Half of the lump—its face, once packed with inverted triangles—had been ripped away, leaving only the remaining half writhing. The emergency stairwell was visibly melting and corroding wherever the lump touched it.
I immediately grabbed Minsu’s snout and forced it open. Inside, his mouth was pitch-black, like a bottomless abyss—there was no way for human eyes to identify what was inside.
Seeing a concrete building dissolve like that, it was obvious the liquefied lump was made of something like hydrochloric acid, just like the BB pellets the children carried. And he had swallowed that. I had to make him throw it up immediately.
But Minsu only whimpered and refused to spit out the half-eaten lump. Instead, he pulled out something that might have been a tongue—or a tentacle—from his pitch-black mouth and sloppily licked my face.
This bastard…
I tried to grab him and shake him for eating something disgusting and then acting like nothing happened, but now that he had grown, he was far too large for me to handle. Only then did I notice he looked like something straight out of mythology—a monstrous wolf.
Since I couldn’t handle his whole body, I grabbed his snout and shook that instead. Minsu paused between licking me and smacked his lips.
{C-could you let go for a moment? You taste sweet, Iru…}
I let go of his snout.
So that wasn’t affection—he was tasting me?
Minsu shyly shrank back down to the size of a large dog. Then, as if swallowing the lump had been nothing, he rubbed his soft body against my leg again.
{Should I eat the rest too and get rid of it?}
“Try eating something weird again and see what happens.”
{This is nothing to me.}
I picked up the now smaller Minsu and pried his mouth open again to check. Unlike when he had grown larger, I could actually see inside now. His teeth were a bit sharp and his tongue slightly long, but there were no visible injuries from swallowing the lump.
While I was busy scolding Minsu about not eating filthy things, the remaining half of the lump poured through the gaps in the stair railing and disappeared.
“I’ve got a feeling.”
{What kind of feeling?}
“That pretty soon, ‘the caretaker’ is going to come find me himself.”
No matter how I looked at it, the lump had fled from Minsu. If the dog accompanying talking Gregor suddenly turned into Fenrir and started tearing you apart, you’d run too.
“Seriously, the strangest thing in this anomaly might be me.”
Maybe it was because I was walking around with a talking dog, but even I felt strange about myself. I was definitely a normal human, but from the perspective of ordinary entities, I probably looked like something completely incomprehensible. If I were a resident here, I’d file a complaint first thing.
When a disturbance breaks out in an apartment building and the residents can’t resolve it themselves, the next one to appear is naturally “the caretaker.” My guess was that the lump had run off to call him.
Sure enough, not long after, Minsu started circling around me.
{Someone’s coming.}
“Finally, ‘the caretaker’? Please—I really need to meet him.”
{…Why?}
“Because I need him to go home!”
Minsu looked more uneasy than when the evil-view-of-human-nature children or the lump had appeared. Seeing him—who could chew something like the lump in a single bite—tense up made my whole body tighten as well.
“Is ‘the caretaker’ really that strong?”
{I don’t know much about the entities here. I don’t leave the school very often.}
“Then why are you so tense?”
{Because you, Iru—}
Before he could finish, a middle-aged man’s voice came from below in the emergency stairwell.
“Are you a resident?”
Without a single sound of footsteps, “the caretaker” appeared on our floor. He was a middle-aged man with a wrinkled face, dressed like an apartment guard. Unlike the residents with geometric faces and multiple arms, he looked almost entirely human.
Unlike Minsu, whose beauty made him uncanny, “the caretaker” had unusually long arms. There were only two of them, but even without bending over, his hands reached his knees.
“Are you a resident?”
The rules sheet flashed through my mind—always be kind to “the caretaker.” Before he could ask again, I quickly shook my head.
“I’m not a resident. I’m a visitor.”
“A visitor?”
“Yes. I’m about to leave.”
Minsu gave a short bark at the approaching “the caretaker.” I covered his snout with my hand and forced an awkward smile.
Up close, “the caretaker” was taller than I expected. From afar, he had seemed to give a good impression, but looking closely, something about him was subtly twisted. The wrinkles on his face didn’t look like natural aging—they looked more like something that didn’t quite fit had been wrapped in skin and crumpled.
{You’re leaving already?}
“Oh, come on—that’s not ‘the caretaker’!”
{Already? Already? You shouldn’t do that. Please move into our apartment!}
I quickly checked the feet of the supposed “the caretaker.” The uniform was correct—but, as expected, the impostor wasn’t wearing black sneakers. He was wearing black dress shoes. Same color, easy to miss if you didn’t look closely.
Once I noticed it, it became obvious his face wasn’t human either. It looked like someone had pulled a face over something else and stitched it in place—half of it was covered in visible seams. That was why, from a distance, it had looked like wrinkles.
{You look like you’d make an excellent resident. Shall we make a deal? If you give me your facial skin, I can help you find what you’ve lost…}
The impostor giggled and reached out to grab me—but Minsu bit down on its hand.
As it screamed, its wrist torn off, I quickly ran through the rules sheet in my head.
1-2. In Baekju Apartments, you can escape immediately by finding the special entity “the caretaker” and saying, “I’m just a visitor, and I’m leaving now.” “The caretaker” appears as a middle-aged man in his fifties, dressed as a guard and wearing black sneakers. Always treat “the caretaker” kindly.
└ There are things that pretend to be the caretaker, so be careful!!! If it doesn’t have a human face, it’s not the caretaker!!!
“The rules sheet, damn it! How am I supposed to memorize all this?!”
I’d get grabbed and killed before I had time to check whether it was sneakers or dress shoes! My memory was already trash—I forgot one philosopher’s name every time I learned a new concept. There was no way I could memorize everything. Only when I was about to die did things come back like, Oh, right!
Putting the information together, that impostor was most likely Entity D—the one you’d easily run into if you lingered near the entrance. It approached with a human-like voice like Minsu, and the half of its face without stitched skin still looked human, albeit distorted.
I was about to run while holding Minsu when my gaze dropped to the black plastic bag hanging from my wrist.
Inside the bag from the resident of Unit 201 were several human teeth—probably belonging to Lee Jaeyoung—and a severed human hand missing two fingers.
“Hey.”
{Ah—ah—my wrist… my wrist is gone—!}
“That deal you mentioned? Let’s do it.”
Suppressing my nausea, I reached into the bag and pulled out the hand missing two fingers.