The man in front of him had a smile so small it barely counted as one.
“Hello.
My name is Kang Jihoon.” He gave a short nod.
“This is my team.”
Behind him stood four people, and Ishaan noticed their faces before he noticed anything else about them.
A woman with large black headphones covering both ears, the kind meant to block out sound completely.
An older man with a sharp, unreadable face and hands folded behind his back like a soldier at rest.
A young woman with a tablet already out, scanning the lobby ceiling before she even looked at Ishaan.
A calm-looking man holding a canvas pouch against his hip, the strap worn soft from years of use.
None of them said anything.
They just watched him with the kind of attention that felt like being measured.
Ishaan had expected a suit and a handshake and maybe some junior assistant trailing behind with a clipboard.
This felt more like meeting a small, silent army.
Ishaan bowed at the waist, ninety degrees, the way three years of Korean office life had drilled into him.
“Nice to meet you all.”
They bowed back, all four at once, like they’d rehearsed it.
“Right this way,” Ishaan said, folder tucked under his arm, already walking toward the stairs.
The elevator was taped off with a hand-written sign that just said OUT.
Nobody commented on it.
He gave them the tour the way Manager Han had trained him to give any tour.
Square footage on each floor.
How long the building had been vacant.
What had already been approved for renovation and what hadn’t.
The first floor was mostly gutted, wires hanging loose where light fixtures used to be.
The second floor still had old cubicle dividers stacked against one wall, waiting for someone to haul them out.
“Original wiring is from the nineties,” Ishaan said, gesturing up at a junction box.
“Whole electrical system’s getting replaced before anyone moves in.”
The older man made a note on nothing visible, just a small nod to himself.
The woman with the headphones walked half a step behind the group, her eyes moving over walls and corners like she was reading something written there.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said, catching up beside him.
Ishaan turned around, pleasant, professional.
“Of course, miss.”
“Yuna,” she said.
“Have you been having any nightmares lately?
Not about the building.
Just in general.”
Ishaan rubbed the back of his head, laughing it off.
“Kinda.
Isn’t that everybody, though?
Everyone has nightmares sometimes.”
Yuna studied his face for a second longer than the joke deserved, then nodded and dropped back into step with the others.
“She does that,” the young woman with the tablet said, not looking up from her screen.
“Don’t take it personal.”
“Noted,” Ishaan said.
They climbed to the fourth floor.
Dust sheets covered half the windows, letting in only strips of gray light.
The older man stopped walking and looked at Ishaan directly.
“Has there been any renovation work on this floor?
Have people reported anything unusual?”
“How do you define unusual?” Ishaan asked.
“Cold spots.
Electrical issues that don’t have a cause.
Insulation that won’t hold no matter how many times it’s replaced.”
“You get all that from a real estate report, or is that a personal list?” Ishaan asked, trying for light.
The older man didn’t smile.
“Answer the question.”
“Right,” Ishaan said, and his laugh came out shorter than he meant it to.
“Yeah, there’s been a few things here and there.
Nothing crazy.
Place has been empty a long time, people talk.” He shrugged.
“One old report actually said someone heard howling on this floor.
Guess we’ve got wolves living in the walls.”
The young woman with the tablet snorted, still typing something.
The calm man with the pouch huffed out something close to a laugh.
“You might be onto something there.”
Ishaan kept walking, gesturing toward the far hallway, the words about square footage and load-bearing walls falling out of him on autopilot.
That was when the storage closet door at the end of the hall swung open on its own.
Ishaan looked at it because he was already looking that direction.
He wished he hadn’t.
A man stood inside the doorway, half his face drooping sideways like the bones underneath had melted.
His skin had gone the color of old paper, cracked at the jaw where the drooping side pulled too far down.
He held a butcher’s knife in one hand, too big for the blade to be anything but wrong, dark liquid dripping steadily off the tip and pooling on the floor without making a sound.
The man staggered forward a step, then another, swaying like he was underwater.
Ishaan’s mouth moved before his brain caught up.
“There’s a draft coming from somewhere above us, that’s probably what opened it.”
“We should check that,” the calm man said, already walking toward the closet without any hurry at all.
“Yeah, yeah, definitely,” Ishaan said, forcing his feet to keep moving in the opposite direction, narrating something about ceiling insulation that made no sense even to him.
Behind him, the long black shape that had followed him for two days slid across the floor and pressed itself into the staggering man’s ruined form.
They merged into one thing.
What stepped fully out of the closet a second later was worse than either half had been alone, the drooping face now stretched too wide, the black shape wrapped around it like a second skin made of smoke.
The temperature in the hallway dropped hard enough that Ishaan saw his own breath.
Everyone felt it.
Yuna’s hand drifted to the side of her headphones.
The older man’s jaw tightened.
Nobody said a word about it.
“I don’t see anything,” Ishaan muttered under his breath, more to himself than anyone.
“I don’t see it.
I don’t know.”
“You were saying, about the building’s history?” Kang Jihoon asked, voice level, eyes not quite leaving Ishaan’s face.
“Right, sorry.” Ishaan cleared his throat and kept talking, filling the air with numbers and dates, watching the thing sway at the edge of his vision the whole time.
Kang Jihoon asked more questions.
Sharp ones.
When exactly had the last tenant moved out.
Had there been complaints before the building closed.
Who had access to the fourth floor now.
Ishaan answered each one, his voice steady even as his hands weren’t.
He kept his eyes on Kang Jihoon’s face instead of the thing swaying somewhere behind him, because that felt safer, even if he couldn’t have said why.
The older man had drifted closer to the closet, close enough to be studying the doorframe like it owed him an explanation.
He said nothing about what he might or might not have been looking at.
Ishaan drifted a little farther from the group, gesturing down a side hallway, still talking, still smiling.
The pain hit his shoulder like a knife through fabric, because it was.
Ishaan’s head snapped around.
The thing stood right behind him, blade buried in his shoulder, the ruined face inches from his own, the smell of something rotten rolling off it in waves.
He didn’t think.
His body just moved, running straight for the only person in the room the thing seemed to avoid without knowing why.
Kang Jihoon caught him before he hit the ground, one arm locking around his back.
“There’s—” Ishaan tried to get the words out, but his throat had closed around something that wasn’t quite a scream.
He lifted a shaking hand and pointed instead.
“He’s pointing at something,” Yuna said.
“There’s a thing standing right there, why isn’t anyone—” The rest of the sentence broke apart into a sound that wasn’t a word at all.
The calm man was already moving, pulling a folded paper talisman from his pouch and pressing it flat against Ishaan’s shoulder before Ishaan even saw him cross the distance.
Up close, the paper was covered in handwriting too fast and small to read.
The pain dulled from a scream down to a throb within seconds.
Ishaan’s breathing slowed enough that he could talk again without his voice cracking down the middle.
He was still held against Kang Jihoon’s chest, one arm wrapped tight around him, when he looked past everyone toward the hallway.
His shoulder throbbed in slow, dull waves now, nothing like the white-hot line it had been a minute ago.
The thing had stopped moving completely.
It stood frozen mid-step, knife still raised, not so much as swaying.
“Why isn’t that thing moving anymore?” Ishaan asked.
The hallway went completely silent.
Every single person turned to look at him at once.
Yuna’s hand had stopped halfway to her headphones.
The young woman with the tablet had lowered it entirely, staring.
Kang Jihoon’s arm tightened slightly around his back.
His voice, when it came, wasn’t a question so much as a fact settling into place.
“You can see them?”