Deal with Him | Lee Heeseung

13-The 13th hour

God, how I love this chapter.

-Andrea

                               July

A July night is the perfect time for the clock to hit thirteen.

Horror movie night went into recess when Evelyn’s eyes shut, right before the last scream from Friday the 13th, but Heeseung kept watching and laughing as he popped popcorn in his mouth and watched the blood drip on the TV screen.

All until the clock hit 12—or was supposed to.

Heeseung’s hand reaches slowly to pull away the girl’s head from his shoulder, as he squints at the grandfather clock in the drawing room. The blanket flies off him as silently as it can, and he gets up, leaving Evelyn to rest her hand on the couch and tiredly mumble.

“What...” Midnight is not midnight. Is anything what is seems? The clock is not, for it hit an hour more than it should’ve hit—an hour dressed as a ploy in its appearance, an hour that was never supposed to be there.

It is thirteen am.

The dim light of the TV shines directly on the angle of where a faint, eerie laughter erupted, and where Heeseung’s gaze darted, knowing—or presuming. His eyebrows pull together in a crease of pondering as he prowls to the noise that is now gone.

Heeseung’s head dashes to his back as quick as lightning when the laughter echoes again, a bit closer to Evelyn. He clicks his tongue in the darkness and, with his snapping fingertips, he turns on the lights.

There is nothing, and this is getting old.

And still, with a collected face and a composed frame, Heeseung steps to the foyer, spearing one last peek at the girl on the couch. The eldritch giggles follow the line that exits the salon, and trails its footsteps like wind.

As the devil draws near the undersized hall, the mirror on the wall slips away and the nail that supported it fidgets there, lost and without its purpose. But Heeseung’s hands catch the glass before she can stir awake and take part of whatever is now happening.

Placing the mirror back on its place, he studies the space up and down, and his hand dashes and seizes in his grasp the thing he has suspected for so long of causing this. “Obviously,” he whispers while, in his fingers, the incorporeal being squirms without a face and without a mouth or teeth or lips, but with some smile made out of ashes and a laugh of screaming souls.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” he asks it, but he knows it cannot speak. Yet, the shadow in his clutch still threshes and giggles and understands nothing but its hellish wish to be released and create chaos.

He knew it. But what kind of shadow moves leaves and plays the piano?

The kind in his palms does. Heeseung scrunches his nose as the nasty, bodiless silhouette continues its fight like the demonic creation it is.

Its laughs are not its and neither are its notes that produce only what it heard, for this is all it can do: leave out what it hears. And in this moment, the sinister laughs of children coming out like broken dolls are not appealing to him. So, hastily as he can, he wraps his bony fingers tighter on the thing that has no form and that could only listen to something that was created from as great evil as he was, opening her house door in an unwonted silence.

Those are the ugliest things of Hell and the only assumption he has is that it must’ve slipped from its infernal ground onto this world that it doesn’t know, like a parasite. And what greater time than when he shaped himself as human and opened the gates?