The Demon Next Door

38

Five years later, they both graduated with honors and kissed their shared dorm room goodbye.

The summer after, they fled and got married; Mr. Do fainted once Kyungsoo phoned him the news, though smiling.

Then they had children

which they walked down the aisle,

and later held their grandchildren in their arms.

Or they could have.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Kyungsoo knew he was going to regret this.

The weather was mockingly cold. Each breath was a cloud that fogged his view. He couldn't complain, however. The temperature matched the way he felt; frozen on the inside, and completely dead.

It was hard to believe that a year had passed of no hand-holding. There had been no kisses to the cheek; no sweet nothings whispered into his ear, those gentle words that had him trembling with satisfaction. It was all gone, as if with the snap of his fingers.

The grave was secluded away from the rest of the tombstones peppering the sodden grass with grief. Kyungsoo made his way through them to the only one he wanted to see, feeling like his own form of ghost.

There wasn't a day when the marble didn't have flowers adorning it. Whether the bouquet came from their classmates (especially Baekhyun) or their parents, the grave always appeared to have its own garden.

Kyungsoo's bouquet already seemed like a hassle. Nonetheless, he moved all of the other flowers aside, placing his own at the very bottom, before setting the others back into their original positions, blanketing his own. He wanted his bouquet to be the closest to the darling buried underneath the ground.

"Are you finished, babe?"

At the low voice, Kyungsoo could only nod. It still sounded wrong when Chanyeol called him that; they hadn't been together for that long, and the void that Kyungsoo had wanted to fill by dating his best friend after Baekhyun left for a university across the country was still empty.

"I'll be in the car then."

Kyungsoo heard the squelch of Chanyeol's footsteps approaching to give him a kiss on the cheek, afterwards quieting as their owner proceeded to the location that he had designated. Kyungsoo averted his attention back to the grave before him.

He was lifting himself off of his knees when the unthinkable happened. A frail, ghastly white hand burst through the ground, sending soil flying in all different directions. Kyungsoo cried out, but the yell was cut short by the fingers coiling around his neck, and the head that slowly arose from underneath.

Kyungsoo found himself staring into empty sockets. The rest of the face was still in tact but menacingly ugly, with worms attempting to dig their way through the olive, rotting skin. The smell was unbearable.

"How could you do this to me?"

"J-Jongin, I—"

"How could you do this to me, Kyungsoo?!"

"JONGIN, I'M SORRY!"

"Woah! Egghead! Ouch?!"

Kyungsoo panted, the realization that the occurrences which had thrown him into a frenzy of cries were just a nightmare. Thunder rumbled outside of the window, and he wondered if the storm was a reason for the horror that had played out in his mind.