Ivory (Sequel to Porcelain)

Chapter 10: Dangerous Magic

The room was warm, the energy high and intense. Kwangmin and I sat on the edge of our seats, leaned forward towards Donghyun, listening as attentively as if he was about to tell us the key to becoming filthy rich. I tried not to let my mind wander towards Youngmin, wondering where he was and whether or not he'd gone through with his plan yet. As for what Donghyun was about to tell us, I was excited to hear it, but I was a tiny bit scared as well.

Donghyun looked at me and smiled ever so slightly. "I knew you were going to get this out of me at some point. I just didn't know it'd happen like this."

I blushed shyly, but said nothing.

He took a deep breath and clasped his hands together. "Well. I guess it all started after Sohyun was kidnapped and your mom took you and left. As I told you before, I tried to cope by losing myself in my inventions. But I was still so sad and so desperate for some relief. Just like how Youngmin must be feeling now. And when you're that desperate, bad things have a chance of happening."

My eyebrows furrowed. What was he talking about? What 'bad things'?

"So what happened?" Kwangmin asked.

Donghyun looked away, fixing his eyes on a random point in the distance, away from our curious gazes. "Well...I started hearing voices. They started out as gentle whispers, telling me to talk to them, to tell me how I felt and what I was going through; telling me they could help, they could be like a friend. I believed them, whoever or whatever it was. I started ranting to them all the time, bringing all my pain out into the open, and trusting them with everything. They were kind and quiet for a while, but then the whispers got a bit louder, a bit more opinionated. They started giving me ideas, things I could do to comfort myself. Many of them were brilliant ideas and one of them in particular is an idea I'm so thankful to have acted on. Why don't you make twin dolls? Out of porcelain! We can make them together, and they'll live like real people, they'll watch over your daughter. Then you'll be happy again knowing she's safe and guarded. You should turn yourself into a doll, too-your new porcelain identity will surely give you new joy and confidence. That's what the voice told me."

Kwangmin and I both gasped at the same time, simultaneous sharp intakes of breath.

"Really?" I exclaimed in disbelief. "But I thought you had always liked the idea of creating dolls, on your own."

"Oh I did, which is why it was so clever yet terrifying. But I'll get to that in a minute." He sighed and continued, "So then, I did what the voice said. I made Youngmin and Kwangmin as dolls, and the owner of the voice did the job of giving them life. I made myself into a doll too. At that point, it should've been finished. I should've stopped talking to the voice; I shouldn't have let them in anymore. But I had gotten too dependent on having the invisible company around...I almost got even more desperate than I had been at the start. That's when the voice got louder and louder and more demanding in its requests and ideas of things I could do "for myself" to "make myself happy". I didn't realize exactly what I was dabbling in, and how dangerous it was, until the voice whispered one night, You would be so much happier if you just died. What's more peaceful than not existing at all? For your own good, you should kill yourself. And I dragged myself over to the Han River at three in the morning.

"But right before I was about to jump, I remembered something. Memories I thought were long gone came back, and they overwhelmed me. I saw the small, brightly smiling faces of you and Sohyun, looking up at me as I held you in my arms, barely two months old. And that's when I realized what I was about to do. That memory broke whatever trance I was in, whatever grip the voices had on me. So I held tightly onto it, focusing only on the faces of my girls, and I told the voices to get lost. I actually screamed it out loud, and I got many suspicious looks from people walking by. But the voices listened-they left, and I haven't heard from them once since then. Their power was broken. I almost had forgotten all of that even happened to me-even talking about it now seems like I'm talking about a dream I had. But the more I think about it, and the more I recall, I become more and more convinced that the same thing that happened to me all those years ago is happening to Youngmin. Which means he's in even more danger than I thought."