Smiling Killing |Inspired By KILLING STALKING|

|Twenty|

"I was a killer all my life" she began, brushing her thick hair from her eyes. "When I was young, my father was recruited to the North Korean army by conscription, and so he left when I was very young. I didn't mind that though, but as a little girl I missed my father as one does. My mother, however, didn't take it well. I wasn't mentally stable to begin with, and I regularly had panic attacks and mental break downs. I had to stop going to school only after a year of being there because I kept attacking the kids. Being at homeschool, but even then...I was mentally unwell. But not even them was when things went sidewards. It was when my father came back that things went wrong. The army had made him do horrible things, shoot innocents, shoot fellow recruits. So when my father came back...he wasn't the same man that he was. He regularly abused my mother and I. And when he did, I'd have a mental fit, one my mother not he could control. And so my mother sent me off to a place where she thought I would be safe..." she laughed then. "I wasn't."

I shifted in my seat, brushing my blue hair from my eyes.

"My mother had sold me off to this ancient family organisation. Their set name being 'Miso'. Not the 'Miso' as in Miso soup, but the 'Miso' as in 'smile'. But they were apparently descendants of Dae-byul, and they believed it too."

I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, feeling a chill run up my spine. I wasn't religious, far from it, but I knew who she was talking about. Dae-byul, was the god of the underworld. The god of pain and suffering, gore and death. The equivalent of Hades, the equivalent of the devil. In our culture, anyway.

"It was...a cult?" I cringed.

She nodded. "The rule there - an eye for an tooth. Which meant, if someone gave you something, you had to pay back in any way they pleased. And none of it was good."

I suddenly didn't want her to continue. I wanted to quickly stand and leave, knowing that what she was going to say next wasn't going to be good.

"So..." she said. "For food and shelter, we had to receive something, or do something. Some of us would get beaten, some would be raped, some would go steal for them, things like that.

Another chill ran down my spine. "And what...? You never told anyone..?"

"They wouldn't believe me" she said, gesturing her head towards the door. "They thought it was some sort of manipulative ploy. Don't know how in the world it was."

"So...that's how you became what you are...?" I murmured.

"There was a man there" she said, tilting her head to the side as she stared at me. "His name was Miso Sasin - the Smiling Devil. The son of Miso Sasin, his father, and his mother I don't know about. But his father ran the cult, treated it like it was sacred and some sort of powerful religion. Miso..." she scoffed. "They were messed up. They would see string into your skin as a sort of branding, and god it hurt like hell. Sometimes they lathered the string in vinegar before they did."

God...

"The son...Sasin...he took a certain liking to me. In a way I didn't like. But it provided me with a slight..." she popped her lips together. "Protection, I guess. But he was arrogant, violent, but witty. A true demon in human skin."

I shivered.

"But I escaped after a few years there" she quipped. "The way I escaped...this was when my true self showed. And I never regretted it."

"I did some research..." I murmured softly. "And you're famous for your victims having no throats and no eyes, isn't that right?"

"Claw out the eyes" she crooned. "Tear out their throats...yeah, that's me."