Coven | BTS 🔞

9| Crossroad

With an entire day to herself, Alice wasn't sure where to go.

She thought about going to the public library, the museum or simply to take a walk downtown Seoul, observing the buildings and visiting the city. However, the girl finally settled her choice on the botanical garden. Alice loved to walk in the forest. She thought that colorful flowers were kind of tacky but appreciated trees and green plants a lot. She liked the smell of the damp earth, the colours of the moss and how quiet it always was in the forest, the ruffling of the leaves muffling everything else.

Walking down the Namsan Botanical garden paths, she noticed that the sky was clear and limpid. There wasn't a cloud in miles and the day was hot and sunny. The girl appreciated to walk around with only her jean jacket on.

Not bad for the first day of October, she thought.

Jimin must be in a good mood.

She was walking around without really paying attention to where she was going and suddenly felt the urge to jog. She hadn't run since the cross-country tryouts and she now felt the need to have her feet pounding against the asphalt. So that's exactly what she did, she started to jog slowly down the path of the garden.

With her leg muscles slowly heating up, the music in her ears and the sun on her face, Alice was feeling good. She crossed a small bridge with a stream under and followed the curves of a small lake before entering a darker part of the garden, where the threes were denser. After twenty minutes of fast jog, she felt the need to accelerate the pace.

She ran faster for a while, getting deeper in the forest. There, the canopy was thicker, and the sun did not get through the layer of leaves. It smelled like rain, moss and herbs and Alice just loved it. There was also a lot less people there. Other joggers were not going as deep in the forest.

Alice was now completely alone, getting even further inside of the garden. The path was smaller, and the plants wilder, like that part of the garden was not as kept as the rest of the park.

The girl was thinking about going back when she brutally stopped, eyes widening. She was now at the junction of a path. The trail was splitting in two, creating a perfect fork, and right at the junction, someone was standing. Not someone, something, observed Alice.

A young Korean woman was glaring back at her, long black hair seemingly heavy and falling down to her waist, hiding most of her face. She was wearing a white dirty dress and was bear feet. Her skin was spectral white, her deformed large eyes begging in a silent prayer. Her teeth were rotten and black, and a long nail was coming out of her chest, dried blood leaking from the wound. She was making weird gulping sounds like she was trying to speak and moving her body in weird ways she wasn't supposed to, like all her bones were broken.

Which they probably are, thought Alice.

It was a ghost, or a spirit, trapped on Earth by a crossroad.

Alice slowly approached. She had done this more than a hundred times, but she was feeling nervous. Crossroad spirits were often dangerous, buried there because they did horrible things or because they killed themselves; vengeful, hateful spirits that the girl didn't want to mess with

Still, Alice carefully walked a little closer. She could now almost touch the woman making gurgling sounds, black liquid coming out of her mouth and leaking down her chin, her bulging eyes oozing with what looked like blood. She turned her head completely upside down and hissed at Alice, her deformed arms thrown in front of her.

Quickly, Alice reached for the nail in the woman's chest and pulled hard. At the exact moment the girl's fingers came in contact with the cold metal, she let out a cry. Images started to pass through her mind, and she re-lived the worst moments of the ghost's life, pain seeping through every shared memory to root itself deep in Alice's chest.