Chapter 032
The missing manual officer.
My missing fifty million won.
And the missing gift Blood Bathtub (scheduled).
“……”
What made it even worse was that Brown—the very party who had demanded the gift—was currently inside my bag pocket….
*He must’ve heard all of that, damn it…. *
It already felt unpleasant enough to leave him at home for various reasons, and since I never knew when I might end up entering another Ghost Story, I’d been carrying him around with me, but now it felt like that had backfired.
It was like… promising a Christmas gift to your little niece or nephew on Christmas Day, only to go to the department store and find a sold-out sign on the display shelf.
Except that niece or nephew was Annabelle.
“Haa….”
A sigh slipped out on its own.
The person in charge, in this setting, has been absent without notice for a week….
It was obvious.
That meant they’d gotten caught up in a Ghost Story and gone missing.
“Just wait patiently. It’s better for your mental health.”
But if I wait patiently and someone else buys the Blood Bathtub first from the alien shop, then I’ll end up breaking the “promise” I made with Brown!
I do not want to get on bad terms with the plush doll that burned an A-grade Darkness to death with a single snap of its fingers…!
I’m screwed, seriously.
Assistant Manager Eun Haje patted my shoulder a couple of times, then returned to her seat, and I sat down at mine and agonized in silence.
What should I do.
Should I anxiously wait two months, then bow my head and apologize if the bathtub gets sold in the meantime?
Should I somehow try to pull a loan?
Or….
…Should I at least find out why the person went missing first?
It wasn’t only because I wanted an excuse to say, I did my best. What if I could find the missing person without any major difficulty or danger?
The Darkness Exploration Record was still in my head and on my smartphone.
Let’s just check.
As it happened, work had gotten pretty quiet after the theme park. And on top of that, I’d already finished the paperwork yesterday for exploring one Ghost Story.
That meant that today, as long as I didn’t blatantly run away from the company, I could afford to do a little slacking off.
Even the higher-ups are only coming in and out of the office.
Of course, since I was the absolute lowest in seniority, I decided I’d only move around briefly for about an hour after lunch.
The first place to check would be….
Obviously the officer’s desk.
Ding.
The elevator doors opened.
Of course, I’d even come up with an excuse for this visit.
“Roe Deer wants to go see the officer’s office at least once? Ah, all right… then take this and go have a look!”
That was because a soft-hearted senior had let me deliver, in his stead, “a training completion certificate that didn’t really need to be handed over right now, but wouldn’t seem strange if it was.”
Thank you, Senior Staff Park Minseong….
In a Ghost Story world overflowing with psychopaths, what a warmhearted choice this was.
I entered the Administrative Support office and looked for an employee to hand the document to. As it happened, one was seated at the desk next to the empty manual officer’s seat.
“I brought some documents from Senior Staff Park Minseong of Group D.”
“Huh? Just leave them there.”
“Yes. Ah, and this as well….”
I held out the bag I’d been carrying politely toward the office worker, who was tapping at the PC without even turning to look at me, his eyes bored.
Inside were golden-brown doughnuts, still warm, dusted with sugar and filled generously with vanilla cream.
And iced americanos too.
For something like this, a bribe really is essential.
“I was buying some food for our group, so I picked up a little extra for you too. I thought it might be nice to have while you work.”
“…! Ah, you really didn’t have to bring all this.”
Even so, the hands taking the americanos and doughnuts were swift. Truly, office workers.
“Senior Staff Kang, pass these around.”
“Oh? Doughnuts?”
“He says he bought them for us.”
“Wow, thank you! Are you from Group D?”
I watched as the administrative staff bit into the doughnuts, and the atmosphere in the office subtly shifted into tea time.
An atmosphere of idle chatter.
The perfect time for a stranger to ease in. All the more so if that stranger was the provider of snacks.
I picked an appropriate moment, reading the room, and brought up the subject.
While looking at the empty seat of the manual officer, Lee Byeongjin.
“Um, should I just leave a coffee at Manager Lee Byeongjin’s seat too? It looks like he’s not here….”
“Ah, just take it with you. He didn’t come to work at all.”
“Oh, he’s on vacation?”
“Vacation? Nah, he’s missing.”
Got one.
As though it didn’t seem particularly regrettable, the employee at the neighboring desk tossed that out casually and exchanged glances with someone across from them.
“Honestly, I figured this would happen sooner or later.”
“Hey, hey.”
“Why? Everyone’s going to hear about it anyway. You’re from Group D, right? You said you’re a new hire? What’s your name?”
“I’m Kim Soleum.”
“…! Oh, are you the one who almost ended up in Group A?”
“Well, I think they looked kindly on me, thankfully.”
“Wow.”
From somewhere around me, I could also hear murmurs like, “So that was the new guy from Group D.”
The employee at the neighboring desk gave me a subtle once-over from head to toe, as if taking fresh stock of me, then quietly hid his indifferent air and said,
“Then since you’ll probably learn about it anyway while working here, I’ll tell you.”
Hmm.
“You know, even while working at this company, there are always people who don’t know any better, pick up something weird, and then go missing.”
“Pardon?”
I furrowed my brow as though considering it, then asked,
“Could it be… that he can’t come in because of something like that?”
“That’s right. That… what was it? A scroll rod?”
“A hanging scroll. A hanging scroll.”
When the person across from him answered in a tone of resignation, the employee next to me snickered.
“Ah, right, a hanging scroll. He was subtly bragging about how he’d bought a hanging scroll that was supposed to explode his financial luck or whatever… and then he said he hit second prize in the lottery after getting it.”
Oh.
He bragged that he’d bought a suspicious hanging scroll and that his fortune with money had opened up, then went missing?
A textbook secondhand-item Ghost Story….
The setup was completely cliché.
Hmm, good.
I made my decision quickly.
Back out.
If I barged in just because I wanted my money a little faster, there was a real chance I’d end up as a corpse.
So I was just about to say something like, “Wow, that sure is scary! In that case, I’ll be going now….”
“But anyway, this means things are kind of bad for you.”
Me?
“Hey, hey, why are you going that far!”
“Well, it’s true. The Darkness under manual revision review is yours, right?”
Yes.
“If it’s not that missing Manager Lee, it’ll be hard for it to pass.”
…?!
W-what do you mean by that….
“That manager was close with Group A, originally. You know how it is. The so-called… ‘same line.’”
“…!!”
Line.
The foundation of office politics.
Factional human relationships split according to which higher-up you were close to!
And the missing officer was someone especially close to Group A, someone riding the “same line,” in crude terms…?
Realization struck like lightning.
So that’s why Group A’s leader sounded so sure!
No wonder they’d been so confident about how quickly the manual revision would go through!
“How the new person will be is honestly anyone’s guess… but the odds of someone from the same line getting slotted in are low. It’ll probably be someone from Director Cheong’s side.”
“……”
“They don’t exactly… get along with Group A.”
Did you hear that just now?
That was the sound of fifty million won evaporating.
It wasn’t just arriving late. It was disappearing entirely…!
No!
Without realizing it, I opened my mouth.
“Do you happen to know where that officer disappeared from…?”
“Well, there’s an interesting rumor about that too.”
The person beside me lowered his head and spoke to me in a whisper.
“There’s talk that he disappeared inside the company.”
“…!”
“There was someone who said they saw Manager Lee in the lobby that morning when he came in to work, you know? But he never made it into the office.”
“…So he vanished somewhere in between?”
“Well, nobody really knows. No one can say for sure. There isn’t anyone who actually saw him disappear.”
“……”
No one saw it… huh.
Even if no person did, something else might have.
I raised my head.
In one corner of the office, the red light of a CCTV camera was glowing.
CCTV.
If he had really gone missing inside the company, then naturally there might be a record left on that device.
For security CCTV used by a company of this size… maybe they’d store it for about two weeks.
If so, then it should still be possible to check.
If I wanted to make sure I got that fifty million won on time, locating the missing person was urgent.
…The problem was this.
In this company, the ones who manage the CCTV footage are… the Guard Team.
And the Guard Team was… well.
———————=
Exempt from liability for lethal shooting. (Applicable to all employees)
———————=
That’s right.
So I really wanted to avoid running into them for all sorts of reasons, but….
Well, now that I’ve joined the company, it’d be impossible to never see them for my entire life anyway.
Since things had turned out this way, I might as well use this chance to gather information and check.
I headed for the first floor, conscious of Brown in my pocket once again.
Straight to the Safety Management Office, where the Guard Team was.
“So I just go down to the basement from here?”
At the outer edge of the first floor, there was a staff-only door leading to a separated basement area, and if you followed the stairs down just a little from there, you came to this metal door.
[Safety Management Office]
I raised my hand.
Knock knock.
“……”
Knock knock.
“Then come in……”
“…??”
I carefully opened the door.
Inside was a narrow space that looked like a typical facility office, with an old sofa placed in the center.
There was one person sprawled across it.
A guard employee in an old navy uniform.
……?
“Hello….”
I quickly scanned the name tag on the person’s uniform.
[Guard Team 3 Captain J3]
“Excuse me, Captain. Would it be possible to check the CCTV footage from a week ago? Someone is missing….”
“……”
A slow answer came back.
“You want to see the CCTV….”
“Yes.”
“Ah….”
The other person looked tired and annoyed by absolutely everything.
Without even bothering to introduce himself, the captain of Team 3, who had been draped over the old sofa, slowly opened his mouth.
“Normally, if you want to see it, you have to submit a CCTV viewing request form….”
Ah.
“But since when has this company ever cared about something like that… just look.”
“……”
I couldn’t tell whether to call that kind or dereliction of duty.
Anyway, since I was the one asking the favor, I pushed over the remaining snacks as a bribe first.
“I thought these might be nice as snacks….”
“Ah, doughnuts.”
The face that had been utterly drained of energy suddenly brightened, and he instantly pushed himself off the sofa and snatched the bag away.
“I like doughnuts, but there’s nowhere that delivers to the company… I can’t go out during the day, so I don’t get to eat them very often……”
I see.
He doesn’t look that violent, unexpectedly.
Still, Ghost Stories also had the cliché of doesn’t look like it, but is actually a ghost.
I maintained my caution and said gently,
“Then would it be all right if I head to the CCTV room now?”
“Yes……. But.”
The employee scratched the back of his head and stared at the doughnut as if wrestling with some grave dilemma, then after a long silence slowly began,
“One guard will remain with you, so watch it together……. It could be dangerous…….”
“Ah, thank you.”
I waited for him to call over a guard by radio or something.
But there was no movement.
“…?”
“…?”
“You said you’d assign a guard to accompany me….”
“Me…….”
The man pointed to himself.
“That’s me…….”
…….
“Ah… right.”
Don’t get involved.
I should just watch the CCTV quickly and get out.
“You said a week ago, right….”
“Yes, yes.”
Anyway, I went into the CCTV room with the guard captain and checked the recordings.
Even though he was supposedly a guard captain, he didn’t seem particularly adept at operating the equipment, which only deepened my suspicions, but the important thing was something else.
“Found him.”
I found the recording with the officer in it.
I saw a middle-aged man enter through the lobby and ride the elevator.
His face matched that of Manager Lee Byeongjin, the officer registered on the company intranet.
And the long object in his hand.
That must be the hanging scroll rod.
It definitely wasn’t the kind of thing you’d bring into the company. There was something creepy about it.
“You’re good at finding things. You’d make a good guard….”
Please don’t say terrifying things like that.
“Thank you. I think I was able to focus because I was trying to find the missing person.”
“…A missing person?”
“Yes.”
The other person fell silent, looking a little flustered.
Apparently he’d only half-heard what I’d said earlier and was only now recognizing it properly.
That someone had vanished inside the company, and the Guard Team hadn’t known.
“I missed that…….”
“Is that very troublesome for you?”
“No……. It wasn’t my shift hours.”
“……”
“They’ll handle it themselves….”
Yes….
A wonderfully lucid shift-worker’s logic. Message received.
Anyway, after checking the elevator CCTV as well, I was able to confirm where the missing officer had gotten off.
The surprising thing was… the officer hadn’t gone upstairs.
“…He went down to the basement.”
A level even lower than this Safety Management Office.
[B2]
The footage clearly showed him stumbling out on basement level two.
…That was chilling.
What on earth happened?
Why had an administrative employee suddenly gone down into the basement as if possessed?
That place only grants access authority to the Security Management Department.
I’d even heard that even they only did patrol rounds there, so what was going on?
Cold sweat ran down my back.
I hurriedly tore my eyes away from the empty elevator.
From here on, even watching the CCTV feels dangerous.
Up until now, maybe I could say I’d somehow managed to view things off the books, but not this. This felt different.
The basement floors of a bizarre pharmaceutical company that obtained raw materials from Ghost Stories.
On top of that, a place ordinary employees didn’t have access to, and didn’t even know what happened there?
Even the Darkness Exploration Record had described it like some kind of Napolitan Ghost Story!
No good. Let’s wash our hands of this and leave.
Keeping my eyes turned away from the CCTV as much as possible, I bowed to the guard captain.
“Thank you for showing me. Then I’ll be on my—”
“Restroom.”
“…?”
“The person you’re looking for. He went into an unused men’s restroom in the basement…….”
“……”
“He didn’t come back out. Not for a whole week.”
I desperately did not look at the CCTV.
But it seemed this guard captain had already briskly checked, on his own authority, the basement fourth floor that the missing man had been going in and out of.
“Do you want to go to the restroom……?”
“I do not have access authority for the basement floors.”
“I’m going….”
Yes. Well, it’s your work post, so that makes sense.
If you go and find the missing person, I’d really appreci…….
“Let’s go together……. We’ll just say you’re a new member of the Guard Team, or something.”
Excuse me?!
“No, you really don’t have to go that far—”
“Let’s go….”
No!!
How had things ended up like this?
I even got handed a uniform.
I was in the service elevator, wearing the dark navy uniform of an ordinary Guard Team member.
I was so dazed I could hardly understand what kind of situation this was.
I got talked into it….
“It’s fine. Field Operations Teams sometimes come for support duty too…….”
Isn’t that a disciplinary measure?
Anyway, by pure misfortune, it had been verified that even if word got out that I’d gone into the basement, it wouldn’t escalate into any major trouble.
I’d also stubbornly contacted Group D and had it processed as formal support work, so there shouldn’t be any disciplinary issue….
Should I say my social survival skills with my superiors were really shining right now?
Even so, I feel dazed.
I’d come this far just to buy one Blood Bathtub.
At this point, even if I didn’t manage to pull in the fifty million, Brown ought to acknowledge the effort.
Ding.
With the elevator chime, the doors opened.
Basement level two.
Even though it was clearly the same sound, somehow it felt ominous here. What appeared before us was….
A corridor lined with ordinary offices.
“……”
Why… were there offices in the basement?
Shouldn’t this be where the safety equipment or facilities are…?
The office hallway, lit a little dimly, was very quiet, and there were frosted glass doors all around.
Office A, B, C… nameplates were attached to them.
The guard captain whispered,
“Don’t open the doors….”
“Yes.”
Even if you hadn’t said that, I had absolutely no intention of touching so much as a fingertip to them.
I walked slowly, keeping my eyes only on the guard captain’s back.
And then it happened.
“Mr. Roe Deer?”
“…!”
“To think you would even put on such shabby old clothes just to give this Brown a gift! I’m truly touched, but my heart also aches. Must my friend really do such drudge work?”
That was a very kind thing to say.
But.
…How are you talking right now?
The Good Friend could only speak and move inside Ghost Stories…. Which meant.
I was already inside a Ghost Story.
“Ah, we’re here.”
The guard captain stopped walking.
In front of a restroom door leaking pale light.
“I’m opening the door…….”
“Wait—”
But before he even heard me, the restroom door opened.
Bang.
As the lights flickered, the space beyond the door revealed itself….
“……”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
The restroom was drenched in dark red-black ink.
As if someone had stabbed an artery with a knife, the erupted ink had splattered all over the restroom mirror like blood.
I froze completely.
I couldn’t even scream.
But the next moment, my sense of smell snapped me back to reason.
There’s almost no metallic smell.
That wasn’t all blood.
But it didn’t smell like ordinary ink either. This was….
…Calligraphy ink?
Tap tap.
Brown tapped me from inside my pocket.
Warning.
My mind sharpened in an instant.
The guard captain looked around the restroom and stretched out his hand.
“Don’t touch it—”
Poke.
“Huh…?”
I was screwed.
The moment the guard captain dabbed the ink with his index finger,
the dark red-black liquid in the restroom began to surge like a wave.
“…!!”
I instantly turned to run, but the sticky black liquid shot out like countless hands, swallowed my feet, and yanked.
Aaaagh!!
Fuck, fuck…!
I barely managed not to go down completely and dropped low instead. As I thrashed, the liquid splashed up under my chin. A curse rose to the very edge of my mouth.
The moment I twisted my head to somehow grasp the situation, I saw the source of it.
“The scroll!”
There was a hanging scroll on the restroom mirror, its center slashed to pieces.
Bloodlike ink was being sucked into the hollow center of the slashed scroll.
Which meant my feet were being dragged there too.
As if some living creature were pulling me in…… wait, living?
Like blood?
The Vampiric Cutlery…!
I pulled out the fork and stabbed it into the floor.
The pure silver fork trembled, then began greedily absorbing the surrounding ink.
“Ah!”
Something was happening!
But a dessert fork no bigger than a finger was nowhere near enough to hold out.
Ting.
The cutlery was knocked away.
Fuck!
Just like that, I was sucked into the scroll.
“Hurk!”
I raised my head.
Through the dark, hazy blur of my vision, I saw old wallpaper stamped with dense, wrinkled patterns.
An unfamiliar place.
…An abandoned house?
I caught my breath and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
And then, then….
I realized.
What I was seeing wasn’t wallpaper.
Talismans.
Every wall, made of rotten wood, was covered all over with worn-out old talismans.
“……!”
Heavy.
A strange pressure ruled this dark and chilly interior, as though the air itself were bearing down on my shoulders.
……Something was wrong.
I felt like a rat that had snuck into the wrong place in the wrong way.
“……”
I clenched my trembling hand tightly.
But there was nothing in it.
…It’s gone.
The Vampiric Cutlery had disappeared.
Sweating coldly, I slowly, slowly tried to breathe in order to keep myself from hyperventilating….
“Excuse me…!”
I thought I was going to faint.
“Th-there! Are you maybe a police officer…??”
I raised my head.
I wasn’t alone in the dark abandoned house.
Small figures crouched over in one corner were staring at me.
They were… children.
Middle school uniforms.
The sniffling students cried out,
“Please help us! W-we touched something like a weird painting, and now we can’t get out of here!”
