Chapter 042
Tap, tap.
Right now, I was quietly walking through an exhibition that plucked out people’s eyes.
And on top of that, I had a piece-of-human-trash-type character from a Ghost Story setting walking right beside me.
‘I just wish Baek Saheon would keep his mouth shut and serve as a human totem.’
On the way here, I had seen several hideous crawling shadows moving along the floor in the distance. Every time that happened, I couldn’t have been more grateful to have someone beside me….
‘I just can’t let my guard down. That’s all. Just don’t let your guard down.’
Brown spoke to me in an amused tone.
-Mr. Roe Deer, you speak with this fellow in a very interesting way. It’s as if you were a completely different person.
‘Don’t you like it?’
-How could that be! It’s very fascinating. As if, for the sake of the show, you’ve created a slightly more exaggerated… persona.
Mm. Pretty close.
-So then, in this magnificent exhibition, is your goal really to leave as quickly as possible?
Exactly.
And….
‘I’ve already made an escape plan.’
I confirmed that this had also been registered as the seventeenth exploration record in <Darkness Exploration Record>, so I’d constructed an escape method to match that case.
I’d already decided which of the items I had on me I was going to use, too.
-Oh!
-But do we really need to call it an escape? If you just grab any employee and ask them to guide you to the exit, it feels like they’d kindly tell you!
That’s where the problem starts.
‘This exhibition uses machines as attendants.’
That monster swinging around those spider-leg-like things.
-Hmm. And then?
‘And each machine only knows the information for the section it’s assigned to.’
———————=
In this exhibition, attendants for our visitors are stationed in each section.
Among the testimonies of previous visitors, there have been frequent cases of these attendants being referred to as “monsters,” but they are Metril-kiosk-style automated steam dolls.
They are vintage models from Imperial Year 62627, and because their memory devices are somewhat poor, they have only learned the information concerning the section they are assigned to. However, they are historic and meaningful pieces of artistic collection.
For the sake of healthy viewing, please refrain from using disparaging expressions.
———————=
What that meant was, if you wanted to ask about the exit, you had to go to the section where the exit was and speak to the employee there.
And if too much time had already passed by then… you’d be “charged the fee” and end up reborn as a human grub.
And figuring out which section the exit was in to begin with was incredibly difficult.
‘But there’s a clue.’
I stopped walking.
Because I had found what I was looking for.
“…An elevator?”
In front of Baek Saheon and me stood a very antique elevator in a relatively modern style.
In front of the brass-colored elevator was an iron lattice gate, and a small bulb glimmered there.
And like any ordinary elevator, a guide plaque explaining the floors and how to use it was attached to the wall beside it.
Except the characters were in a script we couldn’t read at all.
‘One of the things that makes the exploration difficulty even worse.’
The alienness of the script.
Baek Saheon frowned.
“……You’re planning to ride that?”
“Who knows.”
“We can’t even check what floor it goes to. Are you in your right mind?”
I stared silently at Baek Saheon. He hurriedly averted his gaze.
‘As if I would be.’
But I had the host of a Ghost Story talk show who claimed to be fluent in every language!
‘Brown. Could you read the elevator explanation for me?’
-That is not a difficult task, my friend!
-Ahem.
After clearing his throat, Brown began explaining in a friendly voice….
-It says that an attendant is stationed inside that elevator, and if you tell it the floor you want, you may enjoy the service of having the button pressed for you. Hooh, quite an old-fashioned method….
In other words, if you took the elevator, you were guaranteed to meet an attendant and get your eyes plucked out.
I knew that already, but it still made me swallow hard.
‘Any explanation about the exit?’
-Unfortunately, none! It mostly explains the floor numbers and the exhibits on those floors.
-And the place where Mr. Roe Deer is standing right now is the second floor. …Oh, just a moment. There is also an explanation of the history of this mansion.
“…!”
That was information that hadn’t even been in <Darkness Exploration Record>.
‘Keep going.’
-Of course, my friend!
-It says this is the villa of a collector of extremely exalted status, and thanks to his charitable desire to share his art and philosophy, he is holding an endless exhibition!
-It also says this historic grand mansion consists of seven floors above ground and 7,221 floors underground.
“……”
Wait.
What?
‘…7,221 floors underground?’
-That is correct. Hmm, it seems he must have collected quite diligently over a long period of time!
I froze.
‘…I did know there was a basement.’
At first, it wasn’t described.
The early exploration records of this Ghost Story, Mansion of the Blind, are records left behind by people who were lucky enough to escape from the upper floors, or who failed to get out of them and died there.
That started gaining popularity among readers.
And then the records kept getting updated like crazy, getting longer and longer, and the scale of the story’s world expanded.
Then one of the explorers realized it.
———————=
The twenty-third record is the testimony left by a visitor who entered the underground floors through the elevator.
———————=
That there were underground floors.
And so, for the people who failed to find a way out above ground, the records continued with them descending below.
That vast, suffocating horror of watching them continue downward, searching for the exit, lower and lower and lower.
From that point on, this Ghost Story was classified as cosmic horror.
Exploration records meant to leave the reader breathless and overwhelmed.
There was even one record where a person gave up on escaping, went half mad, and just kept descending underground.
———————=
This is the testimony of a visitor who viewed the exhibition section on Basement Floor 105.
Employee 753: The dreadful and horrific things my ears cannot see are truly beautiful. Framed with ■■, a person’s ■■ ■s. Die for this.
There are no further records.
Thank you for your meaningful review. We will devote ourselves to exhibition management for an even more moving experience.
———————=
The deeper underground you go, the more bizarre the collections become, the more filled they are with alien things humans cannot endure. And at some point, in that horror where so many words can no longer be left behind in human language, where all that remains are censored blanks and utter desolation….
Below that, thousands of unknown things, exi—…
Smack.
I slapped myself across the face.
“…?!”
Get it together.
‘There are multiple exits.’
Even if their locations changed every time the exhibition began, that much never changed.
Hadn’t I seen records of people escaping through different exits on different floors within the same run?
‘You can do this.’
It didn’t matter how astronomically vast this place was, or whether it stretched into spaces beyond human comprehension.
There could still be an open exit nearby.
I had exploration data from over a hundred runs, and even the records from this run itself. If I stood here dumbfounded, I’d be an idiot.
‘Even if the floors weren’t specified directly, I already figured out all the hints.’
I couldn’t let myself be overwhelmed by the scale of the Ghost Story. I had to move fast.
Don’t do anything stupid… get a grip!
‘…Good.’
I took a deep breath and started walking.
Toward the stairs beside the elevator.
“Wait, then you’re not taking the elevator… How do you even know where this leads!”
“The second floor.”
“…?”
“From here, we’re moving to Basement Floor 1.”
“The basement? There’s a basem— no, wait, this is the second floor? How are you so sure?”
“Brown told me.”
“……”
“Aren’t you grateful?”
“……”
-Don’t mention it!
Surprisingly enough, Baek Saheon still didn’t run away this time either.
Mm. I should keep treating him at about this intensity from now on.
Even after going down the stairs, the grand mansion remained the same, without a single change in decoration or brightness.
A dim, brass-colored, shadowy landscape continued on and on. It almost felt like seeing the same floor repeated over and over.
Even that ended when the staircase vanished one floor below.
‘…So this staircase doesn’t continue into the basement.’
For now, I decided to look for a new staircase or another means of movement on the first floor.
Naturally, there was no more chatting with Baek Saheon either.
Because we were hearing the sounds of machines around us more and more often.
‘That means we’re getting close to the main exhibition hall, where attendants are practically stationed at all times in rotating shifts.’
We moved almost crawling, mouths shut.
Then I lifted my head and saw a huge sign hanging right beneath the ceiling.
‘There it is.’
The sign for the main exhibition hall.
Carved with antique ornamentation, it was written in very elegant… unreadable script.
-‘The Power of Emotion,’ is it? An unusual exhibition title.
“…!”
That was an exhibit I had read about in <Darkness Exploration Record>. Even just reading the title gave me chills……
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
I clenched down hard on the urge to turn around immediately.
‘If I’m going to search for the exit and explore this place, I have to see it at least once anyway.’
Since I needed to secure a route, avoiding the “safe” exhibits would have been stupid.
So I gritted my teeth and approached slowly….
The moment I looked through the open door, gleaming with lavish raised decorations,
the exhibition space unfolded before me.
Along with a sound that came crashing in like a wave.
Aaaaaaaahhhhhh
I saw countless human mouths crying out.
More precisely, teeth and tongues.
An enormous wall was packed full of beautiful Baroque frames containing human mouths.
Perhaps artificial vocal cords had been attached to them, because each one recited poetry in its own voice, in its own language.
And those hundreds, thousands of frames came together to create an astonishingly strange harmony and scale.
And….
On the floor below them, grubs writhing.
Huuuuuugh, huuugh.
People who could no longer speak human language writhed on the ground with dark, lifeless buttons stuck into their eye sockets.
People who had had the fee collected over and over until they had almost lost all traces of human form.
And the contrast between that and the frames, those rows of mouths arranged in such neat and beautiful displays, made it even more… even more……
‘Ah.’
I think I’m going to throw up.
So chilled it made my head spin, I lowered my eyes to the floor.
Calm down, calm down.
‘They’re not company employees either.’
These were probably people who had been trapped here for days.
Those poor… no, don’t focus on that right now. Let it slide out of your mind as much as possible, as much as possible…….
Kkikikikikik.
At last, from far away, the shadow of an attendant machine began drawing near.
Baek Saheon and I held our breath and crawled into a nearby ventilation shaft, pressing ourselves flat.
The attendant machine’s shadow moved among the grubs.
It seemed to be finding corpses that had stopped moving, grabbing them, and hauling them away….
The sounds of dragging bodies and the machine’s noise overlapped.
“……”
“……”
A few suffocating minutes passed.
“Hey.”
“……”
“It took the corpses away. So corpses have value too, right? As fees?”
What the hell is wrong with this bastard?
“If they had value as fees, it would’ve collected them before they died instead of leaving them lying there like that.”
“Ah, I see.”
Do I really have to listen to this kind of crazy talk even now? Fatigue surged through me.
And on top of that, I even had to make up lies.
‘Honestly, if I told the truth… of course they have value!’
Since this place treated us as “visitors,” it seemed like while we were still alive it only collected parts that wouldn’t kill us right away, like eyes, noses, and mouths, as fees!
I had a feeling even brains or spinal cords would be considered valuable too. I thought there had been floors where things like that were exhibited.
But I couldn’t tell him that. If I did, this was the kind of bastard who would carry corpses around and suggest using them as payment if things went south.
So I kept my mouth shut.
Then—
“…!”
The attendant machines were gone from the now-empty main exhibition hall on the first floor.
From here and there, people hiding in the shadows beneath side tables in the corners suddenly darted out, whispered to each other, then scattered and began running.
With masks on.
‘Employees…!’
From the shapes of the masks and the suits, it was obvious.
They were field exploration employees from our company who had been deployed together with us. It looked like they were hiding in sections off the main route and narrowly avoiding the machines.
“Hey.”
What now.
“If you see any rookies among them, let’s have them join us. Better to have one or two more people, right?”
“Why?”
Baek Saheon looked at me like I was asking the obvious.
“So we’ll have bait to use if we run into a monster.”
This bastard, seriously.
I deliberately tilted my head as if puzzled.
“We already do.”
“What?”
“You.”
Baek Saheon’s face hardened, then relaxed again.
“Yeah. I was planning to bring one more person too. Someone I could use as bait.”
“Nice. Tell them you’re planning to use them as bait.”
“……”
“I told you, didn’t I? At least I’m that polite.”
Baek Saheon went silent again with a disgusted expression on his face.
I’m the one who’s disgusted. What an exhausting guy…….
‘I miss you, Lizard Team Lead.’
I miss that terse salaryman.
But the moment I saw the figure of the last person come out from behind a sofa outside the exhibition hall and run, I was startled.
“…!”
It was an employee I knew.
“……”
“…! Wait, what are you…”
After hesitating for a second, I came out of the ventilation shaft.
When I waved at her, she also saw me and jolted in surprise, then hurriedly lowered her voice.
“…! Sol— no, Mr. Roe Deer? Should I call you that?”
“Yes. Ms. Sheep.”
Go Youngeun.
The rookie employee who had fully supported what I said on the subway was standing there. Had she said she’d dropped out of medical school?
“Were you deployed too, Mr. Roe Deer? No, first of all, I’m just glad you’re safe.”
“…Thank you.”
Anyway, wearing the sheep mask assigned to her, Go Youngeun looked far calmer than she had when I met her back then.
Though her eyes were a little bloodshot.
‘Has she adapted to the job…….’
I was almost moved by the fact that I could have a rational conversation even in this insane situation.
Go Youngeun glanced sharply around, lowered her voice to a whisper, and said,
“There’s a boarded-up window nearby, and I was trying to open it. By any chance, did you happen to see something like a crowbar on your way here? I didn’t think we should use the exhibits….”
“You can’t.”
“Huh?”
“You’re trying to get out through the window, aren’t you?”
“…Would that be a bad idea?”
It would.
Do you know the only time windows are mentioned in the exploration records of this Ghost Story?
———————=
The nineteenth record was supposedly left by a visitor who attempted to go outside through a window, but due to issues of credibility, it has been omitted at our discretion.
Because this exhibition has no windows.
———————=
It’s a landmine.
I came up with a plausible reason on the spot.
“I have a feeling that if you go out through a window, you’ll physically leave the mansion. …Not return to the real world.”
“……Ah.”
Go Youngeun’s face turned pale.
“You’re right. This isn’t reality… so we need to find a door that’s recognized as an exit.”
“That’s what I think too.”
“But in a situation where we don’t even know what floor this is….”
“I checked. This is the first floor.”
“…! How did you— no, wait. The first floor?”
A spark of hope flashed in Go Youngeun’s eyes.
“Then there’s a high chance there’s a door nearby! Most exhibition entrances are on the first floor, so if we search thoroughly—”
I forced my stiff mouth open.
“……The reason entrances are usually on the first floor is because we live with our feet on the ground.”
“That’s—”
“Do you really think this Ghost Story’s original visitors did too?”
“……”
Go Youngeun shut her mouth immediately.
She seemed to understand what I meant right away.
‘How can you be sure a monster would put the door on the first floor?’
And soon, the same bleakness that had come over me a few minutes ago darkened her face.
“Then… wh-what do we do? Was asking that machine monster earlier the right answer after all? B-but I can’t meet another machine now. I don’t… I don’t have another chance….”
“What do you mean, you don’t have another chance……”
“……”
Go Youngeun hesitated, then brushed her hair back slightly with her own hand.
At the place where the rim of her ear should have been, where her hair should have caught….
There were only stitched marks.
“They… they tore my ears off.”
“……”
“When it gestured, ‘Ears instead of eyes, ears instead of eyes!’ I answered with hand signs… and it actually accepted that? It doesn’t even hurt. It’s really strange….”
Go Youngeun trembled faintly.
“And I think it put something strange in there… b-but I can still hear? I-I don’t know what principle it works on… some kind of artificial cochlea or eardrum?”
Ah, damn it.
“It’ll be okay, right? I mean, uh, the employee mall also sells long-term regeneration potions, doesn’t it…?”
“It’ll be okay.”
I answered at once.
“You’ll be okay. Let’s just focus on getting out.”
“…Yes.”
Go Youngeun’s breathing calmed down again. For someone who had suddenly lost both ears, her mental fortitude was superhuman.
Honestly, I kind of admired her.
But apparently not everyone felt that way.
“Shouldn’t we get moving? Try not to waste too much time.”
“…! Mr. Baek Saheon.”
The moment Baek Saheon, wearing the goat mask, stepped out of the ventilation shaft, a sharp note of alertness flashed in Go Youngeun’s eyes.
“Wait a second, are you moving around with him?”
“It just kind of happened, yes.”
“…I see.”
Go Youngeun stared at the goat-masked Baek Saheon like she were keeping watch on him, but she didn’t cut me off and still agreed to come with us.
‘Thank you….’
Do you know how long it’s been since I had a normal companion?
After going through psychopaths and even people possessed by ghosts, it was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Though Go Youngeun did mutter quietly,
“That guy even picked a mask exactly like himself… Did you know that in the West, goats are symbols of the devil?”
“Wow, and did you know sheep are symbols of sacrifice?”
“At least they’re more helpful to humanity than devils.”
Baek Saheon looked at Go Youngeun with a mocking expression, clearly unable to accept that at all, and Go Youngeun ignored him.
-Is this an interlude? It feels like a comedy sketch.
Yeah.
But the problem is that this isn’t a sketch. This is the real situation….
‘The party synergy feels completely ruined.’
But our destination was steadily getting closer.
‘…!’
Found it.
At the end of that hallway, a staircase leading down into the basement had appeared.
