The hands of the anime-character wall clock hanging above Glen’s desk pointed to 3:14 a.m. WIB.
The crickets chirping outside the boarding house called back and forth with the hum of an old fan turning slowly in the corner of the room. In Sewon—a district usually filled with the noisy bustle of art students—hours like this marked the boundary between soothing silence and ominous stillness.
Glen narrowed his eyes, which felt horribly raw. The blue light from his pen display reflected off the lenses of his black-rimmed glasses. Thick dark circles ringed both eyes, stark against his pale face. For three days, he hadn’t properly touched his bed. His third packet of instant coffee that night had gone cold in a black-stained ceramic mug.
As a fine arts student at one of the area’s renowned art colleges, Glen had overflowing ambition. He didn’t want to become just another ordinary graduate who drew commercial illustrations to order. He wanted his name to be known. He wanted his dark fantasy webtoon comic to spread, be read by thousands of people, and be praised as a masterpiece.
Yet behind all that grand ambition, Glen was a coward.
The boarding house where he lived had fifteen rooms, but only three were occupied—including his room at the very end of the second-floor hallway. The remaining rooms sat empty and dusty, tightly locked since last year. Whenever Glen had to leave his room to use the communal bathroom at the end of the hallway in the middle of the night, his heart always pounded hard. He would walk quickly, staring straight ahead and refusing to look toward the darkness of the empty rooms, whose doors creaked softly in the night wind.
For an otaku and introvert like Glen, this cramped, three-by-three-meter boarding room was both his palace and his prison.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
The digital pen in his hand moved deftly across the glass surface of the tablet. On the screen, the details of the latest chapter of his comic were nearly finished. Its main character stood in the midst of impenetrable darkness. Her silver hair hung in disarray, with sharp lines forming the silhouette of a dark dress cut into rigid angles.
But Glen’s focus was fixed on the character’s face.
Half of the face was covered in heavy shadow. And beneath that darkness, Glen drew the detail that always made his own skin crawl: a mouth opened impossibly wide, stretching beyond the limits of a normal human jaw, filled with a jagged row of razor-sharp fangs.
Glen swallowed. His throat felt dry.
“Why do I always draw this?” he whispered softly to himself.
The dream had been visiting Glen since he was in elementary school. The fanged figure never spoke. It only stood in the corner of Glen’s nightmares, watching him in terror from the darkness. And lately, as Glen’s ambition to finish his comic project before its release deadline intensified, the fanged figure had begun appearing more often. Glen deliberately channeled the form from his nightmares into this work of art—considering it both a form of “therapy” and a unique aesthetic quality no other comic artist possessed.
Click.
Glen saved his draft. He let out a long sigh, then leaned his back against the wooden chair, which creaked sharply in the silence.
His thoughts drifted to Melissa. His girlfriend had probably already fallen sound asleep at her own boarding house, a few alleys away. Glen smiled faintly as he remembered how they had first grown close. As two shy otaku, they often spent hours at a small café near campus, trading recommendations for dark manga or discussing theories about their favorite anime stories. Melissa was one of the few things that could make Glen feel calm amid his torturous ambition.
Then there was Amelia.
If Melissa was the place Glen could lean on, Amelia was the pillar keeping him from collapsing. His childhood best friend—a blunt girl who had never been afraid of anything—was always the first person to chew Glen out whenever he started acting stupid because of his cowardly nature. Amelia was the one who had forced him to rent this boarding room because it was cheap, and she was also the one who regularly pounded on his door just to make sure Glen hadn’t died and rotted in front of his drawing desk after forgetting to eat.
The muscles in Glen’s neck felt stiff. His eyelids suddenly felt as heavy as lead.
The fading effects of caffeine and the accumulated extreme exhaustion of several days suddenly attacked his brain in one overwhelming wave. The world around him seemed to sway. The hum of the fan in the corner grew louder, becoming a deep vibration drumming harshly against his eardrums.
Don’t sleep now, Glen thought in panic. One more panel. I just need to clean up the lines around the neck.
He tried to move his hand, but his fingers felt numb. His vision blurred. His consciousness was forcibly dragged toward darkness.
Then, within a fraction of a second he never noticed... his eyes closed.
Two seconds.
During that brief silence of microsleep, the air in the cramped room suddenly dropped several degrees. It was so cold that a thin film of condensation froze around the rim of his coffee glass.
Three seconds.
In the darkness behind Glen’s closed eyelids, a soft scraping sound arose. It wasn’t coming from outside the room, but from the surface of the graphics tablet directly beneath his hand. The sound of a sharp fingernail scraping against glass.
Four seconds...
“Glen?”
A soft whisper—not a human voice, but something like barbed wire scraping across a concrete wall—sounded right beside his left ear.
Jolt!
Glen jerked in shock! His eyes flew wide open, his breath coming in ragged gasps as though he had just surfaced from underwater. His heart pounded so hard his chest hurt. Cold sweat dampened his temples.
He whipped his head to the left in panic. There was no one there. His boarding room was unchanged. The wooden door was still firmly locked from the inside. The fan was still turning slowly.
“Haah... haah... It was just a hallucination,” Glen muttered, clutching his heaving chest. “I just need to sleep. I’ve gone crazy from lack of sleep.”
Glen wiped the cold sweat from his face, then prepared to shut down the computer. But his gaze accidentally fell on the graphics tablet screen in front of him.
Glen felt the blood stop flowing through his veins.
On the tablet screen, across the drawing panel he had just finished, there was a new digital ink line. It was messy, scratched out in a rough, trembling shape—not Glen’s hand-drawn style at all. The black ink line had been pulled out from the fanged character’s mouth in the drawing, crossing the panel’s frame and stretching straight toward the lower-right corner of the screen.
Exactly where the digital pen held between Glen’s fingers was.
And what made Glen’s breath catch in his throat... at the end of the ink line on the tablet screen was a slightly raised blotch of thick black liquid.
Liquid that was still wet. Its smell spread through the cramped boarding room—a foul, bloody odor mixed with the damp earth of a graveyard.