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“I’m disappointed in you, Abby.”
Those words shouldn't have had any effect on Abby. He was on the floor, his lips swollen, teeth bloodied, because Gwi-Ma had instructed two of his lackeys to ‘incapacitate’ him. The man was a monster, someone who experimented on people for his own fiendish whims and housed them in conditions you wouldn’t even subject an animal to. And still, Abby felt a twist of shame at his disappointment.
Over the past few months, he’d begun to see Gwi-Ma as something of a mentor. Gwi-Ma had acted the role as well, perhaps pretending to be someone Abby could trust to inspire loyalty. And it had worked, for a while. He’d spent weeks reasoning with himself that this whole thing, this facility and its intensive treatments, were for the greater good. He’d tried to tell himself things weren’t as bad as they looked, that, as a programmer, his window into the functions of the facility was limited. Surely he was just getting into his own head about the conditions here.
And then Jinu had gone missing.
Gwi-Ma wouldn’t tell him what had happened to the man, and neither would anyone else. That was when Abby began looking deeper into the machinations of Gwiwol Psychiatric Sanctuary.
His nights had been sleepless since then.
“I just,” he said uselessly. “I was just catching up with a friend.”
Gwi-Ma picked up his laptop and cleared his throat. Clearly using a usb internet stick and borrowed laptop hadn’t been enough to hide his tracks.
“Hey Mystery, I know you're probably busy, but I've got a big problem and you're the only one I know could do something about it,” Gwi-Ma read out, his voice flat. “It's my job at Gwiwol Psychiatric Sanctuary. There's something wrong with this place. It has a treatment they call the 'Morphogenic Engine', which can tap into the mind or something. They told me it promoted healing and would be revolutionary as psychiatric treatment in the future. It sounded like a load of bullshit, but the money was good, so I took the job.” Gwi-Ma paused, side-eyeing Abby before continuing. “Really regret that now. I'm still not entirely sure what's going on here; I've heard people talking about 'demons', which might be code for something. Either way, I know the treatment of the residents has to be illegal, and someone needs to expose this place for what it’s doing to people. I don't have any proof to send you right now, but I'm working on getting some. Any chance you could get a search warrant?”
In a whip-crack of a movement, Gwi-Ma suddenly threw the laptop into Abby's office wall, hard enough to shatter one of the degrees he'd hung up and send a spray of glass and plastic spilling across the ground. Abby regarded the mess with wide, terrified eyes.
“Just catching up,” Gwi-Ma repeated slowly. “Is that what you call that?”
Abby opened and closed his mouth a few times. He couldn’t think of anything he could say that would get him out of this. He knew Gwi-Ma well enough by now to understand just how fucked he was.
“You asked me what happened to Jinu,” said Gwi-Ma, his large hands sliding into his pockets. He jerked toward Abby with his chin, and the two men flanking him advanced on Abby. “Well, allow me to elucidate you.”
Abby wasn’t given time to react before a fist slammed into his jaw. He went sprawling across the ground, head snapped to the side. A boot rammed into his belly a moment later, prompting him to curl up, coughing and whimpering, blood spilling into his mouth from a fresh cut on the inside of his cheek. One of them - he couldn’t see who - seized his hair and lifted his head and slammed him so hard into the stone floor that the crack sounded like thunder.
His vision blurred.
“Process him,” said Gwi-Ma.
Another tug at his hair, another crash with the cold, hard floor, and Abby’s eyes rolled back as he sank into unconsciousness.
He woke up an indeterminable amount of time later wearing one of the facility's scratchy jumpsuits, his head lulling and his eyelids heavy. They must have finished processing him while he was out, because now they were preparing him for the first stage of 'treatment' - the video therapy. There was probably an official name for it, but Abby didn’t know what it was. He was only the programmer, after all; he’d only ever been privy to setting up the Engine in the morning so it could be used throughout the day. He hadn't even been present for the treatment. Except for a few memorable incidents, when images of the subjects had flashed on screen before security could usher him out, the occupants' faces drawn and pained, their skin flaking. But they were a split-second of exposure before he was removed from the room.
His head fell forward, chin against his clavicle. His wrists and ankles had been secured to a chair with thick, leather straps, ensuring he would remain in place for the duration of his ‘treatment’. The cubicle he was in was made of glass, like he was a real lab rat.
“You awake now?” a man's voice asked.
Abby barely managed to raise his eyes to them, and he recognised them immediately as Edward, one of the security personnel he'd worked alongside for months. Their acquaintance didn't seem to inspire any mercy.
“There we go.” Edward's hand cupped him under the chin and forced his gaze on a projector screen. Someone behind them pressed a button. “Nice and still now, Abby,” Edward murmured. “Just watch the screen.”
Images flashed, Rorschach-test blots that burrowed into his skull and left his eyes itching at the root. The itch was so persistent that it made Abby want to dig past the sockets and scratch and scratch until he couldn’t see anymore. The hold on his chin slackened as the display poured into him, the lights and patterns and meaningless shapes keeping him ensnared.
He felt the guard's breath on his ear, hot and wet. “Feeling anything? Like your head’s gonna crack in two?”
All Abby managed was a groan. The sound bubbled up his throat like puke.
“You just sit here looking pretty and keep watching the screen, okay?”
The hand finally retreated, and Abby found himself unable to tear his gaze away from the screen. The Rorschach tests were now interspersed with flashing symbols that fled the screen too fast for him to properly register. They pulsed through him, hot and nauseating, painful in some strange, inexplicable way.
His thoughts detached from him slowly, inevitably. His fear faded, along with any other internal dialogue. His jaw sagged. Drool gathered under his tongue and stretched from his lips in messy, shining strings.
He didn't know how long he sat there, enraptured, before an alarm slammed him back into the drivers seat of his own body. It blared and screamed from the ceiling, muffling an actual scream from somewhere far away. A man hurtled into the room and slammed a hand onto the release button for everyone’s restraints, shouting something about liberation and revenge and Abby was just too disoriented to process it.
He barely managed to crawl out of the chair, slamming his knees and palms into the hard stone floor before climbing his way back onto his feet, using the chair as leverage.
His legs quivered under him. Though the images on the screen had stopped, they continued to play behind his eyelids, flashes of white that made his fingers spasm and vision blur.
The lights had gone off. Someone must have cut them. The medical staff, perhaps, hoping that would make it easier for them to escape the wrath of the people they'd been experimenting on.
His attention turned to a small, black camcorder on a tripod in the corner of the room, directed at his chair, no doubt to record his 'progress'. He was familiar with them, having once tried to make it as an Idol by recording his choreography and singing sessions. Though that had quickly fallen by the wayside once he'd gotten a scholarship for a prestigious university.
He carefully removed the camcorder from its stand and flipped open the screen, fingers sweaty and trembling as he switched on the night vision. This would have to do to guide him through the dark.
It couldn’t have been long since everything had gone to hell, yet the facility was utter bedlam. A disgusting, wet, sticky bedlam, with Abby having to step over slaughtered medical staff as he crept blindly through the darkened facilities' sprawling hallways. Though the main lights had been turned off, there remained lamps and the like to make navigating easier.
The other residents looked to him as one of their own. So many of them had arrived here normal, or with issues that could be addressed with proper management, and they had been twisted beyond recognition by the Morphogenic Engine instead, animals in both appearance and behaviour. Their warped appearances - mangled flesh that looked like it had healed wrong, protruding veins, missing lips and missing eyes or more of both - were terrifying examples of what horrors he had been contributing to for months.
The residents invited him to participate, to revel in the carnage. And they grew hostile toward him when he refused, so he ran, weaving his way around carnage and down hallways until they gave up the pursuit. Bent over, panting, he realised he'd run all the way through the testing grounds and into a section of the building reserved for employees. He vaguely recognised it as the place he'd been onboarded.
He quickly discovered the windows here were just as impenetrable as the windows in the inmate areas, every one of them made of a material that couldn’t be broken by bullets, much less the brute strength of a single, weakened man. The exits had been locked in response to the lockdown. The walls were similarly impenetrable, made of old, sturdy stone that even a car would have found difficult to penetrate. The facility had been built in the early 1900s, during a time when people didn’t skimp on construction materials to save a few bucks.
There was no easy way out. Perhaps if he got to the yard, found a fence to climb… there was no guarantee that it was a viable escape route since this place was meant to be as secure as a prison, but anything was better than standing around and waiting for one of the more demented inmates to find him and tear him limb from limb.
With the camera strapped to his hand, he proceeded onward.
“Baby?”
Abby vaguely remembered seeing the man’s file when he’d been booked into the Morphogenic Engine. A former rapper who had shown signs of schizophrenia and had ended his career prematurely to seek treatment. Instead of getting legitimate help, he’d ended up here.
Baby's eyes flicked up to him, away from the doctor he’d been flaying with a knife, probably pilfered from one of the staffrooms. He licked his lips.
“Do I know you?” asked Baby.
The patterns crawling on his skin looked painful, dark like burned flesh, leathery.
“No,” said Abby, choking out the word. The last thing he needed was someone to recognize him as one of the staff. “Do you know which way is to the courtyard? I’ve never been in this part of the building before.” It seemed worth asking, since Baby was the first person he’d come upon in this place that looked to still possess some presence of mind.
Baby hummed and continued peeling the skin off the corpse. Why he was doing that, Abby couldn’t begin to guess.
“What will I get if I tell you?” Baby asked.
Abby hesitated. He didn’t have anything of value, no food or water or weapons. Perhaps he should have picked up something while passing through the kitchen (though someone had been eating people in there, so he hadn’t particularly wanted to stop).
“I’ll- uhm-”
“Nothing?” Baby turned away from him. “Then you’ll just have to find your own way.”
“Please," Abby pleaded. "I need to get out of here.”
“There is no way out,” said Baby, but he still paused his work, thoughtfully tapping the tip of his knife against his thigh. His gaze swept over Abby's biceps. “How about this: you’ve got big, strong arms. Why don’t you pull out this guys heart for me? Then I’ll tell you how to get outside so you can make your useless attempt at escaping.”
Abby blanched at this request, glancing down at the body. Much of the man's arms and chest had been stripped of flesh, so Baby must have been doing this since this disaster began. Judging by the slow rise and fall of the man’s chest, they were still alive; just unconscious, which made Baby’s request all the more repellent. If he agreed, he would be the one to kill the man. He would have that death on his conscience for the rest of his life, however short that might be.
On the other hand, the man was definitely going to die either way. With so many raw nerves exposed, it might even be a mercy. Not that this made the prospect of killing them any easier.
“What did he do to deserve that?” asked Abby, voice trembling.
Baby smiled. “I was his favourite to visit when he'd had a bad day at work.”
Abby sucked in a breath. Oh.
“So,” said Baby, arching a thin eyebrow. “Do we have a deal? Because if you go the wrong way, you’ll end up in the cell blocks, and believe me, you don’t want to be there right now.”
Abby shuddered at the thought of stumbling into the cell blocks. With such a tight concentration of residents, it was probably a veritable bloodbath.
“Come on,” Baby pressed. “You’re not gonna live long enough to reach the courtyard if you don’t do this.”
“It’s just-" He stuttered on his words. "It's disgusting. I don't even know why you want me to do it.”
“Maybe because you don't look like everyone else in this place,” said Baby with a frigid smile, which made Abby shift nervously. If anyone figured out he'd once been part of the staff, that would paint a target on his back - a bigger one than what was already there. “Everything is a lot right now, anyway," Baby went on. "You have to be adaptable if you’re going to survive.”
Baby had a point. This probably wouldn't be the worst challenge he'd face while stuck here.
"And you're... sure there's no other way I could convince you to tell me which way to go?” he tried.
"Yep,” said Baby. "You could try finding your own way there, of course. But the cell block is a disaster zone, and my friend, Romance, is wandering the halls looking for people to disembowel, so I wouldn't recommend it."
Fuck.
Again, Abby looked down at the man, at his placid face and pale lips and the tinge of blue to his skin. He was going to die anyway, so Abby would just be helping things along, giving him a quick, easy death instead of the drawn-out agony of bleeding to death with all your nerves exposed. He could just grit his teeth, close his eyes, stick his arm in, and do it, and then he might have some chance of escaping this place alive. And this man was a monster, more so than any of the residents, who’d been made that way through mutilation of mind and body; Abby shouldn't feel bad about killing him (though he would anyway).
“Okay,” said Abby, exhaling heavily. He rolled his sleeve up until his forearm was unveiled. The entire limb shook.
He squeezed his eyes shut as Baby created an entrance wound for him, slitting the man open just under his ribcage. Abby blindly groped for the wound and wished, desperately, that he'd at least had gloves on for this.
Just reach in, pull out his heart. Just reach in, pull out his heart. Just reach in-
It was soft, wet and warm, the viscera sickening in its smell and texture, and he vomited twice before managing to complete Baby’s task. He dropped the slick, still-beating heart at Baby's knees, bile burning his tongue. The only reason he didn't spit it out was because he worried it would be misinterpreted as an insult.
With a satisfied little grin, Baby reached into his pocket and extended Abby a dog-eared map of the facility. It looked like he’d torn it out of a folder.
“Good luck,” said Baby, before rising to continue on his way, heading deeper into the facility.
Abby staggered in the opposite direction.
The yard was dark, and the spitting rain made it almost impossible to see what was ahead of him. It was oppressive in a way the main building hadn’t been, which was an achievement considering how hellish it was inside. Out here, he felt like a man drifting on a raft through a foggy river, surrounded by threats he couldn’t see. Sometimes he heard feet crunching through the grass or a gasp, a scream, a cry, but it was too dark to find the source of those sounds. Someone could sneak up behind him and stab him, and he might never even see their face.
The moment he found a wall he could scale, he took it. He scrambled onto a slick roof and edged his way around the building’s circumference. The gates on this side of the facility were massive, smooth, with no crevices he could use as handholds, so - peering at the map - he determined he'd have to work his way higher and try leaping from a watchtower instead. It was a risky move, but no more so than simply existing in the facility in its current state.
Help wasn’t coming. He knew that. They were too isolated, too private, hidden somewhere deep in Korea’s mountains. His only chance of getting out was if he scaled that damn fence and stole one of the employees’ cars from the parking garage.
He climbed slowly across the rooftops, making his way toward the left side of the building, where two watchtowers stood. Currently locked, or he would have tried going from the ground instead. He had to progress slowly, lest he slip and end up cracking his head on the cement below.
At long last, he came in jumping distance of the railing to stairs that led up. It was a short, but perilous jump. If he fell, he had no idea where he’d end up - the camera light didn’t reach far enough to tell him what was waiting for him below. Still too dark, too much rain. If not for the light glinting off the railing from an emergency light, he wouldn’t have been able to see the path ahead either.
Abby held his breath. He stepped back, curling his toes into the stone under his feet. He had one shot at this, just one, because he suspected whatever was waiting for him below could incapacitate, if not kill him.
He leapt, and - a great clang rang out as his arms snapped around part of the railing, his hands groping to find purchase on the slick metal. He fumbled to pull himself up, his legs swinging beneath him and toes trying to find something to latch onto and coming up empty. The rain continued to fall in a sheet that had already soaked him through.
He fell. The railing was simply too wet, too slippery. He lost his grip on it and plummeted into the dark, screaming his way toward the earth. In that split of a second before he hit the floor, he imagined his brain splattering, his teeth enamel snapping, his broken bones erupting.
Wood broke his fall. It splintered, shuddering under the velocity of his descent. He stopped for all of a second before falling through that as well, landing hard upon floorboards that plumed with dust as he slammed into them. The air was driven painfully out of his lungs, leaving his chest achingly empty before he managed to gasp it back in. And with it, he inhaled that damned dust, which made him cough so violently that his head swam and his vision wavered. His lungs threatened to spill out of him.
Slowly, slowly, he recovered his composure, and with it finally noticed the pain radiating through one of his shoulders. He’d landed on it hard, maybe splintered or bruised the bone. It hurt anytime he moved it. But he couldn’t be too distraught about the injury, since he hadn’t expected to survive at all.
He slowly got to his feet. His camera had survived the fall too, thankfully. Not so much as a crack in the screen. With a sigh of relief, Abby flipped it back open and peered through the lens. He appeared to be in some sort of storage area, with tables and chairs and boxes littering the floor. An attic, judging by the slanted appearance of the ceiling.
The floorboards creaked under his feet as he moved. It must have been an older section of the building, since the rest of the facility was mostly made of stone. It seemed unused, dusty, plumes of it drifting up as he crept his way across the floor, his ears straining for movement. He heard murmuring - he wasn't alone. Abby swivelled his camera and couldn’t see anyone through the dark. They must have been on the other side of the building.
He crawled over tables, ducked under piles of furniture and refuse, steadily advancing deeper into the building and - ideally - toward an exit. When he looked at the map, this place was attached to the main building and maybe, if he was lucky, that door wouldn’t be as impenetrable as the other exits, since it’d only ever been accessed by staff. Everyone brought into this place was taken in through a side entrance.
A little further in, the murmurings became audible. “There’s someone else here, I’m not alone with him anymore, there’s someone here.”
Abby was unsettled, to say the least. He couldn’t tell the man’s intentions from their voice alone. They might be grateful for company in this terrifying place, or - just as likely - they wanted someone they could hurt to satisfy whatever macabre cravings the Engine had inspired in them.
He considered speaking, and decided against it. Better to not draw attention to himself.
“Or am I hearing things? Is someone really there? Hello?”
Abby pushed on, moving as quietly as possible to try to convince the man he wasn't there. It was too quiet for him to succeed, every creak of the floorboards amplified. The voice steadily grew closer.
“I can hear you,” it whispered. “I can see you. It’s okay, come out. I won’t hurt you.”
Abby hesitated, mouth opening - before snapping shut again. He couldn’t let himself be persuaded to identify himself.
“Ohh, you have pretty hair,” the voice went on, which made Abby tense. Whoever was in here could see him, but he couldn't see them. “Pretty pink hair. I think he would like that. You should meet him.” The sound of footsteps grew closer. “The groom likes the colour pink. Maybe that’ll finally calm him down. Maybe he’ll finally stop, if he has you.”
Abby couldn’t have responded even if he’d wanted to, his pounding heart choking him of his voice. He moved faster now, trying to put space between himself and the voice, trembling as he squirmed his way between two shelves and began to shuffle through.
A thump on the shelf directly in front of him jolted him mid-journey. In front of him, illuminated by the camcorder, was a man with one-half of his face mangled, and wide black eyes that seemed perpetually watery. Unlike many of the other residents, he still had his hair, long and black, greasy and unwashed. He leaned forward before Abby could push himself away.
“Ohh, you’re perfect," he murmured. "You’re just perfect. Don’t move, I’ll come get you.”
Abby did, in fact, move. He ran. He leapt over - and into - furniture in his desperation to get away, his footsteps booming as he advanced deeper into the attic. There had to be an exit somewhere, but he couldn’t see far enough into the building to tell where it was.
He ended up colliding into something soft, letting out a cry as he registered it as a man hanging from the ceiling by a noose. Had the person pursuing him done this?
“Don’t be afraid,” his assailant. “I won’t do anything to you-!” A breathless noise. “Well, he might, but you’re already so pretty, you’re perfect, I’m sure he won’t do anything too extensive, don’t worry, you’ll be okay-”
His legs felt like jelly as he continued to run, crashing into tables and chairs and bookcases as he surged through the attic as fast as he could without incapacitating himself by tripping over something. In his peripheral, he could see the shadow of the man, his black hair draping like a veil over his face.
Sweat broke out on Abby’s palms. He threw himself under a table and crawled, climbed up onto a box, squeezed through gaps between some furniture, and then finally, finally found a door that led to the exit he’d been so desperately seeking.
The trapdoor leading downstairs was already open, thank god. He hurtled down it and into the dark below, fumbling with his camera against the glare from nearby windows. The footsteps that had been pursuing him didn’t follow him down. They stopped at the threshold.
“Ohh, he delivered himself. He’s the first. He must be the one.”
Abby looked back just in time to see the trap door slam shut, cutting off his access to the attic. Not that he could have been paid to return there. It was too dark and too cluttered with furniture to navigate comfortably, and that was to say nothing of the strange man who occupied it.
He readjusted his grip on his camera and ventured deeper into this new level. The sewing machines surrounding him looked ancient, rusted, like they hadn’t been used in a long time. While he’d thought the residents here at least got reprieve through recreational activities, evidently that wasn’t the case.
A thread of music reached his ears as he advanced deeper, cheerful and bouncy and melodic, but tinny, clearly coming from one of the cheap radios that had been made available to inmates to load music onto. One of the only forms of entertainment they were provided, he suspected.
-want a girl, just like the girl that married dear old dad.
He didn’t recognise the song, only that it sounded old and American. He’d worked with enough Americans, both here and elsewhere, to have intimate knowledge of what the American accent sounded like.
The song choice was a little… odd, but not entirely unexpected, given that this facility was a collaboration between Korea and America - not their governments, per se, but influential people from both countries, people with money and prestige. The kinds of people who could abuse the vulnerable and still have enough leverage and resources to become president.
Curtains surrounded the source of the song. The shadows beyond made him nervous, clearly humanoid in their arrangement. But he stood and stared, breath held, and none of them moved. Were they dead?
He slowly crept around to a gap in the curtain, peering past just to peek at what was waiting inside. The sight immediately sent him reeling back, slamming into a table and nearly sprawling across the ground. He didn’t register the pain in his hip from the impact. He didn’t register anything but what was in front of him, a crude re-imagining of childbirth, a bastardisation of its beauty. A man naked and sliced on a table, with the macabre approximation of a child between his legs, made of flesh and viscera, everything gleaming wetly and smelling rancid.
Abby coughed and gagged and pressed a shaking fist to his mouth to hold back vomit.
He should have never left the attic.
Shaking hard, Abby pushed himself upright and stumbled toward the nearest window, desperate for a way out. These ones were old, not reinforced like the others.
With shaking hands, he whipped around to seize the closest sewing machine and hurtled it as hard as he could into the glass. The wooden slats bent, glass shattered, and the shadow of the machine plummeted, hitting the ground with a great, wet thunk. He bent out the now-open window with his camcorder held aloft.
It became immediately apparent he wouldn’t be able to escape this way. There were no ledges here, nothing he could use to creep his way to a more advantageous position on the building. It was all brick worn down by the elements, too smooth to find leverage on. And he certainly couldn’t jump into the black void that awaited him below.
“Fuck,” he breathed, running his shaking hands up through his hair and pulling at his scalp. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, what am I going to do, fuck…”
The music plugged his ears to all sound in this part of the building, so he needed to move away from that first.
He tried the first door available to him, rattling the handle. Locked. And it looked like these doors were made of sturdier stuff than the window had been.
He tried ramming it nonetheless, because anything was better than staying here with that horrorshow draped in curtains. The bruises on his shoulder screamed as he slammed into it once, twice-
“What are you doing, darling?” came muffled from beyond the barrier.
His third impact failed at the half-way point, his feet hauling him back while his body propelled forward, sending him sprawling to the ground in a mess of limbs. The door creaked open, and he was still scrambling, still clawing himself away, too panicked to move with any efficiency.
“Oh, it’s you,” the voice said, and Abby froze. “You’ll get filthy down there, Abby. Come on, up you get.”
A breath hurtled out of Abby, thick with relief. “Jinu?” He turned with the beginnings of a smile, only to have the expression freeze on his face.
When Jinu returned his smile, the ragged flesh on his right cheek pulled. It looked as if strips of skin had been burned away, leaving behind dark, textured muscle, black like ink.
“Is something wrong?” Jinu raised a hand, skin unnaturally cool as he cupped Abby’s jaw. Abby gaped at him. “You look frightened. It’s because of this place, isn’t it? It’s no place for a lady. Here, let me help you up -”
He moved to grab Abby’s hand, and Abby instinctively jerked away from it.
“What the fuck happened to you?” Abby gasped out, which made Jinu frown. “And what are you wearing?” It looked like a ragged approximation of a vest and bowtie. "Did you - did you make that?”
The clothing certainly looked homemade, scraps stitched together with the care of a tailor. Abby knew from prior conversations that Jinu had often needed to repair and make clothes in his youth due to lacking the means to buy new clothes.
Jinu’s fingers curled into a loose fist, falling to his side, where Abby belatedly realised a kitchen knife hung. His blood cooled in his veins.
“It’s not right for a lady to swear,” said Jinu, tsking. “You’ve been through a lot, I can see that, darling, but that’s no reason to lose your sense of decorum.” He reached for Abby again, this time pushing past any resistance to seize Abby by the shoulder. It was all too easily that he pulled Abby from the floor.
Abby took a shaky breath. “A lady?”
“My lady,” Jinu corrected him.
Abby’s stomach clenched in unease. He had a terrible feeling that the display, the mockery of birth, had been made by Jinu. His eyes were the same warm, kind ones they’d always been, untouched by the Morphogenic Engine, and it would have been easy to be deceived by those. But Abby had seen the results of the Engine enough to know Jinu had likely been warped in some irreversible way. His friend, at least as he’d known them, was gone.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out.
Jinu clearly thought he was referring to the swearing, because he said, “It’s okay, darling. I know you didn’t mean to be rude.” His voice was soft, unnaturally calm despite the surrounding chaos. “Let's find somewhere quiet, where we can talk about our future together.”
The hand on his shoulder ensured he didn’t have any choice but to follow. It hauled him along, pulling him down hallways slathered in writing - When the wife smiles, the household smiles; home is where my heart can relax; a couple’s fight is like cutting water with a knife, old Korean proverbs he’d heard throughout his childhood.
“Jinu,” he began uncertainly. “Did you, uhm- that… thing behind the curtain…”
Jinu looked curiously at him. “Hm? What do you mean?”
“D-did you make that?”
Jinu licked his teeth, looking uncomfortable for a fleeting second before shrugging. “I don’t remember. But they’re sleeping peacefully, it’s nothing you should worry about.”
“Jinu, they aren’t sleeping.”
“Of course they are.” He began humming to himself, grip tightening on Abby as he guided them through a doorway. “And like I said, you shouldn’t concern yourself with them. We have more pressing concerns - like the wedding dress; it’ll need adjusting to fit your figure. You’re going to look a vision once it’s done.”
All the fine hairs rose on Abby’s forearms and nape. “Wedding dress…?”
“What else would the bride wear to the wedding?” Jinu chuckled and slid his arm around Abby’s tense shoulders, drawing him closer. “Don’t worry, the guests are already here, and they’re fine waiting.”
Abby was barely cognizant of his surroundings as they walked, his head spinning. Guests, Jinu said. Maybe he’d captured some of the other residents to bear witness to his delusion.
“Jinu,” said Abby, his voice trembling. “You remember me, so you must remember we were once colleagues, right?”
“That's how we fell in love,” said Jinu confidently.
God, give him the strength, because he might have liked hearing that once upon a time.
“Right,” said Abby weakly. “But you remember we worked together on the Saja Project, right? You remember that we- we had lives, before all of this?”
Jinu sighed. “What about it? It’s in the past, it’s unimportant. What’s important is that we’re together now, and we’re about to be wed.”
“I- I know, I just-”
“Darling,” said Jinu, voice firm now. “I need you to focus on what’s important. I need you to behave for me. Can you do that?”
Abby swallowed hard, eyeing the knife on Jinu’s belt. He wasn’t sure if their history would be enough to protect him from it if Jinu lost his temper. “Yes.”
“Good.”
Jinu’s arm fell away from him, and it was only its absence that compelled Abby to finally look at his surroundings. A room with a single, metal table, smelling strongly of copper and grime, with a canvas with pictures pinned to it- those of male and female anatomy, the basics of surgery, and some roughly written notes.
“Sit,” said Jinu, gesturing to the table.
Abby remained glued to the spot.
With a little less patience than before, Jinu seized him by the shoulder and shoved him onto the table, forcing him to perch himself on the edge, which was sticky with... something. It didn’t look, nor feel like it was just blood. The slick texture made his throat knot up against a surge of bile.
Beside him, the pinboard of notes was close enough for him to see.
Attempt 1: failure. Bled out. Attempt 2: failure. Bled out. Attempt 3: failure, bled out, an endless list of victims, most of which appeared to have died due to extreme internal trauma and blood loss.
Further down now, the results changed, just a little.
Attempt 33: lived for five minutes, died of internal trauma. Attempt 34: Lived for three minutes, killed herself on the table saw. Attempt 35: Lived for ten minutes, stitches opened and guts spilled out. Died of bloodloss and shock.
He tore his gaze away, sliding it over to the table saw, which was currently buried in its sheath. His breaths began to quicken.
“Jinu, Jinu, wait, the saw-” He shook hard as he moved to push away from the table. “Yo-you’re not going to use that on me, are you? You know it’ll kill me, right?”
Jinu turned from the mannequin he’d been fussing with. “Hm? Oh, no.” He reached over to pat Abby’s thigh. “Don’t worry, darling, I gave up on that two hours ago. We’ll fix you some other way. The voices that gave me these patterns don’t ask for too much.” He gave Abby's thigh one last squeeze before pulling away. “Once the wedding is complete, we’ll have everything we need to create a family together. A son, a daughter… wouldn’t it be nice to have two? Or maybe three?”
Abby fought against the tightening knot in his throat to speak. “And… what if it doesn’t work? What if I can't get pregnant?”
“It will work,” said Jinu with an easy smile.
“But-”
“Don’t worry yourself with such things, darling. Just be quiet while I prepare your dress.” He pulled it off the mannequin and gestured Abby closer. “Clothes off and come here. I want to see just how extensive these adjustments will need to be.”
It didn’t seem like a good idea to refuse Jinu while the tablesaw was in such close proximity.
Abby pushed off the table and walked to Jinu on shaking legs, reaching down to start undoing his jumpsuit, his cheeks flaring with embarrassment. These were definitely not the circumstances he'd hoped to disrobe in front of Jinu for.
The filthy, blood-smeared fabric pooled to the ground, and the skin underneath wasn’t much better. But Jinu didn’t seem bothered by the blood and grit on Abby’s skin. He pulled the dress over Abby’s head, tugging with handfuls of fabric until Abby was squeezed into it.
The fabric was tight, almost suffocating, preventing Abby from dragging in a full breath, and Jinu hadn’t even done up the back yet. But Jinu closed his hands around Abby’s hips, thumbs on the pinch of his waist, and grinned in approval.
“Ahh, perfect hips for birthing.”
Abby might have laughed at such a remark under different circumstances.
Reaching into a box sitting nearby, Jinu retrieved a needle, some thread, scissors, measuring tape, and strips of cream-white fabric. He hummed to himself as he measured out the necessary adjustments to close the back and ease the pressure on Abby’s chest. This had clearly been designed with a smaller man in mind.
Once he’d finished measuring, he retrieved the dress and got to work, focused wholly on the task of adjusting the dress to fit Abby’s broader figure. While Jinu was otherwise occupied, it was tempting to make a run for it and flee deeper into the building, find an exit. But what if he couldn’t? Then he’d end up cornered and potentially killed, having wasted what little goodwill Jinu had for him on a half-assed escape attempt. Fear of failure prevented him from moving from the table. He sat there, waiting, until Jinu had finished his adjustments and pulled the dress back over his head.
It was still snug, but he wasn’t as breathless as he had been before. Nonetheless, he hoped this farce of a wedding wouldn’t take long so he could change into something more comfortable - and easier to run in. Once they were officiated, Jinu might finally let his guard down long enough for Abby to escape. Or perhaps he could convince the man to escape with him. Out of this place, maybe he’d start to regain some of his mind.
Jinu’s face was one of awe as he took Abby in. He touched Abby’s waist again, the graze of his fingers slow and reverent, thumbs finding the hollows of his hips and digging in.
“You look so beautiful,” he whispered, soft and husky.
Abby’s cheeks warmed. Despite the circumstances, this was still Jinu, and Abby had been attracted to him for a long time.
“About this wedding,” said Abby. “Is there going to be anything weird about it?”
Jinu tilted his head. “Weird? Like what?”
“I mean like, blood, or death, or-”
“Oh, no. No. Nothing like that.” He patted Abby’s cheek. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t risk our special day being ruined.”
Abby tried not to flinch at his touch. Gentle, intimate, yet so viscerally wrong. “Right, but, uhm…” On second thought, he probably wasn’t going to be able to get a straight answer out of Jinu. The man was living in his own version of reality.
“Here,” said Jinu, offering him a hand. “I’ll take you there now. Everything is ready - has been for hours now.”
Hours… just how long had passed since he’d begun his trek to safety? It’d passed from day into night, and daylight was creeping in through the windows, so it must have been at least twelve or so, maybe longer. He was tired. He wanted this all to be over already, he wanted to get out of here, and playing along was probably his only route to safety.
“Alright,” he said, taking that hand, reluctant but resigned.
Jinu hummed to himself as he led Abby along, a chipper tune Abby didn’t recognise. They stepped into an elevator and rode down, and upon reaching the bottom floor, Jinu ushered him down a hallway and unlocked a set of double doors that opened into a sprawling gymnasium. Bodies hung from the ceiling, strung up along the rafters. Abby shuddered at the sight of them. Jinu must have noticed his discomfort, because he glanced back and offered a reassuring smile.
“Oh, don’t worry, those are just the failures. They won’t be in attendance at our wedding.”
It looked like there were a lot of them. Abby didn’t care to count. It seemed like Jinu had been killing - or ‘performing surgery’, from his perspective - nonstop since getting out of his cell. His first victim had probably been whatever poor soul had been bunking with him.
He held his breath as they crossed the gymnasium, lest he breathe in the stink of death. Some were more decomposed than others, greying in areas, blood pooling in their hands or feet, depending on which end Jinu had used to string them up. All of them had sacks over their head. That was at least a little reassuring, since it indicated Jinu felt guilty about his failure, suggesting some vestige of the man he used to be still remained buried deep down.
Only once they were beyond the gymnasium did Abby suck in a breath, and still he could smell their rot. A grimace twisted his features. If Jinu noticed his response, he didn’t react to it; just continued hauling him down the hallway.
The smell of death, fresher than the gymnasium, permeated the room where their ‘wedding’ was to be held. He could smell it just outside the door, the coppery sweetness of it. Jinu strolled on in, tugging him along, uncomfortably at ease in the horror of his own making.
The pews - just chairs Jinu had set up - were filled with attendants, all of them pale, greying, their eyes open and unseeing and tacky, their throats slit. These ones clearly hadn’t been designated as potential ‘wives’. They were simply fodder for Jinu’s fantasy of a packed-out venue. Jinu had even gone to the trouble of having some of them hold flowers he'd no doubt plucked from the communal garden.
At least these dead hadn't been mutilated.
At the back of the room stood their officiator, hanging from the ceiling with their hands bound to the sides of a strange, leather-bound book with duct tape. They had the same patterns as Jinu, though it looked like Jinu had definitively won whatever conflict they’d gotten into.
It was only as they neared the front of the room that Abby noticed the shattered pieces of a mirror scattered across the ground. On closer inspection, he realised they were carefully arranged, forming an odd, jagged circle with symbols smeared on them in blood. Jinu had really taken to the whole ‘demon’ thing. And despite everything Abby had seen, he struggled to suspend his disbelief that it had anything to do with the supernatural.
The mirror shards crunched beneath their feet as Jinu guided him to the ‘priest’. Abby had to carefully tiptoe around the shards so to not hurt his feet. Jinu noticed this and cast him an apologetic look.
“I forgot shoes, I am so sorry.” He gave Abby’s hand a squeeze. “I promise I’ll get you some once we’re out of this place.”
It was good to know Jinu intended to leave, at least. There would be no convincing him to abandon this place required. And once they were out of here, he might be able to get Jinu help - though with how badly his mental health had degraded, that was likely just to lead to his admission to another asylum.
Abby offered a trembling smile. “Right, thanks,” he said tightly. “I’m okay for now. I haven’t cut my feet or anything.”
Jinu smiled back and gave his hand another squeeze. “Good. Lets get started, then.”
Instead of beginning his vows, like Abby had expected, he instead began to chant. A low, eerie tone that sent all the fine hairs on Abby’s nape and forearms standing to attention. The grip on his hand prevented him from pulling away.
He’d seen some questionable things during his flight through the hospital, but still. When the patterns on Jinu began to glow with an ethereal light; when the bodies occupying the pews suddenly sat ramrod straight and spilled golden light from their maws, he almost couldn’t believe what was happening.
Maybe he’d gone insane.
That would have been a comforting refuge from the reality. But even as he told himself over and over, this can't be real, he didn’t believe it. The light was too vivid, it made his retinas throb and tickled his skin like something tangible. Something behind his eyes pulsed in time with the chanting. The symbols from before, from his time spent staring dully at that video recording of Rorschach blots and symbols, flashed in front of his eyes, brilliant white and blinding.
The chanting reached a crescendo, the volume of Jinu’s voice rising and the glow from their spectators eating up all the shadows in the room. The earth seemed to shake beneath their feet. The shards of mirror weren’t reflecting them anymore - there was something else in them now, something dark and unearthly, a place with a multitude of hungry eyes and hungry maws and Abby’s heart hammered so hard he thought it might vibrate its way up his throat and spill from his lips.
“Jinu,” he breathed, choked and pleading. But Jinu just smiled at him and cupped his pale face.
The chanting continued, the world shuddering - or maybe that was just Abby growing faint from terror - with every incremental shift in volume. He couldn’t hear anything over the chanting now. It filled his ears like a windstorm, roaring over the clamouring of this place, of the thud of his own heartbeat, of the pleas spilling involuntarily from his blanched lips.
Then, all at once, it stopped. The light extinguished like fingers pinching a flame, with only the smog of what had just transpired remaining. The atmosphere here felt heavier now.
Whatever had been in the mirror shards had receded. They now reflected his pale, wide-eyed face and Jinu’s calm one.
Jinu’s hand moved to his belly, and he withdrew sharply - it hurt. For a moment, Abby thought Jinu might have stabbed him as part of the ritual without him even noticing. But he dragged the fabric up and there was no wound. But nor was it smooth, unblemished skin. A strange symbol had been written into his skin in the same manner of Jinu’s patterns, shaped vaguely like a heart. The flesh was hard and leathery when he dragged his clammy fingers over it.
“What- what is this?” he asked, the words coming choked.
“A place to cultivate our new family,” murmured Jinu, leaning forward to press his mouth to Abby’s slack one.
Abby was too stunned to pull away from the kiss. His hand was still on his belly, feeling out the strange, smooth edges of the symbol, wincing as it stung like exposed nerves. This was all so surreal that he blinked a few times just to make sure he wasn't dreaming. The situation, unfortunately, didn't subside into something less horrifying.
Jinu broke the kiss and drew back. “Sorry, darling, I'm getting a little ahead of myself - we haven't even exchanged vows yet.”
Wedding vows. He finally remembered that this was supposed to be a wedding.
A hysterical little laugh bubbled in Abby's throat and he quickly forced it back down. As tempting as it was to have a breakdown, he didn't want to do anything that would risk upsetting Jinu when the man still had that knife on his belt. An odd accompaniment to a wedding, but so was everything else about these circumstances.
“Do you take me to be your lawfully wedded husband, Abby?” asked Jinu with unsettling sincerity.
Abby opened his mouth to respond, and couldn't get the expected words out.
Jinu wasn't deterred. “I know, I know, this is all a lot to take in,” he said, leaning his cheek against Abby’s soft waves of hair. “But don’t worry, I know your answer. And you know mine.”
With that, he slid his arms under Abby's back and legs and hauled him up against his chest, starting down the aisle like a man preparing to take his wife to the bedroom to consummate their marriage.
In the cage of Jinu’s arms, there was nothing Abby could do but accept his fate. They were tied irrevocably somehow, in some way Abby didn’t understand, and he wondered if going insane like the others would have been better than this so he wouldn’t have the presence of mind to appreciate the situation he was in.
“I know a way out,” said Jinu conversationally, pulling Abby tighter against his chest. “And I know somewhere we can stay, somewhere far away from here, where we can start our family. A little cabin I inherited from my mother. It’s a little shabby, no electricity, and it’ll need some cleaning up before it’s liveable, but it’s private, and that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?”
Again, Abby said nothing. The prospect of getting out no longer held the relief it once had.
“You’ll love it,” Jinu went on. “It’ll just be me, you, and the baby - or maybe three. My mother always did want me to have a large family.” He pressed a kiss to Abby’s ear, eliciting a shiver. “You’ll be happy there, I promise.”
He carried Abby like precious cargo back through the gymnasium and out the vocational block, where he turned to a solid metal door that was impenetrable to anyone without a keycard. He'd apparently liberated one from a guard, because he awkwardly took a small, rectangular keycard from his back pocket and flicked it over the reader. The door immediately swung open for them.
The walk to the front lobby was oddly peaceful compared to the rest of Abby's journey through the facility. It didn't seem like any other residents had managed to break into this part of the building. Through the windows, Abby could just about make out a dozen or so large, bulky security vans. The front doors were wide open, no doubt the escape Jinu had been referring to.
They found Gwi-Ma in the lobby, hunched over a laptop, frantically gathering what data he could onto an eternal hard drive, his white hair wild and unkempt and one arm curled around a wound on his belly. Abby had never seen him in such a harried state before. He couldn't help staring at him, his jaw loose in shock.
Jinu froze at the sight of him, recognition flickering, maybe a trickle of his old self. His grip on Abby tightened.
“You,” Gwi-Ma hissed, reaching for a gun presumably left by security personnel (though, judging by the viscera slathered across the floor, it hadn't provided them much protection from whatever had come through here).
Jinu gently put Abby down.
“All that work and sacrifice,” said Jinu coolly. “And you didn't even manage to perfect the engine.”
Before Gwi-Ma could turn the barrel of his rifle on Jinu, he simply reached up and snapped Gwi-Ma's neck. He crumpled to the ground in an instant, prone and pale, his eyes wide and rapidly growing tacky.
“He got what he deserved,” said Jinu.
Abby was frozen stiff. He didn't protest as Jinu picked him up again, his gaze on Gwi-Ma's crumpled body, looking almost small in death. Slaughtered like a common rat, a victim to his own fiendish designs. Abby didn't have it in him to feel bad for Gwi-Ma's death; the man had subjected hundreds, maybe thousands of people to far worse fates than his. This entire ordeal had been entirely his fault.
Jinu carted him out of the building and into a morning that felt strangely fresh and welcoming. The air was cool and the sun warm. The world, despite how much it had tipped on its axis for Abby, continued on, ignorant to the personal horrors Abby had endured for the past day or so.
There were car keys on one of the bodies slumped over the entrance steps. Clearly someone else had gotten out before them, and Abby was too tired to wonder which of Gwi-Ma's subjects had fled the coop. He remained quiet and pliant as Jinu tried different handles with the keys until he found one that opened.
Abby sat in the passenger seat, utterly spent. He couldn't lift his chin from his clavicle. He didn't protest when Jinu dug some handcuffs out of the glove compartment and used them to secure his hands to the door, keeping his eyes closed and head propped up against the glass.
"Don't worry, Abby," said Jinu, sliding into the driver's seat and starting the ignition. "I'm going to take care of you now."
Abby opened his eyes just a crack, staring out of the window. It looked peaceful out here, despite the security vehicles dotting the front courtyard. More of them would probably arrive soon.
"Let's go," said Jinu.
Abby watched the building until the surrounding forest swallowed it whole. Then, exhausted, he closed his eyes and braced his cheek against the glass. His restraints rattled as they drove. Away from the horrors now - at least most of them - he was oddly numb, his body feeling like a thing he occupied rather than a thing he was. Even the throbbing of his navel wasn't enough to reel him back in.
Jinu's fingers grazed his cheek. An oddly gentle, affectionate gesture from hands that had committed such atrocities. "It's okay," he whispered. "We're going home."
That didn't bring Abby any comfort at all.