How to Survive the Horror Novel I Wrote
Chapter 6
But it wasn't.
I heard Ugeum's leisurely voice ask,
“Who might you be?”
“Someone who wants to get close to you.”
She was hitting on him. Captivated by Ugeum's looks, she had approached him.
Irritation flared inside me. You'd be better off sticking your head into an alligator's jaws. Just don't do it right in front of me.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
The woman, thoroughly hooked by the handsome serial killer, asked in an alluring tone.
“I'm waiting for my girlfriend.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I knew it. He really had followed me.
Hearing Ugeum's answer, my blind date looked across at me with suspicious eyes. Don't tell me... you?
From behind him, a sigh escaped the woman.
“I had a feeling you'd have one, looking like that.”
“What a pity.”
Ugeum chuckled as if amused. I wasn't amused in the slightest.
“Ji-an-ssi.”
My blind date gestured toward the booth behind us with his eyes, pressing for an answer. I had no other choice.
“He's my boyfriend. That man.”
“You came to a blind date when you have a boyfriend?”
He demanded in sheer disbelief.
“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
Mortified and utterly uncomfortable, I couldn't bear sitting there any longer. Spouting apologies in rapid succession, I fled to Ugeum's table.
The expression on the face of the woman hitting on him wasn't much different from my date's. Pure dumbfoundedness.
“What is this? Were you waiting for your girlfriend's blind date to end?”
She asked Ugeum.
Without answering her or even sparing her a glance, Ugeum just looked up at me with a playful smile. He seemed thoroughly pleased with my earlier boyfriend declaration.
The woman, younger and prettier than me, looked me up and down before sneering.
“She doesn't even seem to be on your level.”
It was remarkably rude for a first encounter. Though offended, I didn't want to blow things out of proportion, so I silently tugged on Ugeum's arm.
Yet instead of standing up, Ugeum openly mocked her.
“I take it your eyes are just for decoration.”
“Excuse me?”
“Are your ears decorations too? If a body part doesn't function, wouldn't you be better off without it?”
Chills ran down my spine. It felt as if this psychopath might gouge out her eyes and slice off her ears at any moment.
Intimidated by Ugeum's veiled threat, the woman shut her mouth.
What kind of situation was this now? My mind spun in an instant.
The Ugeum I had created was a man who wouldn't bat an eye at insults directed at himself. Rather, he was the type to smile and take it as a compliment.
Yet he seemingly couldn't tolerate an insult toward his lover.
Pitying the woman who was suddenly in danger of losing her sight and hearing, I pleaded with Ugeum.
“Let's just go. Okay? Please.”
Ugeum let himself be pulled along without resistance.
As I dragged him out of the restaurant, I prayed fervently over and over that nothing terrible would happen to that woman.
Once we stepped outside, Ugeum used his other hand to pull down my hand that had been gripping his arm. Then he took hold of it. And not just holding it—he interlaced our fingers.
His fingers were long like a pianist's, and his palm was soft. It didn't feel like the hand of a killer. It was large and warm. The unexpected warmth unsettled my heart.
Just what were his intentions? If I could, I wanted to pry open Ugeum's skull and peer inside.
Why did he hold my hand?
Why did he take my side?
Why did he follow me?
What did he plan to do with me?
There was so much I wanted to ask, but I couldn't utter a single word as we walked down the street.
Amid the silence, Ugeum spoke out of nowhere.
“Don't cheat on me.”
My heart sank to my stomach. It felt less like a gentle request and more like a warning.
I hastily made excuses.
“I wasn't cheating. Teacher Ye-yeon begged me so much that I had no choice but to go. I had no intention of seeing that man again, either.”
Because my life was on the line, my excuses grew longer and longer. Ugeum didn't snap at me to stop making excuses, nor did he get angry. He merely smiled playfully and said,
“If you cheat, you die, okay?”
Thump. My heart plummeted. There was no way I could take it as an empty threat.
Like a cow being dragged to the slaughterhouse, I was led back home by Ugeum's hand.
I thought he would just drop me off, but he followed me inside as if it were his own place.
Whether he came in or not, I didn't care anymore.
All I wanted was to sleep. Having had only a few hours of rest, my head felt so heavy that I couldn't think straight. Stumbling over to the sofa, I collapsed onto it.
A heavy sense of resignation weighed down my eyelids. Come what may. What could happen other than dying?
I slowly sank into a sleep as black as death.
“You should sleep in bed.”
A gently coaxing voice echoed faintly from afar.
Half-asleep, I whined,
“Leave me alone…….”
I thought I caught the sound of a low chuckle.
Soon after, my body floated into the air. Sturdy arms and a warm chest wrapped around me, swaying gently.
I drifted completely unconscious.
* * *
I was in darkness.
I stood alone in the middle of a pitch-black void with no walls, no ceiling, and no floor.
No matter how much I looked around, all I could see was endless, bottomless black.
“Excuse me!”
My voice echoed hollowly.
“Is anyone there?”
No answer returned.
As I looked around in a panic, a sound began to drift in from the distance.
I strained my ears toward the direction of the noise.
Clack-clack-clack-clack……
It was the sound of typing.
My heart constricted tightly, as if seized by an invisible fist. In an instant, I grew cold from the tips of my fingers to the ends of my toes.
I immediately turned and fled in the opposite direction. I sprinted until my calves felt like bursting. I ran frantically through the never-ending darkness.
The typing sound grew louder and faster, chasing right behind me.
My lungs felt ready to explode, but I couldn't stop. No matter how much I ran, I couldn't escape that sound.
Rough breaths, a sweet metallic tang, and sobs leaked from my open mouth. Ah, please.
Please!
“Gasp!”
I woke up with a violent start. A familiar ceiling. It was my room. I vaguely remembered Ugeum carrying me here in my sleep.
The room was dark, and the house was quiet. There was no typing sound, no cursed keyboard. On my desk, only my original keyboard rested obediently.
I couldn't make sense of it. It returned even when thrown away, and it had followed me all the way to the restaurant, so why hadn't it followed me home?
Ugeum was nowhere to be seen either. There was no sign of anyone. Did he leave?
I quietly stepped out of bed and went out to the living room. The lights in both the living room and the kitchen were brightly lit, but Ugeum wasn't there.
He followed me all the way to a blind date, only to just leave? I couldn't grasp his actions at all.
He'd act sweet as can be, then suddenly turn bloodthirsty in the blink of an eye. Was Ugeum originally this kind of character?
Yes. That was exactly who Ugeum was. A kind, sociable gentleman. On the flip side, a serial killer executing his own twisted justice.
I had created him that way, but experiencing it firsthand was chilling beyond measure.
Suddenly, the thought occurred to me that I should read through my drafts of the Night Series. Even though I created Ugeum, I knew far too little about him.
Take earlier, for instance. For Ugeum, who wouldn't bat an eye at insults against himself, to react so sharply to slander directed at me...
Returning to my room, I turned on the computer and skimmed through the Night Series drafts one by one.
All to dig up any details about Ugeum that I might have forgotten or overlooked.
And then, I found something crucial.
The one and only love story featuring Ju Ugeum, written back during my early debut days.
The reason why the sentence ‘Ugeum never kills his lover’ had been erased.
Ugeum had a history of killing his lover.
Namely, me.
It was a draft that had started ambitiously as a romance, only to end as a thriller.
The female lead had been me. Back then, I just wanted to be the main character for once. Somewhere outside the horror novels I usually wrote.
The ending had been a tragedy.
The female lead, Ha Jian, was actually a villain Ugeum had been searching for all along, and she had never loved Ugeum for a single moment. Upon discovering the truth, a deeply wounded Ugeum killed her.
The problem lay in the final paragraph.
[In the end, even Ugeum himself did not know why he killed Jian. Was it out of a sense of justice, or out of a sense of betrayal? Was it because he had to kill her, or because he wanted to kill her?
To Ugeum, who hunted only evil, perhaps she was the one and only exception.
……Perhaps.]
It was an exceedingly ambiguous ending.
It wasn't clear whether Ugeum killed her because she was a villain who deserved to die, or because she was a lover who had betrayed him.
That was the problem. If it were the latter, my life was in grave danger.
It meant there was an exception to Ugeum's rule of only killing those who deserved death, and that exception happened to be his lover—meaning, me.
On top of that, my current situation was identical to that draft. I didn't love Ugeum, yet I had become his girlfriend. If he found out, he would kill me.
If caught, I die. If I betray him, I die. One way or another, it seemed death was the only thing awaiting me.
No. I couldn't die like this.
Tension clenched my jaw tight. I completely erased the final paragraph. I intended to revise the ending with absolute clarity.
[In the end, the reason he killed Jian was out of a sense of justice. Because she had to die. To Ugeum, who hunted only evil, Jian was a task that had to be completed.]
Right at that moment.
Clack-clack-clack-clack.
A frantic clatter of typing struck against my ears.
Startled out of my wits, I whipped my head around to see the black wired keyboard resting on the bed as if it were pure magic. It had returned in the blink of an eye.
On the unplugged keyboard, the backspace key was being hammered furiously. Goosebumps prickled all over my skin.
What was even more horrifying was watching the sentences I had just written being erased in sync with the clatter.
Even without being connected to the computer, the cursed keyboard was reverting the paragraph I had revised. It happened every single time, no matter how many times I tried.
Unable to watch any longer, I tried to delete the draft file, only for an error message to pop up.
Cannot delete file.
Just why?
When I tried to check with the cursed manuscript, the document file was missing from my computer. It was utterly baffling. It had been right there until this morning, so why? I hadn't even deleted it.
Suddenly, the sound of typing pierced my ears. Even while my hands remained still, that keyboard was continuously writing something.
I looked back at the cursed keyboard. Sure enough, just as I suspected. The moment I plugged in the cursed keyboard, the document file appeared on the desktop.
I opened the cursed document.
[Jian pressed the backspace key countless times, but to no avail. That was the nature of the past. Something that could neither be erased nor changed.]
I lowered my head and clutched my hair in despair. I hadn't realized. I hadn't known I was submerged up to the crown of my head in a pitch-black quagmire.
I never dreamed that this draft, which I had written and felt too embarrassed to ever look at again, would hold me back like this.
Why on earth did I write such garbage? Why did I give it such a terrible ending? I should have just written that he killed Ha Jian because she was evil. Why did I make it so pointlessly ambiguous……?
I thought becoming the killer's lover was my only way to survive, but it turned out to be an inescapable highway to the afterlife.
I shouldn't have become his lover. If I hadn't, Ugeum would have never harmed me. Hadn't I brought this danger upon myself by claiming to be his girlfriend?
All at once, cold dread seized me to the bone. Looking back, going on that blind date had been a suicidal act. And I had even been caught. It was a miracle Ugeum had spared my life at all.
<If you cheat, you die, okay?>
Ugeum's warning echoed chillingly in my ears once more. A stinging pain flared in my stomach. It seemed my stress-induced stomachache had flared up again.
Just then.
Beep, beep, beep, beep.
The sound of the electronic door lock being pressed came from outside.
It's Ugeum.
The moment that thought crossed my mind, my stomach twisted violently. A sharp, stabbing pain washed my vision in white. It felt as though someone were wringing out my intestines like a wet rag.
“Aagh……”
I couldn't even manage a proper scream. Clutching my stomach, I collapsed onto the floor.
The sound of rushing footsteps and a voice calling my name drifted in from far away. Ugeum had arrived.
The look in his eyes as he peered down at me was far too dark and deep, resembling a hollow abyss.
No. Don't look at me like that. Don't kill me.
Squeezing out every last ounce of strength, I begged Ugeum.
“Save me…….”
With a large hand reaching out toward me as my last sight, everything went pitch-black.
