Alice 

The sun was starting to sink towards the horizon as Yulhee prepared to leave the bakery. It was the beginning of June, and the days were fast heating up. A sheen of sweat was visible on her neck as she pulled on a blue sweater. She the business card in her satchel. Now that she’d made a decision, she was starting to get anxious. This person – if it was a person, and not one of them toying with her – was a completely unknown entity.  

It wasn’t true that everyone in a small rural town knew each other; everyone knew of each other. Someone was always Mrs Han’s cousin third removed, or ex-classmate’s brother, or that-one-who’d-spoken-badly-about-our-Myungsoo-not-that-I’m-holding-it-against-her. The name Do Kyungsoo conjured up a vague face, dark hair, and a scowl. He’d been in Seungwan’s year, she thought, or maybe one above, but he must have kept to himself or left like many for the city where jobs were much, much better, because she couldn’t remember more. Still, she didn’t know him, and Yulhee did not like being on uncertain ground. It made her feel profoundly uncomfortable and exposed.

And that always reminded her of the Woods.

There was a small mirror hanging by the door, and she scrutinized herself, wondering if she looked professional enough. Her average, awkward appearance looked back. People complimented the fact that she was skinny, without recognizing that her scrawny and bony-looking frame was the result of how starved she’d been from what had transpired within the Woods. She had thin lips that tended to be unsmiling, a small nose, and a head of straight black hair cut neatly to her chin. It was a good thing she had a healthy skin colour, for if she’d been pale, people might have begun to speculate on whether she had a pulse. Her mother had always said that you had to make sure things progressed on your terms and not someone else's, and the key to that was looking like you meant business. It would have to suffice.

“Date?” Seulgi teased, her hair pined away from her face as she scrubbed the remaining pans. 

“I’m meeting Moonkyu. Don’t wait for me,” Yulhee responded shortly, keeping her gaze trained on her reflection. Her hands she shoved into the recesses of her satchel so Seulgi could not see them tremble. It was the most explicit lie she had ever told her sister.

“Oh? Can I come with you?”

Yulhee’s face remained blank as she turned towards the door. Inside her satchel, the card cut into her finger from the shaking. “No – no, Seungwan told you to finish cleaning… and I don’t want to keep him waiting.”

“Ah, Yulhee, I always knew you liked –”

The slam of the glass door cut off her sentence, and Yulhee felt like she could breathe again. What kind of sister was she? For that matter, what kind of daughter? True, much of what she presented to them was artificial, but there had been some reality mixed in, and they had cared for her all the same in their own imperfect way. They trusted her as much as they could.

They’d also refused to listen to her. 

This was all she had to go on. And she needed, she had to –

I see them too.  

But someone else might listen.

Yulhee straightened her shoulders. Somewhere out there was someone who might understand. The path was clear.

Trailing through the few, small streets in the town, Yulhee ground to a halt in front of a small, two-storey house. It had a chipped and faded red roof, and was an off-white colour that needed repainting, with several large windows on the front. The garden was a little overgrown. It was located on the edge of the Woods – she could see the dirt track that led into them, the thick, twisting trunks and dark green. The street was very quiet. She could hear the wind, a soft shush shush sound. Yulhee shivered, gripping tight onto the strap of her satchel.

The pockets of shadow where the light didn’t reach made her uneasy. Yulhee wanted, more than anything, to run to a place where the dark could not reach out with its cold, cold hands and snatch her back.

Behind her, the trees stirred the wind.

Bolting forward, Yulhee was practically ramming her fist against the white wooden door. It was pulled open by a woman it took her a moment to recognize, holding a baby to her side. This was the Alice Agency? “Why… You’re little Yulhee. You’ve grown.”

“Min Sunye…” Yulhee murmured, before bowing formally. She had been one of the social workers first assigned to her, who’d asked her if she knew what a bakery was all those years ago. She’d only learnt her name much later, when her mother mentioned Sunye was retiring to finally have children of her own. “I apologize for the noise. I’m looking for Do Kyungsoo. I was told he lived here.”

Sunye’s face cleared, and she stepped aside and let her in, to Yulhee’s concealed relief. “Ah, I’ve leased the second floor out to him. Money’s tight lately, you know? Just go up the stairs behind.”   

Obeying, Yulhee climbed the creaking wooden staircase to find a locked white wooden door at the top of the stairs. Frowning, she rapped smartly on it. A cat meowed from behind it, and she heard someone shuffle about, muttering, “Quiet, Dinah. Stop trying to trip me.”

After several long minutes, where Yulhee waited with her arms folded and her blankest possible expression, the door was pulled open. A young man stood in front of her, surprisingly handsome, with messy black hair, and pouty lips. There were faint shadows under his eyes, and a slight sullen-ness to his expression. He was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. A black-and-white tuxedo cat was curled around his legs. Yulhee had always been a little bit tall for a girl, and he was on the short side, and it averaged out that she was almost his height. He was certainly not what she'd been expecting. 

“Do Kyungsoo?” she asked bluntly, eyeing him up-and-down. Regardless of his appearance, she was still irritated and wary, and she wasn’t inclined to be warm with most people. He gave a short nod. His stare was penetrating and intense. Yulhee extended the business card in one hand, careful to make sure her fingers were positioned so that he could not touch her. “You sent this to me.”

Recognition dawned, and his expression softened a little, a smile dancing on the corner of his lips. He took the card from her, very deliberately avoiding her fingers. If she hadn’t been experienced in appearing Sphinx-like, Yulhee might have blushed. “Han Yulhee? I went to school with your sister. Come inside.”

He turned, the cat at his heels, and Yulhee had no choice but to follow him. The upper floor was one long corridor with wood panelled walls, with white wooden doors veering off into other rooms that she could not see. The floor was decorated with small brown and white square tiles. He stopped at the corridor’s end, where several pictures had been taken down and rested on the floor. In one of them she saw Kyungsoo and another boy, but the face was unknown to her. There was a large window with a wooden ledge big enough to sit three people. A table nearby was stacked with recording equipment. Yulhee didn't know what to make of it. 

“Make yourself comfortable –”

“I prefer to stand,” Yulhee stated. Kyungsoo made a motion with his shoulders as though to say suit yourself, perching on the ledge as Yulhee stood across from him, pointedly far.

“There’s no need to be so formal.” He turned over his arm. Several ragged pale pink scars formed the number nine. “We are more alike than you think.”

Yulhee’s eyes widened. His smile was bitter as he pulled his arm back, resting it on his lap. “There are lot more of us than just nine. I was found four years before you. The circumstances were identical: a child around the ages of eleven to thirteen, with no memories, and absolutely no traces of an existence before it, found in the Woods during the Summer.”

“Do the police know of this?” Yulhee asked sharply, disliking how he knew her story so well.

“Of course. But I’m sure you’ve realised long ago that they can’t help,” he continued, his voice flat. His posture was rigid. “That is why I began the Alice Agency. Its priority is to find out who was responsible, what was done, and the reason for it, in ways that the police are unable to. That involves finding and contacting other victims, like yourself.”

Her eyes narrowed. Yulhee was not prepared to lower her guard to anyone, not even this man. “What do you want from me?”

“Have you ever seen things that aren’t there?” he asked abruptly instead.

I see them too.    

But did he?

For years, Yulhee had been rejected when she tried to tell someone. Bit by bit, she had