In the full light of morning, sitting out on the slightly crumbling back patio stairs off of the first-floor master bedroom with a very large cup of coffee, Chanyeol replayed the morning in his mind.

After nearly five full minutes of panicking in the tower’s library, Chanyeol had screwed up his courage and gone back up to the bedroom, intending to call the police and describe the scene. When he’d gone back up, though, the body was gone, the sheets clean as if they had never been soaked in blood.

But it had felt real. Really real. Terrifyingly real. He was still shaking; he’d had to put his coffee in a travel mug because he was too worried about spilling it if it was in a normal mug, and he kept jumping every time there was a stray noise in the creaky old house.

It was pretty certain, he thought, that the isolation and the general creepy state of the manor was having an effect on his mind. He was not new to stress nightmares, or even to the kind of waking hallucinations that came when a nightmare carried over into consciousness, but this was extreme even for him. His waking nightmare about the conservatory was not normal, his freakout in the tower was not normal, the way his eyes kept playing tricks on him was not normal. And hallucinating a dead body in the bed next to him was so far beyond not normal that Chanyeol didn’t really have words for it.

Chanyeol had had a nervous breakdown before. Not all of the signs were the same, this time, but enough of them were that he was pretty certain he was heading in that direction again. His brain was screwing with him, and he needed to get it under control before he ended up in the hospital.

Again.

It had been years, and Chanyeol hadn’t thought about his breakdown recently. It was behind him, he’d thought. His situation wasn’t at all the same these days. He’d been totally broke, nearly friendless, completely directionless and just-dumped by his first boyfriend, a horrible, painful breakup that had completely blindsided him. None of those things were true right now.

Well… except the breakup. But this one hadn’t been as bad as the first one. Sure, he was still the one dumped - still the one left behind to pick up the pieces of his heart - but at least Minho had been honest with him, and relatively compassionate. He hadn’t cheated, and he hadn’t broken it off via screaming insults, which put him miles ahead of That Who Shall Not Be Named.

Chanyeol missed him. A lot. But Minho had wanted to leave, and Chanyeol wasn’t the kind of person to try and imprison someone in an unhappy relationship. If Chanyeol was going to keep him, he should have done more in the first place; any protestations he made were too little, too late.

He’d find his way alone.

Chanyeol pulled out his phone and opened a folder in his documents he hadn’t for a long time. He’d made notes, back then, lists of ways to cope and warning signs to look out for, lists of things that had triggered panic attacks in the past. Nerdy, sure, but writing it all down had helped, and it meant that he had the list to refer to now.

He was going to have to take much better care of himself. No more caffeine after noon, for one thing, and he’d probably need to start using white noise again to help ease his sleep. He should probably start working out again, that had been a big help the first time around too.

And he was going to be staying out of the northeast tower, at least for the time being. Until he felt more at ease in the house on a subconscious level, there was no need to antagonize himself further with heights, enclosed spaces, and shadowy rooms.

Chanyeol thought about the sketchbook. He’d left it on the bedside table when he bolted, and now he kind of wished he’d thought to grab it. It had captured his attention. It would be nice to peruse the sketchbook some more, but maybe it was a good thing he’d left it upstairs.

This morning, though, he was going to take control of his immediate space. He’d been eyeing some furniture online for a while, stuff that he’d always wanted but never had the money or space to purchase. A very modern, sleek bedroom set in whitewashed birch, a large, fluffy ivory sofa, one of those cool coffee tables where the top lifted up, a massive beanbag chair big enough for two adults to snuggle in it. Chanyeol ended up purchasing all of it and more on his phone, and selecting next-day delivery.

He was going to spend the day completely clearing out and replacing everything in the master suite. Honestly, he should have done that first, before anything else. He knew from experience that if he wanted to feel comfortable in a new place, he needed for it to feel like it was his.

As he got up and headed towards the kitchen to wash out his mug, Chanyeol seriously considered calling Amber. The need to talk about his nightmare, hallucination, whatever it was, was pretty strong.

But she’d just had to pull him out of a panic attack the night before. The memory still made him cringe; he hated forcing others to deal with his own mental problems. She would probably insist that he get out of the manor, for his own sanity, or at the very least she would drop everything to come stay with him.

He wasn’t going to let her put her life on hold because he was having a little psychological issue, and he certainly wasn’t going to give up on the manor just yet, not when it was the only direction he had for his life. So, he decided it would be best if he kept this to himself, for now.

After spending the entire day working on the bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room of the master suite, Chanyeol felt a whole lot better. He’d already scrubbed all three rooms down a few days prior, so he’d spent the day replacing door hardware, cleaning the windows, removing the existing furniture and rugs, and planning out how he was going to arrange his new stuff. Lunch was spent online-shopping for new sheets, new towels, new rugs, pillows and lampshades and art for the walls, and later in the afternoon he’d actually gotten out of the house completely, heading down to the nearby town to pick up paint and painting supplies.

He recognized that he was doing this kind of backwards - he should have painted before buying all new furniture - but whatever. He had the means to do like this now, and after the wacky couple of days he’d had, spontaneously treating himself felt really damn good.

Chanyeol took his time at the hardware store, carefully considering his paint colors and spending a few minutes looking at fixtures while his paints were mixing. Again, he should have gotten samples and tested the colors before he bought whole cans, but whatever. He just wanted the dingy, stained walls to be bright and cheery as soon as possible. If he ended up hating the colors, he could always paint over them later.

On a whim, Chanyeol purchased a very nice pair of floor lamps, some new switch and outlet covers, and got a large pack of bright LED bulbs while he was at it. Excited with his finds and feeling the giddiness of seeing a project come together, Chanyeol bopped to the radio the entire way home.

Laden with paint cans and painting supplies, Chanyeol pushed open his front door, and froze.

Someone was climbing the stairs.

“Hey,” Chanyeol called, hurriedly putting down his load, “hey, what are you doing in my house?”

He received no answer. The man kept walking, trudging up the stairs slowly with his head hanging. As he went around the curve, Chanyeol caught a glimpse of his face - young, handsome, and scrunched up with tears.

Abruptly, Chanyeol noticed that he could see the faded pattern of the wallpaper through the man’s head. The realization stopped him in his tracks, eyes wide. This… wasn’t really happening, was it? That man, he wasn’t really there.

“Hey, look at me,” Chanyeol said again, but he was unsurprised when he got no response. The man was shaking his head, moving more and more haltingly, sobbing soundlessly. His motion was odd, like he was fighting against being pulled.

The man who wasn’t there stopped at the top of the stairs, leaning with both hands on the balcony that bridged between the two staircases and separated the foyer from the great room. He looked down, right where Chanyeol was standing, but he was looking through Chanyeol like he wasn’t there.

The chandelier above suddenly swung towards the balcony, and hung there over the man’s head, suspended. Chanyeol’s eyes widened more, and he stepped forward, wondering if he should run up the stairs, or if he should just get out and lock the door behind him. The man on the balcony reached forward as if to grab something, his expression twisted into a mass of fear and horror.

Both of his hands wrapped around something that wasn’t there, something Chanyeol couldn’t see, and he raised them up over his head and dropped them to his shoulders, as if he had put on an invisible necklace. Abruptly, and with horrible, nauseous clarity, Chanyeol realized what was about to happen.

The man started to climb over the balcony railing.

“No,” Chanyeol yelled, and bolted for the stairs. “Stop, stop, oh my God, don’t!” He took the stairs two at a time, using the railing to pull himself up as fast as possible, but he wasn’t fast enough. Chanyeol could see the man shaking his head, his lips forming around the word no, but the man still jumped.

The chandelier swung out over the foyer. Making a choked noise, Chanyeol shut his eyes and turned his face away, partway up the stairs and helpless to do anything.

“It’s not real,” he said out loud, forcing himself to listen to the words as they bounced off the high ceiling. “It didn’t happen. It’s in your mind, Chanyeol, it’s not real.”

But... why would he imagine this?

Chanyeol opened his eyes. Sure enough, the man was gone… but the chandelier was still swinging.

“Am I insane?” Chanyeol asked the empty room. Shaking, he started back down the stairs, keeping both hands on the railing to steady himself. “I don’t feel insane. Does an insane person feel insane, though?”

As the grandfather clock in the library chimed half-past five, Chanyeol went under the chandelier and looked up. It was still swinging, and now that he was looking, there was a weird jerkiness to the movement, as if an extra pendulum was weighing it down oddly at the top of the curve.

“I’m going to be sick,” he said to no one, but it was somewhat nonsensical because the nausea was quickly being overcome by an odd, lightheaded dizziness. The chandelier lights flickered overhead, and Chanyeol dropped to one knee, pressing a palm to the hardwood floor to steady himself.

He heard a roar.

Terrified, Chanyeol looked up. Directly ahead of him, under the balcony and through the doorway to the great room, he saw still another young man, a different one from the two he’d already seen, running towards him. The man managed to make it only a few steps before he stumbled forward, scrabbling for purchase against the wall next to the doorway and shrieking with terror as he was dragged backwards.

By a tiger.

Tunnel vision made Chanyeol’s perception stretch, the great room receding away from him. He heard a horrible ripping, squelching noise, and collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, his breath coming too fast, too shallow. He tried to force himself to breathe deeply, slowly, but he couldn’t do it.

As Chanyeol collapsed, he caught a glimpse of a man watching him from the balcony above, tall and black-eyed, with an open wound across his throat.

A knock on the door startled Chanyeol awake, and immediately, his first thought was holy ouch. Rolling over, he pushed himself up off the floor.

The floor of the foyer.

Where he was still lying, after he... collapsed?

The events of the evening came back to him in a rush. “,” he breathed, and fumbled for his phone. 7:32 AM, and his phone was down to 6% battery.

He’d hyperventilated until he passed out on the foyer floor, and stayed there all night. What the .

There was another knock, and Chanyeol scrambled to get up, wincing as stiff joints protested. He was definitely going to be feeling that for a few days. Scrubbing his hand over his face, Chanyeol answered the door.

“Hi.” It was an older man, salt-and-pepper hair and a drab blue-grey uniform. “Delivery for a Mr. Park Chanyeol?”

The furniture! “Yeah, that’s me,” Chanyeol said, slightly groggy. “Sorry, I’m - not quite awake yet.”

“Take your time,” the man said, sounding amused. “Nice place.” He peeked past Chanyeol’s shoulder into the foyer. “You fixing it up?”

Giving his head a little shake to clear it, Chanyeol said, “Yeah, working on it. I’m gonna go check that you have a clear path back, okay? Gimme a minute.”

“Sure thing, boss. We’ll start unloading.” He headed towards the truck that was pulled up in front of the house, and Chanyeol let the door stand open as he turned back towards the foyer.

The chandelier was hanging still, the cans of paint were right where he left them, and the tiger rug stared at him sightlessly through the doorway. Chanyeol moved towards it warily, his mind showing him unhelpful flashes of the terrified young man he’d seen the night before, being dragged backwards.

The tiger skin didn’t move, of course. It was very dead.

He ended up bundling the tiger skin up in a dropcloth and shutting it in the nearest closet.

All of the furniture that had previously been in the master suite had been removed yesterday, so Chanyeol went back out front and gave the delivery guys directions where to put things. “Just group all of it in the center of the rooms,” he said. “I still have to paint. I’ll move it when I’m done.”

In the bustle of the next hour, Chanyeol pretty much didn’t have a moment to consider what had happened to him. He directed traffic and answered questions as the delivery people brought in and assembled two rooms’ worth of furniture and accessories. But eventually they left, their big box truck rumbling away, and Chanyeol was once again left alone in a house that he was starting to think was literally driving him nuts.

He used the restroom, splashed water on his face, combed his hair, changed his clothes. Then, he made himself a cup of coffee, grabbed a protein bar, and sank into his new couch gratefully.

“Alright, Chanyeol,” he said very sternly to himself, “you can’t keep doing this. You’re seeing things. This waking nightmare business has got to stop.”

It was nonsensical, but saying it aloud like that made him feel a little better. Briefly, he considered calling Amber, but… If he told her he’d passed out, even without talking about the hallucination or whatever it had been, she’d not only drop everything, she’d probably physically drag him out of the manor.

No. He would handle this himself. It was just exhaustion and stress, he’d be fine.

A good night’s sleep in a room he could really call his own would help immensely, right? Right. He had to get to work. Munching his breakfast, Chanyeol plotted his plan of attack, and then as soon as the food was gone, he plugged his phone in, his music, and got to work.

Painting took up the entire day. He threw tarps over all his new furniture, then opened all the windows and started taping off the trim in the bedroom. By eleven, the bedroom had one coat of pretty, pale periwinkle blue on the walls, and Chanyeol moved into the sitting room to do the same with a sunny butter yellow.

He stopped around two to eat. The pipes in the walls groaned at him, the water in the tap flowed rusty red for a moment, and more than once a weird, unexplainable feeling of dread came over him. Chanyeol ignored it all as hard as he could, defiantly eating his ramen right there in the kitchen, just to show the his own overactive imagination who was boss.

As he headed back to the master suite, Chanyeol spotted the same red, smeared handprint on the wall of the great room, right where it had been the first night he was here. He bit his lip until it bled and kept moving, striding forward like a man possessed, and went back to painting as if he hadn’t seen anything unusual.

Chanyeol hadn’t heard the grandfather clock all day, since his music had been blasting, but right at half-past five his phone just so happened to be between songs, and Chanyeol heard the chime. His heart started to pound, a Pavlovian reaction, but he stayed where he was, resisting the urge to go out into the foyer and look up. There was no roaring tonight, and when he dared to glance out into the great room again, the handprint was gone.

By six, the second coat of paint was drying in both rooms, and Chanyeol was in the kitchen washing off his brushes. He wouldn’t be able to take the tape off the trim until the morning, after the paint had totally cured, but he was done enough that he could at least take the tarps off the furniture and sleep in his new bed tonight. It was a damn good day’s work, and Chanyeol was pretty proud of himself for it.

He ate dinner at his new coffee table, then spent a little time arranging the bedroom furniture as best he could when none of it could touch the walls. With his new silvery-grey sheets on his new uber-comfy memory foam mattress with his fluffy new pillows, with his new lamps with new LED bulbs lighting every corner of the room and his windows open to let in the breeze and air out the familiar smell of paint, Chanyeol felt safer and cozier than he had in a week. He shut all the doors, flopped into bed, and watched stupid YouTube videos on his phone until he fell asleep.

For once, he did not dream.

Refreshed and feeling a whole heck of a lot better about things, Chanyeol spent the next morning taking down the tape and carefully repainting all of the white trim in both rooms. After lunch, he replaced all of the outlet and switch covers in both rooms with new, clean, pristine ones, and then he arranged his furniture. Most of the accessories he had ordered had also arrived, so each room now had toss pillows, art on the walls, and bright, soft, coordinating area rugs in a modern, funky geometric designs. Everything looked so sleek, so colorful, so designer-coordinated that walking into the master suite felt like walking out of the past and into the future, but Chanyeol liked it that way. The rest of the house, he could restore to a historical state, but these rooms were his.

By midafternoon, both rooms were done, so Chanyeol decided he would take a walk around the grounds. It was a nice day, bordering on too warm, but the sun felt good and Chanyeol enjoyed exploring. There was so much space, overgrown but beautiful and full of potential, that Chanyeol ended up just brainstorming out loud all of the possible things he could do with the grounds. A gazebo, a tea garden, a hedge maze, a walking path? Maybe he’d take Amber’s suggestion and have pony rides out here - but he wasn’t about to turn the east wing garages back into stables, so he’d have to have a separate barn or stables built.

But he could do that. He had the space, he had the money, he had the time. If he wanted to build a stables, he could build a goddamn stables. The thought made him giddy.

Smiling, and musing internally as to whether putting in a mini railroad to circle the grounds would be overkill, Chanyeol returned to the house.

There was a lovely, ceramic-tiled decorative pond out in the back, just in front of the deck in what had clearly used to be a manicured garden. It was dry of water, of course, because Chanyeol hadn’t the water line that lead to it yet.

Except it wasn’t dry. It was frozen.

Ice filled the entire pond, cascading from the small fountain in the corner like a waterfall in a Russian winter, frozen completely solid mid-motion. The hot afternoon sunlight gleamed off of the ice, as if to taunt Chanyeol with how ludicrously impossible it was.

“No,” Chanyeol said out loud. “What the , stop that.” He closed his eyes tightly, making himself feel the late-summer sunlight sizzling on his bared shoulders, and then opened them again. The ice was still there. “What the .”

Determined to prove to his own brain that it wasn’t real, Chanyeol strode forward and knelt to put a hand on the ice, and mother it was cold. He had to snatch his hand back.

That was when he realized that there, in the center of the pond, was a hole in the ice. A human-shaped hole, as if the water had frozen around a man’s body, but then that man had simply disappeared. It was so detailed, Chanyeol could see individual fingers in the empty space with ice between them.

Chanyeol blinked. “Nope,” he decided. “Nope, nope, nope.” He turned his back on the pond and booked it for the house, skipping right over the great room and instead going directly into his sitting room. Sunny and modern in yellow, white, and pale green, the sitting room smelled like paint and felt like sanctuary.

Except he could still see the pond through the windows, man-shaped blank space and all.

His hands were still wet and cold from touching the ice. Distantly, Chanyeol heard the grandfather clock chime quarter after three.

“I need curtains,” Chanyeol said, and moved so he was sitting in the beanbag chair instead, his back to the windows.

His first instinct, as it often was, was to open his phone. He thumbed over to the messaging app and paused, his finger hovering over the list of conversations. Amber’s was at the top, of course.

He skipped it, and scrolled down instead to his conversation with Minho. Hey, do you have time to talk? he typed, and sent it before he could think too much about it.

Immediately, he regretted it. , how pathetic was he? But it was done, he couldn’t take it back, so he closed his phone and very determinedly marched to the kitchen to start cooking dinner.

He ended up making the steak stir-fry he and Amber had not finished cooking a few nights before, and this time, there were no knife mishaps. Since he’d started cooking much earlier than usual, he took his time, even going so far as to plate his meal prettily and take several shots of it for Instagram.

“I should be liveblogging this house project,” he thought out loud as he posted the best image. “People would love it.” And he considered the notion seriously as he ate, and even looked up a few articles online about how to get started blogging.

He did check his text conversation again. The message was read, but there was no answer.

Of course. Right. Chanyeol should have known, and he should just close his phone and forget about it.

Let me know. Things are kind of crazy and I’d really like to hear your voice.

The text was sent before he could stop himself, and of course he regretted it, disgusted with himself for being so pathetic. He locked his phone before he could do anything else embarrassing, and went back to eating.

He was just finishing up the dishes when the grandfather clock bonged for half-past five, and Chanyeol, suddenly and with extreme clarity, realized that he’d only heard the chime once today - when the fountain had frozen.

As a matter of fact, the only time he’d heard it chime at all was when some crazy was going down.

Suddenly, and with everything he was, Chanyeol just had to know. Morbid, terrible curiosity pulled him from the kitchen into the great room, and through it into the foyer. And there, as he’d feared, was the man he’d seen before, hanging by his neck from the swinging chandelier. He was nearly solid - Chanyeol could only barely see the late-afternoon sunlight streaming through his body.

Holding down his nausea, and thankful that he was behind the body and couldn’t see the face, Chanyeol took a tentative step forward and reached up. If he stretched, he was just tall enough for his fingertips to brush the man’s bare feet. As the man swung, Chanyeol’s hand was pushed back, as if the feet had hit Chanyeol’s hand. But Chanyeol’s touch didn’t have any effect on the body’s swing, and his feet passed right through Chanyeol’s fingertips.

“Why would I hallucinate the same thing at the same time every night?” Chanyeol asked aloud. “And… Why would my hallucination be wearing bell-bottoms?”

If he was hallucinating the same thing as before, then the other man would be right behind him, wouldn’t he? The one in the great room, who was attacked by the tiger.

Chanyeol turned around, but there was nothing there. The tiger rug was still gone and there was no wide-eyed, terrified young man shrieking for help. But when he moved into the great room to make certain, he saw that the handprint was back on the wall. He forced himself to look at it, and reached out to touch it. The handprint was smaller than his own, long-, and blood came off the wall onto his hand.

“Okay,” Chanyeol said quietly, staring at the blood on his fingers. He rubbed his fingers together, observing the way it smeared over his skin. “Okay then. That’s. That’s a thing that has happened.” He looked back at the foyer - no more body, but the chandelier was still swinging.

Chanyeol went to the library, which was through a wide doorway under the western staircase in the foyer. He hadn’t really studied this room yet, just sort of looked around, but he knew what was under the tallest tarp. He pulled the tarp off, not caring that he was getting someone else’s blood on it.

The grandfather clock was totally still. The pendulum wasn’t swinging, and the clock face was stopped at 6:02, despite the fact that he had just heard it chime 5:30.

“Right, then,” Chanyeol said, feeling weirdly distant. “I think I need to go back up to the tower.”

Chanyeol started up the tower stairs around ten PM, a big thermos of coffee in one hand and a small duffel bag filled with snacks and supplies slung over his shoulder. He went right past the third-floor library and to the fourth-floor bedroom, shut the door behind him, and plopped down on the bed.

“Alright, tower,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Of course, nothing happened. Huffing, Chanyeol got comfy on the bed, propping himself upright against the headboard, and took a big swig of his coffee. He was not planning to sleep tonight. Instead, he pulled out his laptop and tethered it to his phone’s data connection, grumbling to himself about how inconvenient it was not to have WiFi in the house.

His phone chimed. Chanyeol blinked, then hurried to unlock it, his heart climbing up his throat. Was it Minho?

It was - but it wasn’t what Chanyeol wanted to hear. Hey. Look, I’m sorry that things are crazy, but I really can’t call you right now. It isn’t a good idea. Maybe someday in the future we can reconnect, but for now, please don’t try to contact me. We need to be away from each other for a while. Good luck.

. Reading the text over, Chanyeol pressed the side of his fist to his mouth, holding back his frustration. He knew exactly what was happening here. Minho had moved on, and he wanted Chanyeol to move on too, and he knew that Chanyeol would never be able to do so unless he enforced total radio silence.

Worse, Chanyeol knew that Minho was right. He was clingy on the best of days; right now he missed his ex so badly it ate away at his insides. Nothing would heal that except time and distance. Unfortunately, knowing that Minho was acting in Chanyeol’s own best interests even when Chanyeol couldn’t manage it for himself made it hurt all the more - because his reliance was part of why Minho had left him in the first place.

Well. That was that, then. Chanyeol deleted the message conversation entirely, and sat for a long moment, staring blankly at the ancient, ornate, unfamiliar bedroom around him.

He’d be fine. He’d gotten through this before, right? And he had a project to occupy him this time, one that might be important. He’d just focus on that.

Right.

Distracting himself, Chanyeol spent the next several hours looking for any information he could find about the house. Most of the articles actually on the Internet were about his great-aunt, since she’d been living there since before the Internet had been widely available. One of the articles, from the late 90’s, referred to the house as “Dragon Manor,” which Chanyeol had never seen before. He wondered if anyone had ever really called it that.

Searching for “Dragon Manor,” though, did get Chanyeol a few more results, including a mention on a shady-looking site called Haunted Korea that caused his pop-up blocker to beep at him in concern. The site had a very grainy, black-and-white photo that was still recognizably the manor, and a paragraph about a supposed long string of suicides and mysterious deaths going back in the manor’s history. “One eye-witness,” the blurb claimed, “reported no less than seven ghosts.”

“Well,” Chanyeol muttered wryly, “I’ve seen at least three.” The site had no details at all on these supposed ghosts, who they were, or why the place was haunted. “Ugh, this is no help.”

After puttering around for a while and getting pretty much nowhere, Chanyeol thought to look for scans of old newspapers from the area. It took some clever use of search terms to find what he was looking for, but eventually he did stumble upon an archive project that had almost a hundred years’ worth of a nearby town’s local newspaper. Unfortunately, the articles were not indexed in any truly searchable way, so if Chanyeol wanted to find something, he was going to have to look through each and every one.

He ended up opening another tab and researching bell-bottoms to try and narrow down the date range. The pants the young man in the foyer had been wearing were very long, with a wide flare; they matched the description of “elephant bell” bell-bottoms, which according to the Internet were popular in the mid-to-late 70s.

So Chanyeol began going through the Sunday obituaries week after week, starting with 1976.

It took a long time, and was very boring, but Chanyeol sipped his coffee and ate his snacks and kept at it. If he could find proof that the man in the foyer had existed, he would know, once and for all, whether he was crazy.

Around quarter after one in the morning, Chanyeol flipped to the next week and immediately stopped. There, in a half-page section front and center of the obituaries, was the smiling face of the man he’d seen, right down to the fluffy mop of dark hair.

Chanyeol stared at it for a good long moment, disoriented. That was definitely the same young man he’d seen, though it was a little disconcerting to see him look so happy when all Chanyeol had seen was fear and anguish. He looked… young.

And he was young. His name was Kim Jongin, according to the newspaper, and he had been only twenty-five. The funeral service was listed at the manor’s address, but no other information was given.

He was real. The man he had seen - the ghost? - was real. How could Chanyeol have seen the face of a man who had died over forty years ago, unless what he’d seen was actually a ghost?

Or he was developing psychic powers.

Chanyeol was kind of hoping for the ghost explanation, though. The inside of his brain was messy enough already.

He noted down the date of passing - August 24th, 1978 - and scrolled back through the newspapers to the day after. Sure enough, the story had made the news. Chanyeol read it through carefully. Jongin had committed suicide by hanging himself from the chandelier, while the rest of his family had been preparing to eat dinner on the back patio. He’d left behind both parents and two older, married sisters and their families, all of whom seemed to be in complete shock. “He was such a sweet, bright boy, always smiling,” his mother was quoted as saying. “Why would he do something like this?”

Closing his eyes, Chanyeol recalled the terror on the boy’s face as he’d climbed the stairs. “I’m not sure he actually wanted to do it,” he murmured, and , but that was a disturbing notion. And with his family right there… the patio was easily within yelling distance of the foyer, if you were loud enough.

The article also said something Chanyeol found very interesting - that Jongin was the third suicide in that house that century. Names and exact dates for the other two were not mentioned - only “early thirties” and “late sixties.”

Chanyeol saved a screenshot of the article, then moved back through the archives to 1966. He was in for a long night.

Some time later, Chanyeol startled awake, his laptop dark in his lap. He immediately cursed and reached for his phone to check the time - but then the reason why he had awoken became clear.

A man was sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, and quietly sobbing his heart out. Chanyeol thought it was probably the same man he’d seen in this bedroom before, though it was a bit difficult to tell. He was wearing button-front trousers and a flouncy, untucked, half-ed shirt, and he was bigger than Chanyeol had realized, with long legs and broad palms that enveloped his face.

A ghost. An actual, un-living, not-breathing ghost sitting at the end of his bed. Or, actually, more likely that the bed was the ghost’s first, right?

Or he was insane, that was still a possibility. Could he find a way to prove it to himself, once and for all?

Carefully, Chanyeol set his laptop aside, and pulled out his phone. “Hey,” Chanyeol said. “Hey, can you hear me?”

The man showed absolutely no signs of noticing him.

Chanyeol opened his phone’s camera and started to record. The man didn’t appear on his screen, which was freaky, but Chanyeol kept recording anyway, just in case. “Hey,” he said again. “My name is Chanyeol. Can you see me?”

No response. Chanyeol reached out one hand and passed it through the man’s shoulder, then immediately yanked it back, shaking off his tingling fingers. “It’s cold,” he murmured aloud, for the camera’s benefit. “It feels like fog.”

The man raised his head, wiping tears off his face, and stared sightlessly at the floor for a long moment. Chanyeol leaned, looking into his face. It was definitely the man he’d seen in this bed the other night. Alive and in motion, Chanyeol was struck by how handsome he was, and how hopeless he looked.

“What happened to you?” Chanyeol asked softly.

Again, no answer. But after a moment, the man stood, and made his way over to the fireplace. He leaned on the mantle and looked up, staring at the bare wall above.

Chanyeol stood, and came over to stand next to him. They were about the same height, and looking into his face, Chanyeol guessed that they were about the same age, too. He looked so incredibly sad, Chanyeol ached to reach out, to touch him, reassure him.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. His voice echoed in the room, deep and raspy with tears.

“Why?” Chanyeol asked, though he knew he would get no answer. “Why are you sorry?”

After a long moment, the man sighed, and reached up. Long fingers wrapped around something that wasn’t there, lifted up slightly, then came down. He turned and crossed the room to the wardrobe.

The doors of the wardrobe opened, but they didn’t. Chanyeol saw them open, and yet they remained closed, and he couldn’t see inside. The man put whatever he was holding inside the wardrobe, and then he pushed it closed - and broke the handle off with a single, sharp movement.

Okay. “So I need to get that wardrobe open, clearly,” Chanyeol mused aloud.

That done, the man went back to the bed, and sat down on the other side from where Chanyeol had been sleeping. He stared out of the west-facing balcony, where the sun was beginning to rise. Setting his phone against his laptop such that the camera was recording the bed, Chanyeol came around the bed and sat next to the man. He looked… very solid, now. Almost real. When Chanyeol reached out, he could nearly feel the heat of the man’s body under his palm - but he still couldn’t touch.

Very faintly, Chanyeol heard the grandfather clock chime six.

The man sighed, and closed his eyes. “Forgive me for this,” he murmured, very quietly. “I don’t know what else to do.”

He reached into the drawer of the nightstand beside him, and pulled out an ornate silver straight razor, the kind men had used to shave before safety razors had been invented. The horrifying truth of what he was seeing, that this was the memory of a person who had really lived and really died, punched Chanyeol in the gut.

“Don’t do this,” he whispered.

“I have to,” the man replied.

Stunned, Chanyeol stared at him. Had he been heard, or was that a coincidence?

The man raised the razor to his neck. He held it there, for a long, long moment, breathing heavily and visibly screwing up his courage.

Then, he looked Chanyeol straight in the eye, and yanked his arm down.

“,” Chanyeol sobbed, covering his eyes so he didn’t have to see the rest. He felt the impact as the body hit the bed, felt heat, felt weight. Without opening his eyes, he dropped his hand at his side, and it landed on a long, slim thigh, still warm.

Under his hand, the man twitched. A horrifying gurgle filled Chanyeol’s ears, and he burst into tears.

Chanyeol did not eat breakfast that morning. Instead, he sat out on the back patio stairs, staring at the now-dry pond, and called Amber, who of course didn’t answer since it was ity-o’clock in the morning.

So he rambled at her voicemail. “I thought I was going insane,” he said, “but I’m not. The video recording didn’t capture anything but I saw him, I heard him, I saw the wardrobe and the drawer open, and I felt the blood pooling on the sheets so I swear to God, I am not crazy.”

He took a deep breath. “The manor is haunted, and I’m going to find out why.”

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