Drip.

 

      Drip.

 

      Drip.

 

      It was only an IV--at least, whatever it was, it sound like one--and really, it was never only an IV, because an IV meant a dying flame of a life, or a miserable soul, or a lost mind, or something else being brought into the world.

 

      New breaths.

 

      There were other noises too, bubbling, trickling water, the quiet rolling of liquid in glass tanks. And there was a ghostly bluish-white light that polluted the entire atmosphere that felt harsh on the lungs, as if breathing it in was like breathing in Arctic air.

 

      And then there were them, the things that the IV’s were strapped to, the things that floated inside the glass tanks like preserved specimens that would be taken out every other blue moon to be inspected, shoved under a microscope the size of an astronomer’s telescope and flayed open.

 

      Some of them, were, at least, better off than others. Some of them escaped the IV’s and the formaldehyde and the microscope lenses. Some of them found their own lives, some of them came together away from their nightmare.

 

      And those were the ones who were cursed, and as Jonghyun slid his eyes open , he heard the ominous drip-drip of the IV near his head, and he could feel the stiff pain that coursed through his muscles like lactic acid.

 

      There was a dark form that floated above him in the darkness--it should have been harshly lit, that was odd--and he made a strangled noise when he saw the glittering eyes peering down at him.

 

      Tick tock, you live in a clock, the voice of the figure said in a hushed voice. Click clack, you’ll never go back…

 

      He woke up in his own sweat, left hand resting right over his heart, breathing hard. Jonghyun sat up, pushing his sweat-matted bangs off his forehead and shivered in the sudden cold.

 

      The dreams had been getting worse, and he looked around the room he shared with his two sisters. Nothing seemed out of place; on the contrary, everything was quiet and the house seemed to be breathing.

 

      He swallowed and checked the time; it was almost four in the morning.

 

      Tick tock. 

 

 

      “What happens when the numbers run out?”

 

      “Well, there were two backwards three’s at the end of the list, right? They should mean something.”

 

      “He didn’t know what they meant, stupid.”

 

      “I know--”

 

      “Guys,” Jonghyun said dryly from where he was lying on his bed, fully clothed in the day’s attire, “can you let me continue?”

 

      “Junghee’s being such a--”

 

      “Junghee, shut up, then,” Jonghyun said, rolling his eyes and crossing his hands behind his head.

 

      “I’m not Junghee, she is!”

 

      “Honestly, boy, you call us our brother.”

 

      And that was perhaps the most normal part of Jonghyun’s day, lying on top of his bed in a weather-beaten T-shirt and jeans, telling his two sisters the scariest stories he could conjure. Why they demanded them before dinner (and not in bed at night, when all senses were heightened and everything was clearly more exciting) was a different story completely. But today was an exception (thank God).

 

      “Sorry, Jungsoo,” Jonghyun said mechanically. “Both of you. Just. Shut up. And let me continue.”

 

      They shut up.

 

      “What happens when the numbers run out, indeed,” Jonghyun said, after both his sisters had fallen silent in their beds, and the quiet sound of rustling filled the air as they shifted. “Neither of them knew, really. They were getting to the last few sets of numbers, there were about three disasters left until it said backwards three-three--”

 

      There was a light snore and Jonghyun sat up, surprised and slightly insulted. “Which one of you?”

 

      “Jungsoo,” a voice said in the darkness. “Junghee is still awake and listening, oppa.”

 

      “Thanks, I appreciate it,” Jonghyun said somewhat sarcastically.

 

      “Mm,” Junghee said, turning over in her bed that was aligned with Jungsoo’s, “no problem, oppa.”

 

      And then she was promptly asleep. 

 

=== 

 

      As a high school graduate waiting for college acceptance letters to arrive, this much Jonghyun knew: there was something strange about his two twin sisters.

 

      (It didn’t help that he read a horror novel about twins back in middle school, but that was beside the point.)

 

      They were identical and three years younger than his twenty, girly at times, philosophical at others, and generally--generally--two normal teen girls getting on with their lives.

 

      And when Jonghyun looked past all the makeup, the cell phones, and the occasional squealing, he saw one girl and her mirror reflection. It was the only way he knew how to describe the feeling. The both of them thought  and acted so similarly it was unnerving, and he wouldn’t even need to go into their appearances or voices.

 

      It was obvious in that neither he nor his mother (even after enduring the two for seventeen years) could tell them apart one hundred percent of the time. Jonghyun could probably have been marked eighty-five percent of the time, his mother ninety, ninety-five tops.

 

      This much, he knew.

 

      As Jonghyun lied on top of his blankets and let the thoughts stream through his mind aimlessly, he turned his head and peered over to look at Jungsoo, who was curled up a fetal position.

 

      He sighed and remembered the way his mother would get when she would refer to one of them with the wrong name, and she would get all stiff and offended and snappy. It was like a PMS-switch that could go off at any given moment.

 

      Jonghyun wondered if his father would have been able to tell them apart, had he been alive. Before high school, he’d ask him mother what happened to him. He never got an answer beyond, “You don’t need to know, Jonghyun.”

 

      He sighed, the murmurings of his mind fading, and fell asleep.

 

      Tick tock. 

 

 

      Jonghyun was enjoying a relatively dreamless and therefore very pleasant sleep when a poorly concealed crash made him jolt, flail in his blankets for a moment, and sit upright.

 

      Neither of his dead-as-rock-sleeper sisters so much as fluttered an eyelid, so Jonghyun thought it might have been his subconscious going haywire again when he heard another quieter crash and a loud English curse.

 

      Jonghyun bit his lip; his mother was on a business trip for the week, and there otherwise would leave no other option than breaking-and-entering of someone who had too much time on their hands.

 

      He waited until the third crash (which was accentuated with a clanging of pots and pans and a string of English profanities that Jonghyun assumed were along the lines of telling someone to do immoral things with his or her mother) to flip his blankets off of himself and press his ear to their closed bedroom door, straining his ears to hear if there was more than one person. There was only one voice, but it seemed to be murmuring to something else, pausing, and then murmuring again.

 

      Jonghyun turned the knob slowly, praying it wouldn’t creak and cracked the door open to peer out the slit.

 

      It was dark in both the living room and the hallway, but he saw a distinct glow from the kitchen that confirmed his belief that, whoever it was, needed some food. That he could work with.

 

      Running a hand through his hair, and hoping he didn’t have too bad of a case of bedhead, Jonghyun tiptoed out into the hallway, inching along the cold wooden floor until he was standing just around the corner to the kitchen, and listened again.

 

      “Okay,” a voice was saying, slightly panicked. “Okay, Luna, just--stay still, Jesus!--okay, okay--stay still!”

 

      “You know,” Jonghyun said then, not moving from his position and he heard an metallic bang and then silence, “if you need some help, you can ask for it, you know.”

 

      There was no answer, and Jonghyun felt as though he waited a two solid minutes before he turned around the corner to be met face to face with perhaps one of the strangest sights in his twenty-and-a-half years.

 

      There was a boy of about his age standing up on their dining table, barefooted and reaching up into the hanging racks of pots and pans, the nightlight only highlighting the fact that he was wearing what seemed like vines for pants. Jonghyun stared up into the face he could not see, eyebrows raised and a mouth a little open in surprise.

 

      The figure didn’t move, and neither did Jonghyun; it seemed as though each was testing the other to see who’d break first, and it was only then that Jonghyun heard another rattle against a copper pan and the figure jumped.

 

      “I’ll get you out, calm down!” the boy hissed.

 

      Jonghyun thought he heard a tiny voice shrieking something unintelligible and his eyes got impossibly wider.

 

      “What are you doing?” he asked, not too sure he wanted the answer.

 

      The boy didn’t; he only pushed some titanium pots aside, hand groping for something, and Jonghyun wondered if he was in another one of those dreams when he saw a ball of dark blue light dart out from between the cookware, streaking a sapphire trail through the kitchen before coming to a floating stop at the figure’s shoulder.

 

      “Who are you?” Jonghyun asked, as the boy soundlessly leapt down with an unnerving grace. He said nothing, proceeding only to throw open the kitchen window as wide as it would open and backed up about five feet.

 

      “What the hell are you doing?!” Jonghyun said, stepped forward and throwing an arm out, quite sure that opening a window and then backing up was a sign of attempted suicide.

 

      There was a silver glint in his vision and a sharp pain in his arm, and Jonghyun cried out a little as he felt blood sheet down his wrist. He saw the flash of two eyes in the dim light and his heart sped up a little.

 

      The same eyes.

 

      Tick tock, you live in a clock.

 

      The boy was running, running toward the window, and Jonghyun took another step forward and there was a painful tearing sound and the boy was gone in a whisper of glittering blue dust.

 

      Jonghyun stepped back slightly, and for a moment, it was just him and his bleeding arm in the watery moonlight of the kitchen. In the next moment, he saw a dark shape moving along the floor, until it reached the wall and erected itself.

 

      It was a shadow--that boy’s shadow, and his shadow only.

 

      Jonghyun stared at it in horror as it quivered along the tiled wall of the kitchen for a second, creeping along with a mind of its own until it melted into the darkness of the hallway. 

 

=== 

 

      “You know, Jonghyun,” his mother said, about a one and a half week’s after the entire encounter, “you walk around a lot at night.”

 

      He stared at her over his chopstick-bundle of noodles, blinking and saying, “No, I don’t.”

 

      “Don’t you?” his mother said, raising an eyebrow and looking at both Junghee and Jungsoo, who shrugged. “I hear footsteps a lot at night, and they don’t sound like their’s.”

 

      Jonghyun froze, and bit down on his lip hard, icy adrenaline pouring into his blood and heightening his senses. “Might be that kid,” he muttered.

 

      “Kid?”

 

      “I saw him,” Jonghyun said, “almost two weeks ago. He was in the kitchen. I think he wanted food, or something. He looked really shabby.”

 

      “Poor thing,” his mother remarked. “How did he get in?”

 

      “I think he climbed,” Jonghyun said, shrugging. “He escaped out the window.”

 

      “What, he saw you, dropped everything, and took off? Not that that surprises me, really.”

 

      “He was looking for something, at least,” Jonghyun said. “There was this…blue light, I guess, I couldn’t see clearly, and--well, I think he got it stuck in the pans? I don’t know how.”

 

      “Blue light?” his mother asked, pausing in her eating.

 

      “Well…” Jonghyun said uncomfortably, aware of Junghee and Jungsoo staring at him like he’d just announced that he had decided to run a chicken farm, “I guess that’s what it was.”

 

      “Hm,” his mother sniffed, sounding unconvinced. “You sure it wasn’t a robber?”

 

      “I don’t know,” Jonghyun sighed. “It could have been anyone. So, what, you’ve been hearing footsteps?”

 

      “I have,” his mother said. “I’ve looked at more than once expecting to see you walking around restlessly, unable to sleep, but I’ve never seen anyone. Any ideas?”

 

      “Not really,” Jonghyun said evasively, almost positive what his mother was getting at.

 

      She gave him a long, hard look; Jonghyun felt not unlike an amoeba being examined on a glass slide. For a moment, he thought she would let it go, and then she said,

 

      “Don’t let me catch you lying, Jonghyun.”

 

      And then Jonghyun was absolutely positive his mother knew more about that disembodied shadow than she was letting on.