The room at the top of the staircase was dim and cavernous. At the far end, heavy drapes covered the floor length windows. Slivers of light filtered around the edges and bathed the room’s contents in a dreamy grey.  The air tasted cold and stale, as if the space had been empty for a long while. She stepped forward slowly, curious but feeling reckless and disoriented at the same time.  

An easel stood near the windows. It held an unfinished painting of a mountain landscape, deep green treetops smoky with a rolling dawn mist.  Beside it sat a battered workbench flecked with color and cluttered with curled paint tubes and feathery wooden handled brushes.

A white vanity, its marble top fashioned into a graceful inward curve, stood beside her.  Bottles of glass and plastic in soft shades of sea-green and azure littered its surface and, above, loomed a huge silver framed mirror.  She flinched, startled by the ghostly reflection staring back at her through a thick layer of dust.  Her image blinked back at her. It looked washed out.  Colorless. 

She turned away.

A bathroom doorway opened to her right, and in the center of the room stood large bed.  Its mattress was loosely draped with a white sheet. On the wall just over the headboard, a portrait hung.  The figure of a woman sat within it, her hands lovingly clutched the shoulders of a small boy who leaned against her knee.  The rounded curves of the child’s face were familiar.  It was the same pair from the picture in she’d seen earlier – Seung-Bae and his mother.

She stepped closer until her knee grazed the bed’s wooden footboard and, at the touch of her skin to its smooth surface, the air in the room began to thicken. She closed her eyes. From somewhere below rose the sound of a piano playing, soft and slow.

The air grew thicker. Her breath came labored, and her head rolled with vertigo.  Something about the sensation felt familiar, but her mind could not rationalize exactly why this was.  A subtle, yet misplaced, hum began near her ears. She shook her head in an attempt to clear it.

The humming grew louder, until it became a high pitched ringing, as though her eardrums were slowly but steadily being stuffed with dense wads of cotton.  The piano became bolder, each pounding until the notes drove the rhythm of her heartbeat. Her breaths, taken in nervous gasps through her suddenly dry lips, became clearly audible over the urgent melody. 

A lamp on the bedside table flickered on. 

“Who are you?” a voice hissed inside her head.

She stumbled backwards, her arms flailing until she felt the solid security of a wall at her back.

Across the room, a shadow moved closer, stretching and elongating across the buttery gloss of the lamp-lit wooden floor.

“What are you?” the voice screeched.

Her body began to shiver; the back of her head thumped against the wall. Below, the piano quickened to keep time.

And then James was there. His blond-whiskered face filled her sight. His hands reached for her, his smile gentle, his eyes so sad and tired. “I understand now. It’s all right. You’re just not ready yet. Don’t look.”

He covered her eyes.

The floor rushed up to greet her, and the world went black.

.  .  .  .  .  .

“It’s on Friday morning.”

Hyun-Woo was over the initial excitement and now paced across the apartment’s living room, stopping at the end of his circuitous cycle to drum his fingertips on the dining room table. Then he set off again, rubbing his hands together.

“Can you believe it?  This is a chance of a lifetime, you guys. There’s so much to plan out. We have to pick out a strong song, one that really shows off what we can do.  And we need to practice. We have to be perfect.” 

He came to a halt.  “Where is Seung-Bae?”

Hawk and Min-Jae stared back at him, their jaws loose with surprise. 

“Wait, wait …” Min-Jae waved his hands over his head.  “You got us an audition?”

“That’s what I just said,” Hyun-Woo replied.

“With CHS Entertainment?”

“Yeah …”

“On Friday of THIS week?”

Hyun-Woo nodded his head.

Min-Jae let out a wild, joyful howl, and Eun-Mi danced in a circle around him, letting out smaller whoops and poking her fingers into Hawk’s side in an attempt to get him to join in the celebration. 

But Hawk wouldn’t budge.  He stood stiffly, staring across the room towards the foyer where Seung-Bae stood glaring back at him.

The room stilled, the sudden tension in the air thick enough to slice through.

            “Why did you do it?” Seung-Bae broke the silence, his voice raspy and weighted with resentment.  “I told you not to ...”

“I was trying to protect you,” Hawk threw back.

“Protect me?” Seung-Bae countered.  “Or trying to prove yourself right?”

Hawk took a step toward him, hands on his hips, ready to challenge his friend, “Did you know that the police are looking for a missing American college student?  A girl disappeared in Jeju.  She was working with the haenyeo, Seung-Bae.  Don’t you think it’s her?”

            “Wait a minute,” Hyun-Woo broke in.  “You think she’s this missing student?” 

“I’m pretty sure of it,” Hawk replied.  “It makes sense, doesn’t it?  She was probably in some sort of accident and hit her head.  She probably woke up thinking she WAS a mermaid.”

Seung-Bae scowled. “That’s not what happened,” he shouted.

“What YOU say happened makes no sense,” Hawk yelled back.  “Should we take you to see a psychiatrist?  Should we have you committed? Is that a better solution?”

“You’re supposed to be my friend!” Seung-Bae spat.  “Why do you have to question everything?  Why can’t you just trust me?”

“Because there’s something weird about her!” Hawk threw the retort as if it were a gauntlet.

            “What do you mean?” Hyun-Woo interjected.

Hawk shivered and rubbed at his forearms.  “You weren’t there.  You didn’t see what she did, how those guys were acting; the way it felt.  It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Seung-Bae hurried into the room, his eyes searching.  “Did they hurt her?  Where is she?”

            “I took her out of there, out of the station.” Hawk pulled off his cap and raked his fingers through his hair. “We ran away.  That’s why I didn’t find out anything for sure.”

Hyun-Woo sighed.  “Haenyeo  … huh,” he mused.  “Well at least now we have something to call her.”

“Haenyeo? What kind of name is that?” Eun-Mi scoffed.  “Besides, she already told me that her name is Sixth Sister.”

Hawk snorted. He shifted his weight and rolled his eyes.

“Ya!  What do you know,” Eun-Mi yelled at him.  “You’re named after a boxer, but your arms are skinnier than mine!”

            “Ya!” Hawk yelled back.  “Why haven’t you gone home yet?”

“I like Haenyeo,” Min-Jae interceded.  “It kind of suits her.”

Eun-Mi’s annoyance faded away.  “Haenyeo is good,” she quickly agreed.   

“Wait a minute,” Hyun-Woo settled his gaze on Eun-Mi, her comment suddenly registering.  “She told you her name? She talked to you?”

Across the room, a pair of slender white feet appeared on the top step of the staircase and tentatively began to descend.

“That’s right,” Eun-Mi confirmed. “It’s like Seung-Bae oppa said, she can’t talk around you guys.  Her voice is, umm, magical or something.”  She leaned forward, her eyes round, black buttons as she looked gravely up into Hyun-Woo’s face. “If you hear it, it will make you go crazy,” she whispered ominously.

Across the room, the red-headed girl had reached the bottom of the staircase.  She swayed, gripping the railing to prevent her from sinking to the floor.

Seung-Bae rushed towards her and caught her arm.  “What is it?  What’s wrong?”

She lifted her head.  Her blue eyes were glassy, and her teeth chattered. 

Seung-Bae whipped around to face Hawk.  “What did you do to her?” he shouted.

“I didn’t do anything to her!  There’s something wrong with her,” Hawk shouted back.  “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something dangerous about her, Seung-Bae.  We need get her back to where she belongs and it isn’t here!”

Seung-Bae shook his head.  “No, you’re wrong.  This is exactly where she belongs.”

Hawk’s jaw set. Something snapped inside.  “She doesn’t belong to you!” he hissed.

Seung-Bae’s eyes widened with fury as he watched his best friend begin to take slow but steady steps towards the girl.  Seung-Bae moved to step between them. 

“What are you saying …” he questioned coldly. “She belongs to you?”

Hawk stopped.  His jaw worked, and his fists clenched.  His voice lowered in icy admission. “Maybe she should ... I could take much better care of her than you have.”

Somewhere in the middle of the bizarre exchange, Min-Jae had plucked a bite sized slice of grandmother’s kimbap out of the large plastic container he’d left sitting on the kitchen table.  At Hawk’s final outburst, he froze, the food hovered just in front of his wide open mouth, and stared at Hawk in shock. Hyun-Woo and Eun-Mi gaped with him.  No one expected the argument to take this sort of turn.

Hyun-Woo was the first to recover.

            “Whoa, ok … that’s enough,” he moved to place his body between the two young men who stood taunt and poised for a brawl, glaring daggers at each other with red faces and bulging eyes. 

“What is wrong with you two?”  He suddenly shouted. “We don’t have time for this. The audition is in two days, and we need to focus, so snap out of it!”

Hawk pivoted and stormed out the front door.

“What the heck just happened?” Min-Jae asked no one in particular.

Hyun-Woo shook his head and hurried to follow Hawk.