Jongin looked for Kyungsoo for more than a month, but calling him and ringing the doorbell of his house didn’t get him any answer. He was really afraid Kyungsoo might have gone forever. But no one seemed to be actually worried about it. However, a little after New Year’s Eve, Kyungsoo comes back as if nothing had happened.

                But something has happened. Jongin is sure.

                Kyungsoo isn’t the same anymore.

~

                Ever since Kyungsoo had come back, after mysteriously disappearing, Jongin had noticed that he had changed. The petite boy wasn’t as quiet and mature as he had used to be. There was a look in his eyes that reminded him of a child. And of course, the kind of nursery rhymes that he never stopped singing didn’t help either.

                Their relationship wasn’t at all like it had used to be. Because of Kyungsoo’s drastic change of personality, Jongin couldn’t call himself his boyfriend anymore; he had kind of turned into a baby-sitter, and the only thing he did was take care of him and make sure the elder boy wouldn’t do anything silly.

                Usually, when they were spending time together, Jongin would be reading books and studying while Kyungsoo would be sitting on the wooden floor, arms wrapped around his knees and watching television. And he would hum simple melodies that remained stuck in the younger boy’s head for hours. Kyungsoo’s songs – when he sang the lyrics – most of the time made no sense, but now and then Jongin was able to get what he said.

                And it was scary.

                Most of the famous nursery rhymes are actually quite frightening, if you look at the lyrics closely. Some talk about people dying violently, or about animals and even children being killed. And Jongin was starting to understand that, even if he had never heard the songs Kyungsoo was singing.

                Hearing his boyfriend start humming a soft tune, Jongin put his book down on his desk to look at him. Kyungsoo was sitting in front of the television, curled up into a tight ball. Jongin smiled sadly. As he was about to go back to reading, he spotted a little red mark on the petite boy’s arm.

                “What do you have on your arm, hyung? A scratch? Is this a scratch?” Jongin asked. Kyungsoo looked up at him with his huge round eyes and nodded silently. Then he turned back towards the television, that was now broadcasting Pokémon. Jongin sighed and crouched down next to him. Kyungsoo didn’t budge.

                He seemed mesmerised by the screen though he showed no emotions: he didn’t laugh when there was a funny joke and he didn’t blink when something surprising happened. Jongin had thought it would be a good idea to put the television in the bedroom (it would keep Kyungsoo ‘busy’ and Jongin would be able to work without being disturbed constantly by whiny ‘can I have some chocolate, Jongin’ and ‘can you play with me, Jongin’), but in fact, it seemed to have made Kyungsoo even weirder, if it was even possible.

                Jongin looked down. Kyungsoo was holding his cuddly toy, a white rabbit. But once again, he was pulling the ears, hard. “Hey, shh, be gentle,” Jongin said softly. He took the rabbit from little Kyungsoo with delicateness to prevent him from pulling the ears off completely. “Wait here, I’ll fetch some disinfectant,” he added. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kyungsoo taking the rabbit back a little more delicately.

                He got up (not very sure whether Kyungsoo had heard him) and headed to the bathroom, where he took a glass bottle of disinfectant product. When he came back, Kyungsoo had shut the television down. They smiled at each other. And for the first time that day, Kyungsoo spoke.

                “I fell in the stairs. You don’t need to use that,” he said. But Jongin shook his head.

                “Here, let’s clean it up, ” he replied, smiling again and grabbing the sleeve of Kyungsoo’s shirt. He tried to roll it up to be able to reach the scratch but the fabric wouldn’t stop coming back and covering it again. “You should take it off, it would be easier to do it,” he said. Kyungsoo looked at him for a second.

                “Try again,” he replied, a little dryly. It surprised Jongin, because Kyungsoo wasn’t usually like that. He would be shy, quiet, enthusiastic, sometimes ‘blank’ or even overly affectionate, but never angry or unpleasant. It was strange.

                “Why? It would be much easier if you took it off,” the younger boy said, puzzled.

                “I don’t want to take it off,” Kyungsoo said. Jongin smiled at him, and while the elder boy kept muttering whiny ‘no, no…’, he gently ed his shirt. Kyungsoo was gazing at the floor, clenching his fists. But then he seemed to relax, as if he had given up. The shirt was taken off.

                Jongin dropped the bottle of disinfectant, which fell down to the floor and smashed in a horrible noise. He stared at Kyungsoo’s body without a word for several minutes. “What is that, Kyungsoo-hyung?” he whispered. The boy blinked but said nothing. He kept looking at the floor darkly, despondent. “Turn around, I want to see your back,” Jongin said.

                Albeit reluctantly, Kyungsoo complied. When he saw his white back, Jongin breathed in deeply several times to calm down and make sure he wouldn’t do something stupid. “How did you get these?” he asked. He saw Kyungsoo smile a little, almost slyly.

                The petite boy’s back was stained with scratches, cuts and a few opened wounds. The scabs and the dirty brown blood contrasted with his pale skin. There were numerous traces of bruises all over his back and his arms. Some were brown too, some others were still blue, purple or dark green while a few had turned a disgusting shade of yellow.

                Jongin felt nauseous. His friend’s back seemed to have been attacked by something. It was completely destroyed. His shoulder was slashed by cuts. Kyungsoo’s body almost looked like it had been rubbed hard on a rock. He could have fallen from a cliff; the result would have been the same.

                “These are not caused by the stairs. You’re lying, Kyungsoo,” Jongin said. Kyungsoo chuckled and said nothing. He kept playing with the rabbit, half-heartedly, but still managed to pull off tiny bits of fabric with his fingers.

                They remained silent for several minutes, then he finally replied, quietly, “They’re not caused by the stairs indeed.”

                He scratched his shoulder violently – and he ripped off a scab. Jongin caught his hand just in time before he could touch and destroy another one – without even thinking. “Stop that!” Jongin shouted. “You’re hurting yourself!”

                “Oh, you think this is self-harm?” Kyungsoo said softly. With a giggle, he breathed in. He coughed a few times. “I love you, Jongin,” he said with a bright beam. When Jongin saw his delighted face and the horrible wounds at the same time, so mismatched, he lost it.

                “Are you crazy? I don’t want to hear you tell me you love me!” he yelled. “Who did that to you? Answer me, Kyungsoo! Who did that to you?!”

                Kyungsoo burst out laughing, not even trying to pull his arm away. Jongin was still holding it. Kyungsoo rested his other hand on the taller boy’s cheek and kissed him. But Jongin parted a second later. Tears were gathering in his eyes.

                “Who…” he whispered. Kyungsoo smiled a little more, almost as if he were trying to soothe Jongin, and he smoothly freed his wrist from the younger boy’s grip. He opened his arms gracefully and danced a few steps in the bedroom.

                “One and two! The beast is near you,” he sing-sang with his gorgeous voice, sounding like an innocent child. “Three and four! You can hide no more… (He walked back to Jongin and stopped singing.) It will destroy me and eat you too…”

                The younger boy took a step backwards. “What are you saying?” he whispered. “That makes no sense…”

                Kyungsoo had a little smile and danced again. It was awkward; there was no music except his voice, but he still moved heartedly. He didn’t even seem to feel any pain. Though, Jongin was starting to be scared, really scared. He sat down on the bed shakily and watched Kyungsoo, horrified and mesmerised.

                “One, two, three…”

                A while later, his head started to hurt; he had completely forgotten about the disinfectant, that was still splashed all over the floor. Kyungsoo was stepping in it. “Go away, have a shower,” the younger boy told him. He gently pushed Kyungsoo aside and stumbled to the bathroom, where he took a towel and cleaning supplies to clean up the disinfectant pool.

                When he finished wiping the floor, he exited the bedroom and went around in the house, looking for Kyungsoo. He searched into the bathroom. “Kyungsoo?” he called. Usually, the small boy was obedient. He should have been having a shower as Jongin had asked him to. “Kyungsoo?”

                The water was running but Kyungsoo wasn’t there. Jongin turned the tap off and left the bathroom. Kyungsoo obviously wasn’t in the bathroom, nor in the bedroom. Jongin went downstairs but both the living-room and the kitchen were empty. He called Kyungsoo’s name again; no answer came.

                Jongin cursed and went upstairs again. But Kyungsoo had disappeared. Completely panicked, Jongin hurriedly wrote a note for him in case he came back, put it on the table of the kitchen and left the house.

                “,” he said, realising he hadn’t even tried to call Kyungsoo. He dialled his number and waited. One. Two. Three. Four. Jongin counted the ‘beeps’. Five. Six. Something bumped into him and he stopped counting. He turned around, but the thing – whatever it was – that had hit him had disappeared.

                He hung up his mobile phone – anyway Kyungsoo wouldn’t answer. He thought about calling the police. But what would he say? ‘Excuse me, but my boyfriend with the body of a seventeen-year-old and the mind of a ten-year-old, whose back has been devoured by a beast has disappeared. Could you find him, please? Oh, and I forgot, he keeps singing nursery rhymes and yeah – he likes killing little animals.’

                Wow. No way. Thinking about it, this whole story was a complete joke. His heart pounding into his chest, Jongin ran into the streets, not even knowing where he was going and what he was going to do.

                He had to find Kyungsoo.

~

                After hours and hours of research, Jongin had to face facts: Kyungsoo had disappeared. Again. He had looked for him in all the city, calling friends and other people to know whether they had seen Kyungsoo, but no one had. The little boy was gone.

                Jongin went home, exhausted and worried to death. For a second, he hoped, crazily, that Kyungsoo might have gone back home in the meantime, but – of course, he hadn’t. There was nobody in the house when Jongin stepped in.

                While he had a shower, he decided that if Kyungsoo wasn’t there by the morning, he would actually call the police. Who knew what could have happened to the poor boy? Jongin was scared.

                Although he had trouble falling asleep as he couldn’t stop thinking about Kyungsoo, his body was tired of having walked for so long in the streets, and eventually, he drifted into a dreamless sleep.

                Jongin was woken up in the middle of the night when he heard a loud crashing sound downstairs. However, he often had noisy dreams with loud sounds in them, so he just rolled in his bed, waiting to fall asleep again. It was only when he heard another crash! that he opened his eyes.

                He saw only darkness. Puzzled, Jongin got up and walked to the light switch. He ran his fingers against the wall to find it, and when he did – at last – he pressed it. A bright light lit up the bedroom for a split second, before he heard a shrilling noise that sounded like a bug flying and the light shut down.

                Great. The fuses had blown.

                Jongin sighed and remembered there was a torch in the kitchen; he decided to go there. After opening the door of his bedroom, he walked down the stairs carefully, trying not to miss a step. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he waited.

                Another loud crashing sound.

                It was coming from the kitchen. Maybe it was Kyungsoo, Jongin thought. He headed there, making his way by touching the walls. The kitchen was as dark as the rest of the house, and Jongin could see nothing. When he recalled that the torch was in a certain drawer, he opened that drawer and grabbed the torch.

                A tiny ray of light was born in the room.

                Jongin looked around, but there was nothing to see, except a saucepan and plates crashed on the floor. That must have been them producing the noises he had heard. Feeling a little anxious, Jongin picked them up and put them on the working surface. The he turned around to face the kitchen and he stopped moving, waiting.

                He heard it before he saw it. A small, short snigger resounded in the kitchen. Jongin felt a shiver travel down his spine. It sounded like Kyungsoo’s giggles, but different. Distorted. Modified. Jongin took a step to the side; he wanted to reach the door to exit the kitchen. If he did it silently and slowly, he would surely be able to escape.

                The snigger, again.

                Jongin’s heart was beating faster and faster in his chest. He was now almost sure it was Kyungsoo’s voice. But where was it coming from? There was nobody in the kitchen. Even under the table. Nobody. But Jongin had almost reached the door; soon he would be able to run and slam it and lock it.

                And then, he saw him.

                Kyungsoo.

                The petite boy was crawling, like a lizard. He was staring at Jongin with his huge eyes, that seemed to be glowing in the dark. His arms – his arms were bent in an awkward angle, and Jongin was pretty sure that if he had tried to do it too, his bones would surely have broken. But that wasn’t the worst part. Kyungsoo was crawling, yes. But not on the floor.

                On the ceiling.

                It happened much too fast for Jongin; he was staring at Kyungsoo and Kyungsoo was staring at him, and the next second, the small boy had slithered outside the kitchen into the hall at the speed of light, silently and so quickly that Jongin couldn’t follow him with the torch.

                The only sound he could hear was his heartbeats. Trying to keep calm, Jongin breathed in. So Kyungsoo was in the house, but he clearly wasn’t in his normal state. Clearly not. For a second, Jongin thought about calling someone, but he was sure that if he did, by the time they arrived, Kyungsoo would have disappeared.

                So he stepped out of the kitchen, moving his torch in circles to light the room the best he could. Kyungsoo wasn’t in the kitchen anymore, so he could be in the living-room, the toilets, or upstairs, in one of the bedrooms or in the toilets.

                Jongin looked everywhere in the living-room, but there was nothing there. He went upstairs slowly, checking at every step to be sure Kyungsoo wasn’t crawling above him. The bathroom was empty too, which only left the bedrooms. Jongin went back into his own.

                And there he saw the most horrible thing he had even seen.

                The bed was shaking, literally. Bouncing up and down like a ball. There was something under. And even if Jongin tried his best not to think about what that thing was, he knew it. Kyungsoo.

                Not even having a single idea about what he was going to do, Jongin walked to the bed until he could feel the vibrations that the wooden feet created when they hit the floor. Although he knew it was the stupidest thing to do, he held out his hand, closer and closer to the bed. He could almost touch it.

                The bed was shaking more than ever. Jongin didn’t move.

                He whispered shakily, “Kyungsoo?”

                The bed stopped moving.

                Suddenly something grabbed his ankle and he was up under the bed.

                And everything became darker than it already was.