It was raining, and Baekhyun had decided this meant he shouldn’t have to do any work for the rest of the day. He was supposed to be working on a report for the company, but it was impossible for him to concentrate on numbers and clauses when all he could think about was his grandfather’s horrific death and the family curse.

He was currently on the third floor of the house. He was up there because he was hiding from his bodyguards and, since this was a wing of the house he’d never been to before, he thought he would be safer there.

The wing he found himself in was spotless, and yet there was an air of disuse about the place, as though nobody came up here but the servants who cleaned it. It was lit by elegant sconces placed at regular intervals along the paneled walls, but they didn’t provide enough light to keep the corridor from being eerie. The doors along the hallway were all closed; rain splattered against the windowpanes.

He was wondering if anybody stayed in these rooms when he heard footsteps on the stairs behind him.

“Nobody comes up to this wing, Yifan,” Zitao’s voice said from behind, echoing in the quiet of the corridor. “It’s a waste of time.”

But Yifan answered, “He’s not anywhere else in the house. Even that little snot-nosed butler, Yixing, doesn’t seem to know where he is.”

“I hate this place,” Zitao answered gloomily. “This floor creeps me out.”

“This whole place creeps me out,” Yifan muttered. “Let’s just check it out and we can look somewhere else. Maybe Kim Junmyeon knows where he is.”

They were getting closer. Baekhyun could see their shadows growing longer against the paneled walls as they climbed the staircase. He looked around for a place to hide, but the hallway ended abruptly ahead, where an enormous framed painting of an old man hung. There was nothing for it. He’d have to try one of the closed doors and hope that nobody was on the other side.

Taking a deep breath, he tried one of the knobs. Finding it unlocked, he slipped inside and closed the door as quietly as he could.

Luckily for him, the room he had chosen appeared to be empty. It was a bedroom, but it had obviously been unused for quite some time. It was clean, but it smelled strongly of disuse. Still, there was no time to have a proper look around. Outside, he could hear Zitao and Yifan’s voices getting closer. If they looked into this room, they would see him and he’d definitely be in for it. He had to hide.

Looking around quickly, he spotted an old antique wardrobe in the corner. He yanked the door open and leapt inside, pulling the door as closed behind him as he could without shutting it fully.

Just in time, too. He’d barely nestled into the empty wardrobe when the door opened. He couldn’t see the door from his hiding place, but he heard Zitao call, “This room’s clear.” And then the door shut again.

Baekhyun remained in the wardrobe for a minute longer, just to make sure that Yifan and Zitao were really gone, and then, cautiously, he emerged.

Now that he wasn’t in danger of being found by his overzealous bodyguards, he took his time to examine the room he’d found himself in.

It was a bedroom, and clearly had at one time belonged to a member of the family. A woman, if Baekhyun had to guess. The canopy bed was old, older than Baekhyun could really fathom. There was a silver picture frame on the bedside table. Baekhyun picked it up to examine it.

The photograph inside was old, faded and in black and white. It showed a man and woman with two small children, one boy and one girl. The people in the photograph looked stiff and unhappy, though Baekhyun wasn’t sure if that was simply from the old-fashioned photography or not. He wondered who these people were. He was sure they were his family, some of his ancestors.

He replaced the picture frame on the bedside table and noticed an old fashioned silver-handled hairbrush beside it. There looked to be some sort of engraving on the handle, so he picked it up to examine it better. But the second his fingertips brushed the silver handle, something extraordinary happened.

Baekhyun stood rooted to the spot as the room spun around him. Outside the window the rain stopped, and suddenly it was sunny. Then nighttime, then daytime, then nighttime again. Ever faster, the seasons changed outside the window. Shadowy figures moved around him; voices murmured unintelligibly. He whipped his head around, trying to see, to understand, but everything was moving so fast it was impossible to focus on anything.

Just as Baekhyun was starting to feel quite sick, everything stopped. He blinked.

The room was quite the same as it had been when he’d first entered, though the feeling of decay and neglect was gone. Outside the window, the day was bright and sunny. Springtime, it seemed.

The door behind him opened and Baekhyun whirled around, horrified at having been caught where he wasn’t supposed to be.

But the man and woman who entered were so busy arguing with one another that they didn’t notice Baekhyun at all. In fact, after a few seconds, he was quite convinced they couldn’t see him at all.

The man was tall and broad shouldered, wearing a tweed smoking jacket and pressed trousers. He appeared to be in his late twenties, and sported an impressive sort of mustache. The woman, on the other hand, was a few years younger, tiny and withered compared to the man. She was wearing a long dress, cinched tight at the waist. Her long, dark hair was piled elegantly in a knot on top of her head.

The two appeared to be arguing. “Don’t lose your head, Sojin,” the man was saying sternly. “You know there’s no such thing as curses.”

The woman looked at him, a sort of sad desperation blooming in her big, dark eyes. Her face was pale and wan; she looked as though she’d been crying. “How can you say that to me?” she demanded in a voice hardly more than a whisper. “After Mother? After Papa? After Auntie Sunny and Gandmama? How can you say there’s no such thing!”

The man enveloped her in strong arms and she seemed to deflate at once. “Don’t be silly, Sojin,” he said in a frustrated voice. “Those were all accidents. They happen in every family.”

The woman sniffled and wiped at her damp eyes. “I just…I don’t know what to do…”

“Stop acting like a child,” the man said sternly. “I know your father’s passing was hard. It’s been hard on all of us. But you must stay strong. For the children, if nothing else. Think of the children.”

As if on cue, the door burst open again and two small children came in, the boy and the girl from the photograph. The girl was perhaps eight years old, the boy a couple years younger than that. The boy promptly hid himself in the young woman’s skirts and smiled up shyly at her.

“Mama, Daseung has been teasing me again,” the little girl announced in a bossy sort of voice. “He said I’m going to end up where Grandpapa went.”

The woman’s face paled again and her husband quickly ushered the children out of the room, insisting that their mother needed her rest. Soon it was only Baekhyun and the young woman still in the room.

Baekhyun watched her closely. She stood where she was for a long moment, her face hidden in her hands. Then suddenly her face seemed to clear of emotion until it was completely blank. She moved as if in a trance to the dresser and began rummaging in the drawers for a minute until she seemed to find what she was looking for. She emerged with a straight razor, quite clean and freshly polished.

Baekhyun felt his heart sink all the way to his toes.

“Don’t-!” he said, but of course she couldn’t hear him. Whatever this was, he wasn’t really there.

The woman sat on the edge of the bed and with one swift movement, stronger than anything she should’ve been capable of, she drew the razor across her own throat.  

She was gone again before Baekhyun realized he was screaming.

The door slammed open again and Zitao and Yifan were there, looking downright panicked. Baekhyun stared from them back to the bed, where the young woman had just taken her own life. But of course the bed was empty, the bedspread as smooth and unruffled as it had been before Baekhyun had come in to hide.

“Mr. Kim, what are you doing in here?” Yifan demanded reprovingly. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“I-I need to go the library,” Baekhyun stammered suddenly, dropping the silver hairbrush onto the bedside table with a clatter. His hand felt suddenly dirty. “I-I need to see the Kim family tree.”

Yifan and Zitao exchanged a confused look, but, as Baekhyun wouldn’t be breaking any rules by going to the library, they didn’t refuse him.

He was in such a hurry to look through the family tree once he got to the library that he nearly ripped the pages. He tried desperately to remember the woman’s name. Her husband had said it several times. What was it again? Oh yes, Sojin.

He quickly scanned the list of names for a Kim Sojin.

And there she was. Born in 1872, died in 1896. She’d left behind a husband and two young children, though all of them seemed to have met untimely deaths as well.

Baekhyun sat back. There were so many emotions tumbling around inside him that he didn’t know how to even begin sorting them out. 

He ended up at the fortune teller’s on the way to work the next morning. Zitao and Yifan insisted that they walk past her, but Baekhyun was so shaken up by what he had seen the day before that he blatantly ignored them.

“Ah, you’re back,” the fortune teller said with a little smile. “You seem to have many questions.”

“I-I saw something,” Baekhyun admitted. He kept his voice low; the last thing he needed was his bodyguards reporting back to Madame that he was seeing visions around the house now. “A-a flashback almost. I saw one of my ancestors commit suicide. Only, it was like she didn’t do it herself. Almost like she was forced to do it.”

The fortune teller hummed thoughtfully. “Did this vision come to you by itself, or did you touch something to trigger it?”

Baekhyun was surprised. “I-I touched an old hairbrush. I think it might’ve belonged to the woman who killed herself.”

“That makes sense,” the old woman said. “You have a gift, child, although I can’t imagine that it’s a welcome one. Your mind is open, so the ghosts of the past are reaching out to you. They want you to know what happened.”

“But why?” Baekhyun demanded. “How can seeing this woman kill herself help me break the curse?”

But now the fortune teller shook her head. “I’m sorry, child, but that I don’t know.”