Having concluded that the ongoing pranks were the work of ghosts, Jaegyeom decided he would track down the stray ghost responsible.
And yesterday was when he put that plan into action.
Classes were over, and it was ti to go ho. He and Jo Youngwoo had just co out of the main building and were heading for the front gate when Youngwoo, innocent of everything, suggested they stop for waffles. A waffle truck had co by the gate for once. It was the sa waffle he had once described as the school’s famous specialty. Jaegyeom was just nodding indifferently when he spotted three or four stray ghosts gathered in one corner of the flower bed.
They were huddled close with their heads together, intent on sothing.
The mont he saw the little cluster, Jaegyeom told Youngwoo, who was in the middle of cheerfully praising the waffles, to go ahead and order first. Youngwoo looked puzzled and asked why. Jaegyeom told him he had forgotten sothing in the classroom.
Once he saw Youngwoo move away, Jaegyeom headed toward the ghosts.
The three or four stray ghosts were so busy snickering among themselves that they did not notice him approach. When he got close enough to make out what they looked like, Jaegyeom frowned faintly.
One of them was shivering with cold and sniffling into a pair of fur gloves despite it being early sumr. Another had its arms and legs attached the wrong way around and used its feet instead of its hands. The last looked at first glance as though it had a red cloth draped over its entire body from head to toe, but on closer inspection it was not cloth at all.
It was red hair.
The ghosts were crouched in the flower bed, stacking pebbles into a tower. Each one held a small stone, waiting for its turn. The tower they had made was about a foot high. Every ti one of them managed to place a stone safely on top, the other two would laugh in delight. Leaning on one leg, Jaegyeom watched the whole thing with complete indifference.
The shivering ghost placed a stone with a trembling hand.
“You did it! It got taller!”
“You did. It got taller.”
“Did it? It got taller!”
Thankfully, it managed to add the stone without toppling the tower. All three ghosts rocked with happiness and clapped their hands. After standing there for a mont, Jaegyeom raised one hand and gave them a few listless claps of his own.
“Well done. It got taller.”
Then he wedged himself right into the middle of the circle and crouched down among them as if he belonged there. The ghosts stared at him, bewildered.
“Huh...?”
“Huh....”
“Huh...!”
“So is it my turn now?”
Jaegyeom looked around. Luckily, not far away he found a stone that would do nicely. Staying crouched, he waddled over to it. When he ca back with it in hand, he smiled wickedly.
What Jaegyeom had brought back was not a pebble.
It was practically a boulder.
“Heave-ho.”
Crash.
“......”
“......”
“......”
The ghosts stared blankly at the stone tower, which had collapsed in an instant. The little stack they had built so carefully stone by stone caved in at once, unable to bear the weight of the massive rock.
“Ruined?”
“Ruined.”
“Ruined!”
If there was ever a mont that deserved the phrase robbed right under your nose, this was it. It had happened in a blink. They had spent hours stacking that tower. The ghosts, who had looked so happy only seconds earlier, now trembled as they glared at Jaegyeom. He dusted off his palms and stood.
“What are you looking at, you little bastards?”
With a vicious look, Jaegyeom kicked aside a pebble that had rolled to his feet. Then he reached into the inside pocket of his school jacket.
The talismans he had prepared in advance were Reduction Talismans.
With one of those, most low-level stray ghosts and minor creatures could be driven off or destroyed without much trouble. It was similar to the talisman he had hurriedly thrown together when dealing with the inchworms before. He carried them in a paper envelope, each talisman rolled up and tied tight with pure silk thread.
He pulled one rolled talisman from the envelope.
“Which one of you is it? Or is it all three?”
Ghostly force slipped from between Jaegyeom’s fingers. The silk thread binding the talisman reacted to it at once and crumbled into ash.
Only then, with the thread gone, did the talisman’s hidden force spill free.
At last the ghosts understood that what Jaegyeom was holding was a talisman. Cold sweat poured from them. Their jaws shook violently. Stray ghosts were dim-witted things, and precisely because of that, they were vulnerable to fear they could feel directly in their skin.
“It was you lot, wasn’t it? The ones ssing with my seat for the last few days.”
Jaegyeom asked it like a threat.
“Not !”
“ neither!”
Even while trembling all over, two of them looked genuinely wronged. Jaegyeom narrowed his eyes. He had frightened them half to death with the talisman, and still they denied it flatly. Stray ghosts had simple minds. They were not good at spinning elaborate lies.
“So it was you?”
He asked the silent ghost in a gloomy voice.
“I... I...”
Jaegyeom had expected at best so flimsy excuse.
The shoulders of the ghost that had been shivering from the cold jumped violently.
There we go.
Jaegyeom flicked the talisman and glared at it. The ghost clenched its fists and thumped its chest a few tis. It seed frightened and flustered, but also stifled by sothing it badly wanted to say.
“I was just wa-watch-watching!”
“What?”
“I really was just watching....”
“Watching what?”
The snot-nosed ghost, still shaking with cold, said sothing strange. Then it bent down, picked up a pointed twig, and hopped over the border of the flower bed into the schoolyard.
It beckoned at Jaegyeom.
Casting wary glances up at him, it gripped the twig like a brush and began drawing sothing in the dirt.
“What are you doing?”
Jaegyeom asked with his hands in his pockets. The other two ghosts trailed after them hesitantly. But the shivering ghost had already plunged wholly into its work. So that was why it had kept making brushstrokes in empty air. Its drawing skill was astonishing. With nothing but a twig, it carved shapes into the dirt as if engraving them. It moved at trendous speed. A few swift motions and there was a desk. Then a chair. Then a blackboard. Then students in school uniforms.
“...Huh?”
Jaegyeom, who had been staring down at the ground with a flat expression, suddenly widened his eyes.
At so point, the drawing had begun to move.
What the ghost had drawn was a classroom scene. The lines scratched into the earth shifted all on their own. They were moving as though alive. Like an animated film, the students in uniform all ca to life and walked around the classroom. The figures were incredibly detailed. The ghost had captured each person’s features with startling accuracy.
And then, on top of that, it added one more person.
“This is... Lee Juyeol?”
Jaegyeom frowned faintly.
The last figure the ghost drew was unmistakably Lee Juyeol.
Lee Juyeol moved. He spotted an unattended water bottle on top of a locker. He picked it up. Carrying it, he headed toward the seat by the window. He looked around. He unscrewed the bottle cap. He checked his surroundings again.
Then he froze in place.
At that mont, the ghost drew a bag onto one of the chairs by the window.
Only then did Lee Juyeol begin moving again.
He walked to the bag hanging from the back of the chair and poured the water through the half-open zipper.
“No way...”
There was no mistaking it.
The ghost was recreating exactly what it had seen.
“So you were a painting ghost.”
Jaegyeom murmured it under his breath, and the ghost looked up. When they had been building that stone tower, its eyes had been dull and vacant. Now they were bright with intelligence.
A painting ghost.
A ghost obsessed with drawing, one that could depict all things in the world in pictures. Painting ghosts lived inside folding screens. ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ In the old days, when every household had one, they were easy enough to co across. But tis had changed, and now they were rarely seen.
The reason this one was trembling in the cold even at the start of sumr was because the folding screen it had lived in was gone. Cast out of it with nowhere to return, it seed to have put down roots at a school because there was an art room there. In older tis, painters had sotis deliberately summoned painting ghosts in hopes of borrowing their skill, only to waste away with sickness afterward.
A painting ghost could draw only what it had seen with its own eyes.
That was why it must have wanted to clear itself this way, by drawing what it had witnessed. So when it said it had only been watching, this was what it ant.
The culprit was in that drawing.
And the one who had thrown the milk carton had to be him too.
So he had been pretending not to care on the surface while pulling petty, childish stunts behind people’s backs. He was a nastier sort of person than Jaegyeom had expected.
Slowly, Jaegyeom tucked the talisman back away.
“Well. Look at that. You can really draw... You should’ve said it wasn’t you....”
Even if it had tried to explain, Jaegyeom would never have believed it, and the ghost had not known who the real culprit was until now anyway. Still, Jaegyeom mumbled excuses under his breath and looked away. He was beginning to feel bad for smashing their innocent stone tower. anwhile, the other two ghosts had apparently already forgotten what had happened a mont ago. They were crouched on the dirt again, clapping their hands at the drawing.
Did it draw well? It drew well!
“......”
After hesitating for a mont, Jaegyeom clapped along with them.
“You did draw well.”
Clap clap clap.
Unlike before, this ti the applause was full of sincerity.
“Jaegyeom!”
At that mont, far off by the school gate, he saw Youngwoo standing there with a waffle in each hand. After saying goodbye to the ghosts, Jaegyeom went ho with him in companionable peace.
The waffle Youngwoo had bought was good.
And the next morning—
the mont Jaegyeom walked into the classroom, he threw a punch at Lee Juyeol.
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