My home is in a studio apartment complex near Sanmun University.
Geumyeong Villa. A studio barely over 6 pyeong.
Complete with an air conditioner, refrigerator, microwave, and a balcony holding a small washing machine.
The kind of studio you’d find anywhere near a university district.
The first-floor entrance door is secured with a keypad lock shared only among tenants, and most of the neighbors next door and upstairs are college students.
If there’s one distinguishing feature, it’s that the number of Southeast Asian foreign residents has grown over the past few years.
The woman living right across from me included…
……
Anyway, that’s where my place was.
Beep-beep-bip, as I unlocked the first-floor entrance, something whisked right past me.
A thief wearing a padded jacket.
I went up to the third floor and beep-beep-bip entered my door code too.
As the door opened, the same grimy padded jacket shot into my apartment ahead of me again.
“So you really followed me all the way home…”
I took off my shoes and stepped inside too.
The thief in the padded jacket was huddled in the corner by my bed, staring straight at me.
Beneath the hood of the jacket, those eyes were filled with an unmistakable wariness.
What the hell is that thing?
Grooooowl.
The thing clutched its stomach.
Looks hungry.
I was pretty hungry myself since I’d barely started my cup ramyeon at the convenience store before all this.
I pulled minced garlic and leftover bacon from the fridge and tossed them into an oiled pan.
Ssiiiizzzle.
Once the garlic aroma started rising, I poured in about two cups of water and dropped in pasta noodles worth about two 500-won coins.
Let it simmer and reduce, and there you have it: one-pan oil pasta.
I split it onto two plates, like just adding one more spoon for an extra mouth, and set them on the small table with forks.
Slurp, slurp.
As I started eating, the thing in the corner sniffed the air, then crept toward the table.
Then—
Chomp chomp.
It started shoving noodles into its mouth with bare hands, no fork, and when the padded hood slipped off from all that frantic movement, I gasped.
Because the messy, unevenly cut hair underneath was red as blood.
Her face was caked with grime and filth, but looking closer, she was young—like an elementary schooler.
‘A girl?’
Was my sister around that age back when she was in sixth grade? Yeah, about like this.
Anyway, the girl devoured the pasta in no time and retreated back to her corner.
“……”
She’s like an abandoned dog that’s been abused and dumped, all skittish and guarded.
That’s exactly how Bori was when she first came to our house.
But the problem was the stench radiating off the girl.
The kind of sour, musty smell you get from the homeless.
I hadn’t registered it before because of all the chaos, but now that I’d eaten and had a moment to breathe, it was enough to make my nose twist sideways.
“Hey, go into the bathroom and wash up.”
Kicking her out tonight didn’t seem realistic anyway.
So I walked up to the padded girl, grabbed her wrist, guided her into the bathroom-slash-shower room, and closed the door.
“Ha.”
Closing the door made me sigh involuntarily.
Because I had no idea what I was even doing.
If that thing is a hallucination or an auditory illusion, then I’m just putting on a one-man show right now.
I figured I’d search my computer for similar symptoms, so I pressed the power button with my thumb.
Tap tap, click.
“Schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness caused by neurotransmitter imbalances in the brain, characterized by symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, distorted perception of reality, and emotional blunting.”
It sounds somewhat similar to my situation, but…
What doesn’t quite fit is the fact that my only strengths are being physically healthy and mentally sound.
‘Schizophrenia symptoms…no. I’m sure of it.’
I searched “invisible padded girl” and “unseen thief” one after another.
Of course, no satisfying results came up.
Then a thought struck me.
“What was it she said earlier?”
Back when she was eating uncooked ramyeon in the basement parking lot and I caught her.
I remembered the kid babbling something frantically.
Something about a chef.
“…Mecha Chef.”
I searched it.
“Michelin two-star Chef Seong, who cooks like a machine, reopens his restaurant ‘Yosu’!”
“Mecha Chef Seong Junwon confirmed as fixed cast member on ‘Please Take Care of My Refrigerator’!”
Damn it. Now I’m just irritated.
Grasping at straws, I kept searching, and then I found something peculiar.
“Oh…there it is. Mecha Chef.”
Mecha Chef.
It’s a Hebrew word from the Bible.
Hebrew is the script used by that noisy Israelite people from the Middle East.
“The Korean translation of the Hebrew word Mecha Chef is…”
“Mage”
…A mage?
Ha. The air deflated from my mouth on its own.
Half strange bewilderment, half laughter.
And at that moment, I realized something was wrong inside the bathroom.
“……”
It’s too quiet.
Creak.
Worried, I opened the bathroom door.
And there stood the grimy, red-haired padded girl, blinking her eyes and staring blankly in the bathroom.
‘I kind of hoped she’d have vanished cleanly when I opened the door…No such luck, huh.’
I told her to wash because she stank.
Did she not understand?
Feeling at a loss, I turned the faucet and ran the showerhead.
Whoooosh.
“……!!!”
The padded girl flinched.
The kind of startled reaction like she never once imagined water would spray from the showerhead.
For a moment she just stared at the showerhead warily.
Then she dropped to her knees toward the water pooling on the floor—
Slurp slurp slurp slurp, lap lap lap.
She started frantically licking it up!
Like parched African animals gathering around a precious puddle in the middle of a dry season!
I was, to say the least, momentarily stunned by the sight.
“Oh, well. Sure. Hydration’s important, gotta stay hydrated.”
# # #
My sister, three years younger than me, was a tomboy who tore through the world like a hurricane.
Not to brag, but with our parents busy working, I did a pretty solid job acting as her guardian.
Washing up one scrawny, grubby little kid was nothing to me.
“Alright, let’s get these stinky things off you first.”
I unzipped the filthy black padded jacket this bizarre convenience store thief girl was wearing.
Then I peeled off the ragged dress underneath, nothing better than a rag, all in one go.
“Geez, she’s all skin and bones.”
For the record, the yellow dress felt less like clothing and more like touching a coarse burlap rice sack.
‘At least she’s staying still. Thank God for that.’
I was worried she’d throw a fit and go wild.
But maybe she instinctively sensed I’d fed her and given her water and meant no harm, because she was surprisingly docile.
Just as I gathered up the contaminated clothes and was about to toss them into the laundry basket—that’s when it happened.
Sway, sway.
Something impossibly surreal moved at the edge of my vision.
From behind the girl’s back, below her waist, something long extended and swayed.
It looked about as thick as my index finger and nearly a meter long.
Its color was a glossy black, like a leather whip oiled and polished.
Its tip tapered into a sharp triangle like an arrowhead, and no matter how I racked my brain, every conclusion converged on one answer.
“A tail…!?”
It was a tail.
More precisely, something like a demon’s tail.
A round metal ring hung from it, looking like some kind of ornament.
“Invisible to everyone else, and now she’s got a tail too?”
What the hell is going on.
Scrub scrub.
Anyway, I lathered a generous amount of shampoo into my hands and worked up a thick foam on her hair first.
Drip drip drip.
She was so filthy the runoff water turned the floor pitch black.
First thing tomorrow, I need to mix bleach with water and give this bathroom a thorough scrub-down.
And with that, bath done!
“Okay, let’s go dry off and get you dressed.”
Shake shake shake shake shake!
That’s when the girl bolted out of the bathroom and shook her wet body and hair all over the studio.
Like a soaked dog or wolf!
Water splattered everywhere.
“Ah, shit.”
Thinking about the deep clean I’d have to do tomorrow already had me on the verge of tears.
Whiiiiir.
After finishing her hair with the blow dryer, I dressed her in my T-shirt, underwear, and pants.
They’re men’s clothes, sure, but a hundred times better than that tattered dress and padded jacket.
So what should I do with those clothes?
They’re so filthy that just washing them would probably break my washing machine.
Guess they gotta go.
With that thought, I reached for the padded jacket—
Snatch. The girl, who’d been perfectly calm while I dried her hair, moved faster than me, hugged the jacket to her chest, and scurried back to her corner of the room.
Acting like that old black padded jacket was some kind of precious treasure.
“…Fine, whatever.”
Exhaustion hit me all at once.
I flopped onto the bed, and my body and eyelids felt impossibly heavy.
Maybe when I wake up tomorrow, it’ll all have been a dream…
# # #
Sway, sway.
Something tapping my face roused me from sleep.
The tail swaying in front of me vanished with a quick flick.
Following its trail, I saw the girl curled up in the corner.
I was wide awake now.
So it wasn’t a dream.
Even up until last night, I’d felt like all of this had to be a lie or a joke.
But now, reality hit me, spreading through my veins with the pounding of my heartbeat.
“What the hell are you, seriously.”
“…….”
No answer, obviously.
I finished the deep cleaning of the bathroom and the room that I’d put off last night, then stir-fried whatever was left in the fridge in a big pan, finishing off a bright red ham and kimchi fried rice.
Steam billowed from the mound of fried rice rounded onto a white plate.
Gulp.
The girl swallowed her saliva and reached for the hot rice—
“Eeek…!!!“
She shrieked, the freshly fried rice burning her fingers.
It was so funny I burst out laughing.
“That’s why you use a spoon.”
I placed a spoon in her hand, then, as if to show her how it’s done, scooped up some fried rice with my own spoon and ate it. Maybe a bit salty.
“……”
She started eating with the spoon, like she was unfamiliar with it.
Clink, clink.
As the meal was winding down, I turned on the computer and went online.
A girl with a tail.
When I searched, all sorts of results came up.
“Demon.”
The girl’s tail most closely resembled the arrowhead tail of demons from comics and movies.
I searched more about demons.
Lucifer, Baal—names I’d actually heard before—along with the Legemeton, Solomon’s 72 Demons, Mephisto, Faust, and a whole string of grand, plausible-sounding names.
“Paimon…one of Solomon’s 72 Demons, ranked 9th among the 72, with the title of King. Oversees the domains of destruction, rampage, and ruin…”
Apparently, demon worshippers and mages summon or make contracts with these great demons to fulfill their desires.
Come to think of it, she called me ‘Mecha Chef,’ which means ‘Mage,’ right?
I can see a demon no one else can see, brought her home, washed her, fed her…. So…
“So that makes me a mage?”
Thump.
For some reason, my heart was pounding.