You-jeong Jeong - The Good Son

‘What’s going on with you?’ Mother said, sliding out from under my arms and regaining her usual calm.

As I stepped inside and took off my shoes, I felt deflated.

‘Did something happen?’

I didn’t bother to look back. I shook my head. As I walked through the living room, I nodded lightly at her. ‘Goodnight.’

She didn’t stop me. ‘Want me to help you upstairs?’

I shook my head again and climbed up the stairs, not too fast or too slow.

I remembered taking off my clothes as soon as I got to my room, lying on my bed without washing, and hearing Mother go into her room and close the door. As soon as I’d heard that click, I sobered up. After that, I probably looked up at the ceiling for forty minutes or so, until I got too antsy and slipped out through the steel door on the roof.

I just woke up and saw that Mother had called in the middle of the night. I thought it was a little weird – she should have been asleep. That was what Hae-jin had said on the phone. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now I wondered… Why did she call him? Because I was acting strange? Did she know I’d gone out again? What time did she call him? Eleven? Midnight? If she was up for a while after that, did she hear me come back?

If she’d heard me, she wouldn’t have left me alone. She would have made me sit down and grilled me, just the way she got me to confess to my transgressions when I was young. She wouldn’t have let me go to bed until I told her everything. Where are you coming from at this hour? When did you leave? How long have you been sneaking around? Though I’d graduated from punishment a long time ago, it could have been back on the table – kneeling in front of the statue of the Virgin all night and reciting Hail Marys. If she’d seen me this bloody, prayers wouldn’t have been the end of it. No, the fact that I woke up in my own room was evidence that she hadn’t seen me looking like this.

I got out of bed. I needed to figure out what had happened. Taking care not to step in the bloody footprints, I inched towards the door. I stopped still in front of my desk. Behind the desk, in the sliding glass doors to the roof deck, I saw a man. His hair was standing up like horns, his face was red and raw, and the whites of his eyes glinted nervously. I felt faint. That red beast was me?

I couldn’t see anything outside, thanks to the fog coursing in from the ocean. Yellow light flickered faintly from the pergola Mother had built when she’d created her roof garden. I would have turned it on as I left last night. I should have turned it off on my way in.

I noticed that the sliding door was open a crack. It locked automatically when it closed, so whenever I went out to the roof deck, I left it open a little. I should have closed the door behind me when I came back in. I wouldn’t have opened it again no matter what state I was in: it was December, and my room was on the second level of a duplex on the tenth floor of a building by the ocean. I wouldn’t want cold air flooding in, unless I was Mother, who was going through the menopause.

That meant I hadn’t come back in through this door last night. I’d returned through the flat’s front door, judging from the direction of the footprints, the open sliding door and the pergola light. But why would I come in through the front door? Why did I look like this? What did the state of my room signify?

I looked over at my bedside clock again. Three red numbers were glowing against the black background: 5.45. I didn’t hear running water, but Mother could still be in the bathroom. In ten minutes she would come out of her bedroom and go into the kitchen. I had to see what things looked like before she emerged.

I opened my door and went out into the hall. I flicked on the light. Bloody footprints stretched from my doorway down the hallway, all the way to the stairs. I leant against the door. The optimist in my head whispered to me: It’s a dream. You haven’t woken up yet. There’s no way something like this could happen in real life.

I forced myself to move away from the door, and followed the footsteps reluctantly. I stepped onto the top of the darkened stairs, triggering the motion sensor. The light turned on. Bloody handprints were smeared all over the railing, with footprints stamped on each step. Dazed, I looked down at the blood-splattered wall beside the stairs, and the rivulets and puddles of blood pooling on the landing below.

I looked down at my blood-drenched hands, sweater, trousers and feet. Had I got covered in blood on the landing? Who had done this to me? I began to panic, unable to think, hear or feel.

I went downstairs sluggishly. I passed the puddle of blood on the landing and turned to continue down the next flight. I gasped; my head jerked up and I stepped backwards. I closed my eyes. My mind suggested an acceptable option. Nothing’s wrong. This isn’t real. Go back to your room before Mother comes out. Get some sleep. Once you wake up again, it’ll be like any other morning.

The realist in my head disagreed. No. You can’t gloss over this. You have to find out if it is a dream or not. If it isn’t, you have to figure out what happened downstairs and why you woke up looking like this. If it turns out to be a dream, you’ll still have plenty of time to get back to bed.

I opened my eyes. Downstairs, the lights were blazing. Blood had pooled along the dividing wall between the stairs and the kitchen. In the puddle was a pair of bare feet, heels resting on the marble floor and toes pointing up towards the ceiling. The wall blocked my view of what else was there, as if the feet had been cut off to be displayed like sculpture.

Whose feet were these? A doll’s? A ghost’s? Looking down from above didn’t provide any answers. I had to figure out what was going on.

I gritted my teeth and continued ahead. Blood and footprints were on each step; the rivulet of blood had coasted down the stairs and reached the living room. When I got to the last step, all I could see was the physicality of real, human feet – bumpy toes, high arches, an anklet with a dangling charm hanging from the left ankle. My stomach flipped and I began hiccuping. I wanted to go back to my room.

I forced myself to continue. I hesitantly turned to the right, towards the front door. Blood formed an oblong swamp from under the stairs to the kitchen entrance. A woman lay neatly in the middle of it, her feet closer to the stairs and her head pointing towards the kitchen. She was wearing a voluminous white nightgown. Her legs were straight, her hands were clasped on her chest, and her long hair covered her face. She looked like a hallucination straight out of a delusional mind.

I took a step towards her, then another, stopping near her elbow. Her head had been jerked back and her neck was severed. Someone strong must have done this in one swift motion, with a sharp knife. The flesh around the wound was red, like a fish’s gills. For a moment I thought I saw it throb. Dark irises met my eyes from under the tangled hair, ensnaring me, ordering me to come closer. I obeyed. I bent my stiff legs to crouch next to her. I reached out and pushed her hair out of the way, my hand trembling. I felt as though I were committing a crime.

‘Yu-jin!’

Mother’s voice again, the same one I had heard in my dream. This time it sounded faint. I couldn’t breathe. Everything in my mind was crashing down; everything swam before my eyes. My spine crumpled and my feet slipped on the blood. I sat down heavily, breaking my fall with my hands.

The woman’s eyes were bulging like a startled cat’s. Droplets of blood clung to her long dark lashes. Her cheeks were thin and her jawline was pronounced. Her mouth was open in an O shape. Mother. The woman who had lost her husband and elder son sixteen years ago, who had clung to me and me alone since then, who’d given me her DNA.