Calamity by Cedric Rose (korean novels in english .txt) 📕

It was just past 12 a.m. when she heard the first scream. She was gazing up at the stars, immersing herself in the sky's endless beauty, imagining that there was actually a place out there for her, free of pestilence and disappointment. Being so deep in thought, Amaia believed that the scream was an embed of her childhood, a hangnail memory of the pain she tried so hard to forget.A second scream, though, had awoken her from her state of animation. She shot forward from her reclining chair with speed similar to that of a ball in a pinball machine. Though the second scream was brief, it was more vehement than the first, resonating throughout her mind, reminding her of her past. Wanting to believe that the scream was just a disembodied voice of her childhood, she shifted her attention back to the stars. After a few moments she was back in her dazed state of mind, until a soft thump on the floor above her brought her back. It sounded similar to a heavy urn being dropped on a carpeted floor from the height of a table. Four heavy footsteps followed. Amaia immediately rose from her chair and looked at her door, almost sure someone was bound to enter. Sure, problems that occur domestically aloud are bad, but the one's in silence are the worst. Amaia believed this for she had been a victim of this for far too long.She could feel someone's presence on the other side of the door. She was sure of it. She didn't want to move, standing as motionless as a mannequin. She took a few calming breaths, as she was told to do in her decades of counseling, and soon realized it was her paranoia talking.

The house she was staying in was far too big for anyone move from upstairs to her room in such a short amount of time. She still felt as though someone inside of the house was aware of her presence. Someone other than the family that let her stay there for the night. They seem too harmless to hurt anyone, she though. "Unless they get a sick kick out of torturing the people they let stay with them." No one's this nice without some sort of negativity in their life, something they're either trying to make up for or because of some aberrant fetish. She traced the location of the thump and footsteps like a hound to it's home. The stillness of the air was unnerving, much like the pause before a cobra strikes it's target. Sadly, she has always been the prey. She started to make her way for the door, moving as quietly as possible. She reached for the handle in a manner similar to the painting of God reaching to Adam but stopped instantly. She couldn't remember if the handle made noise when she twisted it. She learned to pay attention to things like this, but she was desperate for a place to stay and was too overwhelmed by the benevolence of these supposedly saintly strangers.Just as she began to think about where she could go to escape, footsteps resounded through the hallway above. These were definitely too heavy to be of any of the residents. She carefully but speedily crept to the bed, where she proceeded to lie flat on her stomach, her feet pointing toward the headboard. She felt this was the safest position for her to be in.Footsteps started in the hall again, this time closer to her, sounding more foreign than ever. A door opened. The room right next to her. She could see the light turned on, a golden sliver of light, cutting into the layer of darkness the room held, through the door's bottom. She couldn't see them exactly, but she could see the shadow of the intruder's boots, slicing away at the ray of light.If the intruder was to come into the room, which he was sure to do, he would see nothing but an empty room. Amaia had not touched the bed, so it was still in the same condition it would be if she never entered the home. All her belongings were taken from her one night as she slept in a shelter, so she had nothing to pollute the room. Almost as if he read her mind, the foreign presence entered. She was then overtaken by a thought; "What if the 'intruder' is just Mr. Crowe? He'd wonder where I am and assume I was doing something I had no business doing. What if he makes me leave?" She ran through many scenarios within the 12 seconds the intruder had been standing there. "Do I come out? If so, how would I explain what I was doing?" Just as she said this, she saw something in similar color to a ruby fall to the carpet. She was unsure what she saw, thinking it was a side effect of extreme paranoia, so she thought to ignore it, as she did many things in her life. She continued to look at the direction of the drop though, believing, for once, that she wasn't as loony as she made herself out to be. Just then another drop fell, followed by another, all the same dark velvet ruby colored as the initial drop. Blood, she immediately thought. She had seen too much of it to not be able to recognize it. He moved deeper into the room, heading toward the bathroom, located directly in front of her, but to the right of the intruder. She shifted her gaze as he tread toward it. Sadly, the sheets weren't of an appropriate length to cover the front of the bed, so there was a possibility the intruder would find the perfect angle to catch a glimpse of her. She moved back as far as she could, until her legs began to cross over each other. Luckily, the bed was queen sized and she was of small stature, only 5'2". He walked in only a couple inches, it seemed, then turned on the light. Luckily, she had put all her toiletries into the cabinets so there was nothing of her presence in there either. But did she use the sink? She couldn't remember. She tried her hardest to access the vault of her memory banks but she was denied access. He stood in the opening for what seemed an eternity, but just as Amaia began to feel like captive in his time-altering presence, he turned off the light and walked back toward the bedroom.

His walking must have caused some sort of disturbance with whatever he was carrying, for two more drops fell onto the carpet. He was walking toward the closet. Amaia had tried to turn her head to keep up with his movements but the closet was at to sharp of an angle for her to strain her neck to track him. She closed her eyes, for she felt that without visual stimuli, her senses were better, to listen to what he was doing. She heard the snap of the light's tugged string and the agitation of the closet's contents. She was almost grateful her possessions were stolen, for she would have definitely placed them in there and her belongings were to have surely drawn attention to the lavish items that she was sure were in there, alerting him to her presence. She wondered, then, if her room was being inspected as thoroughly as this, then was the room of the Crowe's daughter? She almost let out a whimper. The daughter was as innocent as could be... But she couldn't focus on her right now, as cruel as she felt for saying it. At least not for the moment. She had to place all her focus on staying unseen. Staying quiet. Staying alive.

Within what felt like seconds, she heard the snap of the light's string, letting her know to remain as still and quiet as possible. With every other step the man took, a new droplet of ruby-red blood fell, with almost a scarlet honey's consistency. She realized how fast time went by as he was in the closet. "I guess I'm just getting back used to hiding", she thought, trying to get some sort of humorous notion from this situation. The cycle never ended for her, no matter how far she ran. As the intruder walked by, she noticed his boots, rather, how they were no longer his boots, and his steps were silent. He was now walking in what appeared to be dress shoes. There was a certain shine about them in the moonlight that gave off a glow similar to a dim light reflecting off a porcelain doll's eye. The shimmer wore out as he walked out of the lunar luminescence, back into the abysmally bleak halls. She listened as intently as she could but couldn't hear where he was. "What if he knows I'm in here and just waiting for me to come out? The halls are too dark for me to tell." Then she heard something from down the hallway. "I don't want to set the world on fire !" "He's ... Singing?" She whispered, almost at the uncomfortable level of 9 decibels, comparatively, as loud as leaves fighting on the ground against the wind, in a surely lost battle. "I just want to start, a flame in your heart !" She recognized the melody, something from a more older generation, she couldn't quite place the song though. She knew she heard from somewhere, but knew that now was not the time for nostalgia. As she inched her way from under the bed, toward the window, she realized two things; One, the steps were made of hardwood. While in dress shoes he was bound to make noise, no matter how lightly he tread. Two, the intruder felt secure enough to sing aloud in the house. The latter was the worst thought, for it set off a chain reaction of situations that inevitably ended horribly for the Crowe residents. Though she emerged from the underbelly of the bed without being assaulted, she felt it was still unsafe to stand. She stayed prone and and imagined she was in a time of war, where if she stands she runs the risk of having her life ended by the well placed shot of a Mauser rifle. Though the situation she was in now reflected this, minus the rifle, she felt safer in her imagination. It was the only place where she could escape, if not for a moment, before her cold, dark reality embraced her once more. As she began her exaggeratedly long journey, inching towards the door, she felt something on her left wrist. A cold, semi-viscous liquid. She had completely forgotten about the blood. She held her wrist up into the moonlight and could see the ruby red liquid smeared on her pale white skin, trailing from her wrist to halfway on the side of her palm. She gagged, imagining vividly what could have happened to the benevolent family that