1: Goedam

"Hello?" His voice cracked.

When Jae-ho opened his eyes, he was lying on his back at the entrance to the alley. Dawn was breaking. His camera was shattered beside him, its memory card cracked clean in two. And on his chest, pressed into the fabric of his jacket, was a single white shoe print—small, child-sized, and wet.

Twenty paces. A child's shoe lay upturned in a puddle that hadn't been there a second ago. It was a small white sneaker, impossibly clean. He didn't touch it. He remembered his grandmother's warning about items left as offerings.

And he knows the Goedam is waiting. Not for him—but for the next person who thinks a story is just a story. goedam 1

He clamped his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. He recited the only thing he could remember—the childhood prayer his grandmother made him say before bed. Not a Christian prayer, but older: words that felt like stones in his mouth, heavy and hard.

He was twenty-seven now, a skeptical urban explorer with a YouTube channel that barely cracked a thousand views. He thought the stories were charming folklore, nothing more. That night, he brought a camera, a flashlight, and a bottle of soju for courage.

Thirty paces. That's when the whispering started. "Hello

He walked slowly, counting his steps as a grounding mechanism. Ten paces in, he saw the first door. It was painted red, the kind of red that looked wet, like a fresh wound. The window beside it was dark, but the glass rippled—as if something on the other side had pressed its face against it and then pulled back.

Shh.

"Just condensation," Jae-ho muttered.

The figure tilted its head. Then it raised one long, gray finger to where its mouth should have been.

Forty paces. A flicker of movement at the end of the alley. He raised his camera and zoomed in. A figure stood there—small, hunched, wearing a dopo , an old scholar's robe. Its face was a pale oval with no features, like a peeled egg. And yet Jae-ho knew it was looking at him.

"Jae-ho-yah. Turn around. Come home."