Forest

She imagined the days to come, wealth flowing toward him like spring water, and the envious looks those noblewomen who looked down on her would give her.

Look, what an outstanding son he had.

Not the raving cripple he was now. Those two disgusting words could never have anything to do with her.

But the ritual had not been completed. I grew a right leg, a perfectly sound right leg, but my left leg remained as it was. At the same time, I lost certain things. At first, it happened at night. Something surrounded me, frightening me with barely perceptible touches and whispers that seemed to warp the mind.

But I was satisfied enough. I could walk, even if I needed a crutch, and I had not paid anything for it. These things... I could still endure them.

But I soon stopped thinking that way. I had overestimated myself far too much. My nerves were constantly stretched taut, afraid that something would rush up to my face in the dark or touch me.

They delighted in seeing me become wretched, spiteful, deranged-a cynical lunatic. They were like children who had never received any human upbringing, possessing the purest malice.

They would trip me when I went downstairs, throw dead rats into obscure corners until we noticed the stench, and smash glass, then use the shards to cover my body in cuts.

My mother noticed this too. She could not stand it, because by then I was a complete and utter lunatic, a ghost-haunted cripple besides. This creation of hers could not be used, could not add luster to the hem of her skirt, and might even dirty her shoes. She abandoned me completely.

If that had been all, I could still have endured it. I could suffer that vicious treatment in the night, curl up in bed, close my eyes, and pray for the darkness to leave soon.

Then the final straw was that I could never be as I had been before. No matter how I pretended, no matter how I resisted, I could never be as I had been before.

After six months, those voices became increasingly shrill, increasingly relentless, increasingly tormenting.

Then my body began to change too. I no longer needed much food. My blood flowed more slowly, my heartbeat slowed, and even my temperature stayed around 32 degrees. That was absolutely not a normal human body temperature. Then my body stopped changing altogether. By all rights, I was already thirty, but I had not developed a single wrinkle. I looked no different from five years ago.

This should have been a good thing. I had become immortal and ageless. But that meant precisely that I would suffer persecution by those things for all eternity. The human mind could not endure that. I had long since gone mad more than once. I killed myself, many times, but I always came back to life quickly. You did not expect that, did you? I could come back to life. The timing varied, anywhere from half an hour to two hours, and afterward my mental state would be extremely unstable. Perhaps it was because I had endured the pain of death. Combined with those things' incessant muttering, it would drive me mad for a while.

I smashed things frantically throughout the villa. I hated her. I hated that woman who called herself my mother. Yes, he knew, because my mother had known perfectly well about these aftereffects. He knew that everyone who underwent this ritual, without exception, either killed themselves or became a complete lunatic.

This ritual never made people healthy or restored their vitality. It merely let you briefly enjoy a life like a fantasy, perhaps for three years, perhaps five. Then those things would wrap around you like parasitic vines, slowly devouring your soul.

And I was merely an accidental product of deception, someone who had not completed that evil ritual. I had received more power than the others, and more evil power. They could not devour my soul directly, so they chose to crush it instead. And my mother cared only about his exquisite nails and the handmade lace hem of her skirt.

Yes, I broke into her home and tried to kill her.

But clearly, I failed. They wanted to drag me off to a hospital. I could not go to a hospital. What would they do to me? Send me to a laboratory, draw my blood, skin me, or... I could not think about it any further.

I forced myself to calm down. I could not become any more miserable. I could not endure any more misfortune.

I spent a year putting everything I valued most in order. My company was managed by an agent, with dividend payments simply transferred to three bank cards each month. Most traces of my identity were erased. The only things I could leave behind were things that would prove I existed if I ever wanted to return to the human world.

I still had a few trusted people. They were the purest, the safest, bound to me not by affection but solely by money. They were responsible purely for things like unforeseen accidents.

As for my mother, I bundled up the things linking her to the cult and handed them to a police officer. She had gone to prison three months ago. Those things would keep her locked up for about eight years.

Before the police took her away, she screamed curses and insults at me, as though I were not his biological son but a monster, a monster born in the mud. But I merely smiled. Look, he was no puppet. A puppet could never have such a vile heart. And I was indeed a monster too.

I brought everything I had to this little cabin. As for why I came to live here, it was purely a coincidence. Remote enough, but not too remote. Quiet enough, but not too quiet.

It let me endure my identity as a monster without forgetting that I still had my dignity as a human being.

I lay in bed. It was night again. I hated the night. Those things loved the night, becoming very active as soon as it fell. I could not make out what they were saying, because what they said were not sentences at all. It sounded like singing, or like they were making some jumble of tones.

It was filth, darkness, depravity, as though countless emotions no human should possess had been mixed into it. Death, disease, or anything filthy and disgusting would not have been too much to describe it.

I needed some liquor. Getting dead drunk would make me feel a little better.

I climbed out of bed and had barely managed to stand upright when something gave my leg a vicious tug. I fell to the floor in a heap, then numbly got back up. I knew it was those things. I headed upstairs to the kitchen. The refrigerator was filled with all kinds of hard liquor. I had just filled a glass when it smashed on the floor, as though something had flung it away. I instinctively tried to catch it, only for something to trip me again. My hand slammed into the broken glass, and pain made my body convulse.

At first, I had fought back and tried to struggle. Later came mental breakdowns, shouting and screaming. But once you realized that nothing you did could change anything, all that remained was the numbness I felt now. I curled up, letting the sharp glass pierce my flesh and slice across my sinews and bones.

The sharp pain mingled with those whispers in my mind, making life worse than death. Yet death itself was a luxury beyond my reach.

A dark shadow flashed past the window. Something watched this scene. He wore a coarse woolen shirt whose edges were already frayed, along with filthy denim overalls. A burlap sack covered his head, with a few holes crudely poked into it. He watched coldly, as though it were a boring mime performance.

Then he vanished into the forest, as though nothing had happened.

And he seemed to vaguely remember that thing, the thing surrounding the young man.

I held on until daytime, my head heavy and muddled. I still had a glass of the 50-percent bourbon whiskey I had failed to drink that night, only in daylight instead. I struggled to my feet, intending to clean up the broken glass, because those things were a little quieter during the day.

I had no intention of going out, but someone knocked on my door. I opened my eyes in confusion. I could no longer say how long it had been since I had slept. A middle-aged man wearing a hat stood at the door.

Oh, a rich young man...

Oh, I gave him a fright. The young man before him had an unexpectedly handsome face, a beautiful Eastern face they could appreciate, but he looked far too haggard. Beneath his eyes hung dark circles heavy enough to rival his eyeballs. His skin and lips had not a trace of color, and he was terribly thin.

His suspicious gaze examined me, and, unsurprisingly, he smelled alcohol. The smell of alcohol, the haggard figure, and that dazed expression-he would never believe I was not on drugs.

Only after seeing his face did I belatedly think that I should not have opened the door. Being around people did me no good now.

When he saw me instinctively move to close the door, he quickly caught it.

"Wait, young man. If you need somewhere to recuperate or get high, you'd better find someplace else. This place is cursed. Living here will kill you faster! Faster than driving that fancy car you've got outside."

It dawned on me. I had wondered why anyone would visit a house first thing in the morning when there were no neighbors for at least ten kilometers around. It turned out he was another lunatic. I ignored him, and after muttering a few more things to himself, he left.

Of course, I did not spend all day slumped in some corner, dead drunk. Occasionally, I baked cookies, pastries, and things like that, and made espresso, one with a lethal amount of sugar and the other with none at all. Those two things helped me stay lucid. Then I would sit outside, where the similarly bustling sounds let me blur them together a little.

But swallowing was troublesome for me, so I generally only finished the coffee and left the cookies somewhere at random.

But occasionally, when I was lucid and went to collect the dishes, I discovered that it was not just the coffee that was gone, but the cookie plate too.