Gorgeous Gruesome Faces, page 20
“Not even close!” Mina snaps at him. “We’re giving you a chance to apologize, and you don’t even have the decency to do that!”
Jin-hwan narrows his eyes at us and sneers, “That’s it. Get the fuck out of my apartment before I call security.”
Candie makes no move to get up from the sofa. “I don’t like the way you’re speaking to us,” she says. “You should go put some soap in your mouth.”
At that, Jin-hwan turns and walks over to the kitchen. Just as Candie commands, he picks up the dishwashing detergent on the sink, opens his mouth, and starts pumping detergent onto his tongue.
“Swallow it,” Candie says.
His eyes screw shut, choking and gagging on the liquid, Adam’s apple bobbing with effort as he swallows the detergent.
A wide, vindictive grin spreads on my face. Mina watches on with satisfaction in her eyes.
“You took a lot from Sunny, and from Mina,” Candie says. “We’re here to collect.”
From inside her satchel, Candie takes out a single incense stick, a small incense dish, and the ornate tin can that I instantly recognize. She opens the tin and scoops out some of the reddish-brown dirt into the dish, before lighting the incense, the fragrant smoke reaching upward in thin white curls.
“First, I need you to give me your hair,” Candie tells him. “Get some scissors.”
Jin-hwan obeys. He has no choice. He opens one of the kitchen drawers and returns to the living room with a pair of food shears.
“Cut,” Candie says.
Instead of simply snipping off a piece of hair, Jin-hwan opens the shears wide and hacks at the side of his head viciously. I flinch. Mina recoils. Tears fill Jin-hwan’s eyes as he attacks himself with the scissor blades, opening and closing them against his scalp. Gashes open quickly, thin rivers of red running down his hairline, onto his shirt collar. He only stops when Candie holds out a hand. Reaching up into the patchy red wounds on his head, Jin-hwan yanks out two handfuls of his hair and deposits them on Candie’s outstretched palm.
Candie puts the hair into the dish, covering it with the dirt.
“Now pick up the ashtray,” she tells him.
Jin-hwan reaches for the ashtray on the coffee table, raising the heavy black thing high into the air. He’s a prisoner in his body, utterly powerless against her compulsion, the only indication that he’s still in there is the raging panic trapped behind wide, unblinking eyes.
“I want you to loosen one of your teeth.”
Jin-hwan brings the ashtray down on his face, smashing it full force into his mouth.
Mina lets out a harsh gasp and turns her head, unable to keep watching.
I don’t look away. I force myself to stare at the gory display, as Jin-hwan pulls his arm back again and bludgeons himself over and over. Something cracks in his mouth. There are bits of white fragments mixed into the red slobber pooling out from his split lips.
“It won’t come out that way,” Candie instructs calmly, almost clinically. “Cut it out with the scissors.”
Jin-hwan opens his mouth wide without hesitation and puts the scissors into his mouth.
It feels like I’m watching a stage production; there’s something so far removed from reality, almost theatrical about the self-mutilation playing out before my eyes. The blood on his face is such a bright shade it could be red paint. He moans pitifully, digging the blade around his swollen gums and broken teeth.
Mina’s covering her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking, but she doesn’t ask Candie to stop.
Finally, Jin-hwan lowers the shears. He walks over to Candie and drops a bloody, half-broken tooth into the incense dish.
“Candie, I—I think we’ve made our point…,” I mutter. The sight of so much blood is starting to eclipse the joy of revenge.
“What do you think, Jin-hwan?” Candie asks. “Have we made our point? Are you sorry for what you did?”
Jin-hwan spits out a glob of blood in Candie’s direction and screams, “Somebody help me!”
Candie shakes her head. “I don’t think you’re sorry at all.”
Jin-hwan’s lips close shut again like they’ve been sealed with tape, allowing only strained, muffled groans to escape. Candie rises to her feet, and I can tell Jin-hwan wants to inch back, but he’s glued to his spot, unable to run, unable to scream.
“You seem to make a lot of decisions using what’s in your pants. Maybe you’ll think more clearly without it,” Candie tells him.
Jin-hwan reaches for the scissors again.
With his other hand, he loosens his belt and unzips his pants. He moves the food shears down to the opening in his fly.
“Candie, stop!” I lunge forward and grab her arm, fingernails digging in. “That’s enough!”
Candie finally turns to look at me. Her eyes are clear, her expression unconcerned.
“That’s enough,” I repeat, pulling at her. “We have what we need from him, right?”
Candie turns back to glance at Jin-hwan, battered and broken, blood pouring from his head, from his mouth, the shears hovering just above his crotch.
“… Go lie down on your bed,” Candie orders him, her voice devoid of emotion. “When you wake up, you won’t remember that we were here. You’ll believe that your weed was laced with another drug, and you had a bad trip. That’s where your injuries came from.”
Mina lowers her hands from her face then and breathes a shaky sigh of relief when Jin-hwan ambles away, closing the door to his bedroom behind him.
Candie reaches into her bag again. This time, she pulls out three masks. The surface of the masks is a brownish-red; they must have been made out of the same clay that Candie carries around in that tin of hers. The masks are painted, simplified representations of female faces. The large eyeholes and little lips are lined with red, and there are dots on the cheeks to represent rouge.
“Now that we have the offerings, we’ll summon the maiden’s spirit to avenge us. She’ll bring him many ill fortunes for what he did.” She hands us each a mask. “Do you both still want to go through with it?”
Mina nods slowly.
I nod as well. “… I’m ready.”
“These masks are worn by the maiden’s disciples during rituals,” Candie explains. “When we put them on, we become members of her sacred inner circle.”
Together, we fit the masks over our faces. Candie puts the incense dish and its contents down on the floor, and we sit cross-legged around it.
“Don’t open your eyes until I say,” Candie reminds us, like last time. “We’ll join hands to complete the bond. The circle cannot be broken until the ritual is finished.”
Mina and I take her left and right hands respectively, and then hold hands with each other, closing the circle. Then we shut our eyes.
In the darkness, Candie chants in a low voice in that same language she used before. The temperature in the room seems to drop by several degrees, sending a shocking chill shuddering through my limbs. Candie continues to chant, her voice an anchor in the dark. My fingers curl tighter around her and Mina’s hands.
A strong stench invades my nose. Like lifting the lid off a dumpster that’s been sitting in the sun. Rotten eggs and fish guts and sulfur. I instinctively try to pull my hand back to cover my nose. Candie squeezes my hand, nails biting into my skin, reminding me to maintain the connection.
The smell grows stronger, pushing tears out of the tightly sealed edges of my eyelids. I hear Mina coughing to the right of me.
Candie continues chanting, undeterred, her voice rising, growing more fervent. A breeze blows past my shoulders, even though there are no open windows in the room.
Then I feel it. A presence.
There’s something else with us in this room.
Something angry.
The heavy odor rolls over me in thick fumes, and I gag, stomach wrenching painfully. An urge I can’t identify rises from the pit of my gut, claws up the walls of my throat, and slides itself over my tongue, pouring out my mouth in an unending stream. Words. I’m regurgitating words, words that I don’t understand but that are somehow flowing fluently from my lips.
Next to me, I hear Mina reciting the words, too, all three of our voices now chanting in perfect unison.
Something brushes up against my leg. Hot breath blows across my neck. My whole body is trembling, but I cling to Candie’s and Mina’s hands no matter how weak my arms are growing.
“Oh god!” Mina screeches suddenly.
“Don’t let go!” Candie’s voice shouts from my left.
The reflexive need to open my eyes burns, but Candie’s warning burns deeper. And I’m too terrified to actually look, to see exactly what we’ve summoned into this enclosed space with us.
“It’s in my mouth!” Mina screams. “It’s in my eyes!”
“Candie, we need to stop!” I yell. “I take it back; I don’t want to do this anymore!”
“No, don’t!” Candie commands. “Don’t break the circle!”
It’s too late. Mina’s hand wrenches free from mine.
A shattering, unearthly screech reverberates through the space.
When I open my eyes, I see that the sound is coming from Mina. She’s screaming. Candie reaches for Mina, trying to soothe her, but it doesn’t work. Mina continues to scream, and when I see the petrified expression on Candie’s face, I know.
The ritual has gone very wrong.
Chapter 26
NOW
Everything has disappeared. The furniture. The decor. The light fixtures.
The dance hall has vanished.
“Candie!” I scream into the darkness.
My voice bounces back at me in echoing waves. Even the tiles on the ground are gone. There’s nothing but unfinished subfloor beneath my feet. No clean white paint, only drywall. The space is practically a construction zone, no sign of the beautiful performing arts center I first stepped into—how many weeks ago was it?
It’s all an illusion.
I’ve experienced this once before, already. Candie showed me years ago, when she brought Mina and me into the celestial maiden’s memories. Everything had felt so real there, the beach, the village, all those people …
How long have I been trapped in this mirage?
“Candie, where are you?!”
I step farther into the empty husk of the building. I have no idea what’s inside. All I know is that Candie is still here.
“You need to get out of here,” a hollow, frail voice says behind me.
I spin. The speaker shuffles out from the darkened corridor. Her shoulders are hunched, and when she steps closer I see the strings of pink hair clinging to her sallow face.
“Faye?” I gasp out.
Faye’s wearing a white robe as well, with long broad sleeves, the heavy fabric hanging down to her ankles. Her feet are bare, too.
The answer comes together in a horrifying flash.
She’s one of them.
“You, Ms. Tao, the other instructors … you’re all in on it,” I mutter in disbelief. “This workshop, you trying to be my friend, everything is a lie!”
“Run.” Her voice is dry and coarse, with none of the bubbly quality that had reminded me so much of what I’d lost. “Before they realize you’re gone.”
Everything about Faye is different. This dour, gray stranger is nothing like the bright, optimistic Faye I had spent my days with, who smiled at me in a crowd of indifference, looked at me with those admiring eyes, the first person I’ve opened up to, the first real friend I’ve made since …
“I tried to warn you years ago,” Faye says. “I told you to stay away. But you didn’t listen.”
With that, I finally realize why Faye seemed so familiar from the first day we met.
I’ve already met her once before.
“Are you … Yingyi?” I ask. “Candie’s cousin?”
She stares back at me steadily, before giving a small nod.
The persona she’d been performing for me was a carefully concocted blend of my younger self’s cheery naivete and Mina’s supportive positivity. But now that she’s shed that false outer coat, all I see is a little girl with wary eyes and a harsh scowl.
She’s scared, too.
“Where’s Candie?” I demand.
“You need to go while you still can,” she says. “Candice asked me to keep you safe. It was her final request—she made me promise.”
I grab Faye—Yingyi—by the shoulders, the fear in my body suddenly reshaping itself into protective fury. “What do you mean final? Is she in danger?”
Faye stays silent.
“I’m not walking out of here without her,” I say. “Please. If you’ve been helping her this entire time, help me get to her.”
Faye’s head hangs in defeat. “I can’t. I can’t defy my family. I’m not strong enough.”
“There’s some sort of ritual happening, isn’t there? Something to do with the celestial maiden?” I try to meet her gaze, but she refuses to look at me. “They’ll punish you if they find out you helped me escape, right?”
Faye’s shoulders tremble under my grasp.
“The safest thing for you to do is to keep me here,” I tell her.
Finally, Faye glances up at me, a frown carving itself deep into the pallor of her forehead. “If I bring you in there, how will you get out?”
“I’ll figure that out once I find Candie. She’ll know what to do.”
Faye is quiet again, and I bite down on my lip anxiously, waiting for a reply.
After a long minute, Faye reaches a hand into the billowing mouth of her sleeve and pulls out something sharp and glinting. A dagger. I suck in a quick breath and take a wide step back.
Faye holds the blade out in front of her as she starts down the darkened hallway. “Stay quiet,” she says over her shoulder. “And if I tell you to run, run.”
I nod, quickly following as the shadows swallow up her small frame.
The layout of the dark and empty hallways is different, curving and turning in ways I don’t recall. I try to keep my thoughts focused on Candie, rather than what we might be locked in here with.
Faye comes to a sudden stop. There’s an opening in the wall, an arched doorway. I lean forward and peer into the cavity. A single, long flight of stairs leads straight down. I can’t make out what’s at the bottom. I’ve never come across this doorway and staircase before.
“This way,” Faye says, stepping through the arch, down the stairs.
At the bottom of the staircase sits the mouth of a tunnel, a walkway that’s only shoulder-width wide, forcing us to travel single file.
The air trapped in the passageway is clammy and moist. I hear liquid dripping from the other end. The tunnel grows narrower the farther we go, and it feels like I’m squeezing myself down a constricting throat toward an unimaginable end.
Just as the claustrophobia verges on suffocating, the passageway opens up. We stumble out into a long corridor. A banal, characterless interior that’s vaguely reflective of the dormitory floor. Low-wattage fluorescent lights glow above, textureless beige tiles line the floors. There are identical doors on both sides of the hallway, running from one end to the other.
We’re in the basement. Where Eugenia and I were chased down into all those nights before. Where I saw that wooden door painted with symbols.
Faye ushers me quickly into one of the rooms, shutting the door behind us. The chamber is small and windowless, with a line of metal storage cabinets along the back wall and a stainless-steel table in the center of the room. It looks like an operating table, and I can’t stop myself from imagining what sorts of terrors might have been carried out on it.
“Were you the one who put those printouts in my locker?” I ask.
Faye doesn’t deny it. “I told Candice that she should have just compelled you to leave from the start. But she wouldn’t do it.”
Guilt and relief slam into me at the same time. After the time she lost control during our fight, I used to fear that Candie would turn her power on me.
Now I know. Even in the worst of situations, Candie refuses to take away my free will.
I frown, glancing around the room once more. “What is the ritual for?”
Faye’s dim eyes lift to meet mine. “Candice didn’t tell you, after Mina?”
“No.” I frown, digging deep, excavating old conversations, searching for this piece of information. I think back to the ritual. And I remember. The tufts of Jin-hwan’s hair. The pieces of his broken teeth.
“Offerings,” I realize. “The maiden wants live offerings?”
Defensiveness rises in her face when I speak of the maiden in a fearful tone, even as Faye defies her own beliefs to help me.
“The maiden gives to us from her own sacred body. We, as descendants of her first disciples, give back to her, to show our devotion. For centuries we’ve performed the blessings ceremony. Those who are deemed most worthy, who most embody the maiden’s divine spirit, are chosen to accompany her in the next life.” Faye says those harrowing words with serene affectation, as though she’s reciting scripture.
All that practicing. The singing. The dancing. We’ve been preparing ourselves for our own slaughter.
“And their faces?” I ask. “Why do they all start to look the same?”
“Those who are touched by the maiden’s spirit become one with her,” Faye tells me. “Sometimes, her visage begins to physically manifest.”
Eugenia. Alexis. Hannah. Mina.
I was looking right into the face of the maiden this entire time.
Nausea overtakes me. How many girls were sacrificed by the maiden’s disciples in their rituals? And how many more will there be?
I wouldn’t have even known about this workshop if I hadn’t seen Candie’s video about it. Candie, who maintains a large platform targeted at an audience of young, impressionable girls. Was she forced to make that announcement video? To attract unsuspecting victims? There will always be girls drawn in by these seductive promises, these irresistible dreams. Girls who will push themselves to the furthest limits, and then push beyond that if they believe there’s an opportunity waiting on the other side. There’s an unending supply chain of bodies.
