WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 2: The Elevator, Alone
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The convenience store near my place was locked, probably because the part-timer had gone to the bathroom. With no other choice, I headed to another mart fifteen minutes away.
‘One lunchbox for tomorrow morning, and maybe I’ll try that new ramen... Oh, and beer and snacks too.’
I had only come out for a light late-night snack, but my hands had gotten pretty full.
“Would you like a bag? Paying by card?”
“Yes, please. I’ll use mobile pay. Here.”
I dug my phone, which had been vibrating endlessly with alerts, out of my pocket. It was almost embarrassing to hold out my hand so the cashier could scan the payment QR code.
As soon as the cashier bagged everything, I grabbed it and hurried outside.
‘What on earth are all these notifications?’
There is a new post on the Guestbook!
There is a new post on the Guestbook!
There is a new post on the Guestbook!
There is a new post on the Guestbook!
“What? Did some malicious macro bot latch onto me?”
I had heard malicious AI advertising bots were going around. It looked like one had found my blog too. I would delete and report it as soon as I got home. My pace picked up.
‘Oh, lucky.’
Apparently, I was not the only late-night snack hunter out at this hour. The elevator was waiting on the first floor.
My studio building had forty units across ten floors, yet only this one elevator.
It was probably the original elevator from when the building had gone up. It crawled along like a grub and broke down endlessly, so once it went up, you usually had to wait forever for it to come back down.
I glanced behind me to make sure no one else was getting on, then rapidly pressed the close-door button. When I pressed seven, the elevator began rising with the groan of its old motor.
“The elevator has arrived.”
“What? Is it broken again?”
The elevator stopped on the fourth floor. This happened at least once a week too. It stopped at a floor other than the one you pressed. The building owner would probably only replace it after it fell.
Clicking my tongue, I pressed the seventh-floor button again. The elevator moved once more.
Five, six...
Then suddenly,
Clunk.
“Urgh.”
The elevator lurched, and my body dropped sharply. For a moment, I thought it was really falling. The doors rattled open.
‘I should just walk up. It’s not even two floors.’
The moment I tried to step out, my body froze.
Instead of the familiar hallway, a damp smell rolled in with an alien landscape.
“What... is this... What did I...?”
The white tiles were stained pink with blood. Half the fluorescent lights were broken, flickering on and off.
Something that looked like a human mass of flesh lay sprawled over an operating table. The wallpaper was densely covered in nail marks, enough to form a pattern.
It was like the dissecting room of a mad scientist. Someone groaned. An arm flailed from behind a curtain on one wall, then was dragged away with a scream.
Wet chunks of flesh were dragged somewhere across the floor, making a long, sticky sound.
“...”
Without time to think, I frantically hammered the close-door button. The curtain fluttered, and the mass of flesh behind it reached an arm toward me.
Our eyes met through the dark-red, twisted flesh.
A human eyeball, an eye, bloodshot and rolling wildly as it looked at me.
Save me. Save me. Get me out.
The doors closed. The elevator moved again.
Upward.
No, was “upward” even the right concept?
Through my shaking vision, I checked the floor display. There were no numbers. Symbols and red letters flickered and changed at random.
“What... what is happening...?”
The elevator lurched and stopped again, and the doors opened.
I instinctively pressed myself into the corner farthest from the doors.
When people get tense, their lungs expand until their chests feel tight. Gasping for breath, I stared at the scene before me.
Acrid smoke rushed into the elevator with a fishy stench.
More than dozens of trees were withering in rotten soil. People hung from every branch. Their blackened faces resembled skulls, tongues hanging out as long as their own torsos.
With no wind at all, the corpses swayed in the same rhythm like rotten fruit.
Round and round.
Round and round.
Their rotted eyelids all turned toward the elevator at once.
They were looking at me.
“Come here.”
“You too.”
“Join us.”
Their mouths did not move, but the voices drilled straight into my head.
Ropes burst from the rotten soil and began crawling upward. As they wriggled toward the elevator like snakes, the stench of decay grew stronger.
“Get away! Don’t come near me!”
When I kicked away a rope, it felt soft, heavy, and warm, as though I had kicked a living thing. I kicked away several more crawling ropes before the doors finally shut.
The elevator started going up again.
No. More precisely, it started moving again.
Where did the seventh floor go? What about my home? Had I gotten into the wrong building?
That could not be it. Everything had been normal until I stepped into the elevator.
Definitely.
Definitely.
My head felt like it would burst.
This was a malfunction. A hallucination. It could be explained. It had to be.
Ghost stories. Ghosts.
They could not possibly be real.
I pressed the emergency button.
Crackle.
“Yes, this is the security office. How may I help you?”
The security guard’s voice came through.
“Sir, I’m from unit 703. I think the elevator is broken. Could you stop it manually? The floors are displaying strangely.”
Instead of an answer, only electronic static sounded through the speaker. I shifted nervously from foot to foot as I waited for the next voice.
“The seventh floor does not exist.”
“What?”
“The seventh floor does not exist in our elevator. The seventh floordoesnotexistfloordoesthe-elevat-”
The voice stretched into something grotesque. The sentence repeated and broke apart amid the sound of metal scraping, until it became complete gibberish.
Noise beyond words.
A sound like bones being chewed.
A scream coming from underwater.
“thereiscanexistfloorforguestdeathlodgingsuicidewenow”
The emergency speaker turned off.
Unable to breathe, I slowly pressed the speaker button again.
Once.
Then once more.
No sound came out.
“The elevator is arriving at the next floor.”
With the familiar announcement, the elevator began moving again. The ceiling lights flickered several times.
Clutching the elevator handrail tightly, I curled up in the corner.
What had I done wrong?
Had I tried some kind of ghost story?
I had never tried a ghost story in this building.
Then why?
‘Think, Seon Jaehyeon. There is no problem without an answer.’
With trembling hands, I took out my phone.
No Signal.
Out of service range.
Every app that used data was dead, along with emergency calls and texts.
“...Even 119 can’t get through. This is really...”
Maybe I had bitten the inside of my mouth. The taste of blood filled it.
It helped clear my thoughts.
Ghost stories were real.
My breath caught.
I had searched so desperately for a real ghost story, but that did not mean I had wanted to be trapped in one like this.
I also understood why you should not blame people who disappeared in ghost stories for failing to call the police.
A twenty-first-century ghost story began with losing service.
There is a new post on the Guestbook!
A notification appeared at the top of my phone screen.
But I was out of service range.
Was I connected to Wi-Fi somehow?
Clinging to that possibility, I began opening every app and website on my phone.
Nothing worked.
Broken text, grotesque images, distorted WAV files, and endless squeaking sounds filled the screen.
‘Please. Just open something. Open.’
Only one window loaded properly.
It was my blog, opened through the notification popup.
Even then, I could only make out the functions that still worked.
Search. View posts. Guestbook.
The newest Guestbook post flashed.
≪We are going to have a good time.≫
≪We are waiting for your response.≫
≪We are waiting for your response.≫
≪We are waiting for your...≫
Messages kept uploading endlessly beneath the spam chain letter.
I hurriedly read the chain letter again. Words I had not cared about earlier caught my eye.
One hour. Limit. Misfortune. Response.
‘All this happened because I didn’t respond for an hour?’
No way.
I forced the ominous thought from my head and decided to deal with the immediate problem first.
The internet was down, yet I could see my blog.
Then, thinking like someone verifying a ghost story, there was only one explanation.
Whether I was the protagonist or the victim, the entity behind this ghost story wanted me to do something.
There would be no logical answer.
I had to think like a ghost story, reason like a ghost story, and escape like a ghost story.
Before the elevator reached somewhere.
I entered keywords like #Elevator, #OtherWorld, and #FloorTravel into the search bar and rapidly skimmed through posts.
After scrolling for a long time, one old ghost story caught my attention.
It was a translated foreign ghost story I had copied from a personal website.
Elevator to Another World.
「Once you board that elevator, you can continue ascending forever. However, the elevator does not stop on ordinary floors. Once you board it, it connects to another dimension, and a different scene appears each time it stops. If you get out of the elevator, you will be trapped there forever.」
I scrolled down.
「The place the elevator arrives at differs for each passenger. It is said to ultimately guide passengers to the place they desire most.
Every passenger who has returned alive from the elevator testified that it took them to heaven, where they met a beloved person who had already died.」
「No testimony has ever been reported from anyone who did not get out of the elevator.」
「The elevator’s end has never been reported.」
“...”
Clunk.
The elevator doors opened.
This time, there was no blood or rope.
Beyond the doors was my room.
The disordered bookshelf, the ghost-story materials piled on my desk, the dark monitor.
It was so familiar that I nearly stepped outside without thinking.
‘Get a grip.’
I slapped my cheek once.
If it had shown me the hallway on the seventh floor, I would have gotten out. It was lucky that it showed my room directly.
As I stayed pressed against the corner without moving, the elevator displayed my room for a long time...
Then the doors closed again.
I calmed my thoughts.
I clicked and read every ghost story scattered across reports and testimonies.
Asking for help through the emergency speaker and demanding the doors be opened manually: Failure.
Exiting on any floor and attempting to escape outside: Failure. No record of return reported.
Attempting to communicate with people outside the elevator: Failure.
I organized the facts one by one in my head.
You board the elevator. You see the scenes. You return, or fail to return.
Assume every testimony in the ghost stories was true.
The elevator’s end had never been reported. In other words, anyone who saw the end either never returned, or everyone returned alive before seeing it.
Why had those people exited?
What had they seen that made them think it was safe to leave?
The elevator stopped and opened endlessly.
My room. The Gwanghwamun intersection. My office. Firefighters shouting that it was safe to come out. My family home. A hospital. The convenience store I often visited. The first-floor hallway again...
‘It has stopped showing scenes beyond what I know.’
No more scenes that looked like bloody movies.
‘Is it because I am thinking of safe places?’
The elevator stopped again.
The smell of blood rushed in once more.
An old American-style country house, an axe embedded in the middle of the dining table. Beneath it, people lay sprawled in blood.
「Margaret Swinton, who boarded the elevator, testified that scenes of her family’s murder appeared endlessly. While Ms. Swinton was away, her family of four was murdered with an axe, and she was the first person to discover the scene...」
The scene matched the ghost-story post I had been reading.
‘Maybe it reads my thoughts. If I focus on how hungry I am...’
“The elevator has arrived.”
The doors opened.
The view of my regular restaurant appeared. The smell of food, the owner moving busily, all exactly as I had imagined.
I closed my eyes and emptied my thoughts.
I imagined not the destination I wanted, but another destination.
The one passage through which a ghost story could go beyond recreating something and connect to the original reality.
Then I began pressing the elevator buttons.
Ten. Four. Two. Six. Two. Ten.
And... five.
‘When you arrive in another world, pressing the buttons again in reverse starts your return to the original world.’
I defined this place as the other world and fixed reality as my destination.
For the ghost story to reach completion, the return to reality and the place where the ghost story occurred had to cross and connect.
“Liar.”
“...!”
The instant that short phrase sounded from the speaker, the elevator began descending at a furious speed with its doors still open.
“You wanted to come back.”
As I fell, I floated.
The upper part of the elevator stretched endlessly farther away, the scenery lengthening with it.
A voice called to me.
A voice I missed, yet did not know.
Do you know?
I do not.
No, I do.
The one thing I had been looking for...
“The doors are opening.”
The elevator stopped.
Fluorescent lights flickered through the opening doors, along with the murmur of people.
“Oh my. Aren’t you from unit 703? You were trapped in the elevator?”
The security guard suddenly leaned into the elevator.
Gravity. Movement. Weight.
The sensations that should naturally exist in an elevator.
Reality.
I ran outside at once.
“I’m alive...!”
My face must have been a complete mess. People might have been annoyed that I had occupied the elevator, but instead they only comforted me.
“Were you trapped for a long time? Didn’t you press the emergency button?”
“I pressed it at least twenty times...”
“Oh dear, something must be out. I need to call a technician first thing tomorrow. Just in case, use the stairs until the technician comes.”
Honestly, nobody would have ridden it even if they had been told they could.
Everyone hurried toward the stairs.
I raced up seven flights in one go. Only after checking the hallway and my door at least ten more times did I enter my home.
Hunger and exhaustion crashed over me at once.
‘I should at least have a beer.’
When I opened the plastic bag, a foul stench rose from it.
All the food that had been perfectly fine was rotten. It looked as though it had been sitting for weeks.
There is a new post on the Guestbook!
The laptop, whose lid I had definitely closed, was open and shining its screen directly at me.
It felt as though laughter was coming from the newest post on the Guestbook.
≪Will you respond to your good fortune?≫
“Ha. Are you insane?”
As if I would respond, I slammed the laptop shut with a Bang.
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