Chapter 27 - Revised Edition, Side Story 1: The Birth of a Psychopath

You can only call someone a good person when you have merely brushed past them. Look at an entire lifetime, and there is no such thing as a good person in this world.

- Hannibal Lecter, from 'The Silence of the Lambs'

I had been different since childhood.

Kim Yang-suk says she was startled when I was born because, instead of crying, I simply looked around. She says she slapped my bottom for quite a while to make me cry, but eventually had to pinch me because I still wouldn't. Only then did I cry from the pain.

Ten months later.

I finally began to speak. Even then, I stood apart from other children. My first words weren't something short like Mommy, Daddy, or milk, but a complete sentence: "Mommy, give me food."

My mother, Kim Yang-suk, apparently realized for certain then that I was different from other children. As a result, I had the opportunity to learn all sorts of things from an early age under the banner of gifted education and the like. Yet my progress wasn't much different from that of the other children. In reality, I had already learned everything and was busy making ants fight, which I enjoyed, but outwardly I pretended I was still learning.

Perhaps even then I instinctively understood that standing out did me no good.

More time passed, and before I knew it, I was five.

Kim Yang-suk's zealous efforts to educate her gifted child had all but ended, and I was now growing up normally.

I played paper-tile flipping, marbles, territory games, and assorted video games with the neighborhood children. My favorite pastime, though, was catching insects, reptiles, amphibians, and the like and playing with them.

Ants, dragonflies, cicadas, scarab beetles, giant longhorn beetles, mantises, all sorts of grasshoppers and katydids, frogs, salamanders, tadpoles, and so on.

Most of the children's mothers disliked those creatures, so keeping them was always my job. Kim Yang-suk didn't particularly care about them as long as I was all right.

I usually played with them in my room.

Then one morning, Kim Yang-suk came into my room, noticed they were missing, and asked me about them.

"Huh? Bongsu, what did you do with all those bugs you caught with the other kids yesterday? You mustn't just throw things like that in the trash."

She rummaged through the wastebasket in my room as she spoke. But of course they weren't there.

"I ate them."

I think that was what I said. It wasn't wrong, after all.

Startled by my answer, Kim Yang-suk gave me a fierce scolding. She told me I mustn't eat things like that. She even told my father when he came home that evening, and I got into serious trouble.

Actually, all I had eaten was the frog. I had made the others fight one another. They killed and were killed. In the end, the frog survived, and I simply ate it. Though that did mean I had eaten them all.

I had proved I was stronger than the frog, but I was still weaker than my parents.

That was when I realized I mustn't do what I enjoyed where others could see me—especially people stronger than I was.

More time passed. I grew up healthy and well.

I never gave my parents grief or fell out of favor with my teachers. Quite the opposite: as a child, I was a model student by anyone's standards.

Kim Yang-suk praised me wherever she went.

A kind son who did well in school.

My teachers, too, often stroked my head and praised me.

The perfect son every mother compared her own children to, praised wherever he went.

That was who I, Dong Bongsu, was back then. When I behaved that way, people readily understood whatever I chose to do for fun, or supplied their own explanation: I had a keen experimental spirit.

But while parents might appreciate a high-achieving, much-praised perfect son, friends were bound to resent him. I didn't know that then.

I think I was in my second year of middle school.

I secretly brought home a few stray dogs and cats from the neighborhood and made them fight. Then some kids caught me secretly burying the dead dogs and cats in the school flower bed. I became an outcast because of it. For the rest of middle school, pursuing my hobbies and experiments became difficult.

That taught me another lesson. I had to make a good impression not only on people stronger than me, but on those who weren't, too, and I had to hide my hobbies from them.

More years passed, and I entered high school.

By then, I had become quite ordinary. On the outside, at least.

Average grades, no particular talents, just the high school kid next door who wouldn't stand out anywhere. That was me, Dong Bongsu.

But there was still one thing that wasn't ordinary.

Strangely, girls liked me and followed me around. At first, I couldn't understand why.

Eventually, despite the bother, I dated one of them. One day, I asked her a question.

"Why do you like me?"

"Oh my! Listen to you! How am I supposed to answer something so embarrassing...?"

After that answer, I did what she enjoyed and asked her again when she reached climax. Panting, she finally gave me the answer I wanted.

"Well... Because you're not ordinary... I guess?"

"What does that mean?"

"There's something different about you. You're ordinary, but somehow you don't seem ordinary. Does that make sense?"

That brought me a new realization. Even when I did nothing, I wasn't ordinary.

So I began deliberately adopting protective coloration. I played the sports everyone else played, watched the television shows everyone else watched, laughed when others laughed, and cried when others cried.

And at some point, people began saying things like this to me.

"Bongsu, you're such a good person."

"Thanks, Bongsu."

"Bongsu, could you take care of this?"

"Bongsu..."

"Bongsu..."

"Bong..."

Somewhere along the way, I had become a good person. Everyone felt comfortable around me. Men came to like me simply as a colleague or friend, and women saw me as nothing more than a coworker, an older schoolmate, or an older-brother figure.

Then, at last, I understood.

Only now had I acquired true protective coloration: ordinariness. Like a chameleon, wherever I went, I now became a "good, ordinary person" without even consciously trying.

At last, I had escaped people's notice completely.

Only then could I reclaim my true self.

It had taken a very long time.

Now it was time to unleash the desires I had suppressed for so long. Not on mere insects or animals, but on real prey.

Only before that prey could I shed my protective coloration and become my true self again.

Evil sometimes pretends to be good, or even transforms itself into goodness outright. Thus, when I cannot see the evil, I inevitably succumb to it in its guise of goodness. For counterfeit goodness is more alluring than true goodness.

- Franz Kafka, Czech literary master

"Hng. Ah!"

The woman's sultry cries. The young man's panting. Their strange harmony filled the richly appointed room. Pale moonlight shone through a large, old-fashioned lattice window.

It gleamed on the sweat coursing over the man's taut back and the woman's smooth thighs wrapped around his waist.

The man's movements grew faster and faster. The woman's moans gradually grew louder along with them.

Then, at one moment, the man's lower body shuddered. The woman's short moan cut hotly through the moonlight streaming through the window.

She had reached climax.

Immediately afterward, the man's sturdy upper body settled fully onto her ample breasts.

For a while, the world beyond the room seemed far away. Then the moment passed, and the man settled into her embrace.

"Ah..."

The woman gave a shiver in the afterglow of her climax and slowly opened her eyes. Her excited sigh mingled with the heat radiating from the man's hot back, briefly clouding her view. It lasted only an instant.

"Huh!?"

As the warmth mingled with her breath cleared and her vision returned, she saw something strange. She had had intercourse with the man in this room several times, so she knew its layout quite well. Dark as the night was, it wasn't so dark that she couldn't recognize the shape of the ceiling.

She widened her eyes and studied it carefully. She couldn't say exactly what was wrong, but there was definitely something subtly unnatural about it.

Unable to identify it, she was just about to tell the man lying on top of her, the owner of the room, when two points of vivid blue light suddenly appeared on the ceiling.

They looked like the glowing eyes of a nocturnal beast. No, looking closely, she realized they didn't merely resemble eyes. They really were eyes. The only difference was that they belonged not to a wild animal, but to an actual person.

The ceiling hadn't changed shape. Someone was clinging to it.

"Wh-who are you?"

The instinctive first words anyone utters upon unexpectedly encountering someone. They were also the last words she spoke in this world.

WHOOOSH! THUNK!

A dagger flew into her open mouth and lodged there. The blade pierced the very tongue that had been producing sultry moans of pleasure only moments before.

SPLAT!

As blood spurted from the woman's mouth onto the naked man's back, the masked intruder dropped to the floor.

SHICK!

The black-clad intruder's sword missed its intended target, the man, and instead cut through the hapless woman's neck. The single stroke severed her head. Yet it remained on the bed. The dagger lodged in her mouth had pierced the back of her head and driven deep into the bed beneath it.

SHING!

Having evaded the intruder's sword, the man left the bed the instant the attack began and drew a sword hanging on the wall, as though he had known the intruder was there all along. Without a moment's hesitation, he thrust at the black-clad figure.

It looked like a simple thrust, but appearances were deceptive. In truth, that single sword strike commanded every direction in which the intruder could move. If the intruder dodged in any direction, the man would unleash a variation of the move to cut off that escape route.

SWISH-SWISH-SWISH!

The man's sword moved with cunning deception as it pressed the attack against the black-clad intruder.