| What Remains Of Yang Jeongin | STRAY KIDS

|PROLOGUE|

Prologue

"This isn't going to make a lot of sense to you in the beginning, and I'm sorry about that."

This isn't going to make a lot of sense to you in the beginning, and I'm sorry about that.

Every story, every person, every life you read is jumbled and seemingly unreal. I could try and give you the most realistic explanation as to how or why all of this happened, but even then... it would still seem too surreal to believe.

So, I'll start with the house.

I lived here until I was 9, my mother shoving us along when my brother, Hyunjin, died. The rooms, the many many rooms inside the house, were restricted; closed off by my father in a fit of a rage when great grandpa Chan insisted on telling us all of the stories of the family curse. But that didn't stop Chan.

He drilled peepholes out of spite.

When my brother died... there was a shift. Not a shift in what the family had to disappointingly endure, but in the direction everything had been going. You'll know what I'm talking about later.

I hadn't been back since Hyunjin's funeral, but arriving at the large house on a small island off the coast of Korea made my chest twist and turn until I couldn't breathe. The mailbox was filled to the brim in unopened envelopes and bills, all labeled in bright red words reading 'urgent' The house remained untouched, breathing in gentle puffs of breath and staring down my every move with eerie excitement as if it had been waiting for me all these years.

But I could not share that same excitement. Even after all of these years, the house still gave me that same feeling it always did, but it was only upon my arrival, ten years later, I was able to identify it as fear. But I wasn't sure if it was the house or the curse that I was afraid of.

I still don't.

I wasn't all too surprised to find that the key my father left behind didn't fit into the front door. It was never that easy. But I managed to find my way. I always did.

But... crawling through the doggy door wasn't as easy as it used to be.

I'm not sure if you'll ever visit the house, so I'll try and describe it to you the best I can.

Great Grandpa Chan loved books about as much as he loved music, so the walls were built in with bookshelves that not only held endless amounts of literature, it held records, CD's and instruments equally as so. However, despite the house being a library, Chan had his own personal library. There was a time that he told me that every single story was stashed in that room, but my father sealed it off before I could go inside as a kid.

I wished he hadn't sealed off the rooms... but something told me that whatever would come out of this, it would be my childhood curiosity vanishing into thin air.