*This work borrows some settings from Marius Petipa’s ballet <Le Talisman> as motifs.
*All materials appearing in this work are fictional and based on the author’s imagination.
The man returned covered in blood.
According to a witness’s testimony, he fell from a running horse.
No one knows how a man with skilled horsemanship made such a mistake.
Because the place where he fell from the horse happened to be a steep cliff path, the man who plunged down the cliff suffered extremely severe injuries.
Even as the physician visited several times, he did not regain consciousness, so everyone who knew him was sick with worry and trembling with fear.
They had no choice.
The man was the sole successor of House Eseldor.
Having lost his parents early and with no siblings, and still unmarried, everything depended on his safety—not only House Eseldor but also the livelihoods of the servants who had served the family.
The day the long-awaited news arrived was about fifteen days after the accident.
However, since the patient’s condition was still poor, only a very small number of servants, including the physician and nurses, were allowed to visit him.
Ayesha received permission to face him only after two more weeks had passed since the man regained consciousness.
She straightened her clothes and headed to the man’s bedroom.
Knock, knock—she knocked and waited a moment, and an answer came back.
“Come in.”
Perhaps because he had been ill for a long time, the resonance of his voice was noticeably lower than usual.
Ayesha carefully opened the door and stepped in.
A pungent smell of medicine rushed into the bedroom.
Mixed with it was a faint smell of blood.
The reason she somehow felt strange must have been that this sharp, acrid smell of illness did not suit the man at all.
Originally, a deep juniper scent used to drift from the man.
That was because the desk and chair in the office where he spent much time were made of juniper.
It was her first time setting foot in the man’s bedroom, but because he had just passed such a precarious period, she had no leisure even to glance around the unfamiliar space.
She went straight to the bed.
He was lying in bed with his eyes loosely lowered.
On the bandage wrapped around the side of his head, browned bloodstains showed faintly.
Even so, it was relatively good.
On the first day the man was brought in, servants carrying baskets filled with bloody bandages and cloth went back and forth between the bedroom and the laundry room constantly.
It was bleeding to the extent that one wondered whether a person could lose that much blood without endangering his life.
Ayesha gazed blankly at the bruises remaining all over the man’s face.
Because she clearly remembered how beautiful his face had been before he was injured, and how elegantly and kindly he had treated her, his current appearance—shut in his room for a month and bedridden—felt all the more utterly wretched.
Ayesha carefully began.
“……I heard you were badly hurt. How are you feeling?”
Anyone could see he was a patient suffering from a long illness.
Even as an empty courtesy, no greeting asking whether he was all right came out.
The man slowly opened his eyes.
As if his vision were dizzy, he frowned and blinked his eyelids three or four times to focus.
At last, light returned to his pupils.
It was a gaze as if a strip of deep night had been cut away and set there.
Within the dense darkness lurked a chilling glint.
A sudden eerie sensation brushed down her spine.
The man’s dark gaze was utterly unfamiliar.
The usual soft and gentle atmosphere had vanished completely, and a coldness sharpened like steel filled it.
What is this eeriness?
Ayesha involuntarily took a step back.
However, the eyes of unfathomable depth still followed her.
Though it was merely a single gaze and could not possibly have physical force, she strangely felt as if her hands and feet were bound.
With a gaze that felt tactile, the man scanned every part of her—from her features to her expression, the clothes she wore, and the posture in which she stood.
Until that gaze that had examined her thoroughly fell away, Ayesha stood frozen in place, holding her breath.
Only then did the man smirk.
“So we finally meet?”
His first words were chilling.
Could it be that he had felt hurt because the visit was so late?
If that were the case, today was the earliest day she could come.
Ayesha hastily explained.
“I kept requesting a visit all this time, but permission was not easily granted……”
“Should I call this welcome?”
She was cut off.
Ayesha faltered.
Had he originally been a person with such a mocking way of speaking?
He was not.
As far as she knew, this man was a gentleman among gentlemen, conducting himself flawlessly.
“Your taste is certainly unwavering. How did you find her?”
Words she could not understand followed.
Ayesha was left speechless and stared at the man.
But she could not look long.
It was because, oddly, goosebumps kept rising.
“A beauty with blonde hair and blue-violet eyes. Yes, even I was a little surprised just now. This is interesting.”
Why is he speaking as if from another person’s perspective?
As if he were a complete stranger, as if he were subtly mocking her.
Wait—a complete stranger?
The thought that had come unbidden summoned a certain memory.
“Ayesha. ‘It’ is circling around me. It is eyeing my body, watching for its chance.”
With a gaze completely different from now, and in a much softer tone, the man before her had cautiously confessed his secret to Ayesha.
“I call it an ‘evil spirit.’”
An evil spirit.
She had thought it was absurd nonsense.
But the man absolutely believed in the existence of the evil spirit circling him, and he feared it.
“The evil spirit will someday take over my body. When I let down my guard, or when I become endlessly weak, so that I lose control over my body, it will never miss that chance and will crawl into me.”
At the time, a passage from that conversation, which she had dismissed as the man’s overactive imagination, suddenly flashed through her mind.
“Perhaps the evil spirit may try to create for itself an opportunity to plunder my body. Judging by the persistent obsession it has with me, it probably will.”
Surely not.
A possibility she had never considered surfaced.
Her heart plummeted to her feet.
Could this make sense?
Could such a thing be possible?
Though she was still half in doubt, when she looked at the man whose atmosphere had completely changed before and after the riding accident, it was hard to shake off the doubt that perhaps—
No matter how she thought about it, it was strange.
If there was some cause behind the fatal mistake that a man who had seemed to live a life far removed from mistakes suddenly made, one that even endangered his own life…….
Could it really be so?
Could the very accident in which he fell from the horse have been the result of the evil spirit’s interference?
“Therefore, I absolutely need Ayesha’s help. Still, I am relieved that Ayesha arrived at this mansion at the right time. As a spirit medium, you must know well how to handle an evil spirit.”
At the time, not knowing how to react to such a bizarre topic, she had merely laughed awkwardly and let it pass.
But in this moment, facing the man who had suffered greatly from severe injuries, intuition was telling her.
The being before her eyes was not the Kirix Eseldor she knew.
The sense of incongruity she felt the moment they met was an alarm bell rung by human instinct.
In his gaze as he looked at her, in his voice whose pitch had changed, in his speech from which politeness had vanished, and even in his attitude toward her, a chilling shiver ran through her.
“……Who are you?”
Ayesha raised her guard.
“Me? Who do you think I am?”
The man retorted, pulling the corner of his mouth askew.
It was a smile that would have looked charming to people who did not know the circumstances, but to Ayesha, who doubted the man’s identity, it looked terrifyingly sinister.
“You, what is your name?”
“Why? Do I not seem like the guy you know?”
She nearly screamed.
Ayesha barely maintained her composure.
She smoothed her expression so as not to reveal agitation, but her mind was clamoring.
This answer made it clear.
The man did not deny it even after noticing her suspicion.
The thing she had been half doubting all along had really happened.
This man before her was the evil spirit.
He had finally been devoured by the evil spirit.
“What did you do to him?”
Ayesha pressed.
Her heart pounded.
It beat so hard that it felt as if her heart were at her ears.
“Ah, so you want to see that guy?”
The evil spirit replied calmly.
Then, unlike his smiling mouth, his eyes coldly sunken, he looked straight at her and added.
“What a pity. You won’t be able to meet him again.”
