The man led them naturally to the front desk. The moment he stepped behind it and straightened his posture, it felt as though even the flow of the air had been put in order.
“How may I assist you?”
The absurdity of the situation made the director laugh.
“You’re asking us that again?”
“It is occupational habit. When I stand in a place meant for a certain role, the words tied to it come out naturally.”
“Ah... right. That sort of thing slips out sometimes. It’s what happens when you get older.”
Lee Seon-hae, who herself often had filming terminology slip into everyday speech, understood at once what he meant. It was a trait common to people whose language at work had almost split into a separate register.
“We’d like to stay here.”
“May I ask how many days you are considering?”
“Mm, let me see first....”
The director turned to the others standing behind her.
“Guys, how long was our scouting trip supposed to last again?”
“If you mean the guesthouse, we had it booked for a week.”
The director looked back at the man.
“We’d like to stay for a week. Is that possible?”
“Of course. Do you have a preferred floor or location?”
“No, nothing like that. If I had to pick, maybe a high floor? I feel like the view would be nice.”
“Understood. I’ll reflect that preference as much as possible in your room assignment.”
What he handed over was an old-fashioned room key attached to a rectangular key tag. The solid weight of it settling into her palm felt unfamiliar, and Director Lee Seon-hae found it strangely fascinating.
‘It all feels unreal in more ways than one.’
Like handling a prop from a movie....
“I will place you on the twenty-first floor.”
“Oh, that’s really high up.”
“However, our hotel operates all guest rooms with a maximum occupancy of two. Would it be acceptable to divide your party between the adjacent Room 1 and Room 2?”
“Ah, yes. That’s fine.”
“Thank you. In that case, before check-in, there are a few precautions I should explain.”
A smooth explanation followed.
“As I mentioned earlier, we are presently in a soft-opening period, so there may be shortcomings across the service as a whole. Your use of the rooms themselves should not present any great inconvenience, but some shared facilities are currently unavailable.”
Having listened quietly, Writer Hong carefully interjected,
“Excuse me, then what about meals?”
“I apologize for the inconvenience. Most of the guests currently staying with us were informed of the soft-opening conditions in advance and have, in most cases, brought their own food supplies.”
“You mean... we’ll need to prepare our meals ourselves?”
“It is regrettable that you have found yourselves in such an exceptional circumstance. Would it be acceptable if I first checked whether there is any convenience we may be able to provide on our end, and then informed you again?”
“Ah, yes.”
“Thank you for your generous understanding. We will do our utmost to minimize any inconvenience.”
Behind them, the staff whispered quietly among themselves.
“This place looks really expensive....”
“Oh, don’t you worry, darlings. I’m paying.”
“Director, I love you.”
“When else am I supposed to show off my money if not times like this?”
The director pulled out her card.
“Please charge it. How much is it?”
“…….”
“...Excuse me?”
“We will not be charging a separate accommodation fee.”
“What?”
“We are still in the soft-opening period.”
As the man’s eyes curved like crescent moons, Director Lee Seon-hae—who had seen no shortage of entertainers in her life—found herself thinking,
‘He really knows how to use his body.’
In their industry, saying that someone “used their body well” did not mean they had good reflexes or good posture. It meant everything from the angle of a smile, to the tilt of the head, to the amount of time the gaze rested in one place.
‘He knows exactly how he ought to smile to look his best.’
She had been thinking it all along, but he truly was someone who smiled with consummate skill.
“To demand payment when we are unable to provide services beyond the guest rooms would be unreasonable even by my standards.”
“Oh my. Is that so?”
“If, instead, you would share with us any inconveniences you experience during your stay, it would be of the greatest help to us.”
The director glanced toward the other guests in the lobby.
“But wouldn’t the other guests complain that it’s unfair?”
“Those currently staying in this hotel already understand what kind of hotel this is.”
“What kind of hotel?”
“A place that does not operate service facilities, and where even meal service is highly restricted. I regret that I was unable to explain that point to you beforehand.”
“Oh, no, there’s nothing for you to apologize for. If anything, we’re the ones....”
“Our side was at fault in the breach of courtesy, so something of this level is a benefit quite easily extended within my discretion.”
“...If you put it that way, I suppose there’s nothing else to say.”
She had been curious to see just how much the place charged, but after he said it like that, it became difficult to press the point.
‘Maybe they haven’t even settled on an exact price yet?’
If it was still in soft opening, that was possible.
‘Or if not....’
As she was thinking, the man continued smoothly,
“We will have your luggage carried to the rooms.”
“Ah, it’s still in the car.”
The man glanced once over the staff standing beside her, then smiled again at Director Lee Seon-hae.
“If you would only open the car doors, our staff can carry in whatever items you require.”
“Our things are all mixed together.”
“If you are concerned about private belongings being exposed, you may personally sort out only the luggage you wish to bring inside, and we will carry just those items in.”
“Ah, then let’s do that.”
The group brought in their suitcases and bags from the car, having packed with a week-long scouting trip in mind.
As they dragged the luggage into the hotel lobby, the waiting staff approached soundlessly.
“Our staff will take responsibility for carrying everything up to your rooms.”
“Thank you.”
“It is only natural that we do so.”
“Mm. Is there anything else we ought to hear?”
“By anything else... what do you mean?”
“You said you’re still in soft opening. It feels like there ought to be other precautions besides not being able to use the service facilities.”
“…….”
Instead of answering immediately, the man extended a hand and courteously indicated the direction of the elevator.
“...I hope you have not forgotten what I told you a moment ago.”
The director looked at him. I hope you have not forgotten. It was not the sort of phrasing that suited him. They had only just met, but throughout their entire encounter he had maintained a thoroughly professional tone.
And yet that was unmistakably a personal warning.
“...Anything else?”
“Perhaps because of the rain, a great many guests are currently concentrated on the seventh-floor rooms.”
“Because of the rain?”
“There are guests who are particularly fond of rainy days.”
“I see, but....”
“If you require anything further or have any questions, please contact the front desk. We will respond immediately.”
“Ah, all right.”
“I hope your time here will be a peaceful one.”
The intonation was natural. The flow, however, was not. Through posture and tone alone, the man skillfully dictated the atmosphere.
The group watched the manager’s back as he walked away.
“…….”
...It all felt strangely unreal.
“...Director, what are we doing about dinner?”
“Ah, I should’ve asked that too.”
She said that, but her body felt heavy. Driving through a torrential downpour was exhausting work.
‘And he only just said he would look into meals for us.’
Even if they asked now, it was not as though a different answer would appear.
“Shall we go upstairs and sort out the luggage first?”
“Yes, let’s.”
“Isn’t it strange? Keys instead of cards?”
“You don’t often see that in a hotel this size.”
Normally, they used cards.
“For the atmosphere, maybe?”
“It certainly is a classical atmosphere.”
“Exactly.”
Just then, the elevator arrived.
The gold doors opened smoothly, without the slightest scrape.
“What a peculiar hotel.”
***
“Oh, my God.”
The moment the door opened, Director Lee Seon-hae exclaimed.
“Were we assigned a suite?”
“At this point... isn’t this basically a house?”
“Honestly, it might be better than my house.”
One of the staff, who had only recently managed to buy a home by stretching every last resource to the limit, added bitterly,
“It looks well over three hundred square meters.”
“What kind of hotel room even is this....”
“It really does look like a suite.”
“But didn’t he say this place only had a hundred-something rooms?”
“One hundred thirty-five.”
“He said each room was spacious. Then are all the rooms like this?”
“Oh, come on. Who would stay here if that were true? It would cost a fortune....”
At the staff’s chatter, the director’s expression turned slightly odd.
“Director?”
“Ah, well. I couldn’t say it earlier.”
“What is it? Why do you look like that?”
“The lounge table in the lobby was designer.”
“What designer?”
“...An expensive one.”
The writer asked,
“Do you know the name?”
“Come closer.”
After hearing the name, the writer looked horrified.
“...Why on earth is something like that sitting in a hotel lobby?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“It must’ve gotten drenched by the rain.”
“They covered it with towels, more or less, so maybe it’ll be all right.”
“No, really, why would that be in a lobby....”
“Let’s look around the room first.”
The group began inspecting the interior with noticeably more careful steps. A bedroom, bathroom, and toilet were there as expected, but beyond those lay unfamiliar spaces.
“...What is this room?”
“An office, maybe?”
“Why would a hotel room have an office?”
“Suites sometimes do.”
There was one office, and one dining room.
“What’s this, then?”
“A place to eat...?”
And one sitting room.
“What is this room supposed to be for?”
“Let’s just call it a living room.”
“What do you mean, let’s just call it that?”
“It’s just a living room.”
“Ah. Right....”
The group looked at one another.
“Were we really supposed to accept this room?”
“At this rate, who knows, we might wake up hauled off onto some little boat.”
“At this level, I’d almost accept it even if they harvested my organs.”
“Accept what, exactly? Honestly, what is wrong with you people?”
“Director, Director. Let’s just go pay. I’ll contribute too.”
“So will I.”
“I’m feeling way too burdened now.”
“And now I’m finally starting to get suspicious.”
“Now? I found it suspicious from the lobby onward.”
“The writer is secretly a lot more timid than he looks.”
“Please call it caution.”
After the uproar, the staff moved on to the practical issue.
“So how are we splitting the rooms? Three women and one man.”
“There are two beds, so we just split two and two. Writer Hong and I can share, and you two can sleep together.”
“We don’t mind, but... Writer, are you all right with that?”
“...Yes, well... we were supposed to sleep together at the guesthouse anyway....”
If anything, it was better this way, since the rooms were separated from each other. It would be far more comfortable than the guesthouse. Naturally. It rivaled an ordinary suite with ease.
Once they had finished dividing the team and sorting out the luggage—
“Darling.”
The director called to the writer.
“Writer Hong, come talk with me.”
“I was wondering when you’d bring it up. Did you find something out?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds like we’re undercover investigators.”
“That’s honestly not far from how I feel.”
The two sank deep into the sofa in the sitting room.
“My first guess is... this feels like a members-only hotel.”
“A members-only hotel...?”
Writer Hong was serious about research, so he understood the meaning at once.
“Do places like that usually exist in locations like this? In Gapyeong, no less?”
“In sparsely populated places, they do crop up from time to time.”
There were spaces in this world whose names and locations were not made public. Thoroughly private hotels one could not even step into without a recommendation from an existing member, no matter how rich one might be.
“Places like that usually run on a membership system, or member invitations.”
“...It’s not really my area of expertise, so I don’t know much about them.”
“They’re not the sort of background that comes up often in our genre.”
The director recalled what she had seen earlier.
“You saw the lobby staff, right? Not to mention the manager who guided us. Every last one of them looked extraordinary. And the service was impeccable.”
“Yes, well, that much is true.”
“There are places like that—facilities built so their owners can use them among themselves without sharing with outsiders.”
“By outsiders, do you mean ordinary common people?”
“That’s right. Or maybe they built it as a hobby.”
“Who builds a hotel as a hobby?”
“If you have too much money, maybe you do. I think this place may be one of those.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Still, this place doesn’t seem quite that strict....”
“It looks strict enough to me.”
“No, think about it. They let nonmembers like us in without much trouble, didn’t they? He said it was within the manager’s discretion, sure, but even getting through the entrance wasn’t especially difficult.”
It was a place in the mountains they could never have reached if they had not gotten lost. Put another way, it was a place one could stumble into by chance if one did get lost.
“Usually places like that either hide the entrance entirely, or block it off.”
“...Doesn’t it feel like we’ve come somewhere we weren’t supposed to, just in a different sense from what we were thinking before?”
“But the manager said this, didn’t he? Since he, as the Operator here, had accepted us without issue, who would object? Doesn’t that sound strange, even for an owner?”
“Well, for an owner he certainly is brimming with confidence.”
“If the people who come to a hotel like this are all a pretty formidable sort, then saying he can brush off their complaints means quite a lot. That’s why I wondered whether it might just be a hobby.”
“The more I think about it, the more it feels like we’ve come somewhere we shouldn’t have.”
“At the very least, he’s someone who holds authority beyond that of a mere owner. In other words, it isn’t a place built to make money. But at the same time, its security isn’t all that strict either....”
“So it’s a hobby?”
“Let’s say... that it’s a possibility.”
There were still strange points left over.
“I still don’t understand why a person like that is doing the work of a general manager. It could genuinely be a hobby, sure, but for that, he provided service far too skillfully.”
She added,
“And he smiles remarkably well.”
She did not mean merely that he was kind, or that he smiled a lot.
Ordinary people rarely know what muscles they use when they smile, or how far the corners of their mouths rise. But that was clearly the smile of someone who knew exactly how he ought to appear in order to carry the most value.
“There are actors out there who do nothing but act all day and still have no idea how they look on camera.”
“So what you’re saying, Director, is....”
“That he probably isn’t just some idle rich man with too much money. It’s hard to believe a person who handles his own body that well would bury himself in a place this remote without any purpose.”
“…….”
“Why are you so quiet?”
“I think we’ve come somewhere we shouldn’t have.”
“You’re scared? How many times have you said that now? It’s the same world where people live, so what place is there that we can’t go?”
“It just feels like a different world.”
“If you say that, I feel terribly lonely.”
“To be honest, I sometimes feel a sense of distance from you too, Director.”
“You can’t go creating distance between fellow artists, Writer Hong.”
The writer let out a pained groan.
“Have you been to places like this often?”
“Not often. Once or twice?”
“That already sounds like a lot to me.”
“But the places I’ve been were far stricter than this.”
“You certainly keep saying strict a lot.”
“More importantly, they weren’t even in Korea. And even then, I only went because I followed one of my uncles when I was younger. I wasn’t a member there either.”
“What about now?”
“Of course not now either. Do you know how much money it costs every month just to keep that kind of membership card? If I had that kind of money, I’d make movies instead.”
“That may be true, but... I don’t know... something about this feels off.”
The director shrugged.
“It is unusual. Normally places like that are resorts rather than hotels. Or they only allow long-term stays, or they give you an entire floor to yourself, or they assign you a private chef or dedicated attendant....”
“You keep talking about some other world entirely.”
“Compared to those, I’d say this place is fairly free.”
“I already thought this was extravagant enough.”
“But if you follow that logic through, there’s something strange.”
“Everything about this place looks strange to me.”
“No, listen.”
The director tapped the table.
“In the lobby, the manager said this, remember? He told us not to forget what he had said earlier.”
“...That the guests here are a bit eccentric?”
“In a place where the service is that perfect, the general manager openly spoke ill of the guests.”
“Maybe that’s just the sort of person he is.”
“If he were that sort of person, it would’ve shown the entire time. But except for that one moment, he never said anything remotely similar, even though he’s effectively above the guests as the owner.”
“Come to think of it, if he’s the owner, why is he taking on the role of general manager himself? This isn’t some tiny guesthouse. It’s a hotel this large. Isn’t it too much for one person to handle one by one?”
“In other words, there’s a reason he has to.”
“He has to personally manage this hotel in detail?”
“That got me thinking—here, the hotel itself isn’t the main point.”
The hotel itself did not look like the true centerpiece.
“The guests—or perhaps the facilities—are the main point.”
“…….”
The writer frowned.
“In a hotel this size, aren’t the guests always the main point?”
“The hotels I was talking about earlier make the hotel itself the main point. Those oh-so-important guests come to them of their own accord. In other words, people suited to a special hotel gather there.”
“And here?”
“What if we think about it the other way around?”
“A hotel built for the guests?”
“A hotel built to suit very special guests.”
“And the general manager described those special guests as eccentric.”
The director crossed her arms and thought.
“When we asked to stay here, he didn’t look pleased. For someone that good at controlling his expression, if he showed that much, it means he wanted us to notice.”
“Then couldn’t he have just kicked us out?”
“There must be a reason he couldn’t. But it didn’t look like fear of receiving a bad review from us, at the very least.”
“He owns a hotel like this, so that much is obvious. Then was he really, sincerely worried because the guests here are eccentric?”
“That may not have been something he said lightly.”
The facilities the director had mentioned were usually overseas. Korea was too small a country for that sort of privacy to be easily maintained. Building one domestically may have forced it to become this comparatively ‘open.’
“But then why go out of the way to build it domestically in the first place?”
Was it simply to keep it nearby for enjoyment? But if so, the location was deep in the mountains. An unpaved road, with helicopters and private planes hardly an option.
“If the goal had been to create an impressive domestic retreat, they wouldn’t have built it here.”
Setting the road conditions aside, at the very least they ought to have left a route open through the sky. It would have been common sense to clear away the surrounding trees and secure even a helicopter landing pad.
“But the building and the forest practically touch, and he said the rooftop is a walking garden. That means there isn’t even enough space to land a helicopter. The only access route is that terrible unpaved road.”
Of course, there might be some secret entrance she did not know about, but judging only from the visible conditions, this was a place that had chosen isolation for itself.
“So what is this place truly for? It feels almost as though it exists for the sake of hiding something....”
“...But if that were the case, wasn’t the entrance far too openly accessible?”
The writer objected.
“People like us could get lost and wander in by mistake, and there was nothing there to stop us. If the security were really tight, they’d have put up iron gates and marked it as private property.”
“Exactly. They could’ve fenced it off as private land if they wanted. But instead the road was simply left open. It may be unpaved, but the security isn’t especially tight.”
“If it were a place meant to hide something, it would have been sealed off far more firmly.”
“Unless letting outsiders in was one of the purposes. As in, they didn’t bother closing it because it already suits their intentions.”
“Couldn’t it be that they want some small amount of publicity even among outsiders? In the end, if nobody hears of a place, it can’t do business. Hobby or not.”
“If that were the case, he seemed far too passive... if anything, he looked like he wanted us gone....”
At the director’s mutter, the writer’s face settled into a look of decision.
“Shall we leave?”
“At this hour?”
“At this hour, precisely.”
“Why? It’s interesting.”
“I’m not the sort who risks his life for the sake of entertainment.”
“Oh, come on. It’s just a guess. Just something fun to talk about. People say all kinds of things in private. This is no more than the sort of ghost-story speculation people trade during orientation.”
“I hate even that. I’m already scared enough, so please don’t start talking about ghost stories and all that.”
“I keep telling you, Writer Hong, you scare too easily.”
Seon-hae teased him with a laugh.
The hotel’s general manager was clearly favorable toward them. The proof was that even while behaving as though he were bound by his role, he had still offered a private warning. At the very least, so long as he remained here, nothing dangerous would happen.
‘Probably.’
So it would be enough if they exercised caution on their own.
“Still, aren’t you curious? A place like this would make great inspiration.”
“…….”
“You’re not denying it.”
See?
Birds of a feather.
***
“...Why.”
“Hello?”
“Why couldn’t he say one simple thing with that perfectly functioning mouth and tell them to leave?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of bastard is it?”
“...Yes, no, yes....”
“What kind of bastard?”
Lee Yeon-woo, who had nearly died once from blood pressure alone, ground his teeth.
“To kidnap and confine me was bad enough, and now it wants to turn me into this kind of filthy criminal.”
That was unforgivable.