Jihae's Wisdom and the Iron Age Cannibal King

I was looking through the crack in the door, watching the red-haired man again. I was a bit worried about him. He kept pacing back and forth, constantly shifting his head from side to side, like he was expecting someone to jump out at him from the shadows of the alleyway.

But he wasn’t worried about that. He had been doing that for days now, ever since he had moved into this rundown building next to our laundry shop. At first he would just sit on his bed and drink wine all day. ‘Him being a drunkard’, my mother said with a sigh. But then he started going out into the street with a knife in his hand and walking around in circles there too, searching for something or someone. And that’s what worried me the most about him: if he was really looking for something or someone, why didn’t he go outside? Why did he only search here in this alleyway and not outside, where there were people passing by instead of just us?

I took one more look at him through the crack in the door before I turned around and ran outside. What I feared most was already happening and I had to warn my mother as soon as possible! The red-haired man had finished his walk around the room and now stood in front of the window with his back to me. He took one last swig from the bottle of wine before raising it high above his head and smashing it against the floorboards. As I turned around to run back inside, I saw him stand up straight and reach for something on top of the table behind him. He came closer and closer towards me, knife in hand, longing for blood dripping from his lips as he grinned at me through those crooked teeth of his…

“Jihae! What are you doing here?”

I looked up from my pillow to see my mother standing there with two buckets full of dirty laundry water in her hands. She frowned at me when she noticed how cold my forehead felt against the back of my hand. She placed both buckets next to me on top of my bed before sitting down next to me with a sigh. “Don’t you remember what happened last time? You scared yourself so much that you threw yourself right into that stranger who had brought us new customers! He could have hurt you badly if I hadn’t quickly pushed him away!”

I shook my head, but not because I didn’t remember anything. Not because I didn’t recall how afraid I was of that strange man who had suddenly entered our shop, threatening us with an axe while demanding money and food from us. No, I remembered everything clearly: how he had threatened us right after we had moved all our belongings out onto our porch for cleaning; how he had come up behind us when we were least expecting it; how frightened my mother had looked when she had seen him cover his face with a cloth mask before walking towards us menacingly…

My mother always told me stories about how cruel some men can be when they want money or food for themselves. How they take little children away from their families to sell them off as slaves somewhere far away; how they kidnap young women from their homes and lock them up in cages so that they can make babies with them until they die without ever seeing their loved ones again… But what if there were people even worse than them out there? What if there were people who didn’t need other people at all – no money, no food – but rather blood? What if there were people out there who fed off human flesh just like animals feed off meat?