And in order to have enough cash on hand for a new hoard, he would need his son and daughter …
The man pondered this for a long time.
Then, using his money and all of his connections, he began searching for a good doctor.
As long as he had enough money, it was easy enough to find a clever, discreet doctor. The amount the doctor was asking for was probably an exorbitant sum to the doctor, but for the man, it was nothing more than a couple of sessions of draining his son’s body. And this whole incident being his son’s fault, he was prepared to make his son take responsibility for it by squeezing out even more gold than what the doctor was asking for.
The daughter was not surprised to see the unfamiliar doctor. For the most part, her pale face betrayed nary a trace of emotion. But as soon as the doctor opened his bag and took out his medicine bottles and surgical knives, his daughter began to scream.
It was a sound almost loud enough to bring the roof of the house down. In the room, everyone—the man, the doctor, and the servant girl brought in to help—blocked their ears and fell to the floor. The medicine bottles cracked and smashed to bits. And when the man came to, his son was standing at the door of the room.
The son, seeing that there were strangers in his sister’s room, tried to run in. The man jumped in his way. Turning his head, the man shouted for the doctor to quickly begin the surgery. As all the medicine bottles had shattered, the doctor did not bother with anesthesia and instead picked up his surgical knife. The man’s daughter tried to get away, but she was too heavy with child to move properly. As the daughter struggled, the servant girl quickly helped to pin her down. The doctor held his knife over the daughter’s stomach.
The daughter shouted in a piercing voice, “Let me go!”
Having just barely pushed his son out of the room and locked the door, the man now turned to her. His daughter looked him in the eye and shrieked once more, “Let me go!”
The man saw the glint of the fox’s golden eyes in his daughter’s pale face.
The doctor’s knife sliced into her belly. Her scream once again shook the house to its foundations.
By the time the son had broken through the door of his twin sister’s room, the doctor was already trying to take out the baby from her belly and the womb it was in. Covered in blood and roughly digging away at the man’s daughter with his knife, the doctor was past the point of seeming human.
The son lunged at the doctor and began ripping at his throat.
As the man approached to stop him, his son cried out like an animal and this time, lunged at the man.
The servant girl holding down the daughter screamed, and fled.
The man fell on the floor, hitting his head. His son mounted his chest and strangled him.
By the time the man opened his eyes again, the blood that overflowed from the bed had drenched the floor he was lying on. What met his eyes was the white, icy gaze of his daughter, whose body had gone cold, her shredded belly open to the air.
After his daughter’s funeral, the man quit his business and holed himself up in his house.
His son and the baby were nowhere to be found. The son did not even appear at his twin sister’s funeral.
The man’s servants took care of him at first. That the man’s daughter had died after a long sickness and his son had left home in shock after her death was all they knew about what had transpired. Which was why, when a mad former servant girl occasionally broke into the house, screaming strange things as she tried to get into the daughter’s room, they would try to wrest her from the door.
But not too long after, there were stories about how the servants had seen “something” in the house. At first, there were rumored glimpses of this “something” around the dead daughter’s room. Then it was seen in the corridors, the master bedroom, the servants’ quarters, the kitchen, and near the stables.
That “something” was beautiful. A soft, golden glow that undulated slowly, leaving behind a faintly glittering fog in its wake. This golden fog was cool and pale, making one want to approach it when gazing at it, or place one’s hand inside it when next to it.
Anyone who was seduced into going near the beautiful golden fog became insane.
The moment one bent over and touched the golden traces on the path, the golden light paused and turned around. It had eyes and a mouth and was bleeding from its split belly, and it extended its long, white, almost clear arms toward spectators and rummaged inside them with its long fingers that were as white as the moonlight and cold as the snow on a winter mountain, muttering: