Psychedelic Moon
Kim Hyung-nam’s solo exhibition had no choice but to close early in the end. Seongran Gallery was one of the few large galleries equipped with exhibition facilities for every kind of contemporary art, from simple paintings to massive sculptures. With numerous other artworks already in storage, a crowded exhibition schedule, and Kim Hyung-nam’s own forceful insistence, the show simply had to end. But that was not all—he also voided the consignment sales contract through Seongran Gallery and disposed of every painting in a single bulk sale. The critical reception of this chaotic move turned out less harsh than Kim Hyung-nam had expected.
The moment he vacated the space, Choi Seok-jun’s solo exhibition Color and Wave was promptly booked in its place. Choi Seok-jun was a veteran of the scene who had served as a national exhibition judge four times and was Kim Hyung-nam’s senior from school; people immediately assumed Kim Hyung-nam had yielded the gallery to curry favor with him.
Of course a figure of Choi Seok-jun’s stature would never pressure a junior so far beneath him simply to stage a show at a private gallery, yet that was how the public saw it.
Meanwhile the small art broker who had bulk-purchased the paintings from Seongran Gallery for two hundred million won filed a theft report on every single Chae-wol-hwa the very next day. Absurdly, the only insurance covering the premises was an ordinary comprehensive business policy; neither the insurer nor the police investigated with any depth, making it a rather classical method of spiriting goods into the underworld. Tax officials were no fools, of course, and came down hard with eyes blazing—but when the parties themselves insisted they had been thoroughly robbed, there was little anyone could do.
One-off transactions of this sort never even appear in double books, so a tax audit would never uncover them. And tax audits? Even Korean medicine doctors and physicians sail through them with their eyes closed. How could an art broker seasoned by the underworld ever get his tail stepped on?
One morning, sunlight spilled across the piles of trash bags stacked in every alley. A truck rolled into the mouth of the lane. It looked like a courier company’s vehicle; it stopped in front of a small building and the driver climbed down.
“Hmm.”
The young man lifted his phone, then seemed to decide something was wrong. He went down to the basement of the building and knocked. No answer came from within.
“……”
The driver pulled his cap low and walked back out of the basement. After glancing around he headed for the hole-in-the-wall store across the street. The sign said Jeil Mart, but it was nothing more and nothing less than a tiny corner shop. An old woman sat nodding off behind the counter.
“Excuse me. The people who lived in that basement—where did they go?”
“Eh? Ah, come in. Need something?”
The driver sighed and took off his cap. Brilliant green-dyed hair, damp with sweat, spilled out from underneath.
“The people in the basement, I mean.”
“Ah. Dunno. Haven’t seen ’em around lately. Don’t think they moved, though.”
“……”
At those words the driver shoved a hand into his pocket and returned to the basement. The door was an ordinary shutter, yet he opened it lightly with a set of picks he drew from his pocket.
Click!
A chain held it from the inside, however, so it would open only so far. He produced something that looked like a thin toothpaste tube, squeezed a little onto the chain, and lit it with a lighter. With a sharp hiss the brass chain burned through and snapped; only then did the door swing free.
“Deok-yeon! Deok-yeon!”
Still wearing his shoes he stepped inside and looked around. There was no sign of life, yet the furniture remained exactly as it had been. He went straight to Deok-yeon’s room and opened the door.
Thud.
The cap slipped from the driver’s hand. The basement was so utterly silent that the soft fall of a small cloth cap sounded like thunder.
“……”
In early summer the basement held just enough moisture and cool air to settle the spirit. And it was far too quiet.
Ah, how long did that silence last?
Without a word the driver turned and walked out. He went to the truck, unloaded a large crate—probably a frame of some kind—by himself, and dragged it down into the basement.
Inside, the place was quiet as a grave. The driver took out a knife, cut away the paper and twine wrapping the frame, and stood it against one wall. A nail was already driven in; hanging the picture was no trouble at all. He hung it himself, then fussed carefully over the left-right balance.
After wrestling with the painting for a while he picked the fallen cap off the floor, dusted it, and jammed it back on his head. With the cap pulled low in the dark basement a deep shadow fell across his face.
“……Well then.”
Lowering his head as he settled the cap, he looked for all the world as if he were saying goodbye. Cap pressed down, both hands shoved deep into his pockets, he turned his back on the basement and vanished.
A basement of roughly twenty pyeong.
Not particularly large, yet now it felt excessively wide and hollow.
On the wall that admitted no light hung a painting of a moon weeping in the dark.
So……
We call it…… Psychedelic Moon.
The old basement, its walls stacked high with desiccant packs, was filled with wooden crates. At a glance they looked like apple boxes, yet every one of them was packed with high explosives—mainly C-4 and TNT. Twenty boxes at forty kilograms each: a full eight hundred kilograms of high explosive.
And the warehouse held more than just explosives. Spare parts for every kind of firearm, the matching ammunition, domestic primers and fuses made by Hanwha—it looked for all the world like a military supply depot.
“Managed to gather this much, eh.”
Gazing at the crates, Se-gun allowed himself a satisfied smile. With this quantity of explosives he could blow the Tetra Anax headquarters sky-high ten times over. Of course that assumed he could get them inside, but even so half the operation was now in place.
“The real problem is still the Jinma.”
Se-gun fed the printed ledgers into a shredder and left the warehouse behind. Tetra Anax’s power lay in information; there was no way they were unaware he had stockpiled this much ordnance. With every other vampire hunter already dead, the fact that they had simply left him alone until now was stranger still. True, Se-gun’s earlier stunt of detonating a bomb in the middle of the city had put the police on high alert, yet Tetra Anax could crash an Apache helicopter into the heart of downtown and still bury the incident. That they would pull their punches over something like this was something Se-gun found hard to understand.
The successful businessman Row Gibson had spent the entire morning being tormented by consultants. Even a vampire, once he became a businessman, found the life of leisure far from easy.
“Damn it. Out! Get out!”
He drove a businessman who wanted him to buy company shares out the door as if shooing away a peddler.
“Huff, huff, huff. Ruthless bastards. The heat’s already making me irritable, and these humans are tougher than I am—a vampire.”
He flipped on the air conditioner and sank into his chair. The sunlight was not especially strong and a stiff wind was blowing. A storm making landfall, perhaps? If so, a little use of magic and Wilhelm would be free to move by afternoon.
Just then the messenger on the computer atop his desk opened. Row Gibson glanced at it without much thought. Astonishingly, the information had come through a vampire-related channel—and from the Korean branch of Tetra Anax, no less.
“Sending a message in broad daylight? What could it be?”
Elliot was a vampire powerful enough to overcome sunlight, yet as a member of Tetra Anax’s line he was not treated as a true Jinma. Even for a Jinma, however, the sun remained an irritating presence. Only a handful of vampires with a certain social standing—himself among them—were forced to operate in daylight like this. Thinking as much, Phantom opened the attached file. It was a PDF document, yet its contents were utterly simple: a general circular concerning “Economic Blockade Measures against Vampire Hunters and Sarhyuk.”
Suspension of every credit card in Sarhyuk’s possession, freezing of bank accounts, theft reports on vehicles, and every other legal measure calculated to bind him tightly were set out in meticulous detail.
In Silvester’s case the plan was a tax audit of the shell company that managed his assets, together with charges of illegal weapons possession and illegal residency. A man like Se-gun, however, who preferred to deal exclusively in cash, offered no economic choke-points. The U.S. military police were currently holding the Western Trading Company contact who had dealt with Se-gun and would try to reverse-trace him that way, but that would take considerable time.
“If they were going to do this, they should have done it sooner.”
Phantom grumbled. What irritated him further was that while introducing such a policy they merely filed a post-facto report to the other Jinma in the tone of “We’ll handle it this way; just watch.” Of course receiving even a post-facto report was better than nothing, yet resentment accumulated all the same.
“But an economic blockade against Sarhyuk as well? So they’ve abandoned the plan to absorb him into vampire society.”
More precisely, Sarhyuk himself had rejected vampire society. He had probably offered the gesture of joining in order to buy time until his bloodline abilities and basic powers as a vampire could develop—and that gambit had worked splendidly.
Who would have imagined he could awaken those powers in so short a time? Phantom nodded repeatedly as he scanned the very bottom of the report. There, in a single line, was written:
Active cooperation of other clans requested. The Alchemist may be consumed without consequence. At the time of this message’s arrival the Alchemist’s location is Jeongseon, Gangwon Province.
The instant he read it Phantom shot to his feet. To declare that a Jinma might be eaten with impunity—words no one could take responsibility for! It was tantamount to using Sarhyuk as bait to set every vampire clan against one another in competition!
Fair competition would of course be desirable, yet this was no different from pitting every department against one another in an operation that was guaranteed to spill blood. Did Tetra Anax still want the other clans to bleed?
“Tch.”
Phantom opened a drawer and took out the cartridges for Beast Double.
The intelligence that Sarhyuk, now a Jinma, had set out for Jeongseon in Gangwon Province to devour Zein—the most enfeebled among the other Jinma—had already spread to every vampire and every vampire hunter by mid-morning. Although Finder’s Korean branch had vanished, Se-gun still logged into foreign Finder servers and checked the information diligently. Yet Sarhyuk going after Zein…
“Son of a bitch.”
To Se-gun, Sarhyuk was more hateful than any other vampire. Sarhyuk’s very existence was an intolerable insult—a total negation and desecration of every scrap of conscience, guilt, and soul Se-gun possessed. That was what Sarhyuk was.
“Kaaaah!”
Why had he forgotten until now? A violent wave of revulsion seized his entire body, so fierce that even Se-gun himself could not understand it. And through the cracks of that hatred the wraiths began to speak.
Yes. Rage. Good. Let us savor blood with your own hands.
Shut up!
The moment Se-gun’s fury turned upon the wraiths themselves they scattered like dew under morning sunlight. They could not violate a mind as powerful as his; rather they were shredded by his will. Even so Se-gun felt no better. If they had form he could smash them to pieces and ease the hatred and revulsion, but formless things only left him more frustrated.
“Grrrk!”
Se-gun clutched at his heart and writhed. He had just finished laying vinyl sheeting in the shower room and was in the middle of setting the explosives and electrical plugs; a seizure now would be fatal. He yanked the power cord free and gripped his heart for a long moment.
“Haa. Haa. Damn it. It’s getting worse.”
Psychedelic Moon, the relentless brutal combat, and the vampire blood administered to heal him had left Se-gun’s body completely wrecked. His one advantage over other vampire hunters had been youth, yet even that was no longer much of a merit. They had never fought day after day the way he did.
Once the seizure subsided Se-gun finished the work by kneading aluminum powder into the explosive to make chaff-type C-4 and loading the fuses. Using the black blade as a cane he rose and barely managed to steady himself.
“Shit. Wouldn’t be strange if I dropped dead any second.”
Grumbling like a dying old man he packed weapons into a bag and prepared to move. By day he was a wreck, yet once night fell he recovered as if nothing had ever been wrong and gained reflexes equal to a vampire’s. He could even cut down ordinary vampires and Esquires without injecting Psychedelic Moon.
And that was what he feared most. To die fighting was the ending he had sought ever since he first stepped into the world of the mad moon—but to become a vampire himself was another story entirely. Transformation into the very thing he hated and rejected? That was the worst imaginable outcome.
“There’s still time until sunset. Shall I go?”
Suddenly Se-gun remembered the old back-alley doctor. The Slavic woman kept her mouth shut, so she might be trustworthy. Of course modern medicine was not about to unravel the secrets of vampires at this late date, nor was she some university researcher with magnificent facilities ready to resume study. Nothing could be expected from a future black as pitch—yet Se-gun was already heading there.
With empty eyes he raced through the city. Come to think of it, when had it been? The day he realized that the only reason he kept approaching Arjuna without purpose was because there was literally nothing else he could trust enough to do.
Yes. And that there was no other way to meet people at all. Perhaps that was why Se-gun had struggled so hard to meet anyone for any reason. And whenever he finally managed to meet someone, his own guilt made him wound them so that he could be alone again. Ah, that pastor. What kind of sprouts had the money he had thrown like a seed of disaster into that peaceful community finally grown?
Such thoughts kept surfacing from the bottom of his consciousness to torment him. Yet by then Se-gun had already arrived in front of the doctor’s apartment.
“Ah. How pathetic.”
The apartment complex was a vast wind-break; the howl of the wind smashed against the buildings and whirled. Se-gun sidestepped a flying plastic bag and headed for the entrance.
A woman’s voice delivered the warning while omitting any actual means of preparation. He could not see her face, but she was probably smiling brightly as she spoke. Se-gun considered the sensibility of recent weather forecasts to be the very embodiment of the uncanny. Yet that was not what mattered now.
Ding-dong.
He pressed the bell and the door opened soundlessly. Inside stood a blonde woman with a deathly pale face.
“Mm. Long time.”
She greeted him in short Korean and let Se-gun in. Blood stained her sleeve; there seemed to be another patient. Even for a back-alley doctor, surgery of this level should bring in considerable money—what did she spend it on? Se-gun was curious, yet he did not ask. In this world one did not inquire into personal trifles; that was the custom. A clean contract that could be settled with money was the most moderate virtue one could hope for in the underworld.
“What is it? Catch a cold?”
“Well, something like a cold, I suppose. You have a guest, don’t you?”
For all that he feared nothing under heaven, Se-gun always used formal speech with this female doctor, Maya. Come to think of it he did the same with Kim Seong-hui; he seemed weak against older women.
“Just finished suturing him. He’s asleep. Korean thugs are disgusting—when you cut open their bellies a ton of fat comes out.”
“Probably the same everywhere.”
Se-gun muttered and sat on the sofa as if he owned the place.
“Planning to check in?”
“No. Lately I’ve been having heart attacks pretty often.”
“Quit the drugs.”
She answered reflexively.
“……”
Se-gun’s mouth closed of its own accord. She had not spoken from knowledge, yet it was the correct answer—so perfectly correct that there was nothing left to say. But it was far too late to quit now.
“Drugs, you say……”
“The way you put it, you really are using, aren’t you?”
Contempt edged her voice. She clearly assumed he took them for the usual reasons—hallucinations and pleasure.
“Even if I told you to quit at this point, you couldn’t, I suppose.”
Maya murmured as she washed her hands at the sink. Dirty dishes still sat in the basin, yet she calmly rinsed the blood from her hands. Se-gun felt a flicker of concern, but it was her business. He had neither need nor reason to worry.
“So what’s the actual problem, boy? Some girl keeping you up at night? Heartache?”
“Hardly.”
“This isn’t a proper hospital. All I handle is surgery. I can call someone else, but you won’t be satisfied. For a full checkup you’d be better off using someone else’s medical card at a regular hospital, wouldn’t you?”
“……Doesn’t seem like that kind of illness.”
Se-gun said, and looked out the window. Clouds raced past; light debris was already losing to the wind and tumbling through the air. Despite the season the landscape held a cold palette. Se-gun watched it and gave a dry little laugh.
“Why did I even come here.”
“Who knows. Coffee? Or black tea?”
She asked as she poured water into the kettle. Se-gun drew a knife and spun it idly in his palm as he answered.
“……Black tea.”
A gentleman with long golden hair sat in a completely light-sealed executive office, polishing his glasses. He was Elliot, the shadow lord who served as Tetra Anax’s hand and controlled the whole of Flex Medical.
“He’s really making a nuisance of himself, that Alchemist. Should have killed him from the start. Delaying while gauging the other Jinma’s reactions was the mistake.”
Elliot had finished every preparation for transporting the vampires. If they did not move the vampires to Jeongseon while the sun still shone, Zein would die by Sarhyuk’s hand at sunrise.
“Surely Zein is a Jinma as well. Would he really lose to a newborn Jinma?”
One of his subordinates asked, but that was the question of someone who understood nothing. No one grasped a vampire’s capabilities better than a vampire hunter.
“The reason he offered the gesture of joining Tetra Anax was solely to buy time to develop Yuda’s bloodline ability. Nothing more, nothing less. That he has now shown his true colors means he believes he has a chance of winning, does it not?”
He took a fine Havana cigar from the elegant case on the table, set it between his lips, and snapped his fingers. The tip sheared cleanly off and fell with a soft tock onto the carpet.
“Careful. That’s a handmade Kashmir rug.”
“Ah. I know.”
Elliot nodded and lit the lighter. Tetra Anax had already known Sarhyuk would betray them. Deceiving those eyes was impossible from the outset. Yet the vampire oracles dispatched to Korea possessed neither specific future-sight nor any ability to unmask hidden true intentions.
In other words the omnipotent Tetra Anax had tested the Korean branch for his own amusement. Ah, if the all-knowing one had any pastime at all, it was only to put his subjects through trials!
“Like a god.”
Elliot murmured as he lit the cigar. Of course Tetra Anax was in name and substance the true king of darkness, yet many enemies remained in this world whom even he could not control.
He should not have played at being a god before wiping those creatures out. Did he not spare a thought for his subordinates’ suffering?
“Well then. Shall we go.”
Elliot murmured, and moved toward the trailer waiting outside the building.