The Hunter Comes Home
“Ugh…”
When Se-geon opened his eyes, what greeted him was a flickering fluorescent light. It was an old tube fitted into a shade hung from the ceiling by chains—the kind rarely seen these days.
He stared at the light, then took in his surroundings. He must have passed out from hunger after losing some blood. A police holding cell would have been the natural place for him… so why was he here?
“Hmm?”
When Se-geon shifted, a roll of toilet paper tumbled from behind his back. Someone had fetched it earlier to stanch the shallow knife wound, simply pressing the roll against the cut. Thankfully it had only pierced the skin; if he had trusted that kind of first aid with a kidney wound, he would already have been a corpse.
Se-geon rubbed his eyes and looked around. The walls were plastered with celebrity bromides torn from who-knew-where, along with photos snipped from sports newspapers. Those densely papered faces of idols formed a cauldron of worship—a pantheon of stars.
Was this what it had been like when barbaric Crusaders stormed into a beautiful mosque with mud on their boots? Se-geon was experiencing culture shock.
The women who seemed to be the residents of this shrine lay tangled together under whatever blankets they could find. Judging by the state of those blankets, they had not met water since the day they hit this floor, and the sleeping girls looked like runaways.
If Se-geon had not wrecked the guys, the men would have been tangled up in here too—but they had all been hauled off to the police station or hospital, leaving only the girls.
“Damn. This is a pigsty, pure and simple.”
As Se-geon said, the room was exactly that. The only organized thing in the place was the neat stack of butane gas canisters in the corner. Looking at the empty cans packed by type, it would not have been surprising if the whole house blew sky-high any day.
“Ah, um… you’re awake…?”
His rustling must have woken a girl. She looked at Se-geon, swept her hair back, and wiped the sleep from her eyes.
“Sorry to impose. I’ll be going.”
Se-geon sat up. But hunger brought the dizziness rushing back. Then she caught his hand.
“You got stabbed. If you leave… will you be okay?”
“…”
Se-geon found his hand held by a girl who spoke in a clumsy, disconnected way. He sank back down onto the dust-reeking blanket. She approached him with a vacant, idiot smile, as if delighted by something.
“Ah, um… wanna sleep together?”
“Ugh.”
Se-geon bit his tongue at how blunt she was. But she came closer as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Looking at her hazy expression, he threw back the same line the cops had once used on him.
“You huff paint thinner or something?”
Anyone would freeze if someone suddenly proposed sex in a place like this. Unless you were starving for it, there was no reason to accept. Se-geon pushed her away and headed for the door. She stared after him, flustered.
“Why?”
“I’m too hungry. It won’t stand.”
Se-geon said it and shook his head. He had just said whatever came to mind, but she accepted it. Among the runaways who slept around like it was nothing, quite a few seemed to suffer from the same problem.
It might have been funny under other circumstances, but Se-geon was having trouble accepting his own situation. He had brutally wrecked those guys for no better reason than that they had picked a fight with him.
Was he going crazy?
Distrust of himself crawled up from his chest. Well, going mad would not be strange. His family had died right before his eyes. He had personally shot and killed someone whose guilt he could not even be sure of. Being sane would have been the strange part.
He did not know what this vacant girl was thinking, but if she told the police where he was, or if those beaten guys decided on revenge, it would be a headache—so he did not want to stay long.
“Well. Looks like I should go get something to eat, then. I’ll head out. Oh, and sorry about smashing up your boyfriends.”
“It’s fine. Boyfriends? What boyfriends…”
She stood up as she spoke. To her, this young man was the reality she had been searching for all along. She could not let him leave before she even knew his name or number.
“Let’s go together.”
“I’m the one who decides that.”
“Huh?”
“No. Never mind.”
Se-geon opened the door. Cold air rushed in. After breathing the room’s toxic cocktail of thinner and butane—like a chemical warehouse—stepping outside cleared his head.
“Cough, cough.”
But the girl coughed one after another. Her bronchioles seemed badly damaged. Se-geon looked at her, then lifted his gaze. The sky was brightening from the east. Between a tall church steeple and utility poles, the Seoul sky looked as small as the palm of his hand.
“Already sunrise.”
“Ah, um…”
“Why are you following me out, though? You should get more sleep.”
Se-geon looked at her and shrugged. Now that he thought about it, this was the same girl who had said he looked like Kurt Cobain when he first met her in front of the station. She made no effort to hide her goodwill toward him.
“No. Just… I’m afraid I’ll get lost.”
“Come on. I’m not a kid.”
Se-geon answered that way. But he could tell she meant no harm. She was like a die-hard fan worshipping a pop star.
Se-geon and Yu-mi headed for a nearby convenience store. Pouring hot water into cup ramen and unwrapping sandwiches, they looked out the window at people heading to school or work. They sat at a table, blankly watching people who lived with clear purpose—or at least with a clear purpose for each day.
In that sense, the two of them were far too similar. Was that why? Even sitting together without a word, it seemed to calm them a little. It was not comfort, exactly. Just a sense of kinship—a strange shared identity. Maybe that was why humans were so weak.
Just knowing someone else was in the same position was enough to feel safe. Conversely, being alone with no one in the same place made you weak… so Se-geon chose her as a conversation partner.
“I was going to look for work. Wasted a whole day.”
Se-geon muttered as he split wooden chopsticks. Yu-mi had seen him combing through the classifieds yesterday, so she already knew.
“Is the wound okay?”
“Just about a centimeter of skin torn. Stitches would be nice, but I can’t manage that—it’ll heal if I wait. I’m more worried about the hole in my only fall coat.”
He said it while demolishing the sandwich. Eating breakfast brought his energy back, and all the weeping and grieving he had done suddenly felt ridiculous. Emotion, when it surges, overrides everything—but once the torrent passes, it leaves only pathetic muddy water. Even the most sublime feelings leave mud behind; Se-geon’s case was no exception.
“I’m Jin Yu-mi…”
“I didn’t ask.”
Se-geon said bluntly.
That day, too, Kim Seong-hui was manning the counter at Arjuna. Wiping the show window with a dry cloth, rearranging merchandise, clearing dust, she wiped sweat from her brow and looked outside.
“Should I hire a part-timer?”
If she could have, she would have already. But her business straddled the legal and illegal realms. Hiring was not something you did lightly. There was no one she could trust.
The autumn morning light was tinted by the colored glass. She paused and looked out the window. And then—
Vrooooom.
A black Corvette Coupe appeared through the alley. Factory-forged metal body, blood vessels feeding a heart that roared. To a speed freak it would not be a mere car. But to her it meant more. The man who drove it was one of the few in Korea worth counting on one hand—and one of those few meant a great deal to her.
“Silvi?”
Screeech!
The car slammed to a stop in front of Arjuna. From the open door stepped a silver-haired priest in a black coat.
A model-lean physique, delicate features that could almost be called androgynous—yet the spirit within was a cruel emptiness, an abyss without bottom. That was Father Silvester, Jinma hunter.
The twenty-four Jinma who stood at the pinnacle of vampires. The only hunter who threatened them. He had returned to Korea.
“Ah…”
Kim Seong-hui covered her face with her hands, looking as if she might cry. Wind blew, and leaves began to fall.
Row Gibson gazed at the newspaper article floating on his computer monitor and let out a sigh. There was no room for doubt that the victim Y in the piece was the girl he had saved.
“From the victim’s point of view, this is a coldly infuriating article.”
Other articles and related materials made clear that she had ultimately attempted suicide from nervous collapse and had already been hospitalized for a full year. A year. One night is enough to drive a person mad. Humans are not the strong creatures they imagine themselves to be, and the mind is no different.
With a heart already dead sealed inside her flesh, she would have been locked away in that hospital.
But if so, why had she escaped? As the thought reached him, Row Gibson—no, the Jinma Phantom—smiled. Death is not complete. At least not among vampires—was he himself not the proof? Likewise, there was no basis for declaring that her heart had simply died.
Whatever her inner state, though, a year of hospitalization would have been a crushing burden on any household. Would she be all right? The worry rose in him unbidden.
A vampire fretting over someone else would make a dog laugh—but the Jinma Phantom was nothing like ordinary vampires.
A destructive, nihilistic temperament was already a recipe for dying young even in a human; what of a man who had lived more than a thousand years? If you did not live each day with progressive intent, longevity was a lost cause from the start.
“Bill will have something to say again.”
He muttered it as he shrugged on his coat. Shutting down the computer and preparing to go out, he was not the Jinma Phantom but the diligent businessman Row Gibson.
The gulf between Row Gibson and the Jinma Phantom was only status and name. By that same unchanging progressive character… once you saved a life, you took responsibility for it to the end. For a vampire’s principle, it was remarkably Catholic in its ethics.
The result had been saving Wilhelm, once a member of the Hitler Youth during the Second World War, and making him of his own bloodline.
And yet for all that, Bill hated it when he saved other humans and took responsibility for them. Saving a human and, if the person wished, turning them into a vampire only weakened Phantom’s power and brought no gain.
Even if the Jinma Phantom was a legendary monster of VT four hundred thousand—fifty cubic centimeters of his blood could turn forty thousand adult men into vampires—and even if he was steeped in every dark art, the fellow Jinma Juk-yo, Chang-woon, and Sepia had still died at the hands of a Jinma hunter.
There was no law that said Phantom himself could not be hunted.
That was why Bill wanted Phantom to stop concerning himself with others and concentrate only on preserving his own strength. So he never stopped lecturing Phantom, and by volunteering as Row Gibson’s secretary he followed him anywhere on the planet.
Even that Bill had sunk into sleep with the sunrise. Though he was a spawn of the Jinma Phantom, Wilhelm was still only a young vampire in his late sixties and did not yet have the power to overcome the sun.
“I… am different.”
He murmured it and raised his right hand. Crimson mist coiled around his arm and twisted in a spiral. Without anyone pressing a button, the call lamp on the elevator lit. Using power on something so trivial would have earned another scolding from Bill—but the sun had put his dear bloodkin to sleep for him.
Something to thank the sun for?
Smiling, he stepped into the elevator. A vampire who had overcome the sun. Living more than a thousand years, seeping in among humans, amassing vast wealth, ruling them.
To him, vampire hunters were not enemies. Hunters who moved for money could never resist the temptation of the money he scattered.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes…
The black-clad priest who chanted that old requiem so often heard in vampire films. Only Silvester, the Jinma hunter who had lived as long as any Jinma while searching for the tears of vampires, could resist the temptation and come at him.
But the thriving businessman Row Gibson had countless bodyguards, and patrons blanketed the political and financial worlds alike. It was he who had used the United States federal government to erase Silvester’s nationality and the Vatican to excommunicate him.
A vampire who held gold and power possessed more “human strength” than any “human.” That Silvester had still hunted Juk-yo, Chang-woon, and Sepia under such adverse conditions was worthy of praise. Phantom offered the Jinma hunter Silvester unstinting applause.
Clap. Clap. Clap…
The sound of applause filled the elevator. Being no human, he could leap from roughly the twenty-ninth floor through a window and not even count it as morning exercise. But to reign over the human world, you had to play by their rules.
“I wonder if the order I placed has arrived.”
Following Bill’s advice, he had finished his own business and ordered a bouquet placed in the lobby beforehand so he could take it with him.
Unlike the vampire hunters who prowled the nights of greed and desire, full of murderous intent like wounded mongrels, here was a vampire who showered cleanly in a royal suite, dressed in a suit handmade by a famous designer, and stepped out to the greetings of hotel boys. Was there any confrontation more contradictory?
Poor Dracula. A frail vampire who could not overcome the sun and who yielded to the cross. The true king of vampires ruled the financial world, manipulated politics, and stood above humans. He had no need to climb into someone else’s house at midnight for blood; scatter money and humans brought the blood to him of their own accord.
The desire to tear a living throat? The desire to rip open a still-warm, savory vein and taste the artery pulsing from the heart like a thrashing salmon?
Anyone who surrendered to such cheap desire was no different from a slum thief smashing a shop window to steal the goods. Unfit to be king of vampires—unfit even to be king of humans.
But then why did such a vampire exist at all? Even if you lived more than a thousand years, tasted every pleasure, and enjoyed every wealth and glory, when would endless life and desire ever be satisfied?
The human problem humans themselves could not answer—the philosophical question with many replies and no correct one—applied equally to vampires.
Of course, even the Jinma Phantom, king of vampires, did not know the answer.
And so he helped humans for his own sake.
Whether that salvation was achieved or not, he rejoiced in giving humans what God could not. Arrogant? If interest in a girl wandering the night streets in a hospital gown through a sea of lights and signs was arrogance, then the humans who had seen her and left her there were far too humble.
The Jinma Phantom left the hotel and walked toward his beloved Dodge Viper GTS.