The Silver-Haired Priest
By sheer luck the shot struck the monster that had burst through the doorway—but the thing only glanced down at its own body, then charged Se-gun without the slightest concern.
It wore a human shape, yet its arms and legs stretched unnaturally long, and its eyes bulged from its skull like a frog’s. Se-gun rolled on pure reflex. The floor, however, dropped away into a staircase.
“Aaaagh!”
He tumbled down the steps, his ruined shoulder taking the full impact of every landing. The monster did not follow at once. It descended with deliberate slowness, as if savoring Se-gun’s terror, then planted both arms against the narrow stairwell walls.
Crack-crack-crack!
With a sound like joints popping free, holes punched into the concrete and the monster’s arms sank into them. It hung there like a child clinging to a doorframe, arms and legs driven straight through the shattered walls.
Whether from the shotgun Se-gun had fired wild or from wounds taken elsewhere, blood still poured unchecked from the monster’s torso.
“Urgh…!”
Se-gun forced his body into motion and lifted the shotgun. A shotgun, though, was made to be held with both hands. With his left arm broken, there was no proper way to shoulder it.
“Ghhh—!”
Still he aimed. One shell left—and from what he had already seen, that single round would barely matter. So how was he supposed to put this thing down?
The thought of waiting for the police flickered through his mind, only to die at once. Let this creature go and he would regret it for the rest of his life. This was the monster that had slaughtered his entire family.
“You…!”
Rage choked the words in his throat. He clawed his mind back together. The hatred he felt for that thing defied language—yet when his mouth finally opened, only one thing came out.
“You son of a bitch!”
Cursing from the blackest pit of his gut, Se-gun lifted his one good foot, braced the shotgun’s stock against it, and squeezed the trigger. Hoping for a hit under those conditions was pure robbery—but the gun was loaded with shot, and the blast still tore into the monster.
“Grawr!”
It lost its grip for an instant, toppled backward, and went tumbling down the stairs. Before Se-gun could scramble clear they tangled together at the bottom—yet he was already surging upright, shotgun raised in one hand.
“Yaaaaah!”
He swung the weapon like an axe and smashed it into the monster’s skull.
Thud!
Blood sprayed. The head cracked open. Se-gun kept swinging in a frenzy, clubbing the thing again and again.
“Ghhh—!”
The monster’s arm lashed out on pure reflex and sheared Se-gun’s left arm clean off. It had already been broken, but the fountain of blood that erupted when flesh and bone parted was another matter entirely.
“Aaaagh!”
He screamed and thrashed. Human meat should not come away so easily. The monster’s strength was no ordinary force—more like an industrial press. There was nothing Se-gun could do to stop it.
Then—
Bang!
A single gunshot punched a hole clean through the monster’s side. Someone had fired with Se-gun right there in the line of fire, and they had not hesitated.
The monster jerked its head around in shock—and in that same instant a flash of steel whispered across its throat. The head left the body in a spray of blood.
“Uhh… uhhh…”
Se-gun lifted his gaze and stared at the impossible scene unfolding before him. A silver-haired priest in black clothes had just hewn the monster’s neck with a massive claymore—the kind of greatsword that belonged in movies, not stairwells.
As if a severed head were not enough, the priest pivoted and brought the blade down in a cruciform stroke. With a wet, sickening sound the monster split completely in two.
“Uhhhhh…!”
That was the last thing Se-gun saw before he blacked out, praying with everything he had that the whole night had been a dream.
Empty cup-ramen bowls littered the floor. In the middle of the room sat Se-gun, gaunt as a corpse.
The apartment was pitch-dark, not a single light switched on. The only illumination came from the faint glow leaking out of his phone.
Brrring. Brrring. Brrring.
The phone screamed itself raw. In the silence of the room it was the only light and the only sound—and Se-gun did not answer it.
By the time the police arrived, the monster’s corpse was already gone. So was the silver-haired priest in black. It was as if neither had ever existed. The one piece of reality Se-gun could cling to was the fact that his arm had been cut off—except when he came to, the arm was attached again.
He felt like a man possessed. But his parents and older brother were dead, and the murder itself was a genuine, grotesque horror. That much was fact.
The police closed the case as a rabid dog that had gone berserk. There were more than enough holes in that story, but admitting the existence of a monster whose body had vanished was out of the question. When Se-gun tried to describe the creature, the officers’ reaction boiled down to a single line:
“You high on something?”
Apparently the biker gang they had arrested that night had said a few choice things about him. The police now filed Se-gun under “hopeless delinquent.” He was forced to undergo a battery of hospital tests—ostensibly because he was the sole survivor of a massacre, but even someone as worldly-naive as Se-gun could tell the real priority was screening for psychotropic substances.
And for the week that followed, the media put him through something that could only be called abuse. Camera crews filmed the blood-soaked interior of the house as if it were some fascinating tourist attraction, then shoved microphones at a half-broken Se-gun without a second thought.
He shoved the cameras away and fled through the crowd. The networks, stung by the rebuff, launched what amounted to a retaliatory campaign of coverage. Neighbors and school friends appeared on air, speaking of him as if he were already dead. The endless requests for interviews and the constant knocks at his door pushed him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.
A few tabloids went so far as to imply—brazenly, under the usual “sources say / or maybe not” weasel wording—that Se-gun had killed his own family with a shotgun mishap. Looking at those articles, he felt less rage than a hollow, exhausted emptiness.
In the end they released him for lack of evidence. He returned to a house that was little more than a ruin. The bodies had been removed, but the rooms still lay in chaos and the bloodstains had not been scrubbed away.
He quieted his hunger with cup ramen and collapsed where he stood. There had been a funeral at the hospital morgue. Se-gun never left the house. He did not go.
About ten days later, a voice called his name from outside the front gate.
“Se-gun! Why won’t you pick up the damn phone? Han Se-gun!”
The voice was familiar. It belonged to his uncle, Han Gyu-il—younger brother of Se-gun’s father, Han Seung-il. The sound of it jolted Se-gun awake. The man who had stood in as chief mourner in his place—surely he could trust him. Surely the man would believe him.
Clinging to that thought, Se-gun bolted for the door. He was almost sick with relief.
Clunk!
The heavy gate—heavier still because Se-gun had wasted away so badly—swung open to reveal a middle-aged man who had not bothered to shave. Gyu-il himself looked haggard from days of running the funeral and calling every relative who needed to know, but the sight of his nephew in far worse shape brought tears to his eyes.
“Aigoo, you little bastard! How’d you get this wasted? Look at you—skin and bones!”
“U-Uncle…”
“You’re coming with me. No arguments.”
Gyu-il half-dragged the unresisting Se-gun into the car and drove straight to the nearest restaurant.
“Eat. What a goddamn tragedy. But what’s done is done. The living have to live. Your dad didn’t die so you could follow him into the ground. There’s no filial piety in that—not in this world. You keep going like this, who the hell do you think is gonna be happy about it?”
Across a bowl of seolleongtang sending up thick white steam, Se-gun could not stop the tears. He ate through them in a mindless rush. Days of near-starvation made him shovel the food down like a beggar who had not seen a meal in weeks.
“Hey. You planning to keep rotting in that house? Come stay with us. We’ve got a spare room. I can’t match your dad, but I’m not scraping by either. You say the word and I’ll put you through university.”
At that bold offer Se-gun’s mouth closed. With his grades, a four-year university was already a stretch. He had always wanted to be a motocross racer and had never been close friends with studying. Running with a biker crew and still acing school would have been the stranger outcome.
“I’m grateful. Really. But I…”
He trailed off. Looking back, he had never been much of a son. Even if he went to his uncle’s house, that fact would not change—and the fear of it sat heavy in his chest. If he had known he would lose his parents this soon, he would have listened to them a little more. The kind of regret everyone eventually feels was already driving a spike through his heart.
“I’m not asking you to decide right this second. Plenty of time. Think it over slow. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Yes, sir.”
Se-gun stood. Only minutes earlier he had wanted nothing more than to die—and one bowl of hot seolleongtang had put the strength back in his limbs. It made him feel pathetic somehow.
He parted ways with his uncle and headed home. Gyu-il had insisted on driving him all the way, but Se-gun declined as politely as he could and walked.
Clouds smothered the moon; the night felt heavy enough to spill rain at any moment. Se-gun tipped his face to the sky. Fresh air rushed into his lungs for the first time in days.
“Ah…”
A tangle of feeling rose in him. Losing his family to a monster like that still refused to feel real. If even he could not quite believe it, how could anyone else? He let out a long breath.
On a gently sloping hill road, a jet-black Corvette coupe sat parked beneath a sodium streetlamp. On any other night Se-gun would have stopped to admire it. Tonight he had no attention left for cars.
Then the coupe’s door opened and a man in black stepped out. A silver-haired foreigner in priest’s vestments—someone Se-gun had seen before.
“Ah—you’re…?”
The face of the silver-haired priest who had cut his way into that nightmare night, the night Se-gun had been about to die, overlaid itself on the man standing in front of him.
Looking at him felt like taking a blow to the head. Se-gun had half-convinced himself the man had been a hallucination. And now he was right here.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Quiet.”
The silver-haired priest lifted a finger to his lips. Whether because of Se-gun’s raised voice or something else, dogs began barking throughout the neighborhood.
For someone who looked so foreign, the priest’s Korean was unnervingly clean. What left a deeper impression, though, was the cold, flat edge in his tone.
“You really do leave a trail of trouble wherever you go. Don’t shout in the middle of the night. How’s the body?”
As he spoke, his gaze dropped to Se-gun’s arm—the arm that had been severed. Se-gun startled and fired back a question of his own.
“Did you put it back on? But how—?”
“Talking here isn’t ideal. How about a ride?”
The priest gestured at the Corvette. Se-gun climbed in without another word.
The black coupe slipped over the asphalt as if it were melting into the night itself. The priest in black handled the car with easy skill and glanced sideways at Se-gun.
“You look like a refugee.”
He said it after taking in Se-gun’s unwashed state. Something in the remark made Se-gun bristle.
“What are you? And what the hell was that monster?”
“What do you think it was? Use your imagination.”
Se-gun hesitated, then answered.
“Don’t tell me… an exorcist?”
“Close enough.”
“Then that thing—was it a vampire?”
“Correct.”
Hearing the word “correct” brought Se-gun no joy. He was the victim of all this, yes—but the conversation had already drifted so far from ordinary reality that it felt absurd. Keep talking like this and the next stop might be a psychiatric ward.
The Corvette eased onto the urban expressway. The hour was late; traffic was thin. Streetlights stood like a dense forest of headstones, lighting the city in pale rows. The priest kept one hand on the wheel and looked at Se-gun.
“I’ll be direct. Did you drink the vampire’s blood?”
“What?”
Se-gun cast his mind back. In the middle of the brawl he had clubbed the vampire with the shotgun over and over. Blood had flown. His mouth might have been open. But why did that matter?
“You’re saying… I might become a vampire too?”
“If you drank the blood, it’s possible.”
“Then this arm—”
Se-gun looked down at the left arm that had once been cut clean off. It had been broken, then severed by the vampire. When he woke, the arm was whole again—fractures healed, everything restored. Barely ten days had passed since the incident. A severed arm should not look like this.
If he had already become a vampire, the answer would be simple.
“No. I reattached your arm.”
The priest shut that theory down cold.
“I don’t know. Whether I drank blood or not—everything was chaos. Why? If I did drink it, if I turn into a vampire… you’d kill me, wouldn’t you?”
“You already know the answer to that better than anyone.”
The priest did not deny it. The complete absence of warmth in his voice was a stronger affirmation than any spoken yes. Se-gun dropped his head.
“Damn it—ghhh…!”
He had lost his family—and now he himself might become the same kind of monster? He could not hold the tears back. He did not want to cry in front of a foreigner whose name he did not even know, but “not wanting to” and “being able to stop” were two different things.
The priest watched him weep for a moment, then shook his head once.
“Hmph. Unnecessary worry, then.”
He turned the wheel and took the car back the way they had come.