No Return From the Night
“So. You want to become an exorcist?”
Silvester sank into the sofa, chin tilted up as he asked the question. Se-geon still couldn’t give a firm answer.
But if he hadn’t had some reason, some purpose, he would never have endured Silvester’s beating just to hear an explanation of what had happened. So Se-geon nodded.
“Yes.”
“Pathetic.”
Silvester’s condemnation came at once. The woman who had introduced herself as Kim Seong-hui cleared away the teacups and smiled.
“You should explain the circumstances first, Silvy.”
“Silvy?”
Se-geon echoed the name under his breath, and she laughed and patted his shoulder.
“Silvester is far too long, and I don’t care for it. Besides, that’s only a baptismal name.”
“So he really was a Catholic priest?”
Se-geon said it, then startled himself with the thought. Perhaps that had irritated him; Silvester swept his hair back and answered with a cold expression.
“Don’t concern yourself on that score. I’ve been excommunicated for quite some time. Still—if I’m going to explain the circumstances, then afterward I’ll need to wipe your memory. Do you consent?”
“What?”
Se-geon recoiled at the mention of erasing his memories. But Silvester seemed to take it for agreement; he looked to the middle-aged man beside him and seized his arm.
“Then watch carefully, you brat. See what a human must sacrifice to stand against the dark.”
“But—!”
The middle-aged man glanced uneasily at Se-geon, clearly flustered. He was hiding something, and it showed—but Silvester brushed the concern aside and shoved up the clothing covering the man’s arm. A thick, muscle-hardened forearm was revealed, pocked with countless needle marks.
Se-geon stared in shock. He knew nothing of this world, but movies had taught him what those bruises meant. Track marks. Syringe scars.
“Any idea why he’s taken so many injections?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Narcotics.”
Silvester said it flatly and shrugged.
“Fighting monsters isn’t work for human beings. You’ve felt it yourself, haven’t you? A vampire can snap a man’s bones and tear his muscles in the blink of an eye. How do you fight something like that?”
“…….”
“Pain shrinks a man. And in close combat, pain is death. Ordinary anesthetics that kill the pain also relax the muscles until you can’t use your strength. That leaves only narcotics. Right?”
Silvester turned to the middle-aged man in the black beret and put the question to him. For a former special-forces soldier, the admission must have been deeply humiliating—but it was a fact he could not deny.
“Yes. Exactly so.”
“It’s the madness of fighting monsters while high on drugs. One wrong step and you become the same as them. Does that look so appealing to you? Once you enter this world, you can never go back. Set foot in the night’s darkness and you never return to reality. Does a kid like you need to do something like that?”
He rose from his seat as he finished. Se-geon could find no words; he only hung his head. Fighting monsters while shooting up was, for a boy raised in Korea’s unforgiving stance on narcotics, something his common sense could barely accept.
His hostility toward the monsters still seethed, but Silvester’s persuasion doused that hostility like a bucket of cold water.
“C-could I have some time to think it over?”
“As much as you like. But if you go running your mouth about any of this, you’d better expect a visit to your family. All you’ll get for spreading what you’ve learned from us is the title of lunatic—and a bullet in the head.”
Vrrroooom!
In the end Se-geon decided to think it over and roared away on his motorcycle. The middle-aged man watched his receding figure through the shop window.
“Customers will be arriving soon. Would the two of you mind clearing out a little?”
Kim Seong-hui looked from Silvester to the retired soldier and asked them to leave. As the shop’s owner, she had to think about her sales. Silvester seemed willing to oblige; still wearing his Snoopy-printed shirt, he walked toward the entrance.
“Very well.”
“Silvester.”
The middle-aged man called him to a halt. Showing Se-geon the arm he used for drugs had left him badly rattled.
Even if the boy went around talking about vampires and monsters and got dismissed as a mental case, habitual narcotics use was another matter entirely. And yet Silvester had simply let him go without wiping his memory.
“Why did you just send that boy away? You may be fine with it, but as a regular user, I’m in a rather awkward position.”
“Who knows. You’re already in the ‘vampire business’ yourself—there’s no law that says the kid can’t be. That’s all. If you’re truly uneasy, handle it yourself. Of course, he still has a place to settle in the ordinary world.”
“And if that place disappears? What will you do when he comes looking for you then?”
The middle-aged veteran put the question to the silver-haired foreigner who looked barely into his early twenties. The silver-haired foreigner—Silvester—thought for a moment, then answered lightly.
“I’ll think about that when the time comes.”
Se-geon wandered through a nightmare.
In the darkness of night, blood dripped in mottled trails, and the vampire walking the streets was wracked by a vast thirst.
The rest of the truth—the part Se-geon had never seen—was rising as a dream. He drifted through the dark until he turned into an alley.
It was a slope Se-geon knew well; the elegant detached houses above it were his own neighborhood. The agony of a ruptured chest and a body run through burned his throat with a thirst equal to the pain. He felt ready to collapse at any moment, yet the powerful vitality the curse had granted only prolonged the torment.
Perhaps this pain and thirst were the curse’s true nature—the abstract thought flickered through the vampire’s mind.
“Hah… hah…”
He gasped for breath and looked around.
His eyes, rolling in search of a sacrifice, found only tightly shut buildings. Almost no living creatures remained. By luck, many households had been left empty—perhaps because of the recession.
But then a human’s body heat caught those hunting eyes. Crimson-glowing warmth, the warm blood flowing within it, even the pulse of a heart—all of it felt close enough to grasp.
It revived the monster’s heart. Gathering every scrap of remaining strength, the creature vaulted the wall. The iron bars meant to keep out thieves were useless against that monstrous power.
The vampire cleared the wall and sank its teeth into the dog that snarled at its approach. As blood poured into it, vitality began to stir again inside its body.
Dog’s blood. Beast’s blood. Not enough. The moment the vampire had soothed its burning thirst, it was already sick of animal blood. It breathed its toxin into the dog’s corpse and went straight into the house.
The door was open, and from inside came the smell of something frying. Deep-frying, perhaps. The vampire opened the door without ceremony and headed for the kitchen. Where the smell led, a middle-aged woman was waiting.
Vampirism. A horror of blood-drinking and cannibalism beyond any civilized person’s imagination unfolded.
It was so grotesque it looked less like a simple “meal” than a kind of rite. The more blood the vampire drank, the more its wounds healed.
“Goddamn Jinma hunter. Bastard!”
The vampire spat the curse. Jinma hunter? Se-geon understood at once that it was another name for Silvester.
“Krrraaaaagh.”
After that, it went exactly as Se-geon already knew. In his father’s room the vampire murdered his father, Han Seung-il; then it killed his brother, Han Se-hyeon, who had seen the slaughter, run to the study, and drawn a gun. The wounds had closed considerably, but the flesh into which silver fragments had entered was rotting as if poisoned.
While the vampire wandered in search of tools to dig out the silver, Se-geon returned to the house that had become a scene of atrocity, fought the vampire, and fell to the lower floor, sprawled and broken.
Shhk!
And then Silvester burst in. He swung a massive ceremonial claymore, overwhelmed the vampire, and finally killed it.
The terror of that “Jinma hunter,” who surpassed even the vampire in physical ability, was so intense it reached Se-geon clearly even in the dream.
The heavy greatsword that pierced the throat allowed not even a death cry, and a vicious kick shattered the skull.
But the dream did not end there.
“What’s this.”
Silvester looked down at Se-geon in that characteristically indifferent tone.
Seeing Se-geon blood-soaked and gasping, he raised the claymore and spoke as he gazed down at him.
He cried it out and made to bring the blade down. He seemed, in his own way, to mean to ease Se-geon’s suffering—but then the sword stopped short of Se-geon’s neck. His eyes had fallen on the shotgun in Se-geon’s hand.
“Ah.”
Silvester stayed his hand and thought for a moment.
“Too good a specimen to kill.”
Then he drew a small syringe from inside his coat.
It was a syringe, yes, but not an ordinary push-type needle—a specialized device called a steam pack. With it he drew blood from the vampire’s corpse, the same creature he had just killed, and injected it into Se-geon’s body.
It was a truly strange thing. The blood-drenched flesh began to mend; when Silvester picked up the severed arm and set it in place, it healed rapidly and finally reattached. One injection was apparently not enough, so Silvester drew the vampire’s blood two or three more times and injected it into Se-geon.
“Aaaargh!”
Se-geon thrashed, trying to avoid the needle. But… already his forearm was bruised, and from the injection marks something had begun to sprout. The seed of the monster that had slaughtered Se-geon’s family spread through his arm, along his veins, into his whole body.
The terror that he might become a vampire himself, and his revulsion at the blood, were more than he could bear. Yet after injecting Se-geon with vampire blood, Silvester showed not the slightest further interest and left the scene.
“Aaaargh!”
Se-geon woke with a scream. His whole body was soaked in sweat, as if he had just stepped out of a sauna, yet the room around him was dark and cold.
He looked over his room. The PC, the video player, the mini component stereo he had used so often when his family was still alive all caught his eye. Se-geon switched on the mini stereo and began clearing away the cup-ramen containers and other clutter scattered across the floor.
He finished cleaning at least his own room, then walked to the bathroom and showered in cold water. The weather was still chilly enough that dousing himself in cold water was painful—but even that pain felt like a luxury to Se-geon.
His brother and parents had been murdered. For him, the survivor, to be unable to endure a little cold water was nothing but the whining of a well-fed man.
Beep.
While Se-geon showered, the phone ran through its cycle and played a recorded message.
"Ah, Se-geon? It's me. Your uncle. Just checking—have you thought over what I asked you to think about? It must be empty living there alone, right? Make up your mind already and come on over. Anyway, I'll hang up now."
Se-geon rested his head against the tiled wall as he listened to his uncle’s voice. As far as he was concerned, he still had no reason to catch vampires at the cost of becoming a drug addict.
He had lost his family, yes—but neither his parents nor his brother would have wanted him to live on meaninglessly while turning himself into a wreck. Thinking that, he felt a little easier.
Se-geon finished his shower and came out into the living room. By his usual daily pattern he should have had breakfast after showering, but his feet would not turn easily toward the kitchen. In the kitchen where his mother had been butchered, the bloodstains still remained. Looking at those stains while pulling food from the refrigerator was more than his still-adequate nutritional state required.
“Already ten o’clock? No chance of making school today either.”
Se-geon tossed his clothes into the laundry basket and sighed. An enormous pile of washing had already accumulated there. For Se-geon, who had never once run a washing machine, that too became something that called his mother to mind.
The fact that everyday chores made him remember her only tormented him further. But he could not go on like this forever.
Se-geon changed clothes and went out to the garage.
In the very front row of M University’s audiovisual materials room, a female student’s cellphone rang with thunderous volume. Worse, the ringtone was “Arirang Mokdong.” If the owner of the phone had not worn such a mortified expression, one might almost have taken it for a deliberate protest against the professor—it shattered the atmosphere of the lecture that thoroughly.
“Oh no. Oh no, oh no.”
The girl named Han Se-jin panicked and simply yanked the battery out of the phone. She was so practiced at the motion that shutting it off and pulling the battery took less than a second. In the end the class bell rang five minutes later and the lecture ended, but for her it was not an exaggeration to call it the worst day of her life.
“Spoiled breakfast, lost my contact lenses, transit card died—and now this at school? I’m going insane!”
She muttered as much while helping the teaching assistant roll up the screen after class. There was originally a device for winding the projector screen, but as with school facilities everywhere it had broken easily, so they had to roll it up by hand.
The sociology professor at M University was famous for being exacting—exacting enough that even the TAs were said to lose weight—and she had thoroughly gotten herself caught.
“Um, I’ll be going then.”
Finished with the cleanup, Se-jin said goodbye to the TA and fled the audiovisual room as if escaping. Then she put the phone battery back in.
“Who would call me this early in the morning?”
But just then she saw a motorcycle coming in through the university’s main gate. A man in an aviator jacket and jeans sat astride it.
“Oh. That’s Se-geon.”
She recognized her cousin and murmured to herself. Come to think of it, only a few days earlier a rabid dog had gone berserk and wiped out an entire family, and she had attended the funeral herself.
But Se-geon, the chief mourner, had been under such a terrible shock—and under suspicion for firing a shotgun—that he hadn’t been able to attend the funeral.
So why had Se-geon come looking for her now?
“Ah, Noona!”
Somehow, among all those people, Se-geon spotted Se-jin. Still astride the bike he rode up to her and executed a smooth turn right in front of her—a soft axle turn, bracing his body with one foot on the ground while revving the bike itself around.