One Life, One Story
I yanked the librarian toward me a beat too late, and Choi Jaeha grabbed hold of Hwang Juyeon.
“A-are you insane! What do you think you're doing! You're out of your mind!”
“Ugh...! Hup!”
Thud.
Shrieking words no one could make sense of, the attempted murderer thrashed about wildly — until the accountant shoved her backward, and the sharp corner of a bookshelf caught her squarely on the back of the head. She crumpled to the floor.
Alternating my gaze between two attempted murderers and two unconscious patients, I found myself suddenly wondering how this scene would end up written down. That I had failed to stop it? Or...
“Sh-she's not dead, right? Seon Yuhan, wh-what do we do?”
“Kim Gilyeong should be fine — it wasn't a deep stab. And she only passed out from the shock, I think.”
Killing a person with a blunt ballpoint pen — not even a fountain pen with a sharp nib — is never an easy thing. One or two jabs at a chest covered by layers of clothing simply cannot inflict a fatal wound. Unless you drove it deep into an eye to reach the brain, or aimed with perfect precision for the carotid artery. Maybe then.
“As for Hwang Juyeon, well... it looks like a concussion, and a pretty bad gash on the back of her head. Hwang Juyeon? Hwang Juyeon!”
I slipped a cushion under the head of our attempted-murderer-slash-patient and checked for signs of consciousness, but her eyes showed no sign of opening. I could manage basic first aid, but treating a concussion was beyond me. A concussion doesn't automatically kill you, but in Hwang Juyeon's case the situation looked genuinely dangerous. She was unconscious, and she was bleeding. All I could do right now was barely stem the flow from her cracked skull. And even that was pure improvisation. A first-aid kit would have made things a little easier.
“I... I was just trying to, to stop her, I didn't even push that hard... uurp.”
“I know. It's not your fault, Choi Jaeha. Please don't worry too much about it.”
I patted the back of the accountant, who was fidgeting uncontrollably and even retching. If this man lost his mind on top of everything else and did something reckless, this whole situation would get even more exhausting.
“Hwang Juyeon tried to kill Kim Gilyeong, and you only tried to stop her. That's self-defense.”
A court of law might not see it that way, but it wasn't something Choi Jaeha needed to hear right now. Not that the legal rights and wrongs of anything that happens inside a labyrinth are easy to adjudicate in the first place.
“Choi Jaeha, let's get some water into you first.”
There was a water purifier inside Chaekbang-Ollae. The accountant staggered over to it, half out of his mind, and drank.
Meanwhile, I pushed two sofas together and laid the unconscious librarian down on them. I positioned the concussion patient where I could keep her in view, but as far outside Choi Jaeha's line of sight as I could manage.
But why on earth had Hwang Juyeon tried to kill Kim Gilyeong?
...And with that terrified look on her face, no less.
I quietly looked down at the book Hwang Juyeon had dropped. The only thing I could think of was that storybook about Kim Gilyeong that Hwang Juyeon had been reading. Maybe, when it came down to it, Kim Gilyeong had done something too unspeakable to even mention. Maybe she was the daughter of the person who had killed Hwang Juyeon's family. Or... whatever it might have been.
Had Hwang Juyeon decided that Kim Gilyeong was someone who deserved to die?
If I read it too, would I learn the reason?
"Book club participants read their own books."
The moment my hand reached for someone else's book, the voice spoke again, urging me to hurry up and read my own share.
“Choi Jaeha, I know it's hard right now, but open your book. You have to read at least a sentence of it.”
“What about those people? What happens to them...?”
Good question.
What was going to happen to those two unconscious people over there? Neither of them was in any state to be reading right now.
“Choi Jaeha, sit down.”
“But...”
“There's nothing more we can do for those two right now.”
The librarian had simply fainted; barring anything unexpected, she would come to on her own. Hwang Juyeon, on the other hand — if she was lucky, she would survive with serious aftereffects; if she wasn't, she would die.
"Book club participants read their own books."
Either way, unless we were willing to gamble on defying that command to intervene — and unless the spirit of Hua Tuo himself descended to possess one of them — the outcome wasn't going to improve dramatically.
“There is exactly one thing we can do right now, and one thing we have to do.”
Follow the rules.
I pressed down firmly on Choi Jaeha's hunched shoulders and sat him in his seat.
"Book club participants read their own books."
“Read your book.”
My voice was swallowed whole by the library's scripture-like pronouncement. Even so, Choi Jaeha seemed to understand well enough; he stared up at me with a blank expression, then bowed his head deeply. I sat down as well and opened my book.
When Choi Jaeha sat his first midterm exams of his third year of middle school, his older brother married the woman he had been dating since his university days. Because his brother had been living on his own ever since entering the workforce, nothing felt all that different. It was only much later, when word came that a nephew or niece was on the way, that it finally sank in.
Choi Jaeha's brother was seventeen years older than Choi Jaeha and had already been a grown man for as long as Choi Jaeha could remember. Someone who had been impossibly far away from the very beginning. And now that person was going to become the father of a child.
His brother felt more distant than before. And at the same time, endlessly close.
Had Choi Jaeha's older sister gotten married by now, I wondered.
I was a little curious what his reaction had been like back then.
"Book club participants read their own books."
The house without our sister was utterly silent. Choi Jaeha learned that some silences have nothing to do with peace. His sister had gone away to somewhere impossibly far.
What?
"Book club participants read their own books."
I'd thought it would be nice, not having that annoying pest nagging at me all the time. Right up until my sister left. But once she was actually gone, the house didn't feel like a house anymore. The feeling was strange.
"What are you doing? Had dinner yet?"
"Yeah. About to head to the academy. You?"
"I had lunch. But what's wrong with your voice? Coming down with a cold?"
"No, I mean, yeah..."
"Is it no, or is it yeah? Fix that habit of not answering properly."
"Yeah. Got it. Guess I'm coming down with something."
If the sister had seen the youngest's face, she would have known at once. Choi Jaeha did not have a cold.
Thank god.
His sister hadn't left the world. She'd left Korea.
For the first time since I'd started reading this book, my heart was in my throat. It was, in its own way, a genuinely suspenseful passage.
"Book club participants read their own books."
How long would that voice keep repeating itself? How long would it wait for those two?
The labyrinth was not a warm, forgiving place — not the sort that made allowances for people incapable of following its rules.
“Nn... mnn...”
A small sound broke the silence of the book club. My head snapped up.
“Kim Gilyeong. Are you with us?”
“Ah, y-yes... ugh.”
Wincing — apparently her chest hurt — the librarian struggled up from the sofa.
“Huh... what am I... why...”
“You were unconscious. Do you remember what happened?”
“Um, uh... no, not really...”
Kim Gilyeong had no memory whatsoever of who had driven a pen into her chest. Apparently the shock had been enough to wipe it from her mind. The human brain does that sort of adorable thing sometimes.
Horrifying thing, rather.
Anyway, the point was that Kim Gilyeong didn't know who her attacker was.
"Book club participants read their own books."
“I know it's difficult, but sit down and read your book for now.”
“Y-yes...”
Only after confirming that the librarian had begun reading her share of the book did I turn my eyes back to my own.
Kim Gilyeong was born at 7:32 in the evening on September 16.
Hm?
Something was off here.
Kim Gilyeong's father used to carry his young daughter on his back and lie prone on the floor reading newspapers or books. Reading something or other had been an utterly natural part of everyday life for Kim Gilyeong.
Why hadn't the culprit managed to kill Kim Gilyeong this time, unlike before? Had they heard us coming and fled?
I looked to the left.
Ah. I'd gotten myself confused.
Had the culprit heard me coming and fled before finishing the job? But then — twice now, they had come for Kim Gilyeong's life without fail. Maybe there was a personal grudge here, something unrelated to the labyrinthification phenomenon.
"Children of Mungrim Elementary, who will write a new chapter of history—!"
The days of enduring the principal's boring remarks in front of the assembly line and singing the school song. The days when there were Saturdays for school and Saturdays for play. The days of splitting a five-hundred-won cup of tteokbokki and a slushie at the stationery store, buying ttakji game cards with the change. The days of daring each other to see who could climb the jungle gym first, who could swing higher.
Still, something was off.
Nobody could leave this library, could they? So how had they escaped? Don't tell me it happened before the building became a labyrinth?
No. No, that doesn't add up.
Was there something I didn't know? Well — of course there was, obviously. But it felt like I was missing something extremely important. There was definitely something I didn't know that I needed to know.
What could it be?
Kim Gilyeong won a prize in the school book report contest.
'I thought, after reading this book, that dreams aren't something you only have at night. After all, at school we suddenly grow big and then small, and sometimes we run down the hall with a clock in our hand because we're late. And sometimes I can't tell whether things my friends said were real or a dream.
When Alice woke up at the end, I was disappointed. Because it would have been nice to keep living in such a wonderful country, and if it were me, I don't think I would have come back.
But Alice did come back, and she returned to her everyday life as if nothing had happened. Somehow that felt ordinary, and a little sad.
This book was fun, and a little scary, and confusing too. But when I think that all of it could be real, it feels like the country inside the book really existed.
So after reading this book, every night before I went to sleep, I opened my closet door just a little to check.'
Alice in Wonderland became Kim Gilyeong's favorite book.
Hold on a second.
Couldn't I find out who the culprit was by reading the last chapter of this book? The book recorded the librarian's life in chronological order, so the recent incident should be written near the end. Unless the book refused to describe the parts its subject couldn't remember — in which case, oh well.
It was worth a try.
Flit.
[Kim Gilyeong]
At the sound of the page turning—
[Kim Gilyeong looked with a puzzled expression]
at me—
[Kim Gilyeong looked at Seon Yuhan with a puzzled expression. "Seon
“Yuhan...?”
"One life is one story. That is the theme of this book club."
“Damn it.”
"The gaze flowing from left to right collides with a blank space and plunges from top to bottom. The gaze flows left to right again. Blocked once more by a white wall, it drops. It scrambles, frantic, back up to the top. And again it races toward a single point at the end, until—
[it turns to the next page."]”
Judging by the library suddenly spouting — what, instructions? Nonsense? — I had apparently made yet another mistake.
"...repeating it endlessly until, at some moment, it lands a period and stops. That is the rule of a story."]”
If one life is one story, then the rules of a story are, in turn, the rules of life itself.
"Seon Yuhan broke that rule."
The moment I'd skipped the middle and started reading from the final chapter, I was branded a public enemy.
["Seon Yuhan...?"]
The librarian's voice — confusion and fear and worry all tangled together — reached me through both my eyes and my ears.
Just before my memory cut out for the last time, a stray flicker of curiosity crossed my mind.
She read Alice in Wonderland. So why did she open the closet?
7. When reading your book at the book club, do not skip ahead to the middle.