I Bought an Abandoned House — 14
Night came quickly to the mountain valley in late autumn.
Only moments earlier I could still make out the other man's face, but by the time our conversation ended and I turned around, a pitch-black darkness had come crashing down around us.
“Whew, I'd better not kill the engine, then.”
I hurried back to the car and started it up. Once the headlights pushed back the dark, I climbed into the back seat and hauled out the ice chest full of groceries.
“Goodness, why'd you bring so much?”
I answered the Village Head with a laugh. “We don't have a refrigerator yet.”
Alongside the ice chest brimming with pine nut makgeolli sat two more — one packed with ingredients, the other with side dishes.
“Hold on a moment. I need to turn on the yard lights.”
I flipped the switch for the LED lamps I'd set up around the yard. The big floodlight and the string of fairy bulbs came on all at once, glittering like a Christmas tree. The yard was dotted with fruit trees — plum and cherry, persimmon, silverberry, jujube — every one of them at least thirty years old, and I had hung the lights from their branches for extra atmosphere.
“Whoa.”
The Village Head's jaw dropped. “So that's what all that stuff you kept hauling up here was for. You've been living like this?”
“Looks pretty good, right?”
“It does, it surely does. A fine sight. But leaving the electricity on like this — how do you expect to manage the bill?”
“They're LEDs, so they draw about as much power as those three heat lamps you've got burning on your maru porch.”
“Ah, quit joking around. You're telling me a bulb lighting a porch no bigger than my nose uses the same electricity as all this?”
When the Village Head shook his head in disbelief, Carpenter Jang snorted and explained on my behalf. “The young man's right. That's exactly why I told you the wiring needs to be redone.”
“Hmm, but that'd cost a pretty penny.”
“You'd be paying even more to Korea Electric every month, one bill at a time.”
“Is that so? Maybe I ought to fix my place up too, while I'm at it.”
While the Village Head wrestled with his dilemma, I opened the ice chest stuffed full of groceries. Carpenter Jang stole a glance inside, and his eyes went wide.
“By the way, didn't you say we'd be having meat?”
“You don't like eel?”
I held up a plastic bag of cleaned, dressed eel as I asked. Even restaurants that specialized in eel sold it by the piece, but I'd bought the stuff by the kilo. My dream, after all, was to eat eel until I burst.
Hanwoo beef, red grouper, even a special cut of steak garnished with matsutake mushrooms — I'd eaten it all while wining and dining clients back in my bank investment days, but even stuffed to the gills, the one thing that tasted good right down to the last bite was eel grilled over charcoal.
So today, determined to eat my fill, I'd stopped by an eel farm on the way and bought a mountain of it.
Is this too much?
The Village Head and Carpenter Jang blinked at me in astonishment, then exchanged a look of genuine pity.
“Is it wearing you down that badly, son?”
“I'm sorry? No — I just like eel, so I bought a lot.”
Sensing the Village Head had gotten some strange notion into his head, I hurried to explain. “Eel's easy on the digestion, you know. And it's delicious grilled over charcoal. I've been getting a little tired of samgyeopsal lately, anyway.”
But why did neither of them look like they believed a word?
“Ahh, say no more, we understand.”
“You know, eel's only truly good for you if you simmer it whole, bones and all.”
Now even Carpenter Jang was looking at me with those poor-sod eyes. I burst out laughing.
“No, gentlemen, hahaha. It is really, truly not like that. Why does eel always send your minds straight to the gutter? You're putting me in an impossible spot.”
“It's all right, son. There's nothing we can't say among friends.”
Carpenter Jang patted me on the shoulder. “Leave the eel be and rest yourself. I'll get the fire going. We just light it in this brazier, right?”
He rolled up his sleeves. Looking for all the world like a druid out of a fantasy novel, Carpenter Jang was so good with his hands that he had the charcoal blazing in no time. The Village Head, meanwhile, set up the chairs and table he'd stowed beneath the tarp.
“Honestly, gentlemen, I'm the one who's supposed to be hosting you — what am I to do with you both jumping in to work like this?”
“This is the only place us old fellows have left to spend our useless strength. Isn't that right, Carpenter Jang?”
“That's right. You heard the man — sit and rest.”
“Hahaha. Yes, well... I can see you've both got your misconceptions, but with no way to prove otherwise, I'll just go finish unpacking the rest of the gear.”
A young whippersnapper moves into the mountains and starts renovating an abandoned house — something must be wrong with him. That was plainly what both men were thinking. And honestly, I had been unwell, so I didn't much feel like arguing the point.
Where would my pride be then? So it's fine. Truly.
I rolled up my trouser legs and walked to the car. I'd bought camping equipment, and I meant to unload it —
“Yahk!”
A white ball of fur suddenly popped out and went darting off into the woods.
“A cat?”
What had leapt out was, without a doubt, a white cat. About the size of the dead one I'd found when I left Seoul.
A chill ran down my spine, just like the day I first laid eyes on that evil spirit cat. But that creature should have been long since destroyed. Besides, the coloring was wrong — the evil spirit cat had been black; this one was white.
When did a cat even get into my car?
Uneasy, I searched the vehicle top to bottom. There was no other cat to be found.
“What's the matter over there?”
The Village Head came over and asked.
“Looks like a cat was hiding in my car. It bolted out of nowhere and gave me a scare.”
“A cat? Cats don't much take to living around our village.”
The Village Head frowned slightly and let his words trail off. At that, Carpenter Jang craned his neck toward the old man.
“You mean the Hwanggu ghost is still wandering the village?”
“Hwanggu ghost, my foot! What kind of nonsense is that?”
The Village Head nearly jumped out of his skin, blinking furiously at Carpenter Jang as if to warn him to watch his mouth. But Carpenter Jang sprang to his feet and pressed the point.
“Now hold on, Village Head. You mean to tell me you never told the young man about the Hwanggu ghost? That's not right. He's sinking serious money into fixing up that house — how could you keep quiet about a ghost that roams this village?”
“Wha—! Right! A ghost roams the village, does it? Carpenter Jang, why are you making up stories that don't exist—”
“I've already met the ghost of the former-former Village Head.”
I blurted it out flatly before the two men could come to blows. In an instant, both of them fell silent. A shiver seemed to run through them head to toe, and the looks they turned on me were etched with fear.
I shrugged and went on. “There was a grandmother with her hair pinned up neat, wearing a white jacket and a skirt embroidered with blue bamboo. She's the one who told me. And a grandfather in a Saemaeul cap — she said he was the former-former Village Head. He used to live in the house up on that hill.”
“Now what ghost is that supposed to be...”
The Village Head's face crumpled, and he stole a nervous glance at me. “I'm sorry, son. It wasn't that I meant to deceive you... I was afraid if you knew how often spirits turned up around here, you'd leave.”
“You knocked the price down knowing full well the abandoned house came with a ghost.”
“That's right! Exactly! I cut the price clean in half for you, didn't I?”
“So don't hide things from me — tell me about the Hwanggu ghost too. Like Carpenter Jang said, I'm about to pour serious money into this house. I should know exactly what spirits live in this village, shouldn't I?”
Is this the right approach? Well, knowledge is power, as they say.
“A village where ghosts... live... I suppose it's true. Our village... Aigoo, I can't go on like this.”
In the end, the Village Head finished setting up the camping chairs and table and said, “Sit here, son. I'll tell you everything I know.”
Carpenter Jang took his seat as well and turned the eel sizzling over the charcoal. As I poured the makgeolli and filled their cups, the Village Head let out a long breath and began to unburden himself of everything that had happened in this village.
“The name Ugok-ri — they say it came from the sound of cattle lowing.”
Good grief, at this rate he'll be talking till sunrise. I gathered up a plate of perfectly grilled eel, the makgeolli jug, and two cups. “Let me take food to the residents of the abandoned house first. I'll listen after that.”
“Who... lives in the abandoned house?”
“A ghost.”
“Damn it all.”
Carpenter Jang gulped down his makgeolli in one swallow. The Village Head shuddered from head to toe.
***
This was the ghost story that had come down through Ugok 1-ri as legend.
They said the wind howling down from the valley pass sounded like the moans of cattle being butchered, and that was how the village got its name — Ugok-ri.
The terrain was harsh, the land's energy fierce, and from long, long ago, all manner of strange misfortunes had visited the place, generation after generation.
As I listened to the Village Head, I searched my phone and found the official story differed a little. The settled version held that the village was named for its winding roads — u for the detours, gok for the curves.
Either way, during the Korean War, when so many were killed and wounded here, they said the stream ran red as blood.
Perhaps that was why. Villagers had wasted away with inexplicable illnesses, and others simply packed up and left.
Could have been contaminated groundwater, too.
The former-former Village Head had summoned a shaman for a gut ritual every year and held rites for the mountain god as well.
“Things were fine back then. No great calamity ever struck the village, and no one ever fell ill without cause.”
Then the former-former Village Head died, and his successor took over the village's affairs — and that was when a masterless yellow dog, a Hwanggu, began roaming about.
Everyone assumed it was a dog abandoned by someone from a neighboring village who had died or moved away, so they left it be. The mountains were full of things to eat; they figured it would fend for itself as a stray.
“But here's the strange part. As the Hwanggu made its rounds of the village, whenever someone fell sick or a soul was about to pass on, it would bark its head off. We thought it a remarkably clever beast. My brother — the Village Head before me — made a point of feeding it.”
Had the Hwanggu lived out its days in peace, nothing more would have come of it.
“Then one day, whether it stepped in a snare or what, we began to hear a dog wailing up in the mountains. My brother went up to look.”
The Village Head moistened his throat with makgeolli before continuing.
“The snare was full of torn-out fur, but the Hwanggu itself was gone. We found out later... one of the village elders had caught the dying dog and...”
“Aigoo.”
Carpenter Jang set his chopsticks down just as he was about to take a bite of eel. His appetite seemed to have fled entirely.
“Who on earth ate the Hwanggu?”
“Didn't live long after. He lost his footing in the mountains and couldn't move after that.”
The Hwanggu had barked loudly whenever the village elders fell ill or were dying — crying out for help on their behalf. And that very dog was likely the reincarnation of the former-former Village Head in his Saemaeul cap.
The old man in the cap had complained of a bad ankle. And the Hwanggu the YouTubers claimed to have seen at the abandoned house had been limping on an injured ankle, bleeding. There was no way all of that was coincidence.
While I sat lost in thought, the Village Head carried on.
“After the Hwanggu died, people started seeing ghosts. Some claimed they'd seen their departed ancestors. Some saw our own soldiers. There were even those who swore they'd seen North Korean soldiers from the war.”
“That would make sense.”
Drawing on what the White Porcelain Grandmother had told me, I reasoned it aloud. “The former-former Village Head was a lower-rank medium, so he would have been able to lay down wards. Even after being reborn as the Hwanggu, he must have kept using that power.”
“A medium?”
“Wards?”
The Village Head and Carpenter Jang asked at the same time.
“Wards are barriers you raise with magic to keep out ghosts and evil spirits. I saw it in a webtoon.”
I spoke between bites of the golden-brown grilled eel. “But with the former-former Village Head and the Hwanggu both dead, the ward broke. That's when people started seeing things and strange, unexplainable things began happening in the village.”
“And even knowing all that, you mean to renovate that house?”
“Yes!”
“It doesn't frighten you?”
I gave another shrug. “They're only ghosts.”
“Only?”
“As long as I don't do anything wicked, a ghost won't harm me. People are another matter. They'll hurt you when you've done nothing wrong at all. It was a human being who caught and ate the Hwanggu that worked so hard for this village, after all.”
The Village Head and Carpenter Jang nodded at my words, though worry still clouded their faces.
“All the same, you'd best be careful. Which reminds me — how about we have a shaman pick an auspicious day to start the renovation? A day with no evil spirits about, that's the ticket.”
At Carpenter Jang's suggestion, the Village Head chimed in. “Aye, if we're doing the job properly, that sounds like the wise way to go about it.”
“I'm afraid I have to disagree. And here's why...”