Winter Preparations – 7
"Twelve years ago, I'd say?"
Mrs. Han Su-ja furrowed her brow as she cast her mind back to those days.
"Our village never had any crime to begin with, and unlike Ugok 2-ri or 3-ri, we never got tourists or campers passing through. It's the kind of place where outsiders never wander in by mistake."
"That's true."
It was a remote mountain hamlet where people scraped by on farming and selling wild greens. Everyone knew how lean the households were, so the neighbors stuck close together and lived with their gates left open.
"But then our village elders started losing the gold rings their children had given them for their seventieth, eightieth birthdays. At first they assumed they'd just put them somewhere safe and forgotten where. Who would ever imagine a thief had broken in?"
"So no one reported it to the police?"
"Exactly. The rings would never have been found anyway."
Mrs. Han Su-ja suddenly smacked her knee and went on.
"Then my brother-in-law spotted a stranger prowling around the village. He said he had this gut feeling—that man's a thief."
"So the former village chief was still in good health back then."
"That's right, hale and hearty. He thought something was off and tailed the fellow, but the man fled on a motorcycle."
A motorcycle?
Hadn't Mrs. Hwang Sun-ja, the former chief's wife, also been the victim of a motorcycle hit-and-run?
When I tilted my head in confusion, Mrs. Han Su-ja continued.
"Then a few days later, my sister-in-law got hit by that motorcycle. She'd gone to market to sell her wild greens and was coming home in the dead of night—and out of nowhere, a motorcycle appears from behind and mows her down."
"...So that's how it all happened."
"Hm? What do you mean?"
I took a moment to organize my thoughts before answering her question.
"Think about it—a hit-and-run on a motorcycle and a string of stolen gold rings, both in a tiny village, one right after the other. That points to a single culprit. And my guess is the accident was deliberate."
"Y-you're saying he ran over my sister-in-law on purpose?"
"I'd need to dig a little deeper to say for certain... but yes, I think that's quite possible."
He must have felt the noose tightening around him, so he manufactured a bigger incident to bury the petty thefts under it.
The case ended exactly as I'd predicted, too. The former village chief was never able to dig any deeper into the theft, the whole thing was quietly swept under the rug, and the culprit was never caught.
If my hunch is right, the man is truly despicable.
As if theft weren't enough, he'd gone and committed a hit-and-run on top of it.
Mrs. Hwang Sun-ja, the victim, was struck out of a clear blue sky.
And it didn't end there.
Days later, the silver rings meant for her granddaughter-in-law and newborn grandchild vanished without a trace—no wonder she suffered a stroke.
She'd endured that much unbearable injustice. Of course the guardian snake would come to me begging for help in catching the thief.
Though the guardian snake is just as much a victim in all this.
Had the snake coiled up in that abandoned house, waiting for a mistress who would never return, only to watch her ashes finally come home and be buried in the family plot on the mountain?
I once saw a TV program about pets. A grandmother in the countryside was rushed to the emergency room, and her dog refused every meal, staring listlessly at the village entrance as if waiting for her to come back down the road.
I imagined the guardian spirit must have been the same.
If he'd watched his mistress's ashes return only in death, then swallowed his grief and waited all those long years for someone who would finally listen to him—
And then I appeared, with my newly opened Yeongan, my spiritual vision. So he'd revealed himself and asked me to catch the man who had harmed his mistress, even at the cost of exposing his own presence.
"About that hit-and-run driver. Even if the village itself had no CCTV, there would have been security cameras along the national highway. Yet they never caught him, which makes me wonder if he had connections in the government offices."
"Government offices?"
"Yes. If your son works at the county office, wouldn't you do everything you could to erase the evidence that you'd struck someone?"
"So you suspect old man Yong-gu is the culprit? Because he rides a motorcycle?"
"I didn't even know the old man rode a motorcycle. That just made it all the more certain."
Looking anxious, Mrs. Han Su-ja glanced out toward the kitchen, as if worried someone might overhear, and spoke up.
"I suspected old Yong-gu myself when my sister-in-law was hit. Though it never even crossed my mind that he might have done it on purpose."
Her chest seemed to tighten; she struggled for breath, panting hard, and tears slid down her cheeks.
"But you need evidence before you can report anything, don't you? And on top of that, he did well by his children—the eldest son's a police officer, and the youngest works at the county office."
"I'm not so sure he raised them well. They might all be criminals themselves."
"Oh, this is terrifying. Look at my hands shaking. Yoonho, dear—someone who's done something like that once, how hard would it be for him to do it again? If you go digging up the past, he might come after you too."
That worry, I thought, belonged to them, not to me.
I gave a wry little laugh.
"Come on, now. You really think I'd do something so reckless?"
The hit-and-run and the burglary had happened a good twelve years ago.
There'd be no evidence left, and no one around willing to testify or come forward as a witness.
And it's not as if I could tell them the guardian snake brought me the evidence.
If I'd been an ordinary man with no abilities, I wouldn't have dared dream of digging into the truth of a twelve-year-old case.
In the countryside, getting on the bad side of the police or county officials makes starting any business an uphill battle. I'd have thought long and hard before acting.
Which is exactly why it's so wonderful that I don't need to worry about any of that.
I gave a casual shrug.
"I'm not planning to do anything right this second. Oh, by the way—when did you say Mak-sun Halmeoni sold her land?"
"Around that same time, I believe? It wasn't long after my sister-in-law collapsed from her stroke that Mak-sun's grandfather passed away."
While he'd been sneaking in and out of the village committing his thefts, Kim Yong-gu must have caught wind that the son was planning to sell the old man's land.
He'd lowballed the price, snatched the field up for a song, and then had the audacity to strut around claiming he was growing dried radish greens on it.
Whether he would repay his sins while still alive, or face his punishment after death—that would be decided once I'd met Kim Yong-gu in person.
"It's getting late. You should get some rest."
When I said I'd be heading home, Mrs. Han Su-ja rose from her seat and asked,
"We're going to bury the napa cabbage and radishes in the ground before it freezes. Shall we bury some for you as well, Yoonho?"
"I'd love that, thank you. When were you thinking of doing it?"
"Tomorrow?"
She glanced up at the night sky, decided tomorrow looked like it would be clear, and turned back to me.
"Tomorrow it is, then. Come by the field if you've got time—our cabbage patch, right next to Mak-sun Halmeoni's."
"I will!"
The weather made it feel as though winter had already swaggered up to our doorstep.
The mountain wind cut unusually cold, and I shivered violently.
"Which son of a bitch keeps tearing up my dried greens?"
Kim Yong-gu, a little past eighty this year, was fuming as he surveyed the inside of his plastic greenhouse—the racks of drying radish greens had been ransacked into complete chaos.
He'd fenced the place off and locked the entrance tight, making it impossible for man or beast to get in. And yet here was this mess.
Kim Yong-gu paged through the security cameras he'd installed at every corner, trying to identify the intruder.
And then—
"Goddammit!"
The moment he saw the great serpent slithering over the fence, he leapt clean off the ground, a chill racing down his spine.
But only for a moment.
"Can you actually make liquor out of a rat snake?"
Everyone knew snake liquor was good for a man's vigor. That was just accepted wisdom, wasn't it?
Because snake-catchers had all but swept the countryside clean, these days any snake other than the venomous kinds had become a rare commodity.
Weren't people saying that catching and selling snakes and centipedes earned more money than tilling a decent field?
Kim Yong-gu debated whether to pickle the snake in liquor and sell it or boil it down into a good health tonic, then hauled himself to his feet.
First things first—I need to set a trap and catch the thing.
He could worry about liquor versus stewpot after the capture. That part could wait.
"You want to catch the rat snake?"
A little while later, Kim Yong-gu stopped by a health supplement shop in the township center and showed the owner the security footage on his phone, explaining that he intended to catch the snake.
The shop owner's eyes went wide as saucers the moment he saw the footage.
"Th-that's no ordinary rat snake. That thing looks like a spirit creature. Its body is thick enough that you could report it to a TV station, and it seems intelligent too. Look—right here. It's staring straight into the camera."
"Which is exactly why it's worth a fortune, right?"
"That's not what I'm saying. The point is you shouldn't catch something like this. It might be a sacred creature, or the guardian spirit of the land itself."
Kim Yong-gu's face crumpled in a deep scowl.
"So what I'm asking is what kind of trap I need and how to set it! If I put out rat poison or something, the snake will be ruined for eating, won't it?"
"You're not even planning to relocate it alive, you're... you're going to eat it..."
The shop owner waved both hands, saying this was something he couldn't help with.
"Ha, unbelievable! What is it with these country folk and their superstitions?"
Kim Yong-gu had swindled people through a pyramid scheme before moving to the remote mountains of Gangwon Province, and though he'd lived here for over twenty years, he still thought of himself as a Seoul man.
He had no intention of returning to the capital, but he remained proudly convinced that he was leagues above the people living in backwater villages like this one.
Everyone here dug in the dirt and lived in poverty, while he had made his fortune, built a two-story house, married off all his children, and founded his own thriving clan.
That pride burned fierce in him.
"Forget traps. Better to just club the snake to death."
It only came out at night, so he'd simply stand watch, then smash its skull the moment it showed—the thing would go limp and helpless on the spot.
Kim Yong-gu snickered to himself and climbed onto his tiller.
The harvest season for Ugok 1-ri's dried radish greens was fast approaching.
He planned to head over today, check how well the leaves had grown, and set the exact harvest date.
But then—
"Hey, you little punk! Who the hell are you, squatting in my field? Son of a—! Who are you?"
What was it they said—thieves only ever see thieves?
The sight of a young man standing in the middle of his radish green field made Kim Yong-gu's eyes roll back in his head.
"Get out of there right now! Punk, who are you?"
Who am I? Me? The Grim Reaper, of course.
Early that morning, the guardian snake had come to my tent and, this time, spat out a wallet.
Kim Yong-gu.
After swallowing the wallet—even holding the man's resident registration card—the snake had labored to bring it back up, then slipped silently away toward this very field.
And now the wallet's owner, Kim Yong-gu himself, stood right in front of me, jabbing a finger my way and cursing up a storm.
Hey, cat. You think you could give this bastard a hard time? Give him some proper nightmares too?
I asked Number One, who was curled in my arms.
[If my master commands it, anything's possible!]
Good.
I'd made a point of never turning Number One's power on human beings if I could help it.
No matter how you spun it, Number One was an evil spirit capable of killing people.
With the shaman and the janggu player last time, they'd been dragging malevolent spirits around with them everywhere, so borrowing Number One's power hadn't troubled my conscience in the slightest. Using that power on a person, though? That was another matter.
The problem was, Kim Yong-gu didn't qualify as a person.
There's no telling how many elders fell ill and suffered after losing the gold rings their children had worked to give them.
And here he was today, wearing a gold necklace, gold rings, and a gold bracelet on top of it all.
A creature who adorned himself with other people's blood and tears—I decided he didn't deserve to be called human.
To start, make every limb in his body ache. Don't open that mouth of yours and go straight for the throat in one bite.
[Got it!]
At the prospect of slipping out of his possessed vessel to torment a man in his true evil-spirit form, Number One flicked his red tongue in giddy excitement.
"You son of a—! You got cotton stuffed in your ears? I'm an elder talking to you, and you just stand there gaping at me like a dead fish? Come here, you little punk!"
Kim Yong-gu marched into the field, looking for all the world as if he were about to grab me by the back of the neck.
I let out a soft chuckle and gave the order.
Now. Go—quickly!
[Thank you, Master!]
Number One poured out of his possessed body and hurled himself at Kim Yong-gu in the form of a black, smoky evil spirit.
Looks like he has no intention of holding back.
Number One swelled to the size of a house and coiled himself around Kim Yong-gu's body.
"Urk—!"