Even Spending Money, the Windfalls Keep Pouring (16)
'No. 1! Now!'
At my signal, No. 1 dropped straight down onto the head of Seo Jinwoo, who was just stepping in through the front door.
"Oof!"
The instant a startled Seo Jinwoo shook his head and turned his back, I reached out to peek at his clothes.
'Ugh! What the—?!'
Just before my hand made contact, an arm shot up out of the collar of his jacket and seized my wrist. It was cold and clammy — like a snake coiling around my arm.
'What are you?!'
I yanked at the jacket, trying to see what that pale hand really was. And then—
Like the thin membrane stretched around a chrysalis, the jacket split open with a sharp shreeek and peeled away like tissue paper. It wasn't me tearing the jacket. It was tearing through the clothes, pushing its face out into the open.
A woman with long, unbound hair. A single eye sat dead center of her face, ringed by lashes so long they might have been glued on. No nose. No mouth. The One-Eyed Curse Spirit was trying to crawl its way out of Seo Jinwoo's back.
I'd seen movies where ghosts crawled out of TVs, but never imagined something like that happening out of a living person's torso.
'Hyaah!'
I threw a punch straight at the spirit's face — and of course, that was the exact moment Seo Jinwoo happened to turn his head. Thwack! He took my fist instead of the spirit and keeled over sideways like a dried leaf.
'H-his head — did I crack his skull?!'
I scrambled to catch him. The moment Seo Jinwoo lost consciousness, the eyelid of the One-Eyed Curse Spirit slid shut — and his back returned to its normal, unblemished shape. It seemed that whenever the eye opened again, the whole nightmare would start over.
Wait a second.
My eyes caught on the tattoo carved into Seo Jinwoo's left shoulder. It was shaped like an eye.
'Who on earth gets a tattoo this creepy...'
No. 1 hopped down from Seo Jinwoo's head, took one look at the tattoo, and gave it a sniff.
The tattoo. I had to find whoever had inked that eye onto Seo Jinwoo's back. Lifting him bodily, I laid him out on the sofa.
"Whoever put that tattoo on him is controlling Seo Jinwoo through voodoo."
No. 1 trotted after me and sprang onto the armrest of the sofa.
"Yeah. He'd easily make a top-ten list of the country's celebrities. Which might be exactly why someone went to these lengths."
Whoosh. I rolled Seo Jinwoo over face-down and studied the tattoo. It looked like nothing more than an eye shape inked into skin — until I stared at it hard, and the pupil contracted, sharply.
"Ugh! It's like a CCTV camera. I think it's watching us right now."
No. 1 fixed a hard stare on the tattoo etched into Seo Jinwoo's back, then jabbed at it with a front paw.
"It blinked!"
No. 1 abruptly slipped out of his vessel, dissolved into black smoke, and seeped straight into the eye of the tattoo.
'Hey! Hey! No. 1!'
I called for him, wondering if he'd possessed Seo Jinwoo, but no answer came back. Even No. 1's presence had vanished entirely.
'Did he go after whoever made the tattoo?'
I leaned in close and examined the mark on Seo Jinwoo's back.
"It changed."
It was now just an ordinary tattoo embedded in the skin. Even so, the unease wouldn't leave me, so I fetched a bandage and slapped it over the eye.
"Don't you dare spy on us. It's disgusting."
"Uuugh."
A little later, Seo Jinwoo sat up, clutching his temples.
"Mr. Seo, are you all right?"
"Ah... Mr. Kim. Ugh — why am I lying down here? And why are my clothes..."
He gave me a look that clearly demanded an explanation for why his shirt was off. I could hardly tell him a curse spirit had tried to claw its way out through his jacket.
"Our cat had a little accident on your shirt, so I couldn't exactly let you keep wearing it."
Blame it on No. 1 peeing. Whatever — close enough.
"I'm sorry. He was thrashing around so wildly that you hit your head. Are you okay?"
"Ah. So that's what happened."
He accepted it surprisingly easily. Was he just a soft touch, or did he trust me that much? What exactly was he looking at that made him think, oh well, fine then? Honestly, I couldn't wrap my head around it.
Anyway.
"There's a T-shirt on the handle over there. Go ahead and put it on whenever you like."
"Thank you."
Seo Jinwoo pulled on the shirt and let his gaze wander around the living room.
"I thought the house looked wonderful from outside, but the inside is even better. It has the feel of a mountain lodge — that scent of wood, so cozy and warm."
"Thank you."
"Um, but, Mr. Kim... did I do anything strange by any chance? Cause some kind of scene? I've been doing such bizarre things lately..."
"No. Nothing like that. One moment."
I ladled out lingzhi mushroom tea I'd been simmering on the wood stove in the sunroom, carried the pot over, and filled a mug for him.
"It's a healthy tea. Something warm will help settle your nerves."
"Um, actually..."
Seo Jinwoo rubbed his throat and tilted his head, puzzled.
"I feel... better. My back kept going cold and I'd break out in goosebumps constantly, but all of that is just — gone. While I was blacked out just now... did you treat me, Mr. Kim?"
I settled into the armchair across from him and answered.
"I put tape over the tattoo. The one on your back."
"The t-tattoo..."
Pain flickered across Seo Jinwoo's face.
"Who put it there? And why is there only one eye?"
I'd been turning it over in my mind. Human or animal, eyes come in pairs — so why had only one been inked?
"There was probably someone who got the matching eye. Who was it? The other person."
Seo Jinwoo bit down hard on his lip. He'd come here asking for help, but he knew nothing about me. He seemed to have decided he couldn't possibly lay his secrets bare.
'Fair enough. He has every right.'
I understood — but if he clammed up like this, there was a limit to how much more I could do for him.
"I imagine it's not easy to open up your private life to a stranger. You're hardly an ordinary person, Mr. Seo."
I forced a smile and went on.
"Get the tattoo removed. And put distance between yourself and whoever talked you into it. If you do, none of what happened before will happen again."
No. 1 would be busy tormenting whoever had inked that tattoo. Once he'd gorged himself to his heart's content, he'd get in touch with me.
'All I have to do is answer the phone.'
After feasting on the Cheonri Sect, No. 1 had grown far stronger than before. Making a call through a possessed body would be nothing to him. I'd just bring him along then.
I rose from my seat.
"They're saying it'll snow again before dawn. Out here in the mountains you won't even catch a glimpse of a snowplow, so I'd head back soon if I were you."
"Mr. Kim — wait!"
Seo Jinwoo's voice cracked with desperation, as if begging me not to send him away like this.
"I can't get the tattoo removed."
"I'm sorry?"
Wasn't it already a scandal that a top star had a tattoo on his shoulder at all? This would be the perfect chance to wipe it clean. I'd told him to get rid of the thing that was scrambling his mind and conjuring all these horrors — and he couldn't?
"And the lover who got the matching tattoo with me... she's already dead."
A dead person manipulating Seo Jinwoo through a tattoo? No way. That curse spirit I saw — that one-eyed thing — was a vengeful curse summoned by whoever was working the voodoo, layered on top of a curse ritual. The whole tangle ran far deeper than I'd thought.
"Tell me everything. What on earth happened?"
"The truth is... there was someone I loved. But she's... gone now. She killed herself."
His birth mother had taken her own life too, apparently.
"I don't know why so many people around me end up killing themselves..."
Seo Jinwoo was the hidden illegitimate son of a chaebol family — the boy born of Jin Yiyoung, the famed beauty who had dominated the screen and then vanished overnight after an affair with a wealthy magnate. The man had sworn he would divorce and marry her, only to drag out the divorce suit for years before dying in an accident.
"I was never even entered into my father's family register. My mother sank into depression, drank herself numb, and in the end... she killed herself."
"That must have been so hard on you."
"It was. But Ms. Bae, my mother's old manager, looked after me a great deal."
CEO Bae Jung-hee. The capable woman who had buried the fact that Jin Yiyoung bore a chaebol's child through an affair as an eternal secret — and received a hefty payment from the chaebol to found her own entertainment company.
"Ms. Bae poured everything into raising me as an actor. I think she wanted me to live out the acting dream my mother never got to chase."
Debuting as a child actor at twelve, Seo Jinwoo had never once changed agencies, all the way into his thirties. He had become the root, the pillar — the very foundation of Bae Jung-hee's company.
"But I'm only human. Living solely as an actor started to feel hollow. That was when I met Hye-ra, who worked as a personal shopper."
"So I should understand it as a secret romance across a social gulf?"
"Yes. Three months. A terribly short time, but I was truly happy — right up until Hye-ra took her own life."
He said the two of them had gotten their matching tattoos as tokens of love just two weeks before Shin Hye-ra's suicide.
"Doesn't that strike you as strange? We couldn't marry right away, so we promised to become each other's eyes through the tattoos — and then she went and killed herself."
"I couldn't make sense of it either. But Hye-ra was on medication, you see."
Being a personal shopper, he explained, meant perfectly anticipating a client's every whim — a crushing, high-stress job. When her insomnia grew unbearable, Shin Hye-ra had quietly gotten a prescription for sleeping pills.
"My mother took the exact same drug. There are reports that it causes dependency and suicidal impulses, but... it's something doctors prescribe, after all."
Shin Hye-ra had obtained and taken her medication through legitimate channels, and then — supposedly as a side effect — she'd lost the battle with the suicidal urges it induced.
"Once I looked into it, I found out this sort of thing is shockingly common. The pharmaceutical company is headquartered in the States, and the FDA certified it as safe, so a lawsuit was impossible. Only the dead are left to be pitied."
"Well, plenty of doctors prescribed fentanyl swearing it was perfectly safe, too."
As I listened to his tragic story, I organized my thoughts.
'Seo Jinwoo can't look at this objectively.'
He was drowning in guilt, convinced he had to bear some of the blame for his lover's suicide. Because of that, he wasn't asking a single question about how Shin Hye-ra had actually died.
One more thing bothered me.
Two people in Seo Jinwoo's orbit had killed themselves with that same drug.
'His mother and Shin Hye-ra dying by the same medication — that's no coincidence.'
Bae Jung-hee, the entertainment agency CEO, reeked of suspicion. And another thing—
The One-Eyed Curse Spirit that had tried to crawl out of Seo Jinwoo's back — it felt like Shin Hye-ra.
Suppose a voodoo poppet existed, made from Shin Hye-ra's hair, nails, and blood. And suppose a poppet of Seo Jinwoo had been made as well. A man and woman bearing identical tattoos — might they still be bound to each other, even beyond death?
'Ugh! Goosebumps.'
I turned to Seo Jinwoo.
"Could you get CEO Bae Jung-hee on the phone right now?"
"My CEO...? Why?"
Because No. 1 is probably over there right now.
No — I was certain of it.