I know nothing.
I knew nothing.
Father and Mother had grown to love this place with all their hearts. Contrary to our fears, the villagers were kind and gentle, so my parents began looking for ways to give even more to them. They would cook extra food and share it even though it wasn’t their duty. When they bought meat, they never kept it just for the family; they divided it among the entire village. If supplies ran low, they would even scoop out portions from our own stores to hand out. That wasn’t all. Whenever heavy labor was needed, Father would set aside his own family’s work and tackle the village tasks first. Mother did the same. They even neglected their own fields yet still went to help weed everyone else’s. Mother, especially, had lived her entire life in the city. She had never once worked the soil, yet she struggled to assist the villagers however she could. Her once-pale skin gradually took on the faint bronze of sunlight.
Mother had always been a woman who valued her complexion. She never stepped outside without sunscreen. Yet for the sake of the people who had welcomed them so warmly, she stood beneath the blazing sun and worked the fields beside them. That was how hard she tried. And even then, she remained a beautiful woman. The slight tan did nothing to diminish her loveliness.
In the face of such devotion from my parents, I, Hwan, could not simply keep complaining. I was not a completely heartless child. Though I grumbled and whined every single time, I eventually joined them in helping the village. After all, we had to live here for three years at least. If I failed the entrance exams again, it might be even longer, so there was no point in making enemies. Perhaps that was when I began to outgrow my adolescence and gain some maturity. Later, I even told myself that if my parents enjoyed this life, then there was nothing to be done.
And so, little by little, I came to accept rural life. Yes, knowing nothing at all. Unaware that every part of it was a trap, I had tried to embrace this existence.
I should have noticed sooner…
Unlike the city, night here turned the world pitch black. In that lightless darkness, only the cries of insects filled the air. Back then there had been a wooden platform in our yard. I remembered pitching a tent on it and lying down together. The soft chirping of crickets sounded almost affectionate. The breeze that brushed past us was far too cool to belong to summer. It eased the heart. I surrendered myself to that tranquility, setting down every worry and anxiety for a brief while. At moments like those, I would think that coming to the countryside wasn’t so bad after all.
With my eyes closed, listening to the insects and feeling the cool wind, I was about to sink into the approaching tide of sleep.
That was when it happened.
“Wake up.”
The icy voice jolted me awake. I snapped my eyes open and sat up. At some point the space around me had emptied. Father and Mother were nowhere to be seen. A light glowed from the church a short distance from the house. I tilted my head. Why would the lights be on at this hour?
I climbed down from the platform and called for my parents. No answer came. A chill wind swept past. For some reason, that cold carried an eerie foreboding. Anxiety rising, I began walking toward the illuminated church.
A horrifying scene awaited.
What in the world was this?
Every villager had gathered inside the church. They were all on their knees, bowing their heads toward something. The silence was absolute. At some point even the insects had fallen quiet. The entire area had grown so still it felt unearthly. Tension gripped me; I swallowed hard without realizing it. I studied the motionless, bowing figures one by one as I approached the wide-open church doors.
“M-Mom? Dad?”
I called out softly. No reply. The people themselves offered none either. The strangeness of the sight crossed into the grotesque, and my unease swelled.
I stepped across the threshold and entered. The sanctuary lay directly ahead, but all the tables and chairs had been cleared away. In their place, more people knelt, bowing toward something in a silence so thick it stole the breath from my lungs. They were frozen like statues; not a single twitch disturbed them.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Confronted with such bizarre stillness, fear slowly overtook me. At last I reached the great cross at the far end of the sanctuary. I recoiled.
The cross was upside down.
The Jesus statue that had always stood beside it was gone. So was the Virgin Mary. The space was empty. Instead, two crosses had been erected on the platform, and upon them hung my parents, posed in grotesque imitation of the crucifixion.
“M-Mom! Dad!!!”
My heart plummeted. What was happening? I rushed toward them, desperate to pull them down. The moment I set foot on the platform—
Someone seized my shoulder in an iron grip. Then, with monstrous strength, they slammed me downward.
“Aaaagh!”
I screamed in agony. The crushing force drove me helplessly to the floor.
“Aaaagh! Let go! Let me go!!”
I thrashed and shouted, but I could not move. Twisting my head to see what held me, I discovered that the previously motionless villagers had swarmed over me. They were all pressing down with brutal weight. Their eyes—every single one—showed only blank, milky sclera.
Aah! They were not human anymore. None of them were normal.
Terror-stricken, I flailed and screamed. But the harder I fought, the heavier the pressure became.
Then it came.
The roar was nothing like any earthly animal. No beast in our country could produce such a thunderous bellow. It was not a beast at all. My body began to shake uncontrollably.
A deafening crash followed. The church roof was ripped away. Rain poured down in sheets. Within the pitch-black void, two crimson eyes glowed like burning coals. The creature growled once more, then turned its gaze toward the cross where Father hung. Shock and horror paralyzed me. I could not move. The hands pinning me down made any action impossible.
And then—
It tore Father’s head from his shoulders and devoured it.
The shock was so immense my mouth fell open, but no sound emerged. While I remained frozen, the villagers who had been crushing me returned to their original positions, once again bowing their heads in silence.
“D-Dad…”
My lips had gone blue. All I could manage was a thin, wheezing sound like air leaking from a punctured lung. No words formed. No tears fell. My mind simply could not accept what it had witnessed.
At that moment a voice slithered through the darkness.
“You are sacrifices. You must become sacrifices… and grant peace to our village. Yes. It must be so.”
The instant the voice finished speaking, the creature’s jaws clamped down on Mother’s skull.
“Aaaaagh!”
A scream tore from my throat and my eyes flew open.
Cough… cough…
I kept spitting out pitiful dry hacks. The coughing refused to ease. Metallic breaths wheezed in and out of my lungs while dream and reality still blurred together.
Then a beautiful woman’s face suddenly appeared above me.
I flinched. The sight felt familiar. Yet the woman did not offer the gentle smile she had worn when she first bewitched me. Instead she stared down with raw resentment. Her eyes blazed with fury, filled with a sticky, venomous hatred so thick it seemed to cling to the air.
“You’ve finally awakened…”
Her words made little sense to me. My body still shook like a leaf in the wind. I looked around, and fragments of memory began to return. The massive boulder behind me. The interior of what looked like a temple. The beautiful woman’s face.
“Ah…”
A low sigh escaped me as another tremor seized my limbs. In that instant her hands shot forward, seizing my cheeks in a vise grip and forcing me to meet her gaze directly. Then she spoke.