The Doctor's Questions
This time, a man who called himself a doctor showed up. He asked a lot of questions. It seemed like he might have been seeing a psychiatrist, but Lee Hwan still couldn’t keep his mind steady. Maybe he had called the doctor so the doctor could figure out whether the nonsense spilling from his mouth was real. He was taken from the interrogation room again and again, sometimes to a hospital room, and they forced him to recount every single detail of the past without adding or removing a single thing. What he had managed to dig out, however, was the story of Miho. She had vanished without a trace. The moment he regained his senses, he no longer knew where she was. Had she simply left him like this? The thought nagged at him. But he didn’t have the strength to go looking for her. Hwan still couldn’t shake the memories of that night. Even with his eyes closed, the bodies torn apart like mountains rose behind his lids. The stench that billowed from them refused to fade no matter what he did. One day he suddenly realized he was covering his own nose and mouth with both hands. He had kept them there until he passed out. In his confusion he had screamed, “The smell… won’t go away… the smell… the smell…” Even that history might have been the reason they moved him from the interrogation room to a hospital bed. His mental state at the time had been dangerously fragile. It was like a thread dangling from a frayed edge, ready to snap. The doctor had even warned the officers not to push him too hard until he accepted every memory he was supposed to carry. He didn’t know how many days had passed. A few days later the officers came again. Hwan had no choice but to dredge up the past once more and tell the story from the beginning. The mad villagers, the attempts on his life, the word “sacrifice” that the old man Yoon had spat out, and exactly how he had reacted in the middle of it all. Every time he remembered, fresh pain lanced through him. The fear from back then tightened his throat until he could barely breathe. “I-I crossed the orchard… then something caught me… I-I fell… and there…” He had to squeeze his eyes shut. His breathing grew ragged. Sweat poured down his forehead. Through the thunder and lightning, the storm that hammered down like a typhoon, he saw those eyes—cold, unblinking—watching him. And the ruthless violence that followed. His body trembled like bamboo in the wind as he bit his lip bloody. His face drained of color. Nausea surged again. The doctor beside him watched with worry. The officers looked equally helpless. Finally one of them set a cup of water in front of him. Hwan gripped it with shaking hands and gulped it down in desperate swallows. Even so, the knot in his stomach refused to loosen. The terror from that night still crushed him like a stone. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes. In the past he might have said something like, “I’ll rest a bit today and finish later,” but the officers didn’t even let him pause. They just kept going. “T-They beat me mercilessly.” He remembered the past afresh, and the pain came rushing back with it. “It hurt too much… I couldn’t fight back.” “Do you remember why they wanted to capture you?” “I don’t know. Really… I really don’t know. They just said the word ‘sacrifice.’” “Sacrifice…” The officers’ eyebrows drew together even more at the word that had already appeared once. “What kind of sacrifice?” Hwan shook his head. He didn’t know. He had no idea what the sacrifice meant, who it was meant for, or even what they thought they would gain from it. “I-I don’t know. I-I was just trying to escape and was late, so the plan fell through… That’s why they beat me. They beat me… they beat me…” Hwan choked out the words through sobs. He kept recounting the story. The police car he had contacted showed up eventually, and he told them everything—even how the cops had been killed by those mad old men. Even now he could see how effortlessly that old man had done it. Calm, smiling, killing without a flicker of hesitation. “Still… thanks to him I got the chance and ran away.” Hwan remembered pushing the old man aside, using every last ounce of strength left in his body. “After that… I don’t even know where I went. I just kept running and running.” “Do you remember anything around you?” “No. It was too dark. The rain was pouring down so hard… I just ran until I reached some mountain.” He couldn’t bring himself to say he had heard a woman’s voice and followed it. What would they think? He was already half-mad in their eyes. Especially now, after Miho had disappeared, he wasn’t even sure he had truly heard that voice or whether she had saved him. It felt like nothing more than a nightmare. “I-I was terrified and just ran. When I came to my senses, I was on the middle slope of some nameless mountain. There was a big cave there… and inside it looked like an abandoned temple.” “A temple?” “Y-Yes… I don’t remember exactly where. But it was some kind of temple, and it seemed unused now. I hid there. But then the old man Yoon came after me. We were arguing… and suddenly…” “Suddenly what?” “He ran away.” He couldn’t say the rest. The old man had almost killed him. No—when he looked back at the memory now, he had died. And then he had come back to life. Ironically, he had been saved by a bead from a fox spirit. Would they even believe that? Probably not. They would just call him crazy again. The officers were frowning harder. “Why did he suddenly run away? Do you know why?” “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Maybe I heard the police siren… I’m not sure. I just ran. Then I stayed there for a while, came outside, and… and tried to find my parents…” Tears spilled again. The scene he had witnessed still lingered like a scar that would never fade. The body of his father with his throat sliced open, the charred corpses, his mother vanishing into thin air… Hwan lowered his head. He whispered, “These are the only things I remember. I don’t know anything else.” The officers didn’t look satisfied. They crossed their arms and sighed. Their foreheads were deeply creased. Hwan understood. He felt the same way. The situation made no sense at all. How could something like this have happened to him, to his family? How could he possibly understand what had gone wrong? “I really don’t know. Why did the villagers turn like that all of a sudden… why did they want to kill me… I don’t know what the sacrifice even means.” He even wanted to ask the opposite. “Why… why us… why…” Tears poured freely.
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