Cheon-young Herself
Before the child sat a low table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a handful of rice piled into a neat round mound upon it. Behind her, women stood motionless as wooden statues, and one of them spoke.
"Bow three times and show your respect."
The guest ignored her and sat down before the child. The woman who had spoken frowned slightly but made no move to stop him. The child, for her part, gave no reaction at all, staring only at the rice on the table. The guest cleared his throat.
"I hear you're quite the fortune-teller. My youngest son is sitting for the civil service examination this time. Tell me whether he'll pass."
He had meant to sound imposing, but a slight tremor ran through his voice. It wasn't fear. Facing a shaman for the first time, he was simply a little tense.
After staring at the grains of rice for a long while, the child shifted only her eyes to look at him. The instant those pitch-black pupils met his, the guest's heart plummeted. He felt stripped naked, every last corner of his inner self laid open and picked apart.
Scowling at the unpleasant sensation, he found the child opening her mouth.
"I was under the impression illegitimate children aren't allowed to sit the examinations."
The guest's shoulders jerked violently.
The child gently stroked the rice with her fingertips. The sound of the piled grains collapsing and scattering tickled at his ears.
"Fail to look after an illegitimate child, and it comes back as a curse. You should have given them a way to eat, at least, and seen that the mother was properly cared for. Then you wouldn't have been struck by a curse, at least..."
Then she picked out two broken grains of rice and flicked them toward the guest.
"Too late, is it? Both of them already dead, so of course your dreams have been restless."
Hong Il-beom watched Lee Su-a's performance with a sharp, unblinking gaze. As if her acting at the table read had been nothing more than a warm-up, Lee Su-a — fully made up and standing on set — was Cheon-young herself.
"Cut!"
Perhaps because of that, the actors facing her couldn't immerse themselves in their own performances. They kept faltering, and NGs piled up.
"We'll go again."
"Aigoo, I'm sorry."
Park Min-hyuk, the veteran actor playing the noble guest, had just blown his third take. He apologized to Lee Su-a with an embarrassed face.
"S-sorry. This must be hard on you..."
"No, it's fine."
The moment the cut was called, Lee Su-a slipped out of Cheon-young and smiled evenly. That power of immersion was astonishing every time you saw it. It was as if the child had an acting switch built right into her.
From the other actor's side of the scene, that only made it more intimidating. Park Min-hyuk smiled awkwardly.
Still, the atmosphere wasn't bad. Better this than NGs from poor acting, after all.
"Never seen NGs like this before. Still, it looks like he's getting used to it, doesn't it?"
"Yeah. Maybe the next one will be an OK?"
The whispered voices of the cinematographer and the assistant director reached Hong Il-beom's ears. They ought to have been exhausted by the repeated NGs, and yet a strange sort of enjoyment ran through it all.
Unfortunately, their hopes went unfulfilled.
"Cut!"
"Haa... I'm really sorry..."
Another NG, as expected. There was nothing to be done about it.
Hong Il-beom looked at Lee Su-a and pondered for a moment. Her acting was extraordinary, but it made no allowances for her scene partners. Acting might be done alone, but a scene had to find its rhythm with a partner, and above all, creating a single work demanded overall balance.
Paint a canvas in several shades of gray, then set a single jet-black dot in the center, and the eye goes to that one point rather than the beauty of the whole. Such a point could be a strength or a flaw, Hong Il-beom thought. Of course, the criterion for judging which it was depended on the situation.
Considering the character, it isn't bad.
Ordinarily, Hong Il-beom would have stepped in and coached Lee Su-a to match her breathing with the others. Other actors' pride might take a hit, but so what? For a director, the work came first.
But he didn't. He had anticipated this situation from the start and had primarily cast actors who wouldn't be easily broken by Lee Su-a's skill. And more than anything, the Cheon-young standing before him now was the ideal Cheon-young he had envisioned.
Yes. Here, this is right.
Instead, he advised the other actor.
"Min-hyuk, try folding the bewilderment you're feeling right now into the performance, naturally. Don't force yourself to recite the lines exactly as written. Keep the flow of the scene, and act as the emotion comes."
"Yes, sir. I'll try."
Park Min-hyuk looked a little unhappy, and even a faint fear had settled on the face he turned toward Lee Su-a. Hong Il-beom wanted that face on camera.
I'll have to be careful in the edit. I really can't make Cheon-young the protagonist.
Not yet, that is. Not yet.
Hong Il-beom called standby once more. The camera pursued Lee Su-a's gaze with relentless insistence.
Cheon-young took in every last flicker of the guest's reaction.
Eyes blown wide, irises shivering in tiny spasms, whites shot with blood, the heavy shadows beneath. A sallow face. A mouth that parted, then snapped shut in haste. A tongue wetting lips that had cracked and split. His rigid shoulders had curled slightly inward, and the hand clenched around his fan stood corded with tendon.
"Wh-what kind of nonsense is that! They're alive and well!"
For all the desperate denial, his voice had climbed higher than before, and the tension locking his upper body had constricted his throat, letting a hoarse rasp leak through. Cold sweat sprang up in an instant across his gleaming forehead.
Cheon-young knew how to gather reactions like these and read a great deal from them.
"You killed a four-year-old, and you dare sit there and lie? That child's mother has hold of your skull right now."
"Hiiiek!"
"No matter how much you insist it wasn't your crime, a vengeful spirit doesn't listen. You were the one who forced yourself on an innocent village girl, and you were the one who failed to protect them from your lawful wife."
Of course, a few of these facts had been learned by less mystical means. The age of the illegitimate child, or the identity of whoever had actually killed the concubine, were not things one could easily glean from the information at hand. Hui-yeong had no shortage of people at her disposal, and she was skilled at investigating a guest's background.
To the guest, who knew none of this, every word of it appeared to be Cheon-young's supernatural power alone.
He dropped to his knees at once and bowed his head to the floor.
"Spirit! Please, spare me! For more than ten days I haven't slept for the wailing of ghosts. When I lie down, my chest tightens as if a small child were sitting on it and I can barely breathe. When I sit, it feels as though someone is striking me from above, pain splitting down from the crown of my head. Please, do something — anything!"
Cheon-young, who had been picking through the rice while glaring at the guest, plucked out a single broken grain and threw it at him.
"A man who wouldn't even see to a burial plot — why would a vengeful spirit let you go?"
"Th-that's...!"
"You didn't kill them, so you decided you bore no responsibility at all. The vengeful spirit had no choice but to come collect that debt itself."
The guest looked up at Cheon-young with a face of despair, then bowed his head to the floor once more.
"Is there truly no way? I'll do anything. Anything!"
"Anything?"
"Yes, yes!"
Cheon-young picked through the rice as if deliberating. The soft rustle of grain sent goosebumps crawling up the back of the guest's neck.
"Raise your head."
At last Cheon-young selected six grains. She handed the three intact ones to the guest and put the three broken ones in her own mouth. When she jerked her chin, the guest hurriedly stuffed the grains into his mouth as well.
"Listen with them held in your mouth. A spirit's grievance is threefold. Resolve all three, and the two ghosts will withdraw."
The guest nodded, trembling, to show he was listening carefully.
"First: forcing yourself upon the deceased in life. Second: taking no responsibility whatsoever for the deceased and the child, and abandoning them. Third: standing by and watching the deceased and the child die."
The guest's face twisted with a look of grievance. It was the face of a man who believed he, too, had a story — that it wasn't only the dead who had suffered. But with the small grains of rice held in his mouth, unswallowed, he couldn't offer an excuse.
Cheon-young paid him no mind and laid out her demands.
"Bring as many sacks of rice as the years the deceased and the child had lived. With those we'll steam rice cakes and hold a rite to soothe the spirits."
"Mmph!"
"Ordinarily we would raise graves as well... but I don't imagine the bodies are still in any condition for that. Am I wrong?"
The guest said nothing.
"Your couple's sins being what they are, does this still strike you as excessive? Then go home as you are. Once one of your three daughters is dead, one driven mad, and one left an idiot, I expect you'll think differently."
The guest stared at Cheon-young with his eyes bulging, then slowly nodded.
Confirming that the man's will had been utterly broken, Cheon-young spoke.
"Swallow."
The guest swallowed the three grains of rice he had been holding in his mouth. They sat in his gut as heavy as if he had swallowed stones, not rice.