The Shadow
Around the time Iseor had just stepped out of the shower, a man built like a mountain sat in a quiet café not far from her studio apartment, tucked into a corner seat by the window with an iced Americano resting in front of him.
The man watched the clip on the smartphone he'd set on the table, his face slack with a kind of lazy disinterest. His eyes, however, were anything but idle — those sharp, restless glances swept the alley and the street beyond the glass without pause.
"Dongcheol. There's a child I've been worried about… Could you quietly look into how that kid's been doing lately?"
When he'd first heard the request a few days ago from an acquaintance who practiced medicine, Dongcheol hadn't weighed the matter too heavily. The man wasn't the type to talk nonsense, so it was hardly a trivial errand — but the case currently sitting on Dongcheol's desk was simply too large to leave him much choice.
Serial kidnappings, in this day and age. What kind of goddamn bastard…
The straw between his thick lips crumpled under the grind of his teeth.
Park Dongcheol. A detective with the Violent Crimes Unit at the Hanseong-gu Southern Police Station, and one of the investigators assigned exclusively to the serial disappearance case that had begun to haunt the residential streets of this neighborhood.
In recent weeks, a bizarre phenomenon had been unfolding across the southern reaches of Hanseong-gu: people were vanishing. The frequency ran at two or three a week. The victims' genders and ages varied wildly, but one common thread bound them all together. The targets were the vulnerable.
Strictly speaking, even that hardly qualified as noteworthy. Criminals had always gone after the elderly, the weak, and women and children — anyone without the strength to fight back. The real problem lay elsewhere.
Is this son of a bitch crawling through the sewers or what?
Dozens of officers had combed every CCTV feed in the area and canvassed the streets until their feet ached, and they had not turned up so much as a silhouette, let alone a travel route. It was as though the darkness of the city itself had swallowed people whole.
With a case of this scale on his plate, he would ordinarily have let a private favor like this slide. But that acquaintance was a capable collaborator who had furnished decisive leads on more than one investigation — and, privately, he was also Dongcheol's maternal uncle. On top of that, whether by stroke of fortune or foul luck, the studio apartment where this "child of concern" lived sat squarely inside the core dragnet of the current disappearance-or-kidnapping case.
And there was one reason larger than the rest.
I owe the man my life. A detective, for crying out loud — I can't just blow him off.
And so Dongcheol watched the alley in front of that child's building once a day, carving the time out of investigative downtime and night patrols with thrifty precision.
"I'm back."
His junior, Detective Im Junho, approached, pulled out the chair across from him, and sat. He was a lean man, though the muscle on him was compact and solid. The two of them had been rotating through the cafés in the area one by one, using each as a temporary stakeout post.
"Yeah. Anything?"
"No, sir. Still no sign of anything suspicious. Ah — thank you for the coffee."
Dongcheol slid over the iced café latte he'd ordered ahead of time as Junho dropped into the seat, scratching the back of his head. Color flickered across the younger man's face, which until then had been steeped in exhaustion and looking thoroughly bitter.
"Tsk."
Dongcheol clicked his tongue. His own mouth tasted foul. It had already been two weeks since the special investigation task force was stood up. And yet, after turning over every record they could find, they had determined that the case had first begun at least two months earlier. People had been vanishing by degrees well before that — it was only when the frequency spiked two weeks ago that the disappearances had finally snagged in the investigative net. In the early days they had filed the cases away as ordinary runaways, lonely deaths of elderly people living alone, disappearances of dementia patients. That complacency had let the damage grow.
"Hey — over there…?"
Junho, who had been knocking back his cold coffee, suddenly sat bolt upright and pointed out the window. Dongcheol's head snapped around on reflex, following the line of that finger.
A latch clicked.
Across the street, a slight shadow slipped out through the first-floor entrance of a cramped, aging studio building. Dongcheol's thick brows drew together. The girl's appearance matched the description he had committed to memory, down to the last detail.
"Let's go."
Chae Iseor. The very child his acquaintance — his maternal uncle, Kim Yunseong — had so earnestly begged him to keep watch over.
Iseor sat with her shoulders drawn in as far as they would go, staring at the backs of the two large men's heads in the front seats.
This was the second time she had ridden in a police car. The first, for the record, had been in her previous life — when a strange woman had falsely accused her of sexual harassment and she had ended up behind bars.
Suing her back for false accusation, waiting on the verdict… what a long, miserable hassle that was.
Having lived through that sour chapter, the impression she carried of the police was not a kind one. They had locked her in a holding cell on the strength of one party's statement alone. If she had come away from that with a favorable view, that would have been the strange part.
But Iseor could not let any of that discontent show. For one thing, the man in front of her had a face ugly enough that most criminals would start calling him "boss" on sight. And more than that, her mother's words kept circling through her mind.
"The Lee Hayan of now is not human."
Above all else, it was because those words would not leave her.
"More than half of what makes up that body is something other than human. If we treat the question of humanity as a matter of composition, then it can no longer be called human. And yet, at the same time."
Mother had not hesitated to tell her the truth. Iseor's terrible suspicion had been, to a degree, correct.
"The continuity of the being called Lee Hayan has never once been broken."
It was a story both astonishing and grotesque. A body transforming into something other — and, sealed intact inside that husk, a human mind. In the midst of that confusion, Iseor had immediately put a second question to her lips. Then what about me?
Mother had looked down at her with perfect calm and added:
A firm, unambiguous answer. And a short while after hearing it, the girl had been swallowed by a violent wave of self-loathing. It was why she could finally put a name to that strange feeling she'd had looking down through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the luxury restaurant at the department store.
I was relieved.
She had been genuinely, sincerely relieved. Even after being told that those children had become monsters, or were becoming them — she had pressed a hand to her chest in gratitude that she would no longer have to be the victim. And then…
…I was glad.
Iseor squeezed her eyes shut. Mother had promised her, without a flicker of doubt, that she would never become a monster. But the self she was now felt as though the inside of her, at least, had already turned into one.
How did I end up harboring something so ugly?
Her upper lip settled quietly over the lower one. The reason she had wanted to be alone was this guilt. That Mother had, in the end, made those children into something monstrous — that was frightening, yes, but she did not hate it. It should have stopped there. Taking joy in the process of someone losing their humanity was a feeling she could not, by any measure, forgive in herself.
Is something actually happening to her?
In the front seats, the two men were privately at a loss. They had loaded the child into the car on the pretext of having questions related to the investigation, and then found themselves unable to open their mouths. Seasoned violent-crimes detectives or not, the person in the back seat was just a child. A little girl so small it was hard to believe she was a second-year middle schooler — and draped in a gloom so dense and heavy that they could not bring themselves to speak to her lightly.
"Ahem!"
Dongcheol finally ran out of patience and jerked his chin at his junior in the passenger seat. Junho jogged to a nearby convenience store and came back with something to eat. A soft cheesecake.
"Want this? You must be hungry."
"Thank you."
The detectives' bribe, however, did not have much effect. The girl accepted the cake, glanced around uncertainly, and then carefully divided it into three. An adult-minded child, considerate of the people around her to a degree like this. The sight was admirable, and at the same time it was impossible to guess what kind of history might sit behind a nature like that.
"Ah — no, no. We're fine. We don't need any."
"Go on, eat it all. We were just at a café until a minute ago."
"Ah… all right."
Of course, none of that lifted the shadow from the girl. The weight she was carrying was not the kind a snack could lighten — and, decisively, Iseor herself still held the memories of an adult.
Dongcheol stole a look at the child's face in the rearview mirror and swallowed a sigh where no one could hear it. A weariness washed over him, as though he were living through his kindergartener daughter's teenage years a full decade ahead of schedule.
"Um… didn't you say you had some questions for me?"
Inside the car, where a stifling silence had settled, Iseor was the one who finally broke it and asked them their business.
"Ah. Right. Have you seen any of the people in these photos around the alleys near here lately?"
Dongcheol hurriedly brought up a screen on the tablet across his knees and showed her several photographs.
"No. I've never seen any of them."
"What about anyone or any car acting suspicious, hanging around near your building?"
"That neither, not really…"
Only then could the detectives shift into investigative mode. Of course, the questions were a formality and nothing more. The real reason Dongcheol had put Iseor in the car was that he could not leave the child his acquaintance had asked after alone on a dangerous street. Junho had no way of knowing that particular circumstance.
"I'm sorry. I don't think I've been of much help…"
"No, don't think that. We weren't expecting much anyway. It's not like that bastard's left any tra— ngh!"
Junho, who had been on the verge of letting something he absolutely should not have said slip out, jerked in his seat. Dongcheol's elbow had driven into his ribs. It was the kind of boneheaded mistake Junho would not ordinarily have made. The child who had been sitting there so wilted had finally spoken, and the impatience to keep the conversation going had made his mouth careless.
"The hell are you running your mouth to a kid for?"
"I— I'm sorry…"
Junho hunched over with a groan. Dongcheol understood the impulse well enough not to dress him down any further. The muscular man studied the girl with a complicated look in his eyes.
Still. We got something out of this.
Whatever had her looking so dark, she did not appear to be suffering anything so ugly that Yunseong would have needed to ask this of him. Her clothes were neat, and the skin visible past her sleeves hadn't a single mark on it. The shadow clinging gloomily to her back still sat wrong with him — but prying any further into someone else's family affairs was more than he could justify.
I'll keep watching for a while longer, though. As promised.
With that thought, Dongcheol turned the wheel.
"Want us to drop you at that park from earlier?"
"Oh — yes. Thank you."
Iseor bowed her head. Watching the road slide past the window, she turned over something the police had just brought to mind.
A serial disappearance case…
She had completely forgotten, until now, to ask Mother about it. And the fact that the police had not managed to catch so much as the tail of the culprit — that was news she was hearing for the first time.
But what if that culprit is Mother?
It was entirely possible. She had no evidence, and yet a conviction of that kind settled over her all the same. Iseor's face went a shade paler and set hard. The aftershock of the devastating things she had heard at home had not even begun to fade, and now another vast question had taken up residence in her chest. If this serial disappearance case really was Mother's doing—
What am I supposed to do?
She could not tell a soul. And she could see no way of handling it alone. The girl's dilemma deepened without end, past any bottom she could find.