Whispers in the Fog
A sticky, suffocating heaviness hung in the air.
It was a foulness beyond anything mere fog could account for. And threading through it, a smell — fishy and rancid at once — jabbed like a needle into his nose. Whatever waited in that darkness was the cause of all of it.
Shhhiriririri.
What sounded like the wind was no wind at all: a phantom chorus rang in his ears — dozens of voices, men and women, young and old, muttering in low tones faster than speech should allow. And strangely, impossibly, he could grasp what they were saying.
Come...
This way. Hurry.
Step.
His feet moved whether he willed it or not. Forced forward toward the fog, he thought he could hear Noh Soo-chul shouting somewhere behind him — but the whispering smothered the sound, and not a word came through clearly.
Come...
You're doing well. Yes. That's it. Keep coming.
Step. Step. Step.
Trudging into the fog with leaden, sluggish steps, Kang Hyeong-seok felt his breathing grow ragged. He knew he had to resist — but it was as if a transparent rope had wound itself around his body, coil upon coil, dragging him along.
Tling. A bell sounded right beside his ear, and his feet locked in place.
More and more bells joined in.
Tlararararang!
By the end, a dozen small bells seemed to be shaking all at once, their tones heaped one atop another. It sounded like the bells shamans ring — and at that sound, Kang Hyeong-seok snapped wide awake.
"Hah! Haahk—haahk, haahk!"
Eyes flying open, he frantically scanned his surroundings. The car sat trapped in the fog, visible only as a silhouette, and Noh Soo-chul's face had drained chalk-white with terror.
"Hey! What's wrong with you! Pull yourself together!"
Wiping away the cold sweat, Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head hard.
'Damn it. Not again.'
Something beyond sense and reason had taken hold of him. Just like the ghosts that had tormented him countless times over the years — that darkness, too, had been trying to lure him in.
"What are you doing over there! Aren't you coming? Get over here!"
Noh Soo-chul bellowed for him with more venom than usual, but his voice shook so badly with fear that it carried no menace at all.
"It's nothing."
Kang Hyeong-seok stared into the darkness with eyes that had changed since a moment ago. Nothing met his gaze, yet he felt certain something vicious was about to burst through the fog at any second.
We need to leave this place. Now.
"Let's get back to the car first, Deputy General Manager."
"Wh-what?"
"I'll explain in the car."
"What about reporting it? We should—shouldn't we call someone?"
"I said let's go. First."
He tugged at Noh Soo-chul's forearm, but the man didn't budge an inch.
"What are you talking about? We report it first, you punk!"
Noh Soo-chul was digging in his heels beyond all understanding. The sheer wrongness of it chilled Kang Hyeong-seok — and when he looked into the man's eyes, he found pupils that seemed to gaze at mountains impossibly far away.
Goddamn it.
Kang Hyeong-seok bit the curse down and spat it out through his lips alone, without a sound.
'Deputy General Manager Noh has been lured in.'
To be lured was to be in danger. The things people called evil spirits charmed their victims into acting in ways that made no sense — and that was how those things took what they wanted.
What the chang-gwi wanted was human life. To be precise: the blood and flesh of Kang Hyeong-seok and Noh Soo-chul.
His hands shot out and seized the man. "Snap out of it! This is no time for this!" Kang Hyeong-seok gripped his shoulders hard and shook — but Noh Soo-chul's face only kept going slack, the very muscles loosening.
THWACK!
Kang Hyeong-seok smacked him on the shoulder with his open palm. It rocked his whole frame, yet the man only went on muttering, "I have to report it... I have to report it."
"Snap out of it! Come on!"
Kang Hyeong-seok raised his fist to shoulder height. He couldn't bring it straight down — for an instant, he faltered. Old habit: the man was his superior at work. But the decision came quickly after that.
Because that superior was Noh Soo-chul.
SLAP!
Noh Soo-chul's head whipped sideways and he tumbled across the ground.
"Gahk! Ugh! Aaaaargh!"
Jolted wide awake, Noh Soo-chul clutched his cheek and glared up at Kang Hyeong-seok, eyes fierce as axe blades.
"You—you bastard, did you just—just hit me?"
"Snap out of it! Goddammit!"
Kang Hyeong-seok shouted more savagely than Noh Soo-chul had ever spoken to him — a face he never once showed at the office. And so Noh Soo-chul could only work his jaw open and shut, cheek clutched in his hand, his tongue refusing to cooperate.
Then, calmly, Kang Hyeong-seok held out a hand.
"Get up."
Noh Soo-chul actually flinched away from the offered hand, startled.
'Bullshit. A coward this spineless — what the hell had he been counting on, running his mouth like that?'
With one yank at his collar, Kang Hyeong-seok hauled him to his feet and started toward the car.
"Follow me. Quickly."
"You—you—why, you..."
"I said follow me!"
When Kang Hyeong-seok whipped his head around and barked, Noh Soo-chul trailed after at a wary distance, scared out of his wits.
'Damn it. We're dead.'
Noh Soo-chul would never know — not even in his dreams — just how perilous this situation was. Something vicious had spread itself across every inch of the earth around them. The way a tiger hides within fog, the chang-gwi was hiding its body in the mist.
Kang Hyeong-seok had been tormented by ghosts long enough to be sick of it, and experience told him exactly how dangerous this moment was.
'Lose your grip on your mind, and you die.'
Clutching his sanity for dear life, he stopped in front of the car. Aside from the crumpled front bumper, smeared with blood and fur, nothing else about it seemed wrong.
Clunk!
But, cruelly, the door would not open.
The relief that had just settled into his face drained of color in an instant.
"We're screwed. Goddammit."
Spitting the curse with genuine feeling, he threw the strength of his entire body into shaking the door by its handle.
Clunk, clunk, clunk!
He pulled hard enough to wonder whether the handle might tear clean off — but the door did not move a hair.
"Y-you never unlocked it."
"It's a smart key!"
This, from a man who had happily freeloaded a ride on every single business trip — Noh Soo-chul just kept bleating his clueless nonsense.
"What are you doing? Grab on with me!"
"Uh—okay."
Before Kang Hyeong-seok had even finished speaking, Noh Soo-chul darted over and took hold of the handle beside him.
"We pull on three."
"O-okay!"
"Two, three!"
CLANK!
The entire car rocked on its wheels, but this time, too, the door didn't so much as twitch.
CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!
"Haahk, haahk!"
Letting go at last of the door that would not open, Kang Hyeong-seok dragged in great gulps of air.
If something had gone wrong, it had gone thoroughly, catastrophically wrong. A fault in the car or the key? Not impossible — but for that of all things to happen now, of all times, made no sense whatsoever. It was as if someone, determined not to let Kang Hyeong-seok and Noh Soo-chul slip away, was conjuring one aberration after another.
"Haah, haah, haah."
The sinister thought pressed down on his chest, and his breathing quickened. He had been hounded by ghosts plenty of times before. But never once had a moment been this dangerous. He might die here today — at the hands of whatever dwelled in that fog.
Kang Hyeong-seok stood beside the car, staring into the thick fog and the darkness behind it. And when Noh Soo-chul, following his lead, looked toward the same place—
"Hello? Is someone over there?"
A man's deep voice came drifting from beyond the fog.
"A—a person! There's a person!"
For an instant, color bloomed in Noh Soo-chul's face and he moved to answer. But Kang Hyeong-seok's hand clamped over his mouth at once.
'That smell. Raw blood.'
The moment that voice had sounded, the fishy reek had reached his nose — the raw, fresh sort of stench you'd catch outside a fish shop. Which meant it was not a smell that should ever hang over a fogbound mountain like this one.
'The reek of ghosts...'
The smell of the dead. The smell of an evil spirit. It had brushed past his nose the instant that voice reached his ears.
"Looks like you've had an accident. Are you all right over there? Sounds like you need help. Come on over this way."
With his hand still sealed over Noh Soo-chul's mouth, Kang Hyeong-seok backed away slowly. His other hand rested on the man's shoulder, and he could feel the trembling running through that body, plain as day.
"I'm no strange person. I'm a villager from down below — just passing through on a small errand. Is it one of those situations you can't speak of? Hello? Are you all right?"
Kang Hyeong-seok swallowed, his throat clicking. The ghost-stench — that raw-blooded reek — was thickening by the second.
It's coming closer.
"Say something already!"
Kang Hyeong-seok looked back. Beyond the guardrail, a slope plunged downward as though the mountain had been sheared with a blade. The fog was too thick to see the bottom, but for escape it beat the road — a straight, wide-open lane offering no cover at all.
That was when it happened.
"Noh Soo-chul! Kang Hyeong-seok!"
The thing called their names in a voice so resonant it set the whole mountain ringing.
Every hair on his body standing on end, Kang Hyeong-seok yanked Noh Soo-chul hard.
"Run!"
"Hnngh—haaaahk!"
"If you want to live, run!"
Kang Hyeong-seok was already sprinting for the guardrail, and Noh Soo-chul tumbled after him, mind blank with terror.
He flung himself over the rail and looked back — only to check on Noh Soo-chul, that was all — and that was how he saw it, closing in behind them.
It was not human.
Tiger-like stripes covered its body from head to foot. It had the bulk of a calf. But the head was a man's. As if to proclaim that a tiger had devoured it, the face was twisted in agony — and only the lips were split, torn back all the way to the ears.
As if it were smiling.
In one motion, Kang Hyeong-seok seized Noh Soo-chul by shoulder and collar and hauled him over the guardrail.
"Gahk! Aaargh!"
Dragging the shrieking man upright, Kang Hyeong-seok poured himself down the slope as though he were falling.
"Wh-what—what's back there! Assistant Manager Kang! Hey!"
"Don't look!"
If Noh Soo-chul got lured in a second time, he wasn't confident he could do anything about it.
Crash! Tat-tat-tat-tat!
As they tore down the pitch-dark mountainside, he turned the thing's appearance over in his mind. His Yeongan, his spiritual eye, had been open since childhood — he had seen many ghosts and been tormented by plenty. A shaman who never receives a god is the person lowly spirits and evil ones covet most. One misstep, and she becomes a shaman in name only, a vessel with an impostor spirit squatting on her seat; even spared that fate, spirit sickness will grind her down with cruel suffering. Kang Hyeong-seok had, thankfully, never fallen to a crippling spirit sickness — but he had seen his fill of evil spirits.
A ghost shaped like that, however, he had never once seen. Not in his entire life.
'Why? Why would something like that exist?'
Rustle! Snap!
Shoving aside branches that lunged at him and night moths that whirled at his face, Kang Hyeong-seok ran through the darkness to put distance between himself and the chang-gwi.
"Haahk, haahk! Haahk!"
His breath was crowding up under his chin. The stones damp with fog seemed to lie in wait, watching for their chance to snap his ankle; right behind him, the chang-gwi seemed ready to snatch the back of his neck.
An ordeal harsher than anything he had ever lived through dragged an old memory up to the surface.
"Mansin, why haven't I received my Momjusin?"
He must have been around thirteen at the time. Kang Hyeong-seok had stayed close to the shaman who had performed his Sin-nureum, and every so often he would put questions like this to them.
"I can see ghosts. I'm so scared. I don't want to see them anymore, but I keep seeing them. You said everything would be fine once I received my Momjusin. So when? When will I finally receive one?"
"My poor child."
The shaman had stroked young Kang Hyeong-seok's head.
"You have no need for fear. The Momjusin who will take you is a great one. If that one is watching over you, what is there to be afraid of?"
"But I haven't received the god yet?"
"That one has claimed you as its own. Would it fail to protect you?"
"But it's so frightening. If this is how it will be, then I want to receive my god soon."
None of it made sense to him. Not the Momjusin who left him seeing ghosts. Not the shaman who only told him to wait. Not when he had been in such agony as a child.
"The time has not yet come."
"Then when? When can I receive one?"
"That is for your Momjusin to decide. So be patient a little while longer. When you have become a vessel complete — when you are ready to receive that one — then that one will come looking for you."
Thump! Crash!
"Aaaaargh!"
Kang Hyeong-seok glanced back at Noh Soo-chul, who had gone down over a root jutting from the earth. The chang-gwi, its eyes blazing with malice, was closing in fast.
"Damn it!"
"A-Assistant Manager Kang! S-save..."
Grabbing the outstretched hand, Kang Hyeong-seok ran on.
Woooooong!
The mountain wind howled into their ears like the shriek of an evil spirit, crawling gooseflesh across their skin.
"I wish I could receive my Momjusin soon."
These were the very words — the very thought he held right now — that young Kang Hyeong-seok had once said to the shaman.
"Hyeong-seok. Remember this one thing: your Momjusin is waiting for you with a longing as desperate as your own."
"Waiting for me?"
"Yes. Just as that one once wished for nothing but your birth."
That was how that day's conversation with the shaman had ended.
'If not now, then when — isn't this exactly that moment?!'
That was the quiet bitterness Kang Hyeong-seok still harbored toward his silent Momjusin.
"W-wait! Just—hahk! Haaaaahk!"
Dragged along by his seized arm, Noh Soo-chul choked the words out between heaving breaths, but Kang Hyeong-seok only kept racing down the mountain, glancing back again and again.
Ssasa-sasa-sasa!
The chang-gwi was pursuing them from behind, sliding off to their left — exactly as though it meant to herd Kang Hyeong-seok and Noh Soo-chul in the direction it wanted them to go.
Kang Hyeong-seok's molars ground down hard, and in the span of a breath he ran through a dozen thoughts.
'Which way?'
Back to the car? Or right? No — left? Just straight on?
Just as he began to flounder, his way lost to him—
Tling.
A clear bell-tone brushed past his ear.
Tling.
Tling.
Tling.
It went on ringing, as if to show him the direction he had to take — and the sound pulled Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze toward it.