The Broken Salt Line
A stray spirit had latched onto Shin Jeong-ah — proof that her energy had been sapped thin, leaving her open to whatever was unclean.
Kang Hyeong-seok studied her in silence for a moment, then turned toward the espresso machine.
"Have a smoke?"
"Huh?"
"I saw your cigarette pack yesterday while you were clearing out your desk. Want me to show you where the smoking room is?"
"Oh— uh, yeah."
No smoker alive refuses a trip to the smoking area. The machine gurgled out a fresh Americano, and he handed her the cup.
"What about you?"
"I made some this morning. It's at my desk — I'll go grab it."
He walked Shin Jeong-ah out of the break room, returned to his own desk, and pulled open a drawer. There it is. The jar where he kept his salt.
Salt drove off stray spirits. That was exactly why Kang Hyeong-seok, who had been tormented by the things often enough, always kept a jar of it within arm's reach.
Jar and tumbler clinking, he gathered them up and headed for the rooftop with Shin Jeong-ah. There he sipped his coffee and watched her put a cigarette between her lips — or, more precisely, he kept his eyes fixed on the old hag wrapped around her throat, squeezing it without pause.
"Section Chief, hold on a second."
"Hmm?"
"You've got something on your shoulder. Want me to brush it off?"
"No, it's fine. I'll—"
Cigarette clamped between her teeth, Shin Jeong-ah started to reach across her shoulder.
"It's a bug."
Her hand froze dead at the word, and her eyes shot to his, silently begging for help.
"It's a big one. Don't move."
"Qu-quick — do something!"
A soft clink of the lid. Twisting the jar open from his pocket, he swept his salt-dusted fingers across her shoulder and brushed it clean.
"There. Got it."
"Is it— is it off?"
"Yes."
As he flicked the leftover salt from his fingers, Shin Jeong-ah gulped down air, her face gone white as chalk. She was terrified of bugs, apparently.
"Aigoo..."
"I take it you really don't like bugs."
"Anything with too many legs? Absolutely not."
Whether it was relief, or simply the knowledge of what had been sitting on her, Shin Jeong-ah rubbed her shoulder — and her brow creased. She would find it strange, of course. The weight pressing on her chest and the dead drag of fatigue had both just lifted, all at once.
As she lit her cigarette, Kang Hyeong-seok spoke with careful ease.
"About that nightmare you mentioned from last night. What was it like?"
"Just a weird dream. Nothing worth worrying about."
"Was it, by any chance, a dream about a ghost?"
That did it. Mid-drag, Shin Jeong-ah turned to him with her eyes gone wide.
"Hyeong-seok — do you believe in that stuff?"
"Folklore was my major."
"Folklore? They actually teach that here?"
He'd heard that one more times than he could count. Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, a wry smile settling on his face.
"Studying it, you end up brushing against shamanism and superstition, and I suppose some of it rubbed off on me. I only asked on the off chance."
On this, people came in two kinds: those who believed in Korean shamanism, and those who didn't. To nonbelievers it was absurd superstition, a culture that deserved to die out; to believers, shamanism was science and religion both. And in Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes, Shin Jeong-ah belonged with the believers.
"Huh. Wouldn't have pegged you. You don't look the type."
Muttering half to herself, Shin Jeong-ah tilted her head and went on.
"Maybe it was because of what you said yesterday — I dreamed about a ghost."
"What kind of ghost?"
For a while, Shin Jeong-ah smoked in silence. It was a face she had no desire to recall. But he had helped her out yesterday, and she couldn't bring herself to brush the question aside.
"It was crawling around on the ceiling. There was nothing below its knees."
"...I see."
"Why's your face so serious? It was just a dream."
Kang Hyeong-seok drank his coffee without a word. Whether it had truly been a dream hardly mattered. She had seen a ghost, and she had turned up at work with a stray spirit clinging to her — the ghost had left its mark on Shin Jeong-ah. And that ghost was almost certainly the very presence the shaman bells had warned him about.
"There's a folk remedy I know of."
Sure enough — perhaps she really did frequent fortune-tellers — the word remedy changed the look in her eyes at once.
"How on earth do you know that?"
"I told you — I know a little of this and that."
He took a deliberate sip of coffee, letting the pause do its work, then went on.
"On your way home tonight, buy some red beans."
Delivered like that, his advice sounded no different from small talk.
"Simmer them in a pot until you go to bed. It'll help."
"Boil red beans?"
"Yes. You'll feel a world of difference. And if you want to be extra careful, lay a line of salt along all four walls of your bedroom — just make sure the line never breaks."
Red beans and salt both drove off the impure. The salt worked on the floor itself; the steam rising off the boiling beans filled the room. It was one of those remedies simple enough to do at home.
"I was planning to go pick up a talisman at some point, but..."
"It's Friday. Go after work and it's already too late, and with the weekend in between you wouldn't make it until next week — and by then, far too late."
Shin Jeong-ah turned it over in her mind, nodded, and typed his instructions into her phone. Watching her, Kang Hyeong-seok sipped the last of his coffee.
Maybe he was starting to understand what Lee Geum-kyeong had meant — become a shaman among people. But it wasn't only her words behind it. It doesn't feel like someone else's problem. Not because this was Shin Jeong-ah specifically, or because she was the executive director's niece. He simply wanted to reach out a hand.
He knew, better than most, the agony of being hounded by ghosts. He knew how crushing it could get — and that was exactly why he couldn't bring himself to look away.
"What was your cell number again?"
"My cell?"
"Sorry — I've never done this kind of thing before. Can I reach out if anything comes up?"
"Of course."
They were on the same team regardless; it could only help to have a way to reach each other. He took her phone, dialed his own number, and pressed call. Even as he did, he hoped she would never have a reason to contact him about ghosts. He hoped, simply, that the folk remedy would be enough.
The pot burbled and bubbled, the smell of red beans at a rolling boil filling every corner of the apartment.
Burner turned down low, Shin Jeong-ah eyed the sealed window. Every fiber of her wanted to fling it wide open, but that felt like it would undo everything.
The beans simmered on, bleeding red into the water. Arms crossed, Shin Jeong-ah stared at the pot, then dug out her vape, clamped it between her lips, and sank deep into thought.
Weird. I could swear there's something to him.
At first he had seemed like the most ordinary office worker alive. But now, some part of her suspected otherwise.
How does he know remedies like that...?
Plenty of people held a casual interest in shamanism. But people who knew the remedies down to this level of detail? Boil the red beans; lay the salt so the line never breaks? How many people walking around knew that much?
The pot bubbled on, and her thoughts boiled over with it. She remembered catching something strange about Kang Hyeong-seok as he'd explained the remedy — a flicker of something, there and gone in an instant. But it had been the particular aura she had only ever seen around shamans.
Is this guy really the real deal...?
She drew deep on the strawberry-smoothie-flavored vapor and shook her head. She was reading far too much into it.
A soft hiss of falling salt. Having laid it in long, thin lines, Shin Jeong-ah folded the bag closed and looked up at the ceiling.
She had seen it in the small hours — the thing crawling across that very ceiling. She'd called it a dream because there was no way it could have been real, but honestly, she wasn't sure anymore. Gooseflesh raced up her arms at the memory of its shape.
She tore her eyes from the ceiling, checked that the salt lines were laid just as he'd said, then killed the burner and shut the bedroom door behind her — praying, with everything she had, that nothing would come of any of it.
His phone shrieked and rattled as if begging to be answered, and Kang Hyeong-seok woke with a start.
"Nngh..."
Still half in a dream, he fumbled up the phone and reached to kill the alarm. Except it wasn't the alarm. It was a call from Shin Jeong-ah.
Before his thumb could find the answer button, the call cut off. A moment later, a text arrived.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he let out a long, heavy breath. So the folk remedy hadn't worked. Nothing else could have her calling at this hour on a Saturday morning.
A glass of cold water washed the last of the sleep from his head, and he dialed her back. Click — the call connected on the first ring, and her voice came pouring through.
"Hyeong-seok, I know it's rude to call you on your day off, but I'm really, really scared."
"It's all right, Section Chief. Breathe."
Shin Jeong-ah, who had been spilling words in a panicked rush, went quiet at his level voice.
"What happened?"
"Th-the thing is. That method you told me about yesterday?"
"Yes."
"Last night I was so exhausted that I slept straight through, you know?"
Her voice trembled hard enough that he could all but see her face through the phone.
"But this morning I checked the salt, and it's not the same shape as yesterday."
"...Hah."
"You know what this is, don't you? It's something bad, isn't it? Isn't it?"
"You're at home right now?"
"Uh-huh."
She said nothing more, but her voice said it all: please come. Please. Kang Hyeong-seok closed his eyes, opened them, and looked down at his palm. Three dots — the ordination marks that had seared themselves into his skin the day he first took up the shaman bells.
He pressed his lips together against the silent command, then let them part.
"I'll come to you."
"...Really?"
"Yes. I'm leaving right now, so give me about twenty minutes."
"Okay. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, and — thank you."
"Wait for me outside."
He hung up and grabbed his car keys.
The engine hummed beneath him. In the car, Kang Hyeong-seok drank from the tumbler of coffee he'd brewed before leaving. Black, made at home. On the passenger seat beside the cup holder sat his backpack — the one with the shaman bells inside.
Please let this be nothing serious.
A living person, affected by the dead. Taken on that fact alone, this had already outgrown the category of a small incident. Still — no sense letting go of hope.
It could simply be her saju.
The Shin Jeong-ah he'd observed had a hair-trigger temper, that much was certain. She frequented fortune-tellers, and she'd shown a deep hunger for ways to drive off ghosts. People who kept returning to fortune-tellers came in two kinds: those seeking to pierce an uncertain future, and those seeking to end their suffering.
The Ghost Gate Barrier Star. The Great White Tiger Star.
If he had to guess, those were the stars lodged in her natal chart — and neither was a kind star to carry. Worse, when the two of them shared a single chart, they could produce exactly what had happened to Shin Jeong-ah: a sudden, violent susceptibility to the dead.
Between one thought and the next, Kang Hyeong-seok let out a heavy sigh and pulled up near Shin Jeong-ah's building. She didn't know his car, so there she stood in the alley, scanning the street with a face full of dread.
Click. The car door.
"Section Chief."
"Hyeong-seok!"
The moment she saw him climbing out with his backpack, the breath she'd been holding left her in a rush. That was simply how it went, this kind of pain — hard to win anyone's empathy, harder still to find help. To Shin Jeong-ah, drowning in it alone, his arrival was as welcome as a firefighter stepping out of the smoke.
"You said something happened to the salt?"
She held up the photo she'd taken on her phone.
"I—I sprinkled it in a perfectly straight line, I swear. And look what it's done."
In the photo, the salt was scattered — pushed aside as if a wind had blown in from the wall itself. But the wall stood far from any window, with a clothes rack installed against it, and by any common-sense measure, such a thing could not happen.
"Let's go in together."
"I-in there?"
"Whatever you decide to do about it later, it still has to be dealt with."
Shin Jeong-ah flinched, then nodded with a stiff face. He was telling her she might have to move out altogether. Footstep by footstep, the two of them walked in together — into a quiet residential lane on a Saturday morning. Yet not a speck of peace or ease reached him. Only a deep, visceral wrongness pressed in from every side.
With Shin Jeong-ah watching, swallowing hard, Kang Hyeong-seok gripped the front door. The hinges let out a long whine as the door began to swing slowly open—
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Inside his backpack, the shaman bells had begun to ring — as if screaming a warning of the evil that waited within.