What the Dead Remember
Tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap.
The hour was creeping toward midnight.
Liberated at last from the local grandee and his government friends, Shin Yo-sep sat in his car and hammered at his phone. He was parked just short of the motel the grandee had picked out for him — reputedly the finest lodging anywhere nearby, though a faint musty breath of mildew ghosted out of the place, and that alone was enough to tell him what a wretched establishment it really was.
No sooner had the message gone out than Kang Hyeong-seok's call came flying back.
(Where are you?)
Sinking deep into the driver's seat, Shin Yo-sep peered out at the night from inside the unlit car as he spoke. "In the car."
(Nothing's happened to you? Anyone hanging around?)
"No. And there's no danger of anyone listening in, either."
Which was exactly why he was taking this call in a car rather than a motel room.
(That's a relief.)
"How are things on your end? Find anything?"
(It won't be easy. Some of them came at me earlier. They've even put search parties together and are sweeping the area. You're certain nothing's happened?)
Yo-sep mouthed a curse, lips barely moving, then set a cigarette between them with a knotted brow. He ducked his head, cupping the lighter's flame out of sight, lit up, and drew the smoke in slow and deep.
"I had a drink with the local grandee and a couple of the officials. Money talk, apparently, works wonders — they were almost warm."
(Is that so...?)
"So that's what this is, then — a man with money worth fleecing."
And yet he dreaded even to think about why they had set upon Kang Hyeong-seok. Perhaps they had meant to take him hostage. Perhaps to keep him as a chip for negotiation. Either way, one thing was plain: smiling faces or no, these people stood ready to swing a blade at any given moment.
"Whew-! So what's the play? You want to pull out for now and link up with me later?"
He asked it with worry threading his voice, but the answer was a foregone conclusion before he ever heard it.
(I have no desire to perform your Cheondo-gut.)
"Heh."
(Listen to me, Yo-sep.)
The voice was pitched so low that Yo-sep instinctively pressed the phone closer to his ear.
(If any of them ask about me, you don't know anything. No exceptions.)
Yo-sep nodded with a face that liked it none at all, burning his cigarette down, while Hyeong-seok continued in that same low register.
(I'll dig into it on my own. It's a small village — whatever they've got hidden away, it won't stay buried long.)
"...You'll be all right on your own?"
(Why would I be on my own?)
Yo-sep's eyes went wide, caught square off guard — and then he smiled, something wry and complicated crossing his face.
Kang Hyeong-seok was a shaman. A great one, at that — a giant Yo-sep had unearthed with his own two hands. One body, yes. But a mighty god walked at his side, and so his soul counted for two. However alone the man might look, he had never once truly been by himself.
(And if it comes to it, I have you.)
"Hearing you say it like that, I'm almost moved."
(Cut the crap. What's your next move?)
Yo-sep sucked at his lips and swept his gaze over the surroundings once more. The car sat dark, and the night around it lay hushed — a backwater village, a good distance out from the capital region. Small lights glimmered here and there, but nowhere could he find a stare turned his way.
"I've been invited to a worship service."
A chance to meet the cult leader face to face. An opening Yo-sep had wrung out by putting his directorship at Shinjin Construction front and center.
(Day or night?)
"The service itself is Sunday, naturally, but I'm sitting down with him briefly tomorrow. Word is the church is holding some kind of event."
(If you can manage it, meet him alone. With another one standing at his shoulder, it stops being something anyone can handle.)
"I know the tricks these cults play."
They always claimed the miraculous. They said that though made of flesh and blood, they wielded the power of gods — and then they set out to prove it. Prophecy, healing, clairvoyance, mind-reading, and the rest of the catalogue. But all of it was smoke. Such things could not truly exist, and so, as a rule, it took many hands working in concert to dupe a single soul. The Baekbaek Sect had been no different: its believers would quietly investigate a newcomer's past, and then the leader would "divine" it all to the man's astonished face.
"Whatever they pull, they won't pull the wool over my eyes."
And Hyeong-seok was not the only one who was never alone. Shin Yo-sep, exorcist priest, believed in God as well — believed in the Lord his God, and in the grace that walks beneath His glory.
(Good. Text me if anything happens.)
"You too."
Yo-sep held his silence a moment, burned the cigarette down another notch, and opened his mouth.
"Stay safe."
(Hanging up.)
Just before the line went dead, he heard Kang Hyeong-seok laugh — short and low. Yo-sep answered it with a brief snort of his own and fixed his eyes on the street, drowned in darkness. Then he looked up at the motel's scattered lights and jammed his cigarette into the empty coffee can Hyeong-seok had left standing in the drink holder. The can held nothing, so for a long while the smoke simply climbed out of its mouth and unraveled.
Yo-sep watched the smoke without a word, then folded both hands atop the steering wheel.
"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Eyes closed, he carried the prayer onward.
"Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us..."
His prayer had never been for himself alone. It rose for the two of them — for Shin Yo-sep and for Kang Hyeong-seok — and that was why he meant it, truly, to reach heaven.
"...and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen."
Even after the amen, Yo-sep did not open his eyes for a long, long while.
Deep night, in mountains where no living soul stirred. The silence ran so deep that he could hear water slipping over the rocks of a spring far off. No lights burned anywhere; trees decades old stood packed tight, walling off the view in every direction. And there, Kang Hyeong-seok was stacking stones with a craftsman's care.
Stone met stone with a dry clack. He raised fist-sized rocks at the four directions — east, west, south, and north — and planted atop each pile a leafy branch spread open like a fan. Only then did he lift his face to the moon.
Wrang-!
He shook the Sacred Shaman Bells, their chime washing over the clearing like water poured out to cleanse it.
While Shin Yo-sep buys me time, I have to find the object of their faith.
That was why he had prepared all of this.
The branches fixed in stone would stand in for the flower altar. A Dodang-gut prays for a village's peace and well-being; a Jinogigi-gut calls up the dead, in the manner of a Ssitgimgut. He would summon the dead for the village's sake — call out the souls of the murdered and trace through them the root the cult had driven into this soil.
Wrarararang-!
Eyes closed, as Shin Yo-sep had prayed with his closed, Kang Hyeong-seok rang the bells and opened his mouth with slow care.
"I come to welcome the guardian gods of this village wanting in so many ways. I ask only that you look upon this shaman's sincerity, and forgive what is lacking."
This was no rite performed at a proper shrine, and no ritual table had been laid. But the cult had to be destroyed, and no one could call his devotion to this village small.
"Fresh offerings, fresh offerings, fresh offerings, fresh offerings, humbly presented — as heaven opens and earth is spread wide, ascending left and right through mountain and stream, to become the sun, the moon, and the shining stars."
Standing amid the four stone piles that ringed him, Kang Hyeong-seok shook the bells and drew the Sinjangkal. Chanting the sacred verses in the manner of a god-possessed medium, he carried the rite forward, step by ordered step.
"You who came down amid the sounding of the rites, you who brought forth the mountains, the waters, and the trees — O great lords of every awakening, O reverend hosts of every awakening, deign to receive this devotion. On this good day, chosen and taken up: hair washed in the upper chamber, body bathed in the middle chamber, hands and feet cleansed in the lower chamber — devotion to the sacred spirits rendered whole and unfeigned, and thanks given in utmost sincerity."
The god had to answer. The village crawled with those hunting Kang Hyeong-seok. He had to slip beneath their eyes and reach the one place they had hidden away most deep and most dark.
Wrarararang!
The bells rang at full cry, and he swept the Sinjangkal across the tops of the four stone piles. Wind rose from his sleeves and set the leaves trembling, and somewhere far off a nameless bird called out in a voice he had never heard.
"Heaven opens as it will, earth gathers and is raised; ascending high above the heavens, to become the sun, the moon, and the shining stars — you have come down amid the sounding of the rites."
The night air ran cool. And still the sweat gathered on Kang Hyeong-seok's brow and fell away in beads.
"When you became the mountains, the rivers, and the trees — Lord Mokdeok prepared the grain; Lord Suin drew up the waters. Lord Hwadeok kindled the flame."
Eyes shut to the last, Kang Hyeong-seok gathered his whole mind into a single point. Step by step he drew near to the god, and the air around him began to change. Power sank into the movements of the ritual implements, and the leaves on the stone-planted branches thrashed and clamored.
Then it came.
Wrang!
The bells pealed hard, and Kang Hyeong-seok dragged in a breath, eyes still closed. Then, face still shut to the world, he turned it by slow degrees toward one direction in the dark.
"...So many of you have come."
A spiritual presence so violent that no eye could have borne to open itself to it.
Psssshhhhhh—!
The trunks of the trees on every side bent low, their leaves swinging earthward like a grove of willows. And perched upon them were the dead.
Thud.
Even the stone pile crowned with branches was coming apart at its seams — and into that very moment Kang Hyeong-seok spoke, with careful, deliberate reverence.
"The dead who have come to me tonight carry a deep and bitter grudge."
Pssshhhh—!
The branches wailed as though screaming, and the driving wind made the whole mountain shriek like a chorus of the doomed. A vicious reek — blood, ghost-stench, and rotting carrion — stabbed at his nose.
No grudge, however deep, could make one or two souls reek like this. A venom potent enough that any ordinary shaman might have been forgiven for turning tail and fleeing with blood on his lips bore down on Kang Hyeong-seok like a physical weight.
These were the souls of those the Baekbaek Sect had destroyed long ago. Their number came to better than three hundred. Hundreds upon hundreds of grudges and grievances, so vast they had been strangling the very air.
Wrararang!
Shaking the Sacred Shaman Bells to ward himself, he forced the words out through a strangled throat.
"Please, tell me. Those who wronged you — whom do they serve? And where is it?"
Just then, a sound brushed past Kang Hyeong-seok's ear.
Clatter.
Stones toppling. Then the branch laid across the top dropped to the ground and went skittering here and there on the wind. It was the stand-in he had built for the flower altar — and properly done, a fan planted in rice stands for safety and peace. For it to collapse could mean only one thing: something ill-omened waited in that direction.
North of here?
Sssaaahhh—
The branch swung to the right, pushed along by the wind.
No — northeast.
Wrang.
The bell gave a single soft chime, as if to tell him his guess was true. Kang Hyeong-seok dipped his chin in the smallest nod, then parted lips that were going blue, eyes still closed.
"There is no time just now."
Shaaaaah—!
The branches thrashed in the wind with an ominous hiss, but his low voice carried on, level as ever.
"But I will find the thing that harmed you, and I will destroy it. So I beg of you — gather up your grudges and hold them, only a little while longer."
He had couched it in every courtesy he possessed, but the wind, mad with rage, refused to be stilled so easily. Far too much time had passed since these souls had died. A resentment with nowhere left to go, grown so vast and so deep that it bordered on the demonic — and Kang Hyeong-seok bowed his head to it in silence.
Then he opened his eyes and closed his fist around the Sinjangkal.
"Be at peace."
Wrang! Sssah—!
Shaking both sacred implements, gazing out at the hundreds of souls that stood out plain and bright even in the deep dark, he chanted the calming verse.
"Spirit of the East, open your eyes! Spirit of the South, open your eyes! Spirit of the West, open your eyes! Spirit of the North, open your eyes! Spirit of the Center, open your eyes!"
A verse for stilling the spirits that had gathered, before the rite could be brought to its close.
"Though the shrine stands fallen, may the shaman's honored seat stand in peace and health; one body, swift as sickness; master within and without; drive out and guard, ward and shield; may descendants flourish down the generations; a hundred demons annihilated, ten thousand blessings enduring; may every wish be achieved and granted as asked, and blessings rise ever upward — so may it be."
Wrarararang!
As the bells rang out full and bright, the venom streaming from the dead grew pale, thread by thread. Kang Hyeong-seok swung the Sinjangkal after it, severing the last of the poison from the air, and pressed his lips into a hard line.
Thank you for your guidance. I understand the pain you have carried. But for now — wait for me just a little longer.
Praying with everything he had that the sincerity reached them, he looked down at the branch rolling across the ground. Then he set off walking — into the direction the dead, murdered by the Baekbaek Sect, had shown him.