The Door to Hell
Beep.
Shin Yo-sep lowered his phone, and his face looked more burdened with thought than usual. A thin tremor ran through the hand at his side, the veins standing proud beneath the skin, and his eyes drifted restlessly, as if searching for somewhere to settle.
"The operative's reached the edge of the village."
They stood deep in the mountains. A temple sat nearby, ringed by forest where the green growth had run wild and lawless, tangled like an unraveled skein of thread. Kang Hyeong-seok, who had called him out to this place, pressed his lips thin and nodded, and in that interval Shin Yo-sep tipped his head back and let out a scalding breath.
"I don't know. Whether this is right."
No doubt the hesitation came of Shin Yo-sep being a priest.
Kang Hyeong-seok drew a long breath through his nose and turned his gaze on the village. Before long, the operative would reach it — and then he would move exactly as Kang Hyeong-seok intended, just as Shin Yo-sep had relayed.
"I know. I do. That this is an unreasonable thing."
They had to shake the heart of the cult leader — no, the shaman. They had to drive her to summon her god. And then they had to find where that god was hidden, and destroy it. One chance. That was all they would get. A single mistake was unthinkable.
"You said the operative was someone you could trust? Has he done work like this before?"
"Anything that comes down to using his body, he does well."
Then it would be all right.
The job they had entrusted to the operative was, in a word, to throw the village into confusion. Not easy, that. It'll be hard.
He had heard that the man had already come to this village once before, to gather information. His face was known, and having fled with a woman in tow, he would be hunted hard by the cultists. The easiest way to punch through all of it and sow chaos in the village was fire.
"A fire is the most thorough way there is to drag every eye to one spot. And where he's setting them, no one will get hurt."
Shin Yo-sep's gaze clung to him; Kang Hyeong-seok frowned as he looked out over the village.
"Just think of it as one grand gut."
The voice was pitched low, meant to lend the man something to believe in. Shin Yo-sep's face said he was far from willing, but he raised no objection — only closed his hand around his phone. Then he typed out a message to the operative and sent it: Please. I'm counting on you.
Glug-glug-glug.
Pouring out the oil he had carried in a plastic bottle, the operative kept throwing glances over his shoulder. A single car was running along the national road close by, but thankfully it paid him no mind.
His heart hammered; his mouth was going dry. It was worse with the abandoned fields stretched wide open all around him, offering nowhere to hide.
He sealed the mouth of the bottle with a vicious twist and looked to the western sky. An unnamed mountain reared up steep from the earth, and the sun hung directly above it, sinking by degrees as though the mountain were drawing it down.
"Hoooooh..."
He vented his tension in a long breath, like steam hissing from a boil, and fished a lighter from his pocket. A small sound. The wind. The stir of a bird. Jumping at each and every one, he also drew out a cord of toilet paper twisted tight as rope. Then he picked up a small stone, wound the paper around it, and when the sun had dropped clear away and darkness closed in, he shifted his eyes to the ground he had drenched in oil.
Click.
He lit the paper and, molars clenched hard, hurled the stone. It was the spot where the oil lay thick — over dead branches, over grass and rice straw — and the moment burning stone met fuel,
FWOOSH!
flame geysered upward. The fire roared to life in an instant, spewing black smoke, painting the operative's face and clothes red.
"Hey! Hey!"
A human voice came floating from far off. The operative glanced that way once, then tossed the oil bottle into the flames and broke into a dead sprint.
FWOOSH!
It happened in that open ground, where black smoke billowed up and spread as if it would fill the whole sky.
Wee-ooo! Wee-ooo!
The wail of fire trucks filled the village end to end. It was not yet the hour for the sky to soak black with night, and yet the dark had come all the same — it seemed the thick, acrid smoke was to blame.
Bang! Yu-ji flung open the church door — plainly having run the whole way — and shouted with the blood rising up his throat.
"P-Pastor! Pastor!"
The pastor stood with the cross at her back. At her calm, Yu-ji faltered, and his next words came out strangled.
"I-It's chaos, Pastor. Fires are breaking out all over—!"
"I know."
Hope and relief spread across Yu-ji's face. This woman whom he and the others called their pastor possessed a mysterious power — a power one could only call a miracle of God. The gift to heal the sick, to see straight through hearts and pasts, was not something any ordinary religious figure could hold.
He had been certain she would loose that piercing insight again tonight. But against every expectation, the pastor's face had gone rigid.
"Pastor...?"
"Someone is setting these fires."
Yu-ji's frozen eyes wavered with disbelief.
"W-Wait, no! Don't tell me it's that Director bastard—!"
The pastor shook her head, eyes narrowing sharp.
"What about the Education Center?"
Flustered, Yu-ji shifted his gaze outside the church. Quite some distance from here, in a commercial building that bore no signboard at all, stood the facility they called the Education Center. A place reserved for only the most steadfast of the faithful, where the doctrine was taught. A place of truth and salvation, precious to them as a beating heart — he had never dreamed it would come up here.
"Sh... Should I cancel the session?"
"Hurry."
"Yes! Yes!"
It was the very moment Yu-ji snatched up his phone and hurried to dial—
Wee-ooo!
A fire truck tore past, siren screaming, not far from where they stood. Could there be a fire near here too?
As Yu-ji stood rooted, phone in hand, the pastor's lips sealed themselves shut. Then, eyes narrowed to slits, she mouthed something — soundless words, moving on her lips alone.
Shin Yo-sep and Kang Hyeong-seok saw the smoke surging over the village as well. Three fires in all. He checked his wristwatch; roughly twenty minutes had drained past.
"...Just a little longer."
Shin Yo-sep nodded without a word and turned his eyes back to the village, and Kang Hyeong-seok shook the sacred shaman bells in one hand — small, fine measures — to quiet his own heart.
The shaman has to call her god down. Once she summons it, either the god finds us — or she traces the fires to their cause.
Shhhhhh—
The air rolling in from the village stank of burnt things. Kang Hyeong-seok dragged his tongue across a mouth gone desert-dry, and as Shin Yo-sep sat clutching his phone, a buzz broke the quiet.
A text from the operative.
"Hold on!"
Shin Yo-sep asked him hurriedly to stop the ringing bells, then read the message with the phone held in both hands. Then he turned his head and met Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes.
"That building you saw — he says there's no one in it."
"What?"
"The photos you took and sent me. Remember?"
The pictures of the village he had shot on a tripod their first day here. Among them had been a single suspicious building — no signboard of any kind on its face, and yet a place where believers gathered. It had never sat right with them.
"The operative just texted. He's there now."
"Anyone inside?"
"They've all gone. Empty."
The blocks around it were dead commerce, and the residential streets lay a few blocks off. And the building looked to be one the cult treasured beyond measure.
Kang Hyeong-seok ran his tongue along his canine tooth, then held his hand out to Shin Yo-sep. To do, in the priest's stead, the thing the priest could not bring himself to do.
The phone passed into his hand, and Kang Hyeong-seok tapped out a message and sent it. It said only: that place too. Please.
Shin Yo-sep took the phone back and slipped it into his pocket without a word, and Kang Hyeong-seok pulled in a long breath, eyes fixed on the direction of the church.
And a short while later, black smoke began to climb from where the operative was as well.
"No! Pastor, you mustn't!"
"Where are you going! You absolutely cannot!"
Shaking off the believers who threw themselves in her path, the pastor entered the building — the one that served as the Education Center. And fire, in a place like that, at an hour when there should have been no one inside.
Tap-tap-tap! She flew up the stairs and flung the door wide open.
The blaze was not yet fierce; no flames lunged for her. But black smoke and the reek of burning crashed over her all the same.
"Pastor!"
"Get her out of here, now! What are you doing!"
Angry shouts rose at her back. Several believers caught at her arms, begging her to come down at once — but the pastor glared at the seat of the fire, eyes blazing in her head.
The podium. The podium she used when she taught her believers was wrapped in flame and roaring.
Water had been laid down around it, it seemed — the fire did not spread. The only other mark of damage was the soot staining the ceiling.
And still the pastor's face shook, violently, and tears spilled down her cheeks.
It was not the podium alone that burned. Her precious symbols burned beneath it too. The scriptures inscribed with the doctrine. The sacred objects, the white cloth among them. The very things that made up the body of her order — all of it, aflame.
"Pa...stor?"
The believers, reading something gravely wrong in her expression, shrank back, stumbling. And the pastor bowed her head without a word.
Her clenched fist was trembling.
JRRRRANG!
The sudden cry of the sacred shaman bells dragged Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze with it. It was not a sound meant for his ears alone — Shin Yo-sep's head turned at that same instant — and Kang Hyeong-seok, bells thrust out before him, turned slowly in a full circle.
A divine omen, warning of danger. That it rang meant something dangerous had shown itself.
She's called her god down.
The god was moving.
Kang Hyeong-seok hunted for its bearing. The moment he angled the bells toward the temple, they rang out loud — but he swung them toward other bearings as well.
Here? Is it here?
JRRRRRANG!
A little to the right of the temple. When he swung further right of that, the sound died away. Then it had to be that place, exactly.
"Follow me!"
Kang Hyeong-seok shouted as he burst into a run, and Shin Yo-sep threw one last look back at the village and chased after him.
The smoke rising over the village was thinning fast — natural enough, for the fires had been small. But what waited ahead of them would be a blaze in earnest.
Tap-tap-tap-tap! Skrrt, shwaaash! Slipping on the dead leaves and back on his feet in the same breath, Shin Yo-sep hung hard on Kang Hyeong-seok's heels.
Before long, the cult leader would know exactly where they were. Everything had to be finished before her pursuit came down on them.
Tap-tap-tap-tap! Past the temple, Kang Hyeong-seok climbed, bells in hand, breath sawing hard. There was no trail here, and the dark mountain made every step treacherous. Even so he ran, following the bells wherever they led.
Jrang. Jrang. Jrang. Jrang.
Each time they rang, it was as if the bells were telling him he was still on the right path.
JRRRRANG!
At the sudden, violent ring, Kang Hyeong-seok swept his eyes around him. Two trees stood side by side like jangseung — the old guardian posts raised at village thresholds.
There?
Jrang!
He confirmed Shin Yo-sep was still with him, then made for the gap between the trees.
"Your phone! Get the light on, quick!"
The beam threw their shadows long and lit the ground around Kang Hyeong-seok as well. And there, between the trees, he saw it: an iron plate he never would have found without standing nearly on top of it.
Shwack! Shwa-shwack! He swept the fallen leaves away, then looked up at Shin Yo-sep with the face of a man who had arrived at last. Shin Yo-sep stared down at the plate in turn, his face gone rigid.
The iron plate, a ring set into its face, lay shut fast against the earth — for all the world like a door to hell.