The Grave That Held No Corpse
Thwack! Thud!
No one would ever know. That beneath a black sky, in the depths of a black mountain, black earth was being dug up.
Sshk! Thwack! Thud!
Fake grave or not, a grave was still a grave.
"In lush depths of green pine, between tiered ranks of white stone—"
"Soyo, the Sacred Mother, deep in the treasure grotto of the rock face, above ten thousand cranes, upon a thousand peaks—"
⟨ Great True Lord Bodeok ⟩
The chant was a courtesy paid to the mountain god, and through it Kang Hyeong-seok staved off Dongti—divine retribution for disturbing sacred ground—along with any misfortune that might otherwise befall them. When the last of the words had faded into silence, he raised his shovel and broke the ground.
That night, only the moon and the drifting clouds would bear witness to what happened here.
Thwack! Thud!
Thick sweat poured down as Kang Hyeong-seok and Yoon-sang carved their way deeper into the earth with pickaxe and shovel, a mound of soil swelling steadily at their side.
Then, after the two of them had dug down for what felt like an age, a strange sensation came climbing up the pickaxe Yoon-sang had just driven into the ground.
"H-Hyung-nim."
His voice shook—they had reached the coffin at last. Kang Hyeong-seok swept the soil away from around the pickaxe in great shovelfuls, and the beam of his headlamp soon laid bare a flat plane of wood.
A coffin.
A false grave, just as he had thought. And yet there was something here beyond even the aura that clings to coffins—something far baser, far more treacherous. The presence of something that should never have been, and yet had made its home in this place.
"Step back."
Kang Hyeong-seok flung the warning out in a low voice, then brought his pickaxe down on the corner of the coffin and shoved the handle away.
Crack!
The thick wooden coffin splintered, opening a gap—and with it, air that had sat stagnant for decades came rushing out.
"Urk! Uuuurk!"
The foul, stagnant miasma was thick enough for anyone to feel, and Yoon-sang retched like a man whose insides were turning over. In that moment, Kang Hyeong-seok wedged his fingers into the gap.
Screeeech.
He began to push the massive lid. His forearms swelled, heavy veins standing out beneath the skin—and slowly, the coffin came open.
Thud.
As the lid slid aside, Yoon-sang peered down into the pit with a trembling face—and then nearly wept with relief to find no corpse inside.
But this was no time for relief.
"Hoooh... hoooh..."
Breathing hard, Kang Hyeong-seok stared down at what the coffin held, his face stiff and contorted. A doll no larger than a young girl's torso. White face, black hair. Dressed in a kimono. An Ichimatsu—a Japanese doll.
"Wha...?"
Yoon-sang, who had been screened from a clear view of it by Kang Hyeong-seok's body, went white to the lips. He had noticed what was wrong with the doll. Its neck was far too long.
Clatter.
The moment Kang Hyeong-seok picked it up, the long neck stretched, and the doll's head lolled back. A neck like a centipede, monstrous and repulsive—and even when insects came crawling out of its clothes, Kang Hyeong-seok did not let it fall.
"So you were inside it."
Because he knew what dwelled within.
A Rokurokubi. More precisely, the soul of a person made into one.
"Hara Seiko."
The moment Kang Hyeong-seok spoke her name—
Rattle.
The doll's head moved. At a glance it might have seemed he was shaking it, but his hand was perfectly still. Only the doll was moving, rattling of its own accord.
"Hak—hahhh..."
Yoon-sang's ragged breath froze white in the air. Something vile—a yokai—lay cradled in Kang Hyeong-seok's arms. It was the truth Kim Ki-ok had hidden from the world, and it was his own mother.
As though it grieved the long years spent buried, the doll quietly bowed its head.
"What grieves you so?"
Kang Hyeong-seok addressed the doll in a voice low and calm, the way one might soothe a frightened child.
"I am ready to listen. Tell me."
Rattle, rattle, rattle.
The doll only rattled on—and Yoon-sang drew out his phone with trembling hands. Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze snapped to him at once, but still Yoon-sang fumbled at the screen and sent back a look of desperate pleading.
It's not like I'm taking a picture, so just give me a second, hyung-nim.
Having said exactly that with his eyes, Yoon-sang opened a translation app and typed in the words Kang Hyeong-seok had spoken. Tap. He pressed the translate button, then the one for spoken playback, and Japanese flowed from the speaker.
"I am ready to listen. Please tell me."
The instant the translated words poured out in Japanese, darkness began to seep across Kang Hyeong-seok's vision.
The light gave way. In its place, wind came surging in.
Wooooom.
That was how the memory began—with a ringing in his ears.
"Hah! Hah! Haaah!"
Ragged gasping. Drip... drip. A red liquid trickling from the head of a hammer. The one holding it was a young Kim Ki-ok.
Scrub, scrub. He wiped the blood spattered over his body and hands with a clean towel, but it would not come away easily. It couldn't have.
Inside the vision, Kang Hyeong-seok looked down at the woman in the kimono lying crumpled at Kim Ki-ok's feet.
Hara Seiko...?
A woman felled with her skull caved in. Attacked in the home that should have held the greatest peace of all, by the son who should have been the most harmless of all.
Gritting his teeth, Kang Hyeong-seok lifted his gaze to Kim Ki-ok.
"Huk! Sob! Hhhuk!"
Kim Ki-ok was wiping the blood from his hands through a blur of tears.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Mother."
He was speaking in Japanese—but perhaps because this was Hara Seiko's memory, Kang Hyeong-seok could understand every word.
Why did he kill her?
Had he truly meant, from the very beginning, to make her a Rokurokubi?
Kang Hyeong-seok was watching Kim Ki-ok in silence when—
"...Agh. Aaah."
Hara Seiko moaned and stirred. Kim Ki-ok's face went rigid, drained of all color, and Hara Seiko began crawling forward on pure reflex—a movement born less of purpose than of the blind instinct to flee. But it was more than enough to plant a vast terror in her son.
"N-no—aaaargh!"
Seizing the hammer as if in the grip of a fit, Kim Ki-ok threw himself at his mother and clambered astride her back.
Thwack!
Blood burst free, and Hara Seiko's hand jerked violently—
Thwack! Thwack! Thud! Crack!
Under the madly swinging hammer, her fingers fell away one by one, strengthless, and every time the head buried itself in her skull her body rocked with the recoil.
That was how Hara Seiko died.
Squelch! Thwack! Crunch!
Even then, Kim Ki-ok did not stop for a long, long while. He knew she was already dead. But he was terrified that, just maybe, she would move again—and so he could not put the hammer down.
"Ugh! Kk! Uuuugh!"
Only when the skull broke open and what lay within came into view did Kim Ki-ok finally stop. Then he pressed himself against his mother's cooling back and held her with all his strength, before pushing himself upright.
"Kim Ki-ok."
Kang Hyeong-seok called out to the man drenched head to toe in blood. This was a memory, a phantasm. He knew it could not answer him. But the urge to accuse, to condemn, was too great, and the words spilled out of him all the same.
And then Kim Ki-ok turned his gaze toward Kang Hyeong-seok.
Thump. Thump.
Kim Ki-ok strode over in long, unhurried strides and opened the chest of drawers beside Kang Hyeong-seok. Then he snatched up a sheaf of documents and hugged them to his chest. Kang Hyeong-seok could not tell what they were—but to see the man cradle them so preciously was to understand at last. That was what Hara Seiko had died for.
"All of this... you killed your own mother for that?"
Kang Hyeong-seok asked as though groaning, but the words never reached Kim Ki-ok. The man simply went on bustling about his work.
Glug-glug-glug-glug!
Having drenched Hara Seiko's corpse and the floor around it in oil, Kim Ki-ok raised a portable kerosene lantern with trembling hands. The flame caught behind its glass wavered and swayed, throwing off sinister shadows.
Kang Hyeong-seok's face twisted with contempt and despair, Kim Ki-ok's Adam's apple bobbed hard—and then—
Crash! Whooosh!
The thrown lantern shattered atop the oil, and flame roared upward. It was a wooden house. In seconds the fire had run up the walls, devoured the curtains, burned away Hara Seiko's kimono and her hair. And then the house itself, where a mother and son had piled up a lifetime of memories.
"Hff! Hff! Hff!"
Kim Ki-ok gasped for air. In that hellish house boiling with heat, he looked at his mother's corpse and slowly moved his trembling lips.
At first, he wept. But soon, he laughed. Young Kim Ki-ok looked upon his dead mother and laughed even as he cried.
"Th-this is how I get to live, Mother."
A mother will do anything for her child, won't she.
You've spent your whole life sacrificed to me—so give it up just once more.
Isn't that what parents are for? So their children can prosper?
And besides, you're the one who threw away your own homeland to marry into this land.
You'd never be able to face your ancestors anyway. So stay in this land a little longer, for your son's sake.
"Hhh... heh, hehehh..."
Mouth laughing, eyes weeping, Kim Ki-ok fled the house with the documents clutched tight. Just as that loathsome retreating back left Kang Hyeong-seok feeling hollow to the bone, everything around him changed once more.
Rattle.
The long-necked doll. Pulled from the grave only moments ago, it now hung clean and spotless in an onmyoji's hands. Night had begun to press in around the scene, yet Kang Hyeong-seok could see every detail with the clarity of broad daylight.
The onmyoji. Kim Ki-ok. And a young woman, cradling an infant whose face was hidden beneath a cloth.
Shff.
Watching Kim Ki-ok all the while, the onmyoji stripped the doll of its clothes. Then, into the doll's body, he slid the hammer head with its black-caked blood, together with a talisman.
"With this, Hara Seiko has become your shikigami."
Kim Ki-ok bowed low to the onmyoji, palms pressed together in reverence.
What... what in the world is he thanking him for?
Because this was a phantasm, Kim Ki-ok's heart reached Kang Hyeong-seok as well. Kim Ki-ok was offering his true and heartfelt gratitude to the onmyoji who had made a yokai of his own mother.
"As your mother once protected you, so shall the shikigami protect you."
The onmyoji's voice was flat and stripped of all cadence—so much so that it felt less like speech than a mantra, a sacred incantation.
"The rest of your days shall be peaceful. And prosperous."
Then—
Sensing a gaze upon him, Kang Hyeong-seok turned his eyes toward it. Behind a tree, a young man in work clothes—Na Seong-hwa—stood watching Kim Ki-ok and the onmyoji, his face drained white.
"Now you have a duty you must fulfill."
"I will keep it ever in mind."
"Become the bridge that binds our two nations."
"So I shall."
"Raise a shrine to press the gods of this land beneath it, and summon our own gods into this land."
"Yes."
So that everything in this land might become wholly ours.
The onmyoji's eyes were saying exactly that.
Kang Hyeong-seok squeezed his eyes shut. He did not want to see this. Horrifying. Filthy. Contemptible.
"Waaah! Waaaahh!"
Somewhere, a baby was crying. Was it the last shred of conscience left in Kim Ki-ok, wailing? Or Seiko's memory, remembering the Kim Ki-ok who had once been her infant? And if neither—then the wailing of the child who had stood at the onmyoji's side?
"...nim!"
A familiar voice broke through.
"...Hyung-nim!"
It grew louder and louder, enough at last to drag his consciousness back into the present.
Turning only his head, Kang Hyeong-seok looked at Yoon-sang.
"H-Hyung-nim! Are you all right?"
Kang Hyeong-seok opened his mouth to answer—and understood why Yoon-sang looked like that. His own breath smelled of blood. Vessels deep in his nose had burst as though torn apart, and his eyes ached as if gouged with an awl. He had held the doll—the wellspring of the Rokurokubi—for far too long.
"I-I'll come down right now!"
Yoon-sang started to climb down into the pit—but Kang Hyeong-seok stopped him with a shake of his head.
"I know everything now."
The story bound up in this doll, everything that had led here, the han knotted through it all—he understood every last strand of it, down to the depths of his heart.
Shff.
Before Yoon-sang's bewildered eyes, Kang Hyeong-seok stripped the doll of its clothes. Then, through the hole bored in the doll's back, he drew out the hammer head and the talisman.
"It's time to begin the haewon."
With those words, Kang Hyeong-seok dropped the hammer head to the ground. Black with crusted blood, it landed upon the earth without a sound.