What Remains, Remains
What must remain, remains; what must be sent off, is sent off. That is the resolving of han — the work of the dead and the living alike.
Rustle.
Leaving the fallen hammer head where it lay, Kang Hyeong-seok took hold of the talisman. The corner that the onmyoji had tucked inside the doll had turned pitch black — and that was not the work of mere years.
"Mmmngh."
Yoon-sang stared, stiff as a board, at Kang Hyeong-seok and the talisman in his hand.
How did he know there was a talisman inside that thing...?
He knew it was a pointless question to ask. Kang Hyeong-seok was a mudang; of course he could see, hear, and feel what ordinary people could not. But knowing it in your head and feeling it in your gut were never the same thing.
"Yoon-sang."
"Yes! Yes!"
Yoon-sang yelped the reply, and Kang Hyeong-seok stretched out a hand toward him. "Got a lighter?"
Unable to manage even an answer, Yoon-sang patted frantically through his pockets, dug out a lighter, and handed it over. From inside the pit, Kang Hyeong-seok reached up to take it, and with the doll cradled against his chest, he rolled the flint.
Click — fwoosh!
In the dim red glow of the small flame, Kang Hyeong-seok brought the talisman close.
Fwaaaam!
The thin paper ignited in an instant, as though gulping the fire down. And when Kang Hyeong-seok let go, the talisman soared into the air as if it were dancing. Strange to say, the flames did not die. It hung high overhead, burning on and on, as if waiting for something.
Waa-rang!
Ringing the sacred shaman bells, Kang Hyeong-seok began the chant, pushing each word out with his breath.
"Escort of the Ten Kings — come forth, and send the departed on her way."
Through the silent mountains, his calm voice spread out in ripples.
"Seventy years among the living, a rarity since ages past; even eighty years come to few.
"A face fair as blossom is granted only its span — a hundred years in this world is borrowed light, a gleam of passing glass."
Wa-rang! Wa-rang!
"Of every hundred souls who fall, thirty meet their allotted end; seventy die out of season, cut down and undone by wrongful death."
Chanting the Sutra for Guiding the Departed, Kang Hyeong-seok prayed that Hara Seiko's soul might be led across.
"How pitiable, that grieving soul. Whom will it follow, and where will it rest?"
A soul slain by her own son. A soul who had no one left in this world to lean on.
"To die in a land not one's own, far from home — is she not a soul gone adrift, wandering the wind?"
A soul who had forsaken her homeland and wed in a foreign country — and whose life was not allowed to be long.
"The blossom cast down by the east wind will flower again when spring returns."
O woman, like a petal falling on the spring wind. Be born again, please. Leave nothing behind — softly, softly — and go.
Wa-ra-rang!
The shaman bells rang out, and the talisman's form began to come apart. Its scattered ash fell like tears, onto the doll, onto the black earth. All the while, Yoon-sang had stood staring up at it like a man whose soul had left him.
A photo...
He needed photos if the footage was going to be of any use. He raised his phone toward the burning talisman — but he couldn't bring himself to press the shutter. Something in him simply knew that he must not.
Wa-ra-rang!
The shaman bells rang through the mountain, where nothing but moonlight quietly lit the dark. Then Kang Hyeong-seok, cradling the doll and the bells to his chest, pressed his palms together.
"Mount the white clouds, ride them high, and bear the incense of the offering away."
Fsss. The talisman, scattering into ash, was guttering out. Watching it, Kang Hyeong-seok recited the final verse of the Sutra for Guiding the Departed.
"Return to the world of bliss — be guided on, and born again."
Fsssssssss. The talisman was ash. Darkness came flooding back, and with it the cold night air, forgotten until now. Hara Seiko was gone.
"H-Hyung-nim."
After a long stillness, Yoon-sang found his voice, lips trembling. "Is it— is it over? Has she been guided across?"
Kang Hyeong-seok was gazing up at the place where the talisman had burned. The silence stretched on — and just as Yoon-sang, nerves fraying with every second of it, instinctively clutched at his chest—
"Hara Seiko has departed."
What must leave, leaves.
"...She has?"
Yoon-sang searched his face with eyes that seemed to ask, then isn't it finally over? But Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head.
"The Rokurokubi didn't."
Then his gaze slid to the hammer head half-buried in the soil.
What must remain, remains. That is the resolving of han.
Shshshshsh! Leaves shivered in the wind that came blowing through. Kang Hyeong-seok looked down at the hammer head with eyes full of something tangled and heavy. Hara Seiko had departed — but something had been left behind in this land, like that hammer head. The yokai called the Rokurokubi. Kim Ki-ok's karma.
Glug-glug-glug.
Kim Ki-ok filled his glass with water and rubbed at his throat. Something felt off tonight — his energy was strangely low.
"Damn bastards. Crawling into a place like that — do they even know where they are — pulling this nonsense..."
It had to be because of the ugly business at the factory. Because the altar had been smashed. Convinced of it, Kim Ki-ok carried his unease with him into bed.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
It was one in the morning, and the wall clock's second hand moved with an ill-omened steadiness. Sleep, unusually reluctant tonight. He shut his eyes to invite it and stared into the darkness behind his eyelids. He had just shaken off the last stray thoughts, narrowed his whole awareness to the comfort of the bed, when—
Tap-tap-tap.
A faint vibration from beneath the bed tickled his back. Kim Ki-ok's eyes flew open; he tried to move. But as though pinned by sleep paralysis, not even a single finger would obey.
"Wh-what... what is this."
And yet his mouth still moved. In all the time since he'd installed his feeding spirit, he had never once been pinned in his sleep — Kim Ki-ok could not begin to make sense of this.
Tap-tap-tap.
The vibration came again from under the bed. From the gap between bed and floor — a darkness without one point of light — came the sound of something clinging to the underside of the bed, drumming its fingers.
"Ugh! Kkh!"
Kim Ki-ok strained every nerve to wrench himself free of the bed—
Ssssssuk.
—and the thing crawled out from beneath it. Slowly, it raised its upper body.
"Huk—!"
The moment his eyes met its, Kim Ki-ok's breath stopped on reflex. A blank face. Familiar features. Wearing Hara Seiko's likeness — it was the Rokurokubi.
"Huk, huk. Th-this thing, please..."
Kim Ki-ok broke off mid-sentence and looked at its mouth. A profound wrongness rolled over him, cold and creeping. Because the Rokurokubi was laughing.
—Hee! Hee-hee! Uhee-hee-hee-hee!
It had shown him no expression at all in all the time since it had become his feeding spirit. And now the thing was laughing.
"Wh-what...?"
Then it happened. Without a sound, the Rokurokubi's neck began, ever so slowly, to lengthen — its smile unchanged, its face still angled down at him. The climbing head began to travel along the ceiling.
That's not my mother. That is not Hara Seiko!
A thing left behind in this land. A yokai that could not leave this soil — just like the hammer Kim Ki-ok had used to murder his own mother.
Sssssssk. Hair rasped against the ceiling, and with every stretch of its journey the Rokurokubi's hair came loose into a wild black tangle. Between the strands, only the smiling mouth stayed visible.
"N-no. No!"
The Rokurokubi was not Hara Seiko. Which meant that smile was not a mother's laughter. It was the grin of a yokai that had finally found the object of its grudge: Kim Ki-ok.
Jerk! Jerk! Shaking the one part of his body that still obeyed him, Kim Ki-ok fought to throw off the paralysis — but it was useless.
Sssssssss. The head began its slow descent. And when it had come so close that its nose nearly touched his—
KWAAM! The Rokurokubi beside the bed seized Kim Ki-ok by the skull.
"Agh! Aaarghhh!"
He shrieked at the brutal grip. In the same instant, the Rokurokubi picked up the thick glass bottle brimming with water. And then—
BAM! It brought the bottle down on him.
"Graaaaagh!"
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Exactly as Kim Ki-ok himself had once done, the Rokurokubi hammered his head against the bed again and again.
"Agh! Aaaah! Aargh! Graaaagh!"
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Kim Ki-ok screamed with a cruelty that would have sickened any witness. But his body would not move, and he could not even run.
BAM! Crack! Crack! Like someone smashing a watermelon in a mortar, the Rokurokubi went on crushing Kim Ki-ok's head.
Its neck stretched long as a spider's web, tracing a dizzying pattern across the ceiling, the Rokurokubi never once stopped looking down at him. That gaze was the worst of it.
THUD! THUD!
Teeth shattered, the bridge of his nose flattened, Kim Ki-ok heaved up dark-red blood in thick, quivering gulps. There was no more pain now. He could feel only his life running out — and in that moment, Kim Ki-ok understood that he was being murdered by his mother.
Mother.
Karma returns by the law of heaven: virtue repaid in blessing, evil repaid in punishment. Kim Ki-ok understood, finally, that he was receiving the price of what he had done — and the understanding devoured him with a terror greater even than the Rokurokubi.
He had tried to raise a shrine that would crush the gods of this land. That karma had not yet come due.
"Sp... spare... me."
With his ruined mouth, Kim Ki-ok forced out the plea — and the Rokurokubi's hand stopped. Then it gathered him in, his eyes crushed to pulp, and held him with all its strength. It was not warm, the way a mother's embrace is warm.
"S-sp... spare me. Spare me, please."
Kim Ki-ok knew what was coming, and he shook with dread. But the Rokurokubi only pressed him down into the bed. Into the floor. Deeper, ever deeper into the floor. Into a place that was not this world — the place men like Kim Ki-ok are meant to go. Into hell.
"Uuuuh! Uaaaaaaaaargh!"
His scream tore apart, and beneath it came the splintering groan of the bed's legs giving way.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Morning came the next day. The wall clock's second hand swept on as though nothing at all had happened the night before. Soft light filtered through the curtains drawn across the window, and the room held a hush that was almost peaceful.
Knock-knock-knock.
A fist rapped at Kim Ki-ok's door. "It's time to wake up, sir."
The aide's voice came through, courteous and measured — but from inside the room, there was only the steady tick of the second hand.
Knock-knock-knock.
The knock sounded again, and the aide repeated — once, then again — that it was time to rise. Only silence came back.
"Did anything happen yesterday?"
"Nothing at all, sir. Not up until I left for the evening."
After that brief exchange with the housekeeper, the aide let out a long sigh. "I'm coming in."
Kim Ki-ok was an old man; something could have happened to him. Judging it so, the aide turned the handle with his head bowed, the housekeeper watching anxiously from a step behind—
The instant the door swung open—
"KYAAAAAAAGH!"
The housekeeper stumbled backward, hands clamped over her mouth — then drew them up to cover her whole face. The aide's breath stopped by reflex, and he stared, dumbstruck, at the figure lying in the bed.
Bzzzzzz. A single fly crawled out of Kim Ki-ok's mouth.
He lay there with both eyes bulging wide, his face contorted past any resemblance to a human being.
"Qu-quick! Call an ambulance! Hurry!"
"Y-yes! Yes, sir!"
"Pull yourself together! Move!"
Unable even to wipe her tears, the housekeeper backed away, fumbling for her phone. The aide stood frozen in the doorway, staring blankly at Kim Ki-ok.
What in God's name happened to him...?
There was not a single visible wound anywhere on him. And yet — as though he had been dragged, still breathing, down into hell itself — he looked nothing like a man who had met a natural end.
With trembling eyes, the aide looked at the glass bottle resting at Kim Ki-ok's bedside. The water in the great, thick vessel lay as serene as a mountain lake — and told him nothing at all.