The Hanged Man in the Fog
"Vroooooom."
With Kim Jae-sik in the passenger seat, Kang Hyeong-seok drove on, following the navigation's directions. It was the first day of the holiday break. The highway had been jammed enough to wring a sigh out of anyone, but mercifully the traffic had thinned to a lazy trickle once they merged onto the national road.
"Vroooooom."
Such was the remoteness of the place they were headed for.
"It certainly is far."
"Well, it is South Chungcheong, after all."
To be precise, they were bound for the far south of the province—a coastal corner of the region that bordered North Jeolla.
Kang Hyeong-seok lifted his eyes to the sky. It looked as though the typhoon truly might come; the clouds were moving fast.
"What could possibly happen?"
As if he had peered straight into Kang Hyeong-seok's thoughts, Kim Jae-sik spoke up, then pulled out his phone to check the map.
So our professor's eyes are already going.
There was something quietly pitiful about the way he drew his chin back and peered up at the screen.
"Haah... at this rate, I don't know if we'll even manage a decent night's sleep."
"If it comes to that, we'll just have to drive back out to wherever we're staying."
Kim Jae-sik shook his head as though the mere thought were unbearable.
"This is why it all reminds me of the old days. I was a good deal younger then than I am now, you know."
"You mean back in my college days?"
"That's right. Remember? You know the one—the day you and I were boiling ramyeon over a gas burner at that inn."
"Ah—yes. I remember."
The memory was dreadful enough that Kang Hyeong-seok grimaced without meaning to.
"That's the one! When you and I went tearing out of there screaming!"
"It was horrific. It still is."
It hadn't been a ghost they saw. If anything, a ghost might have been easier to get over.
He and Kim Jae-sik had been cooking ramyeon in a pot between them, and the moment he reached for his chopsticks, an enormous cockroach dropped from the ceiling straight into the pot. The sight of it flapping its wings was so traumatic that the two of them bolted clean out of the inn.
"I haven't eaten so much as a crumb in an inn since."
"...Is that so."
"A motel, minimum. At the very least, a motel."
"Ahh."
"Truth be told, I can't much stomach ramyeon either."
"I do still have it now and then."
"But not often, hm?"
Kang Hyeong-seok answered with a grave nod. An air of needless solemnity had settled over the car, and Kim Jae-sik seemed to relish even that.
"Still, I'm glad you came along. It puts my mind at ease. Feels like being back in the old days."
Kang Hyeong-seok nodded, smile and all.
"I feel the same."
The warmth that had briefly slipped out of the car came creeping back like something asking, May I come in now?, and the two of them fell into an easy, rambling conversation.
They drove on for a long while yet, until at last the road itself changed—turned rougher underfoot.
"Grrrrrumble."
Gravel or shattered asphalt—whatever the bits were, they clung to the tires and rattled along beneath them. And little by little, the conversation dwindled. The noise rising from the tires played its part, but there was a bigger reason.
"Is it because we're near the sea? What is with this fog..."
"The typhoon's influence, perhaps?"
"I've never seen its like. Let's take it slow."
Just in case, Kang Hyeong-seok drove with even his hazard lights on. Thanks to their early start, it was still late morning, shy of noon. Even so—this was too much. The fog lay so thick it bordered on excessive.
"Grrrrrumble."
Running along the rough road, Kang Hyeong-seok watched the navigation mark them drawing steadily nearer to the destination. About ten minutes now. Not much distance left.
"Perhaps I should have gotten us a meal before we left the main road."
The moment Kim Jae-sik murmured it—
"Cling-aaang."
The Sacred Shaman Bells rang out from the bag he had left on the back seat behind the driver's. Kang Hyeong-seok flicked a glance rearward, then put his eyes back on the road.
That was when it happened.
"Screeeeech!"
"Gwah!"
Kim Jae-sik pitched forward at the sudden braking, and the water deer that had appeared dead ahead stood staring at Kang Hyeong-seok with ink-black eyes.
"Hoooh."
Letting the breath out, Kang Hyeong-seok turned at once to apologize.
"No, no. It happens."
Kim Jae-sik gave the deer a look of profound grievance and waved it aside, and the animal trotted around the car and slipped into the brush at the roadside. Their gazes followed it, entirely without thinking.
They shouldn't have. At the very least, they should have snatched their eyes back at once.
"...Haah."
Kim Jae-sik let the sigh pour out of him, his sight locked in place, while Kang Hyeong-seok prayed desperately that his eyes were deceiving him. But what hung above the passenger-side window was, unmistakably, a human foot.
Click.
Kang Hyeong-seok unclasped his seat belt; Kim Jae-sik did the same, and both men stepped out of the car. The sticky sea wind and the clammy damp of the fog pressed against their skin as they lifted their gaze.
A tree. A very old tree, to be exact—so immense that calling it a dangsan, a village's guardian tree, would not have been the least bit strange; it stood as vast as the settlement's own patron god.
And a person was hanging from it.
"Creeeak. Creeeak."
With every gust of wind the corpse swung like a pendulum, and each time, a fishy reek—the kind you would sooner expect from vermin or a snake—spread through the air around it.
Kim Jae-sik, gazing up at the body with despair and dread swimming in his eyes, squeezed them shut and spoke, while Kang Hyeong-seok fetched his phone from the car and dialed 112. He gave their location and ended the call, though his gaze never left the corpse.
Damn it. Of all the ways to start.
They had only just arrived at the village. And this was the beginning—a corpse. Thinking he had set foot somewhere even grimmer than he had bargained for, Kang Hyeong-seok turned his eyes back down the road they had come by. The lane was too narrow to turn the car around—as if to tell them there was no going back now.
"Weee-ooo, wee-ooo."
It was a long while before the police arrived with an ambulance. They put a few brief questions to Kang Hyeong-seok and Kim Jae-sik, then loaded the body onto a stretcher and covered it with cloth. The questions were a formality—their names, why they had come, how they had chanced upon the body, and so on. There was no sense that either man was under suspicion. Their identities were beyond doubt, for one; and for another, quite as much as those identities were clear, the corpse's time of death looked to reach back quite a long way. Judging by its color, several hours at the very least.
"Excuse me—do you, um, know who that man is?"
Kim Jae-sik, still not quite recovered from the shock, asked with an ashen face, and the officer shook his head.
"I'm not at liberty to say."
"He wouldn't happen to be an outsider, would he?"
"And why would you ask that?"
"No—no reason."
Kim Jae-sik ground his lips together, his expression troubled, and the officer turned away. Then, near the yellow police cordon, he began combing the ground around the body for anything else that might be there.
"Excuse me! May we go?"
Kang Hyeong-seok bowed politely to the officer and climbed back into the car with Kim Jae-sik.
Thunk. Vrrrrrm.
"Hoooh."
"Still, I don't believe they suspect foul play."
Kim Jae-sik shook his head, his face gone heavy.
"You didn't see it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"There was nowhere for him to climb up from."
The corpse was a man in his fifties. He must have weighed seventy-five kilograms at the least. With nothing to stand on, scaling a tree that size to hang himself by his own hand would not have been easy.
...
Driving toward the village, Kang Hyeong-seok took a long, slow breath through his nose. He knew better than to think this way. And still, the image kept redrawing itself in his head: something far larger than a man, stringing the fellow up in that tree.
"...And you didn't see his spirit, either?"
It was after Kang Hyeong-seok answered with a solemn nod that—
"Ha. This is enough to drive a man mad."
"Would you like to turn back now?"
"And you?"
Sadly, the answer was a foregone conclusion, and Kang Hyeong-seok replied in a bitter voice.
"I'm staying."
"Then where would I go?"
Kang Hyeong-seok huffed something like a laugh and drove into the village. Their destination was an ordinary country village. With the sea so near, the buildings stood low; the newest-looking among them was a two-story structure with red exterior walls. Save for the thick sea fog, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the village where he had once seen a dokkaebi.
"Let's try the village community hall first."
"Yes, Professor."
Kim Jae-sik took Kang Hyeong-seok's phone from the dashboard, searched the map for the community hall, and set it back where it had been. It was no hard-and-fast rule, but whenever they came surveying a village like this, the community hall was always their first stop. The elders gathered there. They had lived long lives and knew a great deal, and with any luck, one could meet the village chief—the community's highest authority—in a single stroke.
"Grrrrrumble."
He was following the unpaved dirt road when—
"Let go! You bastards! Let go!"
In front of the community hall, a man dressed in a shaman's garb was flailing his arms about, venting his fury on a crowd of people older than himself.
"Where do you think you're going?!"
"You want folk dying one after another?! Have you lost your mind?!"
"I can deal with this! You goddamn idiots!"
"Watch your mouth when you speak to your elders, you wretch!"
Kang Hyeong-seok brought the car to a halt and watched the commotion unfold. It seemed the whole village had turned out. Men and women, old and young alike, had ringed the man in the shaman's garb as though laying siege to him—that was the shape of it.
"Quit your damn cursing and get out of the way!"
"Aigoo, honestly!"
"And what in the world is that supposed to be?"
Kim Jae-sik muttered it in a wearied tone. In the meantime, Kang Hyeong-seok shifted his gaze from the crowd to the man in the shaman's garb. Mid-forties, average height, average build, and a dirty look about him; there was a light in his eyes, though it had a greasy gleam to it.
"A false shaman."
"Hm?"
"Something has answered him—but it is no god."
It happened now and then: some stray spirit styling itself a god. Mistake one of those for a true deity and swallow it whole, and you ended up precisely like that man.
"Fuck's sake—did none of you get word?! Another person is dead. Again! How long are you going to just leave it be?!"
At the false shaman's roar, the faces of those holding him back darkened.
"Let go! Shit!"
Wham!
Swinging his arms to shake the people off, the false shaman strode away in long, hard steps—passing directly beside the car Kang Hyeong-seok sat in, their eyes meeting for a brief instant. Outsiders, it seemed, got on his nerves.
"Ptui!"
Unable to master his own temper, the man spat for good measure and disappeared off into the distance.
"...The mood in this village is something else."
"Yes."
Kang Hyeong-seok parked in a convenient spot and looked up at the sky. It was not yet time for the typhoon. Like any typhoon, it might yet curve away toward Japan or elsewhere. But the sky, crammed full of ink-dark clouds as though the storm had already arrived, looked terribly disturbed.
Much like this village.