What the Old Lake Holds
Shwaaaaaa! Snap.
As Kang Hyeong-seok came back into the village community center, Kim Jae-sik, who had been sprawled out watching television, pushed himself upright.
"Whoa, what took you so long?"
"I took a look around, that's all."
"Do your looking in the daytime. The daytime."
Folding his umbrella, Kang Hyeong-seok gave a wry smile.
"Some things only show themselves at night."
Kim Jae-sik's expression turned serious in an instant. He'd gone out with Lee Nak-yul, after all, so the professor had simply been assuming, Does the boy live somewhere far off?
"...Did something happen?"
Kang Hyeong-seok nodded gravely and stepped into the hall, peeling off his soaked socks as he went.
"Yes. I saw an imoogi."
Kim Jae-sik's face stiffened all over again.
"An imoogi?"
"Yes. It was enormous."
Would he ever lay eyes on such a thing again in his life? The imoogi had been that kind of sight—so shocking, so utterly overwhelming, that the question had crossed his mind and simply stayed there.
"What—no, no. Hold on a moment."
Kim Jae-sik fetched him a towel, then dug into his personal bag and came out with a voice recorder, a notebook, and a pen. He sat Kang Hyeong-seok down in front of him, switched the recorder on first, and lifted the pen.
"Tell me everything. In detail."
Watching him like this, there was no mistaking it—the man really was a professor. Kang Hyeong-seok laughed as though pushing a breath out of him, and described exactly what he had seen.
"Aigoo, so it was an imoogi. It definitely was."
"Do you think this rain might be connected to it as well?"
"Wouldn't put it past it."
To the half-doubting question, Kim Jae-sik gave a refreshingly straightforward answer.
"The imoogi and rain are bound together, deeply. You must have heard tales like that as a kid—the one where a school groundskeeper beats an imoogi to death, and from then on it rains every single field trip?"
He might have, at that. There had been others of that breed—the one about the world ending when King Sejong the Great finished turning the last page of the book in his statue's hands, or the one where Admiral Yi Sun-sin drew his sword the moment midnight struck. Those sorts of stories had made the rounds, sure enough.
But no matter how he turned it over, a school security guard killing an imoogi made no sense at all. If that were actually possible, the man belonged off saving the world as a hero, not watching over a schoolyard.
"In any case, if this comes from the imoogi's grudge, I don't imagine it will be simple."
"I suppose not..."
The delight that had been sparkling in Kim Jae-sik's eyes dimmed. People's lives were at stake, after all. Remembering that, he couldn't very well carry on like a child at a festival.
"Still, you're a shaman. There must be some kind of method, no?"
"The best one would be to meet it and try to talk."
Korean shamanism diverged from its Western counterpart in many ways, and the widest gap lay in the matter of exorcism. Where the Western tradition leaned toward subjugation, the Korean tradition was founded on dialogue—listening, understanding, embracing, unraveling the han, the bone-deep grief and grudge, and thereby resolving the cause itself.
"Can you really hold a conversation with a snake?"
"That's exactly what worries me. That, right there."
If it had been human, things would have been easier. Or even a dokkaebi—at least then his mind would have been somewhat at ease. But the question kept resurfacing: Could an imoogi even understand words?
"Hyeong-seok. Don't tell me..."
Kim Jae-sik's voice suddenly dropped away.
"You're not thinking of going out at this hour, are you?"
"No. I'd rather not die either."
It was the dead of night, and the rain was still coming down. Climbing up to the mountain where the imoogi waited would amount to a laborious and utterly certain method of suicide.
"Nothing more will happen tonight, will it?"
"It failed tonight because of me. I doubt it will attempt anything further."
"What did you do?"
"There was a bit of trouble at the cattle shed."
Kim Jae-sik clicked his tongue, looking thoroughly done in, and shook his head.
"Fine. Sleep first. Sleep, and tomorrow we'll put our heads together, all right?"
"Yes."
"But first—go wash up! I'll get the boiler going. You'll catch your death of cold."
Kim Jae-sik rose and planted himself in front of the boiler, muttering, How in the world does this thing work? Still, an amber light bloomed on the LED panel, and the whir of a motor drifted over from the boiler room, so it seemed the machine had cooperated in the end.
Thanks to that, Kang Hyeong-seok got his hot shower.
"Get some sleep, Professor."
"I will! Don't think about a thing and sleep deep. Deep."
Could I, though? The doubt packed his head full, but Kang Hyeong-seok kept it behind his teeth. Judging by the look in Kim Jae-sik's eyes, the professor felt exactly the same.
Click.
The light went off, and through the window came nothing but the thunderous drumming of rain. So the professor switched it over to heating. The air conditioner was still running and the air stayed cool, yet warmth was rising from the floor. A tremendous extravagance—but it felt like the room itself offering a small word of comfort, you did well today, and so Kang Hyeong-seok was able to quietly close his eyes. Sleep did not come easily, but his body, at least, could rest in comfort.
The next day felt like a rerun of the night before. Lee Nak-yul came by, and he and Kang Hyeong-seok prepared the meal together. Kim Jae-sik took on the dishes and the cleanup, and for a man who lived on instant food, he was astonishingly tidy about it.
"Just thought I ought to do my part."
After the meal, with the three of them seated in a triangle, Kang Hyeong-seok broke the silence first.
"Got anything thought out?"
"Yes. In the end, it comes down to the snake."
Letting a heavy sigh escape through his nose, Kang Hyeong-seok put into words what he had worked out over the course of the night.
"We're going to need a lot of boric acid."
"Boric acid? Not the blood of a white horse?"
"Hard to get hold of, and even if we spread it, the rain would only wash it away."
Had the imoogi truly thought things through to that extent? Was that why it had called down this rain?
"There's a pharmacy in the village, but I can't say how much boric acid they'd carry."
Lee Nak-yul said it in a soft, unhurried voice, and Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head.
"With the mountains this close, they're bound to be stocked."
Folklore holds that snakes loathe boric acid, which is why hikers sometimes tuck it into their packs. When he was a boy, Kang Hyeong-seok's grandmother had stretched her socks up long and poured boric acid around her ankles before heading out to dig mugwort.
"If we run short, I'll ask someone to bring more in from outside the village."
Lee Nak-yul nodded solemnly, and Kim Jae-sik quietly drew out his notebook and began copying down Kang Hyeong-seok's words.
"Today is going to be very busy. So—Mr. Nak-yul."
Lee Nak-yul's gaze came to him, and Kang Hyeong-seok went on, his face apologetic.
"I'd like you to gather the villagers for me, please."
Lee Nak-yul nodded like a soldier who had just received a solemn order.
Tap... pitter-pat... tap.
"Hey there! Don't bury it so thick—ration it out so the other houses get some too!"
"Mr. Kim! Your house isn't the only house in this village!"
Under the direction of the youth president and the village chief, boric acid began going down all across the village. The work had started in the very teeth of the morning wind, the whole village turned out dusting every corner, and Kang Hyeong-seok stood in the middle of it all and watched.
"Anyone here who keeps a dog at home!"
Several people stopped their sprinkling and raised their hands.
"Boric acid is toxic. A dog might get into it, so keep a firm hold on the leash, or else keep them inside where they can't wander out. The same goes for cats!"
"Yes, yes."
"Well, dogs will eat any old thing, won't they."
One man muttered it half under his breath, but before Kang Hyeong-seok could open his mouth, someone else cuffed him across the shoulder.
"Chief, won't we run short of boric acid?"
"We will. But someone's already gone into town for more, so they should be back around lunchtime."
"Once the boric acid work is finished, please have one of the more skillful hands start twisting us some geumjul—sacred taboo ropes."
"Geumjul?"
"Yes. The homes with children, and wherever there are livestock sheds, need to be ringed with them first."
Geumjul held the power to bar wicked things. With the boric acid the serpent hated scattered everywhere and the ropes strung up on top of it, the village would fall that much less under the imoogi's influence.
"Until every last bit of the work is done, you must tell people to hold off on leaving their homes. Chief, you'll need to make the announcement over the PA several times, and make sure anyone who does step out carries boric acid with them."
"Ahh, yes. Yes."
The way the chief looked at Kang Hyeong-seok was no longer quite ordinary. There was expectation in it now—the hope that the shaman was finally doing something—and it seemed that the simple act of doing had settled some of the dread weighing on the man's chest.
"And, Mr. Youth President."
"Yes?"
As the youth president turned, rainwater scattered from the brim of his yellow rain hood.
"When I first came to this village—"
"Yes...?"
With the youth president's face asking what is he getting at?, Kang Hyeong-seok spoke in a low voice.
"That man in the shaman's garb. The place he went—was it that mountain, last night?"
The mountain where the imoogi had been. The youth president had been at his side for that. Though he had no spiritual eye and could see nothing, he had witnessed, clear as day, the spectacle of lightning hammering down around the creature again and again.
"Yes, that's right."
"Is there something on that mountain, by any chance?"
"There is something, but it was all so very long ago..."
"What is it?"
"A gut was held there once—a shamanic rite, a long time back."
The youth president sent the village chief a look that begged for rescue, and the chief came shuffling over, nodding as he nudged the younger man's arm.
"It was long before his time. This one wouldn't know the half of it."
"I'd be grateful if you'd tell me."
"There used to be a small lake up on that mountain, long ago."
"A lake..."
Imoogi were bound deeply to water.
"The water in that lake was so clear and sweet—I played there plenty myself, mind you—but then one day the animals started dying off at that lake, one after another."
"The animals?"
"And later on, people too. Anyone who so much as went to play at the lake came home and wilted away, aching and sighing, till they dropped dead. Child or grown-up, it made no difference. Every last one of them."
Kang Hyeong-seok drew his lower lip between his teeth. The longer the explanation went on, the more certain he grew that this was no coincidence—that it was tangled up with what was happening in this village right now.
"So they called in a shaman and held a gut, and after that there was no more trouble. Instead they barred people from going near, ringed the place with geumjul, and put up warning signs."
Even the shaman had been unable to settle it, then. All they could do was build a fence of precautions around it. That was unmistakably the shape of the chief's story.
"I'll have to go and see it."
"I'm sorry—go? There?"
"Yes. I need to confirm it with my own eyes."
"In this weather..."
"If anything is to be done, it seems it falls to me to go."
It was not arrogance. He simply wanted, more than anything else, to see it with these two eyes. If only he could meet the imoogi face to face—if words could pass between them—then surely a road would open.
"You're truly going?"
"I have to."
Shwaaaaaaa.
The chief glared up at the sky as though it had wronged him personally, then turned his gaze back to Kang Hyeong-seok.
"...I'm sorry, and I thank you."
"It's a road that saves people's lives. It has to be walked."
At that, the chief's face crumpled with feeling, and he swung his eyes around to the youth president.
"You. You're going with him."
"...I beg your pardon?"
The youth president looked back as if calamity had ambushed him out of a clear sky, and the chief exploded.
"What's the matter with you! The man doesn't know the roads—how's he supposed to find the place on his own!"
"Ch-Chief, there are other people, aren't there—"
"Send old Mr. Kim, is that it? Or shall I hobble up there myself! You useless whelp!"
"There's Nak-yul, too. He's young."
"Why, you! You good-for-nothing little—! I'll smack you one, I swear!"
When the chief hoisted his cane, the youth president ducked and shielded his head—but the cane never came down. An order fell instead.
"Less talk! Get your things and get out here double-time!"
"Ah... aigoo."
"Boric acid—don't you forget it! And keep a good hold on your phone!"
"...Yes, sir."
The youth president answered with a face fit to cry, and Kang Hyeong-seok smiled wryly to himself. Guide or no, a guide was something he had needed all the same.
And so, as the two of them readied themselves for the mountain, Lee Nak-yul slipped away—off, presumably, to press together a few rice balls for the road.