The Charlatan on the Fourth Floor
The whole drive to the shrine, Kang Hyeong-seok never said a word. He only stared straight ahead, his face crowded with thought.
Fucking bastard. What the hell was he thinking, pulling a stunt like that?
The more he turned it over, the hotter he burned—enough to scald his forehead. It is a shaman's duty to protect the living. It is a shaman's duty to comfort the souls of the wronged. And this shaman—using ghosts to shove people straight into danger?
That made him no different from the ones who took a fat wad of cash to fling harm at strangers, or pulled filthy tricks just to fill the shoes a rival shaman had dropped.
Let him claim he didn't know. Better that he'd written that talisman without knowing a thing. Because otherwise, it felt as though Kang Hyeong-seok might have to give that shaman bastard a beating himself.
"Hey... ease up on that face, will you?"
Shin Jeong-ah, reading the mood, broached him cautiously—uncharacteristically so—and Kang Hyeong-seok answered only with a nod, his lips pressed into a hard line.
Just as the tangled air between them was growing heavy enough to sink, the navigation announced that the destination was near. Kang Hyeong-seok leaned forward, sweeping the street with eyes that asked, is this really the place?
"Isn't this an officetel?"
"It is. Why?"
Kang Hyeong-seok answered with an unreadable look on his face.
"Nothing. Never mind."
Call it prejudice. He simply felt that tarot cards suited an officetel better.
So not an old shrine, then. At that point there was no need to look to know how things would go. This was no shaman with her seat locked down tight, the way Lee Geum-kyeong's was.
A shaman whose shoes were planted that firmly was never left alone by the powerful or the wealthy—which was why, when such people did raise a shrine, it was so often in a district where the ground alone cost a fortune. If Lee Geum-kyeong had coveted money even slightly, she could have built palace-like shrines in places like Cheongdam-dong, and more than one of them.
Vrrrm. Clunk.
Kang Hyeong-seok parked in the officetel's underground garage and waited for the elevator with Shin Jeong-ah. All the while she kept dialing her phone.
"Not picking up. Looks like he's with a client."
"Let's go up anyway."
Kang Hyeong-seok boarded the elevator with a preoccupied gaze, the bag holding his sacred shaman bells hugged to his ribs. In plain, everyday clothes, he read less like a man of the spirits and more like a cram-school instructor.
That must have been why the kid boarding on the first floor—some high schooler, by the look of him—kept sneaking glances, half-convinced this was a new teacher.
Ding.
But Kang Hyeong-seok stepped out not on the third floor, where the academy was, but on the fourth, where the shrine was. Long talismans pasted across the door, even flags flying—anyone could see it for a shrine.
"You should be the one to call him out, Section Chief."
"Me?"
Shin Jeong-ah shot back with eyes full of incomprehension, but Kang Hyeong-seok calmly explained himself.
"The more I think about it, the more it seems he wanted you desperate. So it's better if you're the one who calls him out."
"Ah. Got it."
She nodded, her face saying she hadn't followed all of it.
Kang Hyeong-seok took his place out of the peephole's sightline, and Shin Jeong-ah raised her balled fist.
Knock, knock.
No answer, so she pressed the doorbell, and in the end she was pounding on the door with her fist.
Well done, Section Chief Shin!
"Open the door! Master Sorcerer! Open up, I said! It's Shin Jeong-ah!"
Nobody even told her to, and she throws a fit like a natural.
Beep! Chirp-chirp.
The door finally opened, and a young man appeared—plain cotton clothes with nothing but a shaman's vestment thrown over them.
"Do you have any idea where this is, raising all this racket!"
They had pictured a woman. The practitioner was a man.
Kang Hyeong-seok stepped straight into the view of the paksu—the male shaman—still mid-roar. That he had been hiding himself until now. That there was nothing friendly about his eyes.
And when the paksu faltered at the hand reaching out toward him—
Grab!
Kang Hyeong-seok clamped down on his shoulder and shoved him backward into the room. Shin Jeong-ah, slipping in behind, shut the door the instant they were both inside.
"Wh-what the—? You two! Who do you think you are, coming in here!"
"You wrote that talisman, didn't you?"
No preamble, no buildup—he cut everything away and threw only the heart of the matter. Even so, the paksu flinched at the shoulders as though the words alone had told him everything. And when the man's mouth twisted into a smirk, what he was thinking came into view as well.
"Looks like the ghost gave you a rough time, then. I told you, didn't I? If the talisman has no effect, you'll be needing a proper gut."
That was the moment.
Two figures came into Kang Hyeong-seok's sight. One was an elderly man, standing helpless in the inner room where a ritual altar stood; the other was a small child bolting in a blind panic.
The old man was human.
The child was not.
"You'll have to wait your turn—there's someone ahead of you. I'll hear everyone out, so sit down and wait."
The paksu tried to shake off the hand gripping his shoulder; Kang Hyeong-seok only bore down harder. Holding the man pinned, he turned his head toward the bewildered old man.
He could see it too. Why someone would be driven to beg for help from a charlatan like this. And the desperation that had pushed a man to squeeze answers out of a fraud's empty words.
Kang Hyeong-seok studied the old man for a long moment—and felt his own mouth open.
"Your daughter's surgery will go well."
The old man's eyes flew wide, and the paksu, flustered, looked back and forth between Shin Jeong-ah and Kang Hyeong-seok.
Before the pair of them, Kang Hyeong-seok went on, level and unhurried.
"You've suffered terribly in your heart, haven't you. You believed you were a father who could never dress her in anything nice, never feed her anything good. But you never managed a single word of apology—you only ever scolded her. You even said that raising a daughter was pointless, that a girl who marries belongs to another family anyway."
Like a mudang deep in divination, Kang Hyeong-seok was peering into the old man's past and present. That was where the crushing air about him came from.
But the reason the old man stood rooted like a stone, every scrap of his attention fixed on Kang Hyeong-seok, was not that air alone.
"That's why you believe your daughter's illness is your fault too, isn't that right? No. You don't have to believe that any longer. The guilt you have carried in your chest all your life, the tears you shed alone, the blame you heaped on yourself—it has all reached heaven."
By now the paksu didn't even think of trying to free himself. Overwhelmed by the weight in the room, the old man stood with his mouth hanging slightly open, watching this stranger comfort him.
"Those tears were offering enough. Your daughter's surgery will go well. And once your strength returns, go visit the National Cemetery. You must take your daughter with you when you go."
The old man gazed at Kang Hyeong-seok as though he had just received the most important counsel of his life. He had been gulping air, mouth opening and closing without a word; now his lips contorted, and a long, shuddering sob tore out of him. It did not take long for tears to gather in the creased corners of his eyes and fall.
"A-are you... a sorcerer, sir?"
"No. I'm not that kind of man."
"Th-then how could you..."
"I'm simply someone who walks the road my patron deity points me down."
The paksu, still caught in Kang Hyeong-seok's grip, stared at him in open astonishment, and Shin Jeong-ah's expression turned strange. Because in her eyes, the man standing there right now looked like something far beyond any shaman she had ever heard of.
"There are words that must be given to a human, not to a god. What you are holding in your chest right now—carry it to your daughter, without fail. She will understand, and she will accept all of it."
The old man nodded, his face fighting down the weeping. Then he bowed low, deeply, to Kang Hyeong-seok.
"Thank you. Thank you."
"Go on, now."
"And, the—the payment..."
"Spend it on a taxi."
The old man wore his stunned look right up to the end, then nodded rapidly. His head had already been full to bursting with the thought that he had to get to his hospitalized daughter at once.
He left the shrine trailing thank-yous behind him, and then only three people remained: Kang Hyeong-seok, Shin Jeong-ah, and the paksu.
That was when it happened.
WHAM!
Kang Hyeong-seok drove the paksu into the wall.
But unlike before, the man could neither roar nor summon an arrogant glare. Kang Hyeong-seok had declared himself no practitioner—and the paksu had recognized that he stood on an entirely different plane altogether.
"Wh-where... where is it you've come from, sir?"
"What? Won't your little boy-god tell you?"
The paksu's mouth worked wide and soundless, and then he bowed his head low.
"Your god ran off long ago. No—it was never a proper god in the first place."
The fleeing child he had seen the instant they entered the shrine. The thing that had bolted at the sight of Kang Hyeong-seok's patron deity was a heoju—a false god. When the Sinnaerim rite is received wrongly, it is sometimes not a god that descends into the vessel, but a heoju.
So could a paksu with such a thing squatting in him be a proper paksu?
No.
At his very best, he was a charlatan. The paksu, as Kang Hyeong-seok had read him, was a charlatan with a false god seated where a god should have been.
"With shallow gifts, he could peek at the past a little. But that was the whole depth of it, wasn't it?"
True divination means carrying a god's own words—not something a charlatan can do.
Shame flushed the paksu's face. But no words came; he was too busy scrambling out from under Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze.
"Say it with your own mouth. Why you wrote that talisman."
Kang Hyeong-seok let him go as though flinging him loose. But the paksu could not make his mouth move, and his eyes fled from Shin Jeong-ah's.
"Talk!"
When Kang Hyeong-seok, patience spent at last, roared, the paksu clenched his molars and made a low, pained sound.
Grab!
This time Kang Hyeong-seok closed his fist fully around the man's collar, and his voice sank low.
"Shall I make sure you never play paksu again?"
Only then did the paksu's eyes fly open—before his trembling face dropped. There was nothing in Kang Hyeong-seok's words to prove it. But he looked like a man who could make it true without breaking a sweat. After all, the heoju—the only thing that had ever let him play at being a paksu, however feebly—had bolted the moment it laid eyes on him.
Eyes screwed shut, body shaking, the paksu finally lifted his face to meet Shin Jeong-ah's gaze.
"I'm... I'm sorry."
It was the voice of an ordinary man—not anyone putting on a practitioner's airs. He went on like a man confessing to something he could barely force past his teeth.
"I don't know what you've been through. But that was not a talisman for driving out ghosts. That thing..."
Shin Jeong-ah threw a question at Kang Hyeong-seok with her eyes alone.
Can I press him?
Kang Hyeong-seok answered with a silent nod.
Go ahead.
Permission granted, Shin Jeong-ah folded her arms and let her eyes go vicious.
"Talk straight. What kind of talisman was that?"
"A talisman that opens a... a passage for ghosts to pass through. It calls ghosts in."
"...Why?"
Shin Jeong-ah asked again, swallowing her temper one more time, and the paksu ran his tongue over his cracking lips before he spoke.
"F-for a gut..."
"A gut?"
"I-I wasn't going to charge a lot! I planned to take the talisman down during the rite! And I didn't even know if the thing would work! I truly did it without knowing!"
"You insane bastard!"
At the shameless excuse, Kang Hyeong-seok's fist curled. It felt as though he would regret it for the rest of his days if he didn't put this man down right here and now.
He was on the very point of smashing his fist into the paksu's face—
"Hey! You son of a bitch!"
Shin Jeong-ah flew at him out of nowhere.
THWACK!
Her shin hammered into the side of the paksu's thigh. It happened with no window at all for anyone to stop it.
"KYAAAAAGH!"
The paksu clutched his thigh and began to buckle; Shin Jeong-ah, already on him, kicked his chest out from under him.
Thud!
His head cracked against the floor, and the paksu looked up at her with fear and bewilderment tangled in his eyes. And then Shin Jeong-ah, her face gone completely off the rails, laid into his cheek, one blow after another.
Crack! Craaack! Crack!
Sounds like that do not come from just anyone hitting a person. Even among people who had learned to fight, only the ones who had trained in deadly earnest could produce them.
Crack! Crack! Craaack!
"Urk! Kuh! Gghk!"
"Fuck! Me! Because of! THAT!"
Every time a blow landed, the paksu's face snapped to a new expression—bewilderment, then disbelief, then flat-out horror, one after the next. At this rate the man would end up a ghost himself, so Kang Hyeong-seok hastily grabbed Shin Jeong-ah.
"Rein it in! What do you think you're doing! Right now!"
"Let go of me! You won't? Then I'm killing that bastard today and going straight to hell after him! Me! Because of you—ghosts! Ghosts, fuck, one after another—!"
Shin Jeong-ah lifted one leg as though to launch a kick—then set it back down.
"Hold it in! Come on. Please."
"GAAAAH!"
Would Kang Hyeong-seok himself have gone this far, even if he had been the one swinging? Shin Jeong-ah, enraged to the point that such a thought even surfaced, was terrifying.
Kang Hyeong-seok quickly shot a signal to the paksu with his eyes. It said: if you don't want a funeral in your name today, get down on the floor and start begging.
Whump!
The paksu received the signal loud and clear—and dropped flat on the spot.