The Punishment That Lingers
A few days went by.
During that time, Kang Hyeong-seok carried on with his thoroughly ordinary office life.
"Manager, could you take a look at this for me?"
"Let's see. Ah, this part should be changed—it was revised last quarter."
"Oh! I must have pulled up an old version, then."
He walked Namgoong Min-ah through the documents she brought over for review.
"Manager Kang, you've been dropping food an awful lot lately. You feeling all right?"
"No, sir. I'll be more careful."
"Get yourself checked at a hospital one of these days. You've got me worried."
He had even taken to sharing food with Baekseol-i often enough to earn that concern from Kwak Young-ho.
No one knew.
—Chomp, chomp.
That Lee Jin-pyeong's Baekseol-i had taken to padding over to Kang Hyeong-seok every single lunch hour of late. Of course, the moment the meal was finished she would hop off his knee as though nothing had happened and trot straight back to her owner.
"And off she goes."
Shin Jeong-ah, whom he kept running into on the rooftop, was frowning around a cigarette more often than not. Usually it was work, or the stock market—but today something else seemed to be gnawing at her.
"Is something the matter?"
"Hm? No, it's nothing like that."
"If there is, just say the word."
The Sales Team 2 employees standing off at a distance stole a few sidelong glances before retreating down the stairwell, and only then did Shin Jeong-ah speak.
"It's nothing major. I just asked Ha-yoon about something, on the off chance."
A lawyer who specialized in divorce—the same friend who had lent her strength so tirelessly behind the scenes during the spirit wedding, too.
"Did something happen to Ha-yoon?"
"W-well, actually, I consulted her once about that business a while back. You know the one."
Certain of what she must have asked about, Kang Hyeong-seok raised his coffee to his lips over a rueful smile. It was the kind of business that soured the mouth like coffee with not a single grain of sugar in it.
The hanging ghost, and the matter of Lee Jang-woo.
"I just wondered how come we can't bring that bastard down, so I asked her."
"Go on."
"She says the case was closed ages ago, and unless he confesses on his own, it's hopeless."
As though the whole affair were her own, Shin Jeong-ah raked her hair back, cigarette still wedged between her lips, twitchy with irritation.
"Guys like that belong in prison."
"His life is probably hell already."
"Even so. I can't help feeling human matters ought to be settled by human hands, you know?"
Shin Jeong-ah had certainly been working beside Kang Hyeong-seok long enough now. Even the way she talked let slip the faintest hint that she understood which side of the world he walked.
"What? Why are you laughing?"
Though his laugh had made no sound at all, she caught it with uncanny timing and looked none too pleased about it. Kang Hyeong-seok settled his back against the railing and answered.
"Nothing, really. Only—something I keep noticing. You get angry for these people as if it were your own fight, Manager."
"Because they're pitiful, that's all."
She shot back as if to say, isn't that obvious?
I suppose she's just born that way.
The White Tiger Star in her fate might send her lunging like a beast of prey the instant anyone crossed the line, but her natural temperament was a kind and gentle one underneath.
"Whew—none of us can fix everything. So don't let it gnaw at you too much."
"...Yeah."
Shin Jeong-ah answered with a gloomy sort of understanding, then burned a slow drag off her cigarette at his side while he sipped his coffee.
The start of autumn had come and gone not long before. Perhaps that was why the sky looked scrubbed clean, and why the summer heat that had felt utterly merciless finally seemed to be losing its grip. Before long, the leaves of the trees lining the streets far below would flare red and gold, and as it did every year, the world would begin making ready for winter.
"The dead can't exactly take their case to the prosecutors, after all."
At something as self-evident as the turning of the seasons, Shin Jeong-ah's gaze fastened onto him.
"Honestly, lately I keep thinking about punishment."
"You mean divine punishment?"
"Something like it. I meant the kind that stays with you."
"......"
"That must be how it is for Lee Jang-woo right now."
Every night—maybe even at this very moment—Jang-woo could be shut up in some cramped back room, drowning in dread.
"Even so, it doesn't satisfy me. Men like that deserve to suffer far more."
"Unless he saves himself, it will only grow more agonizing from here."
Or perhaps, before that could ever happen, he would end his own life.
Kang Hyeong-seok drank his coffee with a troubled look, then tipped his head back toward the blue sky—a sight that might have wrapped someone's heart in peace. But not Lee Jang-woo's. Perhaps because the man already had some inkling of where he would be going once he died.
"Haah..."
"Don't dwell on it too much. Everyone is repaid in exactly the measure of their own karma."
Kang Hyeong-seok drained what was left in his tumbler in one swallow and pushed off from the railing.
"Quitting time's almost here. You should get ready to head out too, Manager."
"Mm..."
"Going straight home tonight?"
Shin Jeong-ah dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and slid her eyes over to him. Her look seemed to ask what he meant by that, though he hadn't asked with anything particular in mind.
"No, nothing. You just seemed to have a lot on your mind. And when that's the case, nothing beats seeing a friend, does it?"
"Hm, funny you should say—I'm already supposed to meet Ha-yoon."
"Works out nicely, then."
"What about you, Manager Kang?"
"I have plans of my own."
Shin Jeong-ah smiled wide enough to curve her eyes into crescent moons.
"A friend?"
"No. I'm going to see my teacher."
"Ah, right."
She knew the person as well—the shaman who had given her a protective talisman, and the one who stood as Kang Hyeong-seok's spiritual mentor.
"I thought I'd pay my respects to Grand Shaman Lee Geum-kyeong. It's been a while."
Shin Jeong-ah nodded, looking thoroughly sold on the idea.
Grrrrr.
As he climbed the upward road leading to Lee Geum-kyeong's shrine hall, Kang Hyeong-seok checked his wristwatch. The dinner hour had passed, so she might even have finished eating by now. Even so, the snacks for Lee Geum-kyeong and Cheong-geum stowed on the passenger seat meant he wouldn't be arriving empty-handed even if they hadn't—all in all, not a bad state of affairs.
Hm?
In the rearview mirror, a car came into view, trailing behind him. He checked the time again. No mistake—it was late.
An urgent visitor, then.
Unless a matter was truly pressing, Lee Geum-kyeong never permitted visitors at this hour.
Vrooooom!
Kang Hyeong-seok sped up as if to say come along, hurry, and sure enough the car behind glued itself to his tail. And so the two vehicles rolled to a stop side by side in the front yard of the shrine hall.
Bang!
Before he could even get out, the driver's door of the other car flew open. The eyes that met his were frantic. A middle-aged woman, wearing the expression of someone praying: please, don't let him be another visitor.
Bang!
Kang Hyeong-seok stepped out of his own car and waved her urgently toward the shrine hall—go on, quickly. Only then did she bow her head to him in gratitude, before easing a man out of the passenger seat, supporting what could only be her husband.
Eyes rolled back white, mouth hanging slack—and skin gone a ghastly shade of blue.
Damn it. A possession case.
One he might have to handle himself.
Kang Hyeong-seok hurriedly pulled the bag holding his ritual implements from the car.
"Young Master!"
Cheong-geum came rushing out into the front yard and called to him at the top of her lungs.
"Just let the Teacher know!"
He shouted back just as loudly, and the middle-aged woman—realizing that this man, too, was no ordinary person—felt her chest seize up until the corners of her eyes went damp. She was that desperate.
So Kang Hyeong-seok sprinted to her side and looped the man's arm over his own shoulders.
"Teacher! Opening the door!"
Bang!
Then he ran for the shrine hall door that Cheong-geum pulled open.
"Thank you. Thank you."
The woman's voice, chasing after them, was squeezed down tight.
"Teacher!"
Kang Hyeong-seok bowed his head to Lee Geum-kyeong and carried the man inside with him, laying him out on the floor; Cheong-geum then told the wife to wait outside.
"B-but..."
"If you stay here, ma'am, you will only be in the way."
Only after those iron words from Cheong-geum did the woman drag herself, spent, out of the shrine hall. Before the door swung shut, her eyes met his—a look that said, please, take care of him.
Thud.
The moment the door closed, a solemn, ponderous gravity crashed down over the room—something none of them could have predicted only minutes before. The Buddha statue enshrined within, the shamanic implements, and the incense still hanging sharp in the air only deepened that weight.
"You've come at a good time."
Lee Geum-kyeong spoke as she studied the man's complexion.
"It seems Heaven guided me here."
Lee Geum-kyeong laughed as though pushing the breath from her lungs, and Kang Hyeong-seok studied the man's face, then undid his belt. After that, he combed through the man's pockets and the inside of his clothes for any other scrap of metal or anything with an edge—a precaution against whatever self-harm might come.
"Do you know what this is?"
"Yes. It's possession."
The man's breath carried a reek that bordered on rot. Lee Geum-kyeong nodded without a word, and Kang Hyeong-seok turned his eyes to her, wordlessly asking for the explanation.
"A worthless husband."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I mean that he is not a good husband."
He thought he understood her meaning. Faint as it was, the scent of a woman's cosmetics clung to the man's clothes—and his hair smelled of shampoo, too.
"This is a man who took a woman not his wife to a motel where someone had died—and there, a ghost fastened itself onto him."
Lee Jang-woo rose in his mind unbidden, and Kang Hyeong-seok bit down on his lower lip, his face knotting.
Then came her next words.
"And what is it those eyes of yours see?"
It did not sound like a simple question about what his Yeongan—his spiritual eye—could perceive. Kang Hyeong-seok held his silence for a moment, letting his gaze travel from the man, who lay with rolled-back eyes and never so much as twitched, to the closed door. Then his lips flickered, and he spoke.
"I see sin, and regret. And the departed soul."
The wife waiting outside surely knew it too. The man must have begun acting strangely at the motel and lost his mind; a frantic call would have reached her, and floundering, she would have come running to Lee Geum-kyeong. What must it have been like for her—learning of her husband's affair, loading him into the car, and then sending Kang Hyeong-seok that pleading look?
Thanks to the conversation he'd shared with Shin Jeong-ah at the office, his head felt more tangled than usual.
"You're thinking more than usual today."
Lee Geum-kyeong said it low, then drew her upper body upright—and the movement, as if putting distance between herself and the man, snagged Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze.
"You will be the one to resolve this."
"Me? You mean... me, Teacher?"
Lee Geum-kyeong gave her answer with a nod. And Kang Hyeong-seok moved his eyes to the man.
Through his Yeongan he could see it: the departed spirit clinging to the man like a demon.
So it's an evil spirit.
A ghost that had died by hanging. A cruel thing, and savage of temper. And the reason it had latched onto this man was jealousy.
"In life you lusted after women—and yet, for all that, you resented the wife who left you, and ended your own life by your own hand."
His low voice drew the eyes of both Lee Geum-kyeong and the spirit, and Kang Hyeong-seok, his gaze still sunken and dark, went on.
"What grievance could burn so bitterly that you torment the living? It is nothing but a meaningless attachment. Lay down your envy and jealousy, and depart for the place you must go."
He had spoken as though chanting sacred scripture—slow, measured, threaded with cadence—and with that, he drew out his Mudang Bang-ul, the sacred shaman's bells.
Shalalalalang!
And then he began the chant that would drive the ghost from the man's body.