Come, This Way
It was sticky and stifling. A discomfort that went beyond anything the fog itself could account for. And a smell — fishy, rank — kept needling its way up his nose. The thing inside that darkness was the cause.
Shiiiiiiii—
A phantom sound like the rush of wind rang in his ears. Dozens of voices — men and women, young and old — muttering in low tones at a frantic clip. And strangely enough, he could almost understand what they were saying.
— Come. This way. Hurry.
Step. His feet moved whether he willed them to or not. Forced onward toward the fog, he fancied he could hear Noh Soo-chul bellowing somewhere behind him — but the phantom chant smothered the sound, and nothing came through clearly.
— Come.
You're doing well. Yes. Hurry and come.
Walking into the fog with slow, leaden steps, Kang Hyeong-seok felt his breathing turn ragged. He knew he had to resist. But it felt as though a rope of clear glass had wound itself around his body, coil over coil, and was reeling him in.
Ring. A bell sounded right beside his ear, and his feet stopped dead.
The bells kept multiplying.
Rrrring-aling-aling-ling!
By the end, a dozen small bells seemed to be shaking all at once, their chimes stacking one atop another. It sounded just like the rattle-bells shamans use in their rites — and at that sound, Kang Hyeong-seok snapped wide awake.
"Hah! Hahh, hahh!"
Eyes flying open, he looked around in a panic. The car sat trapped in the fog, little more than an outline; Noh Soo-chul's face had gone chalk-white with terror.
"Hey! What's the matter with you! Snap out of it!"
Wiping away the cold sweat, Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head hard.
Damn it. Not again.
Once more, something that defied sense and reason had gotten its hooks into him. Just like the ghosts that had tormented him all his life. That darkness, too, had been trying to charm him under.
"What are you doing over there! Aren't you coming? Hey!"
Noh Soo-chul kept calling to him, snarling harder than usual — but his voice shook with fear, and there was nothing intimidating about it.
"It's nothing, sir."
Kang Hyeong-seok stared into the darkness with eyes that had changed from moments before. Nothing appeared in his field of vision, and yet he could all but see something vile bursting through the fog at any second.
We have to leave this place. Now.
"Let's get to the car first, Deputy General Manager."
"Wh-what?"
"I'll explain everything in the car."
"I'm saying we go. Right now."
He tugged at Noh Soo-chul's forearm, but the man didn't budge an inch. He was digging in his heels beyond anything explicable — and the sheer uncanniness of it made Kang Hyeong-seok's skin crawl. When he looked into his eyes, he found the gaze of a man staring at some faraway mountain.
Goddammit.
Kang Hyeong-seok ground the curse between his teeth, letting it out through his lips alone.
The Deputy General Manager's been charmed.
Being charmed was a dangerous thing. The things men called evil spirits would charm a person into acts that made no sense — and that was how they took what they wanted. What a Chang-gwi wanted was a human life. To be precise: the blood and flesh of Kang Hyeong-seok and Noh Soo-chul.
He seized Noh Soo-chul hard by the shoulders and shook him.
"Snap out of it! This is no time for this!"
But the slackness was spreading — even the muscles of the man's face had begun to go loose.
WHAP! Kang Hyeong-seok smacked his shoulder with an open palm.
"Come on, snap out of it already! Come ON!"
He raised his fist to shoulder height. But he couldn't bring it down right away — for a heartbeat, he hesitated. The man was his superior at work, after all. Then his resolve hardened soon enough.
That superior was Noh Soo-chul.
SMACK! Noh Soo-chul's head snapped sideways and he went rolling across the ground.
"Kuhk! Ghk! Aaargh!"
His senses slammed back all at once. Still clutching his cheek, Noh Soo-chul glared up at Kang Hyeong-seok with murder in his eyes.
"Y-you son of a bitch, d-did you just h-hit me?"
"Then snap out of it, sir! Fuck!"
Kang Hyeong-seok roared at him more viciously than Noh Soo-chul had ever spoken to him. It was a face he never once showed at the office — and so Noh Soo-chul, cheek still in his grasp, could only open and close his mouth, his tongue refusing to work.
"Get up."
When Kang Hyeong-seok held out a hand, Noh Soo-chul flinched — actually flinched, as if afraid of him.
Unbelievable. A man with guts that small — what had he been counting on, to run his mouth the way he did?
Kang Hyeong-seok snatched him up by the collar, hauled him to his feet, and started for the car.
"Follow me. Quickly."
"Y-you, you—"
"I said follow me!"
When Kang Hyeong-seok barked over his shoulder, Noh Soo-chul trailed after him at a distance, scared half out of his wits.
Damn it all. We're dead. Noh Soo-chul would never know — not even in his dreams — just how dangerous this moment was. The ground around them had been carpeted with menace. Like a tiger lurking in the mist, the Chang-gwi was hiding its body somewhere in that fog. Kang Hyeong-seok, who had been wrung dry by ghosts time and time again, could gauge the danger from hard-won experience.
Lose your grip on your mind here, and you die. Clutching at his sanity for dear life, he stopped in front of the car.
Aside from the crumpled front bumper and the blood and fur smeared across it, nothing else looked wrong. Clunk! But cruelly, the door would not open. The relief that had settled into his face drained of color in an instant.
"We're screwed. Fuck."
Cursing in earnest now, he threw his whole body into shaking the door by its handle. Clunk, clunk, clunk! He yanked hard enough that he wondered if the handle would tear clean off in his grip — but the door didn't move so much as a hair.
"I-it's not unlocked."
"It's a smart key!"
For a man who'd been mooching rides off him on every business trip, Noh Soo-chul sure had nerve, spouting that kind of nonsense.
"What are you doing? Grab it with me!"
"O-okay."
Before the words were even out of Kang Hyeong-seok's mouth, Noh Soo-chul rushed over and seized the handle alongside him.
"Pull on three."
"O-okay!"
"Two. Three!"
CLUNK-CLUNK! CLUNK-CLUNK! CLUNK-CLUNK!
"Hah! Hahh!"
The door absolutely refused to open. Kang Hyeong-seok let go and dragged in great gulps of air. If something had gone wrong, it had gone thoroughly, completely wrong. The car or the key fob malfunctioning? It wasn't impossible — but for that to happen now, of all moments, made no sense at all. It was as if someone were conjuring these freak phenomena, determined not to let Kang Hyeong-seok and Noh Soo-chul slip away.
"Hahh, hahh, hahh." The ominous thought bore down on his chest, and his breathing quickened. He had been tormented by ghosts plenty of times before — but never had there been a moment this dangerous. He might die here today, at the hands of whatever waited in that fog.
Kang Hyeong-seok stood beside the car, staring into the thick fog and the dark beyond it. And just as Noh Soo-chul, following his lead, turned his eyes to the same place—
"Hello there? Is someone over there?"
A deep man's voice drifted from the far side of the fog.
"A p-person!"
For one instant, color surged into Noh Soo-chul's face and he moved to answer — but Kang Hyeong-seok clamped a hand over his mouth at once.
That fishy reek. The moment the voice carried over, the smell came with it — the raw, blood-and-fish stench of a fishmonger's stall. Not a smell that had any business rising on a fog-bound mountain like this.
Ghost-stench... The smell of the dead. The smell of an evil spirit. It had brushed past his nose the instant that voice rang out.
"Looks like you've had an accident. Are you all right over there? You seem to need help — come on over here."
Hand sealed over Noh Soo-chul's mouth, Kang Hyeong-seok backed away slowly, one step at a time. His other hand rested on the man's shoulder, and the trembling running through him came through plain as day.
"I'm not some strange person. I'm a villager from down below — just passing through on an errand. Are you in some kind of trouble? Is something stopping you from talking? Hello? Are you all right?"
Gulp. Kang Hyeong-seok swallowed, his throat bone-dry. The ghost-stench, that raw-fish reek, was thickening by the second.
It's coming closer.
"Say something, will you!"
Kang Hyeong-seok looked back. Beyond the guardrail, a slope plunged away as if the mountainside had been carved sheer. The fog was too thick to see the bottom — but for escape, that side beat the road: a dead-straight, wide-open lane with nowhere to hide.
That was when it happened.
"Noh Soo-chul! Kang Hyeong-seok!"
The thing called their names in a voice so clear and booming the whole mountain rang with it. Feeling every hair on his body stand on end, Kang Hyeong-seok yanked Noh Soo-chul toward him.
"Run!"
"Hnn, hnnnnngh!"
"If you want to live — RUN!"
Kang Hyeong-seok sprinted for the guardrail first, and Noh Soo-chul scrambled senselessly after him.
Whoosh! He hurled himself over the rail and looked back — to check on Noh Soo-chul, and instead saw it, closing in from behind the man.
It was not a person. Tiger stripes wrapped its entire body. It was built like a calf, but its head was a human one. As if to proclaim that it had been devoured by a tiger, the face was contorted in agony — yet the lips alone had been split in a straight line back to below the ears.
As if it were smiling.
Kang Hyeong-seok grabbed Noh Soo-chul's shoulder and collar and dragged him back over the rail.
"Ghk! AAAAGH!"
He hauled up the shrieking man and went pouring down the slope as if the mountain itself were spilling them loose.
"Wh-what's be-behind us! Assistant Manager Kang — hey!"
"Don't look!"
If Noh Soo-chul slipped under its spell again, he had no confidence he could handle it.
Rushhh! Tat-tat-tat-tat! Racing down the pitch-black mountainside, he turned the thing's appearance over in his mind. His Yeongan had been open since early childhood; he had seen plenty of ghosts, suffered plenty at their hands. Take shamans who never receive their god: stray spirits and evil ones covet such people. Slip up even once, and they become what's called a hollow shaman — a vessel with some empty, godless thing seated where a god should be — and even short of that, they are wracked cruelly by spirit sickness. Kang Hyeong-seok had, mercifully, never fallen to a crippling spirit sickness, but he had been forced to lay eyes on more evil spirits than he could count. Yet a ghost of that shape — not once, not ever.
Why? Why on earth something like that?
Rustle! Crack! Shoving aside the branches that lunged at him and the moths that swarmed his face, he ran through the darkness, putting distance between himself and the Chang-gwi.
"Hah, hah! Hah!" His breath had backed up to the base of his throat. The fog-damp stones seemed to lie in wait, watching for their chance to snap an ankle — and right at his back, he could feel the Chang-gwi poised to snatch the nape of his neck. This vicious, unfamiliar predicament dredged old memories up from the depths.
"Teacher, why haven't I received my Momju-sin?"
He would have been about thirteen. Kang Hyeong-seok had stayed close with the shaman who would later perform his Sin-nureum for him, and from time to time he had asked just that question.
"I can see ghosts. I'm so scared. I don't want to see them anymore, but I keep seeing them. You said once I receive my Momju-sin, everything would be all right? So when can I receive it?"
"Oh, you poor child."
Back then, the shaman had stroked the boy's head.
"You have no need for fear. The Momju-sin you are to receive is a great one. What is there to dread, with such a one keeping watch over you?"
"But I haven't received the god yet?"
"You have been set aside for that one already. And how could a god fail to protect what it has claimed?"
"But I'm still so scared. If it's going to be like this, I want to receive my god quickly."
None of it had made sense to him. Not the Momju-sin that simply left him seeing ghosts. Nor the shaman, who would only tell him to wait. Not when the child he had been ached so much.
"The time is not yet come."
"Then when? When can I receive it?"
"That is for your Momju-sin alone to decide. So endure a little longer. When you stand complete as a vessel — when you are ready enough to receive that one — it will come seeking you."
Thump! Crash! "AAAARGH!"
Kang Hyeong-seok glanced back at Noh Soo-chul, sprawled over a jutting tree root, while the Chang-gwi bore down on them, eyes glinting with menace.
"Damn it!"
"As-Assistant Manager Kang! S-save me—"
Kang Hyeong-seok caught the outstretched hand and bolted on.
Wooooooong! The mountain wind came howling past, ringing in his ears like the shriek of a demon and crawling gooseflesh up his skin.
"I wish I could receive my Momju-sin soon." Young Kang Hyeong-seok had said those very words to the shaman once — the same thought he was having now.
"Hyeong-seok, remember only this. Your Momju-sin longs for you every bit as desperately as you long for it."
"It's... waiting for me?"
"Yes. Just as it once wished for nothing in this world but your birth."
That was how the conversation with the shaman had ended that day.
"If this very moment isn't the one, then when?!"
It was at that moment that Kang Hyeong-seok held a quiet grievance against his Momju-sin, silent as ever.
"W-wait! Please, hahk! Hnnnnngh!"
Noh Soo-chul, hauled along by the arm, gasped the words out between heaving breaths. But Kang Hyeong-seok kept tearing down the mountainside, glancing back over his shoulder.
Ssshhhfff! The Chang-gwi was pursuing them from behind, sliding off toward their left flank. As though it meant to steer Kang Hyeong-seok and Noh Soo-chul, precisely, in the direction it wanted.
Grind. Gritting his molars, Kang Hyeong-seok packed a great deal of thought into a very short span.
Where do we go?
Back to the car? Or right? No — left? Straight ahead?
Just as he began to flounder like a man who had lost his way—
Ring. A clear bell chime brushed past his ear.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
The bells went on ringing, again and again, as if pointing out the direction he had to go — and they drew Kang Hyeong-seok's gaze after them.