The Yeommae
In that instant, an image seared itself into Kang Hyeong-seok's mind.
It was not something the Body-Governing Patron Deity had passed down to him. It was knowledge that told him — the folklore he had majored in, the years he had spent studying the ways of Korean shamanism.
"A Yeommae...?"
There was no mistaking it. The woman had set her mind on a Yeommae.
If she had truly been standing there before his eyes, he would have seized her by the collar — thrown a punch, if that was what it took — to stop her.
So that's why Ha Jang-seo is sick. It was you. It was you all along.
A Yeommae was a curse-implement made from the living. Its materials: a bamboo tube and a young child. The child was shut away and starved, and once its fixation on food had swollen past all reason, a bamboo tube filled with food was held out to it. And when the child reached out its hand, that hand was severed — soul and craving sealed up together inside the tube. It was an implement built upon a Taejagwi, and the mere act of carrying it was said to grant a mudang uncanny sight and impossible efficacy. And the greatest of its powers was this: to sicken a person until they died.
Ssssssss.
The surroundings were sinking into darkness, sliding over into another vision, and Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head as he watched the greedy woman.
Rustle. Rustle.
It was late, but sleep would not come to Ha Jang-seo, and he went on rummaging through the wardrobe.
"Honey, what on earth are you doing?"
"I told you — I'm going hiking tomorrow."
Even as his wife grumbled from the bed, Ha Jang-seo went on gathering his hiking clothes out of the wardrobe, his face lit up like a boy's.
"Call it off. You're hardly in any shape for it, old man."
"I'm telling you, it wasn't my idea."
"Then go see the doctor. Mountains — honestly. Mountains."
It was sound advice, and Ha Jang-seo smiled a sorrowful smile. His hands stopped for a moment — then started moving again.
"How was I supposed to say no? A worn-out old man like me, and he asks me to come share a climb with him."
At the weight that had settled into his voice, his wife could only let the corners of her eyes sag; no words would come.
"It means more than you know. Thank you. Kindness like that isn't easy to come by, not in this day and age."
He had let slip that he was thinking of giving up the farm, and — as though the words had pained him — Kang Hyeong-seok had proposed they go hiking together. He had always been glad to see the man, but somewhere in the back of his mind he had always assumed the warmth was just business, a sales job being what it was. Which was exactly why the invitation had startled him so — and moved him so.
"If you're that grateful, then get well, and get well fast. Only a well man can keep his farm going — and put in a good word for that young man with his boss while he's at it."
"You're right. You're right, of course."
Ha Jang-seo laughed, wrinkles deepening across his sun-browned face. "Aye. That's the way of it."
Fingering the hiking clothes he had dug out for the first time in years, he shrugged off his shirt.
Skin the sun had never touched showed beneath, stark white.
And the red blotches the clothes had hidden.
The sinister red blotches that even the doctors at a major hospital had failed to name covered every span of Ha Jang-seo's back. His wife, unable to bear the sight, had to wrench her anguished face away.
Clatter. Clatter.
The new vision began with the sound of stones giving way.
Deep in a dark mountain — a place without so much as a single thread of light, just like the bean field where Kang Hyeong-seok stood.
Clatter — crash!
As the pile of stones was cleared away, the greedy woman's face emerged along with the moonlight.
"Baby, Mommy's here. You're hungry, aren't you?"
The girl — hands, feet, and mouth bound tight — had wasted away to skin and bone; only her eyelids could still feebly stir.
"Mommy's here, I said. You wretched little thing — when your mother comes, you greet her."
The woman went on smirking, as if nothing in the world could be so funny.
It was a Yeommae. The one act a mudang must never, ever commit. And this woman was committing it against a daughter of her own — never mind that not a drop of blood ran between them.
Ssshhhk.
The woman slid a bamboo tube through the gap. It was about as long as a forearm, and thick enough for a grown hand to slip inside.
"Mommy brought food. Food. I brought kimchi pancakes — your favorite."
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at the hand of the woman standing outside the pit. Wrapped around it was a hand axe, honed so keen that even in the moonlight it gleamed a cold, murderous blue.
"Come on, come eat. Oh — that's it. That's it! Good girl."
The child squirmed, wriggling closer. Then, moving her bound hand with painful, clumsy effort, she pushed it into the bamboo tube.
And that was the moment.
CRASH!
The woman sent the rest of the stones tumbling down, and Kang Hyeong-seok squeezed his eyes shut.
THOOM!
"Uuuhhgg—uunggh!"
The sound of something severing — and the girl's scream, ripping out around the gag stuffed in her mouth. Every hair on his body stood on end.
So a Yeommae had been carried out here after all.
Squelch!
Kang Hyeong-seok gritted his teeth against the sound of the axe swinging, and swinging again. Schlick! Whack! Crunch! Whack! Whack! But the godforsaken blows would not stop coming, and every one of them stabbed into his ears.
He turned his trembling face toward the woman — and slowly opened the eyes he had shut.
It was not a human face. What looked back at him could not, by any stretch, be the face of a human being.
"Ehehehe! Hehehehk! Uhehehehahaha!"
Cackling like a madwoman as she sealed the mouth of the bamboo tube with a clean sheet of hanji — that was the last thing the vision showed him before it dissolved.
Chirrr, chirrr!
Grass insects that had gone unheard began to sing, and somewhere far off, cars droned along a distant road. Above the pitch-black bean field, Kang Hyeong-seok gulped for air until his stomach heaved with dry retching.
He had looked at something no one should have to look at, and now his arms and legs would not stop shaking.
But it did not last long.
"Haah... haah... haah!"
Light hardening in his eyes, Kang Hyeong-seok raised his head. This was no time to be shaking. The place where the Yeommae had been performed was here — this very bean field. And Ha Jang-seo had said his health had failed ever since the day he bought it.
I have to find it.
He had to find the Yeommae buried in this bean field and free the girl's soul.
Shuff, shuff! Shuff!
The sacred shaman bell and a cheap dime-store lantern held out before him, Kang Hyeong-seok began to run through the darkness of the bean field.
"...What ever happened to her mom?"
Clutching her head in both hands, Namgoong Min-ah spoke in a low voice to the friend on the other end of the phone.
(It was such a long time ago, I can't swear to every detail...)
"Tell me anyway. I don't know anything at all."
It was a voice far too low for someone who was usually all sunshine. At the sound of it — so damp and deflated it was hard to turn away from — Seo Jin-ah let out a sigh, and began.
(I don't know the whole of it either. I was really little back then. Everything I know is what I heard from my parents.)
"That's fine. Anything you've got."
(You know she had a stepmom, right? She died.)
"...Wait — what?"
Namgoong Min-ah lifted the head she had let sink, and the voice on the phone went on.
(I heard it from my mom. There must have been some kind of phone chain among the parents back then — apparently word reached her dad...)
With her feelings in a hopeless tangle, Namgoong Min-ah rubbed her forehead.
Her friend's disappearance. The death of her friend's mother. It wasn't often that life tangled itself up this badly. And what flustered her most of all was that she had no idea what face she was supposed to make.
(Honestly, they called it a disappearance, but I think her stepmom was the suspect. And then once the stepmom died, the whole investigation just fizzled out.)
"Ah..."
(Nobody knows how she died, either. Well — it's not exactly the kind of thing you'd tell the children, is it?)
Namgoong Min-ah nodded at no one, a bitter look on her face.
Crunch-crash! Crunch!
Kang Hyeong-seok ran through the bean field, sweeping the lantern this way and that.
"Hah — hah!"
Breath scorched the back of his throat, and sweat slicked the hand that gripped the lantern. It was brutal work, this — hunting for a Yeommae that had gone into the ground a decade and more ago. But he could not stop. Ha Jang-seo's failing health was reason enough — but more than that, he had seen with his own eyes how the girl's story ended. Whether the Yeommae had succeeded or failed, her soul was trapped in that bamboo tube. And the only one left who could free it was Kang Hyeong-seok.
Jararang!
Shaking the shaman bell, he parted his chalk-white lips.
"Taishang Laogun proclaims the Marvel-True Scripture of Numinous Brilliance. Taishang, the Great Dao of the Primordial Limit. Taishang, the Thirty-Six Venerable Scriptures. Taishang Laogun — the Jade Emperor Supreme — and Houtu, Venerable Deity of the Earth."
He drove the scripture on with the heart of a man begging aid of every spirit in heaven and on earth.
"Great Emperor Ziwei of the North Pole. Emperor of Bestowed Life of the Purple Tenuity. True Lord of the Left Assist. True Lord of Sole Command. True Lords of the Three Bureaus. True Lords of the Four Sages."
Then—
Jarang!
The shaman bell rang out, as if to show him the way. Kang Hyeong-seok charged for it without a second's hesitation, gripping the lantern hard.
Why would a Yeommae be here? Could the ritual have failed? Or had the thing proved more than she could stomach, so that she buried it in this bean field to be rid of it? Either way, the woman who had made it could not have come to a gentle end.
A thousandfold — the gods' retribution was hers a thousand times over!
A mudang exists to help people. For a mudang to turn her craft against the living instead — she would have drawn the gods' own punishment down upon herself for it, and the end of that punishment must have been too hideous to imagine. Please, he prayed — let her death have eased, if only a little, the han of the murdered girl, the grief and grudge that would not settle.
Clinging to that hope, Kang Hyeong-seok pressed on in whatever direction the shaman bell told him to go.
Crunch! Crunch-crunch!
The low-growing bean stalks wound about his ankles as if they were the girl's soul, begging to be saved. A chill night wind came sliding down off the darkness-swallowed mountain and broke over his body.
Find it. Find it, whatever it takes.
He had to find the soul that had been bound to this field for a decade and more — and set it free. Only then would the calamity knotted into this ground come undone. Only then would Ha Jang-seo get better.
JARARARANG!
The shaman bell tolled loud. Kang Hyeong-seok dropped to his knees as though they had given out, laid the bell down beside him, and at once began tearing the bean plants out by the root. The spot lay a little off from the center of the field.
Chunk! CHUNK!
He dug down through soil that radiated a chill no summer field had any business holding. This was it — the very source of the wrongness he had felt from this field. With every handful of earth piling up beside him, he could feel himself closing in on the thing itself.
Please. Please. Please.
And then, abruptly, Kang Hyeong-seok caught himself wondering what it was he was praying for. Whether he wanted the Yeommae to be here — or wanted it not to be — he honestly could not tell anymore. If it was here, he would have to face it. Face to face, closer than arm's length, with a curse wrought to sow calamity and sicken the living into their graves.
Chunk!
He had come this far. What was left to hesitate over? With that thought hard as iron in him, he drove his strength into the dig. The soil, soft at the surface, hardened by degrees, and he lifted the lantern upside down.
Chunk! Pak! Chunk!
He hacked the earth down behind the lantern, stroke after stroke — until the light flickered once and died. Total darkness closed around him. His hands did not stop.
He had been digging down like that for a long while—
JARARARARARANG!
The shaman bell erupted, ringing violently, driving back the perverse air. Still gasping, Kang Hyeong-seok let his hands pause for a single breath — then cast the soil aside again.
Clunk.
His fingertips struck something hard. Something smooth and rounded — and no stone at all. He pulled out his phone, switched on the LED beside the camera, and aimed it down.
There it was: a bamboo tube, its surface blackened with age.
"Hoo... hoo... hoo."
Still heaving the air in and out, Kang Hyeong-seok clenched his molars and held his breath. Then, with the most careful movements of his life, he drew the tube — buried fast in the earth — up and out. The mouth of it, where the woman had sealed it with hanji paper, was exactly as she had left it.
"...Seventy years is the allotted span of a human life, so it is said — a rarity since the oldest days. Eighty, the very limit of years — and that only by strength."
Reciting the opening Sutra for the Dead — the rite that releases and consoles the departed — Kang Hyeong-seok moved his hand to the hanji seal.
"The soul, panic-stricken, scatters — how pitiable. The moon wanes white, the wind bites cold — how mournful. Pitiable... pitiable. O wronged and wandering soul — from whom do you flee, on whom will you lean?"
Is not our brief sojourn in this cruel world no more than wind and light passing over the soul?
The flowers felled by the east wind bloom again when the bright spring returns.
The fragrant grass that grows for the wandering prince has kept its green through age upon age.
He drew a sharp breath. Kang Hyeong-seok looked up at the moon gazing down on him. In his eyes lay a deep and wordless plea: that the Taejagwi sealed inside this bamboo tube might somehow be soothed — received, and taken in.
"O night of the full moon — the bright moon waxes full only to wane again—"
Kang Hyeong-seok closed his fist around the hanji sealing the bamboo tube.
"Heaven and earth are but a travelers' inn, and this drifting life of ours holds not yet a hundred years of allotted span.
Riding the white clouds, borne up on the clouds, you have gone on to the Emperor's own realm.
Return now to the world of Ultimate Bliss — be led home, and born once more."
Eyes screwed shut hard enough to hurt, Kang Hyeong-seok ripped the hanji from the tube's mouth.