The Bell's Summons
The situation was desperate. And yet, in a voice as though he were the one bewitched, Kang Hyeong-seok asked:
"Do you hear a bell ringing?"
"What bell! I'm about to die of exhaustion here!"
Whether because his breath was jammed up to his throat, Noh Soo-chul snapped back through gritted teeth.
It was the answer he had been hoping for.
It isn't a physically real sound. It's spiritual.
A sound only Kang Hyeong-seok could hear — by any measure of common sense, an impossibility. But the point at which common sense could still explain anything lay far behind them now.
Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling, wararararang!
The sound of a shaman bell.
A sacred shaman bell carries immense meaning. It is the instrument that calls the gods, opens the rite, and strikes down evil spirits. These days you could buy one for money, but in the old days it was something a mudang shaped over years of ascetic discipline.
No evil spirit like the Chang-gwi could hope to counterfeit the sound of such a bell.
Whoosh!
"Kraaagh!"
Kang Hyeong-seok had thrown himself toward the source of the bell so abruptly that Noh Soo-chul's scream ripped out of him.
Sha-sha-sha-sha-sha!
The sound came from a little further back — from the very direction the Chang-gwi was driving them out of.
Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling. Wararang. Warararang.
"Where are you going! Hey!"
Noh Soo-chul's complaining kept grating across his hearing, drowning out the bell.
"Quiet! Please!"
At the thunderclap of Kang Hyeong-seok's bellow, Noh Soo-chul's face went rigid and he shut his mouth, meek as a scolded child.
Yes — just stay like that for now. That way I live, and so do you.
Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling.
The bell rang on ahead of them, as though beckoning them to follow.
Sha-sha-sha-sha-sha!
The Chang-gwi's movements turned frenzied. It would whip past his shoulder without warning, then tear like wind through the space between him and Noh Soo-chul.
"Huuuuaaaagh!"
Every time, Noh Soo-chul tried to crumple to the ground in terror, and every time Kang Hyeong-seok's hand hauled him back up.
They could not stop. Could not turn. Do that, and they would truly die.
What made the Chang-gwi fearsome was not that it was a ghost.
The Chang-gwi delivered its chosen mark to the tiger. Whether that tiger was one of flesh and blood or some spectral shape, he couldn't say — but let your mind break, and you would never live to see tomorrow.
Sha-sha-sha-sha-sha!
No matter how the thing harried them, Kang Hyeong-seok clung to the bell with dogged, desperate focus.
Ting-a-ling!
The bell suddenly rang out loud and clear — and whoosh, a wooden wall materialized without warning out of the fog.
Thud! He pulled up short, and Noh Soo-chul, right on his heels, crashed hard into his back.
"Haah! Haah! Haah!"
A shrine.
It was no grandly raised shrine, yet care had plainly gone into its making, and with no door to bar the way, its interior lay open to view.
"Wh-why did you come in here?"
Without a word, Kang Hyeong-seok stared into the shrine.
"Sa-say something! Assistant Manager Kang — is this payback for all the hell I put you through?"
It would have been a lie to say no such thought crossed his mind at all. Still, reading the shrine mattered more.
The bell has stopped. This is the destination.
Statues of the Fairy Maiden, of the presiding General Deity, and of the minor shrine gods. A straw mat spread across the floor.
No fallen leaves, no cobwebs — and still he could tell that no mudang remained to serve this place.
An altar bearing an incense burner and a pair of candlesticks.
It was because of the shaman bells resting upon it.
Sha-sha-sha-sha!
The sound of the Chang-gwi darting around them came sullen and vicious as the night wind. But it could come no closer now, spewing nothing but raw, raging malice, as though furious at its own failure.
Whoooeeeng.
Branches swayed in the wind; leaves came pouring down.
His breathing turned strangely quick — while his heart, contrary to all of it, sank calm and still.
Looking at the paint flaking away in patches from the General Deity and the Fairy Maiden, Kang Hyeong-seok pressed his lips into a hard line.
"Answer me! Assistant Manager Kang! Hey!"
Noh Soo-chul pressed and pressed for a reply, but it didn't last.
"...Assistant Manager Kang?"
A powerful sense of wrongness. An air that forbade the slightest careless move. From the moment they had reached this shrine, Kang Hyeong-seok had felt like someone else entirely.
Sha-sha-sha-sha-sha!
The Chang-gwi and the bleak wind wailed together.
Even as Noh Soo-chul shook head to toe with fear, Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes never left the shaman bells.
It felt as though something unknowable were opening its eyes in the deepest chamber of his chest.
Was it you who guided me here?
The abandoned shrine, and the shaman bells. He wanted his patron deity's answer to them both.
Sha-sha-sha-sha-sha-sha-sha!
To the Chang-gwi's shriek — like a kitchen knife raked through the air — Kang Hyeong-seok screwed both eyes shut. Then he opened them and brought his palms neatly together.
"Show me."
"H-hey! What are you doing! Right now!"
Because it was no ordinary gesture, Noh Soo-chul clung to him, voice quaking with dread. Even so, Kang Hyeong-seok gave himself wholly to the prayer.
"I have come, guided here. I would know the will that called me to this place."
With an earnest and truthful heart, he carried the prayer on.
"Speak to me, I beg you. Is this the moment I have waited for so long?"
Noh Soo-chul's uneasy gaze drifted to Kang Hyeong-seok. He was speaking to a god. Even Noh Soo-chul could feel the power and sincerity in it — a force he had never sensed in the man before.
"Are you telling me the time has come for me to receive you?"
Ting-a-ling!
In a shrine where not one breath of wind stirred, the bell rang out of its own accord.
"Th-the bell just now..."
Startled, Noh Soo-chul hastily smothered his own mouth. He couldn't have said why — only that speaking here was forbidden. Even the sound of his breathing felt like blasphemy.
Something was about to happen in this place, right now.
Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling.
While Noh Soo-chul's eyes trembled, the bell went on ringing.
"...Is it your will that I take this up?"
Ting.
The bell rang, as though in answer.
The bell binds god and man together. That was how Kang Hyeong-seok could read his patron deity's intent.
Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling.
Kang Hyeong-seok felt his mouth go dry.
His patron deity was speaking. Take up these shaman bells. It was the moment he had waited for all this time. And yet his hand would not reach out unbidden. His destiny hung on what he did next.
Face your destiny.
Follow the will of the god.
I will be with you.
Shaaaaaaahh!
The Chang-gwi's cry was closing in. The air shuddered viciously, and the reek of slaughter rolling off the thing stabbed into his nose.
And then—
Bam.
The Chang-gwi was inside the shrine.
"Huaaak! Huaaaaak! Aaaaagh!"
At the sight of the Chang-gwi rolling its eyeballs round and round as it looked Kang Hyeong-seok over, Noh Soo-chul screamed until his throat threatened to split.
"S-save me! A-Assistant Manager Kang! It—it got inside!"
The Chang-gwi began to advance with slow, deliberate movements. Wind came flooding in like a typhoon.
As hems and hair whipped wildly, Kang Hyeong-seok opened his mouth, unhurried.
"I understand."
Face set in resolve, he reached out his hand. The moment he lifted the shaman bells, a mysterious timbre spread through everything around him.
It was the first time in his life he had ever held a shaman bell — yet it felt utterly familiar, as though it and he had been one body from the very beginning.
And at the same time, a foreign sensation came over him.
His patron deity. A General Deity whose name he did not even know. That was what was descending into Kang Hyeong-seok now.
Warararang, wararararang.
The shaman bells shook with terrible force, and Noh Soo-chul, crumpled on the ground, stared up at him with startled eyes. He couldn't have named what had changed — only that this was no longer the Kang Hyeong-seok he knew.
"Assistant Manager Kang...?"
A mudang. A mortal who has received a god. That was the image radiating from Kang Hyeong-seok, bells in hand.
Wararararang!
Shaking the bells with all his strength, Kang Hyeong-seok turned his gaze upon the Chang-gwi. The beast that had hunted him stood bristling, every hair on end.
Kang Hyeong-seok felt his mouth open of its own accord.
"Heavenly Divine General, Great Divine General.
Earthly Divine General, Great Divine General.
Divine Generals of the Five Directions, Great Divine Generals."
The Okchugyeong. One of the scriptures he had once memorized in hopes of standing up to ghosts. Back then he had recited it without understanding a word of its meaning, and it had accomplished nothing. That was no longer true. He grasped its meaning in full now — and it was working.
Wararang! Wararang! Made one with his patron deity, Kang Hyeong-seok glared the Chang-gwi down, and the Chang-gwi curled its lips back off its teeth. The fur along its spine stood up and its claws came out — but it could not bring itself to lunge.
"Divine Queen of Great Fortune, Great General Deity.
Azure Emperor of the Capital Ward, Great General Deity.
Crimson Emperor of the South, Great General Deity.
Duty Messenger of the Western Moon, Duty Messenger of the Sun.
Star Lord of the Great Sun, Star Lord of the Great Moon."
Wararang! Wararang! If anything, the Chang-gwi staggered, giving ground inch by inch.
"Unfailing and upright, shaking the vault of heaven—
divine gold setting the mountain aglow—
through the four winds: O Fire God, O Golden Tiger."
The Okchugyeong was unmistakably taking hold. It poured fear into the Chang-gwi — and peace into Kang Hyeong-seok.
"Vermilion Bird of the South, ward off strife and slander.
Let no sickness break the body; let ghosts and spirits give way.
Ten thousand times ten thousand, months of fortune without end.
Misfortune, begone — a thousand li, at speed."
He did not fear the Chang-gwi any longer. Chanting the Okchugyeong as though to drive the beast before him, he swung the bells as if to dash them down.
Wararararang!
"Om geupgeup yeoyullyeong sabaha!"
The bells pealed like thunder, and numinous power rolled out across the night.
Ssssssss.
Glaring hatred at Kang Hyeong-seok to the last, the Chang-gwi backed away, melting into the fog. In the same breath, the dank, sinister pressure that had clamped down over everything rapidly guttered out.
"U-uhhh... uhhhhhh..."
Noh Soo-chul, still crumpled on the ground, looked up at Kang Hyeong-seok with a face smeared in tears. His eyes asked only one thing: was it finally over?
Watching the fog where the Chang-gwi had vanished, Kang Hyeong-seok answered on parched lips.
"I don't know. Me neither."
But one thing at least looked certain: for the moment, the Chang-gwi had fallen back.
From beyond the guardrail, Kang Hyeong-seok waited while Noh Soo-chul scrambled back over.
Was this really the same Noh Soo-chul?
The man's face was so drained of color he hardly seemed like the same person; he trudged along in silence, eyes glued to the ground.
"Hoooh."
Letting out a weary sigh, Kang Hyeong-seok started toward the car. It was the dead hours before dawn, and the fog, uncannily thick all this while, was thinning away as though dissolving into the moonlight.
Thud. Thud.
Tired. So very tired — tired enough that he half wondered whether all of it had been nothing after all, some mass delusion. But the shaman bells hanging in his hand said otherwise.
Drawing near the car, Kang Hyeong-seok looked down at the carcass lying on the damp asphalt.
"It was a young water deer."
Why on earth had this looked like a Chang-gwi? Seeing it now, he had to admit they had certainly been under something's spell.
He dragged the water deer's body to the edge of the road and offered it a brief prayer. Then he pulled open the passenger door — and Noh Soo-chul jolted back with a cry, throwing an arm over his face. The trembling in his eyes said plainly what he feared now: Kang Hyeong-seok.
"Get in."
Kang Hyeong-seok, calm by contrast, said it evenly, climbed into the driver's seat, and waited until Noh Soo-chul was in before starting the engine.
Vrrroooooom.
As though nothing at all had happened, the car ran off through the thinning fog. All the while, Noh Soo-chul stayed pressed to the passenger window, staring blankly ahead like a man whose spirit had left his body.
Relief at having survived? It seemed to be more than that — a shock, deep and total. He had been hunted by something monstrous. That was not a thing a man forgets easily.
Hummmmm.
In the hush of the car, Kang Hyeong-seok raised the hand that had gripped the shaman bells. It was an unconscious gesture — and yet his brow drew tight in an instant.
Three marks that had never been there before were glowing on his palm, radiating numinous energy.