The Same Direction
Clack!
The moment Kang Hyeong-seok hauled up the parking brake in the hospital lot, he shoved himself out of the car.
It was the night of the very day they had signed the lease on the warehouse. Barely five hours had passed since he'd clocked out, and he could still vividly remember the taste of the coffee Lee Jin-pyeong had handed him.
And now that man had been in an accident.
A car accident.
"Assistant Manager Kang!"
Kwak Young-ho, spotting him in the hospital lobby, raised his voice — then, mindful of the stares around them, lowered his hand instead.
"Where's Assistant Manager Lee? Is he badly hurt?"
"Let's go burn a cigarette."
Unable to press anything further into that troubled face, Kang Hyeong-seok simply walked after him.
A convenience store a short way from the hospital. Kwak Young-ho bought canned coffee and cigarettes there, and in the alley with a view of the hospital he fished one out and put it between his lips.
Meanwhile, Kang Hyeong-seok rubbed his thumb over the logo on his can.
He handed me this same can, not five hours ago.
Fuck's sake. What a miserable thing to be reminded of.
Click — whoosh!
"Hoo! How much did they tell you?"
"Only that he'd been in an accident and was hurt badly."
"Haah... son of a bitch."
"Is it serious...?"
"He's in surgery. So, yeah."
Fidgeting with the innocent can of coffee, Kang Hyeong-seok stole glances at Kwak Young-ho's face. Had the man always looked this old? He seemed older than usual — and that face said everything about how rotten and hollowed-out he felt inside.
"The car was totaled. The truck driver's claiming it wasn't his fault. Crossed the center line himself, and somehow he's the wronged party — I don't get it."
"...What?"
Kwak Young-ho pulled the smoke deep into his lungs and let it back out like a sigh.
"At first they thought Assistant Manager Lee had drifted over the line. Does that make any sense to you? The truck swerved over, deliberate, and ran him down. The cops found it suspicious enough to draw his blood, apparently."
"'Must've been drinking. Or on something.'"
Kwak Young-ho muttered it as if letting it slip, but the words never reached Kang Hyeong-seok's ears. One thought had swallowed his mind whole.
It was a sal.
A truck driver who had crossed the center line as though something had taken hold of him. And Lee Jin-pyeong, wrecked so badly the car was half-gone. There was only one conclusion he could draw — the sal he had seen seething at the warehouse had stretched out its reach and struck Assistant Manager Lee.
The odds that he was wrong were slim. The truck driver's reaction, as relayed through Kwak Young-ho, was that of a man possessed by something — textbook, down to the letter.
"...You came to mind, actually."
"Me?"
Kang Hyeong-seok lifted his face, still half-lost in the weight of his own thoughts, and Kwak Young-ho went on, eyes fixed on the hospital, smoke curling from his lips.
"That thing you said about energy, about fortune and whatnot. I couldn't help wondering if it's tied into this. ...Ah, hell. Listen to me. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore."
"..."
"Anyway — don't worry yourself sick over Assistant Manager Lee. You hear me?"
Kang Hyeong-seok pressed his lips shut, then forced them apart.
"I understand."
Kwak Young-ho met his eyes and smiled a bitter smile. For a man telling him not to worry, the smile was brimming over with exactly that.
"No visitations allowed."
The surgery had ended at two in the morning. Kwak Young-ho, who had kept vigil there the whole time, opened his mouth to say something — then let out a sigh and simply nodded.
"If anything happens, call me at this number."
Kwak Young-ho held out his business card, but the doctor offered a question instead of his hand.
"Are you family?"
"No. A coworker."
"And the patient's family?"
"They're flying in from the States. No flights available, so it'll take two days at least."
Kwak Young-ho answered in their stead with a bitter smile, and the doctor accepted the card with a nod of understanding.
Through all of it, Kang Hyeong-seok had been trying to catch a glimpse of Lee Jin-pyeong in the recovery room beyond. But he couldn't. All he could make out were nurses hurrying back and forth, and between them a stillness — a blanket-covered figure that never so much as stirred, ringed with IV lines dangling in ranks.
"Did the surgery go well?"
"We did everything we could."
Grimness settled over Kwak Young-ho's face, and over Kang Hyeong-seok's beside him, in equal measure.
Lee Jin-pyeong might die. He didn't want to entertain the thought. But the doctor's expression and the whole heavy atmosphere of the corridor made it impossible to keep that grim thought from taking root in his head.
"Department Head."
"Hmm?"
"You've been at this all night. You must be exhausted — please go home and rest."
Kwak Young-ho parted his lips as if to say something, then closed them again. He clapped a hand lightly against Kang Hyeong-seok's shoulder and gave a small nod.
"You've had a long one too, Kang. Head on in."
"I'll go in once I've seen you off."
Kwak Young-ho broke into that same 'look at this rascal' grin he sometimes wore around the office.
"All right, all right. Get home safe."
"Yes, sir. See you Monday."
Kwak Young-ho waved and walked away, and then the doctor disappeared somewhere as well, leaving Kang Hyeong-seok alone in the hollow corridor.
A hospital in the small hours was nothing like one in daylight. The handful of admitted patients, the skeleton crew of medical staff, the wide-open empty space — it all gave off the same desolate air as a school drained of its students.
"Worried about your master?"
Kang Hyeong-seok murmured it while staring at the recovery room door. There was no one near enough to answer — and yet a reply rose from beside his feet. A thin whimper. A long, keening whine.
It was the spirit of the Spitz Lee Jin-pyeong had raised. The small white thing huddled at his feet, tail tucked, too anxious to do anything at all.
With no one around to see, Kang Hyeong-seok reached out a hand to the dog. As though it had been waiting for just this, the Spitz pressed its face into his palm — and he felt nothing there.
That was the pity of it.
"...Your master's going to be fine."
Kang Hyeong-seok drew the little spirit against his chest and kept his eyes on the recovery room door.
The Spitz went on trembling, keening softly, until anxiety squeezed tears from its eyes.
Gritting his teeth, Kang Hyeong-seok stroked its head. Still his hand felt nothing — no warmth, no fur, nothing. Even so, he went on stroking its head and back without end, to soothe its fear.
All while staring at the recovery room door with the eyes of a man who had made up his mind.
The sun was only just beginning to rise.
Vrrroooom.
Having stolen a brief nap in his car, Kang Hyeong-seok drove through Osan and on toward Yongin — toward the place where Lee Geum-kyeong's shrine house stood. He swung the wheel hard toward the mountain, followed the concrete-poured road up its flank, and stopped partway up the slope.
He didn't get out right away. Instead, he covered his eyes with his palm.
It was because of the sal.
He hadn't come by way of Osan for nothing. He had checked the warehouse and confirmed the sal seething out through its shattered glass. A haunted place, left to itself, was no great danger in its own right. But the moment people set foot inside, the story changed completely.
The foul things. The sleeping things. The quiet things. The things that envied the living. All of it flew like a flight of arrows at anyone entangled with that warehouse.
Who came to mind first? The people at the company — Kwak Young-ho, Lee Jin-pyeong, Shin Jeong-ah, and all the rest. And beyond them, the laborers who would be hauling goods into the warehouse, and those men's families too.
If he couldn't cut this sal out at the root, funerals were going to come one after another.
Knock, knock, knock.
At the rapping on the driver's-side window, Kang Hyeong-seok pulled the hand from his eyes.
"Young Master? What brings you out this way?"
Cheong-geum, Lee Geum-kyeong's disciple, had her face pressed so close to the glass that her breath was fogging it white.
Kang Hyeong-seok cut the engine and signaled that he was about to open the door; only after Cheong-geum had stepped back did he climb out of the car.
"I'm sorry for turning up without so much as a phone call."
"Some new trouble's found you again, I see."
Cheong-geum said it playfully — then caught sight of his dark expression and wiped the smile from her face. Her voice dropped low and grave.
"What's happened?"
"There was a sal lodged in the warehouse our company contracted."
Sal. The moment the word left his mouth, the look in Cheong-geum's eyes deepened. That was how grave a thing sal was — the kind of knot of lethal misfortune no practitioner of the craft could ever afford to treat lightly.
"It feels like a particularly vicious one. My guess is one of three: the Hoengsa-sal, the Sudden Death curse; the Jeolmyeong-sal, the Life-Cutting curse; or else the Gwimun-sal, the Ghost Gate curse. Either way, it has to be severed."
Kang Hyeong-seok's words ran on without a hitch. And that was precisely why Cheong-geum, knowing full well this was no moment for admiration, marveled in silence.
Korean shamanism recognized twenty-one varieties of sal. For a man who had only just begun walking the shaman's path, being able to classify one at all was no small feat.
"You know your craft well, Young Master. Did your Momjusin teach you that as well?"
"I studied it on my own. You know why."
A life hounded by ghosts was treacherous enough that he'd had to learn whatever he could just to push the dread back down.
"...What happened to you, back then?"
"I'd been seeing them off and on since I was little."
As Cheong-geum's eyes thinned with the question, Kang Hyeong-seok rubbed the corner of his mouth, his lips bent with old bitterness.
"I was too young even to start elementary school, and so scared of ghosts that I cried every single day. My mother would hold me every time. That was all she had to give me."
As if she understood that feeling all too well, Cheong-geum pressed her lips together hard, her face gone stiff.
"Every day was terrifying. Painful. There were times I caught myself thinking that if I just died, the pain would finally stop."
"...Young Master."
"And of all of them, sal was what I feared most. A ghost, you could at least run from. But once a sal tangled itself around you — well. There was nothing left to do about it."
Those tormented by ghosts can flee the ghosts. And then, the way a man steps on a buried mine, they can entangle themselves with a sal — the way Ha Jang-seo had suffered after buying the field where the Yeommae lay buried.
"If it weren't for the Madam, I would have died back then."
Cheong-geum's expression clouded as deeply as his own.
Sal was always there, all around them. The light sal and the heavy sal. A dozen different kinds, springing without warning out of anywhere, ready to stab a person through. Cheong-geum, who learned her craft under Lee Geum-kyeong, knew that better than most.
"Is there any way to reach the Madam?"
"...You know how she is."
Cheong-geum said it low, and her hands would not stay still, betraying her turmoil. Young as she was, her palms were calloused stiff from years of handling ritual implements; kneading them, she let her troubled gaze drop away.
"She's gone off to perform a Yongsin-gut — a rite for the Dragon Spirit. She's buried in the preparations, and no one can reach her."
"...Right. Of course. Silly of me."
Lee Geum-kyeong had gone to perform the Yongsin-gut. A rite for the boat crews and the villagers nearby — praying for full nets and barring the calamity that would rise from the sea. With so many people's livelihoods and lives riding on it, even Lee Geum-kyeong could not afford to cut corners on her preparations.
"And if your hunch is right, Young Master — if it's the Sudden Death sal — then this is already a dangerous situation."
"It is."
The Hoengsa-sal took its name from the same characters as the phrase for a sudden, violent death — a curse under which a person could drop dead at any moment. The other two sals he had named were every bit as cruel.
"A coworker's life is already hanging by a thread."
"Have you taken any other measures?"
"I asked my supervisor to see that salt was scattered around the office and near the hospital."
Cheong-geum nodded, her face saying thank goodness. It was the best a layman could do. Scattering salt or red pepper powder was common knowledge, but that didn't make it useless — if anything, the remedy had spread among ordinary people precisely because it worked.
"And from the look of you, you mean to settle the sal yourself."
"I have to. Somehow — ideally before this day is out."
Cheong-geum gave him a look of quiet respect. A shaman who walked among people. She could guess, well enough, what kind of life his Momjusin had decreed for him.
"The Madam said something to me once."
"Yes?"
"She told me that if you ever came asking for help, I was to give it gladly."
Cheong-geum smiled faintly, dropped the hand that had been fidgeting at her side, and rolled it into a firm fist instead.
"If you have need of my help, Young Master, you need only say the word."
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at her in silence for a moment. Then he let out a short breath of a laugh and nodded, deeply.
"Thank you."
What lay ahead was the most dangerous thing he had ever faced. No one would ever know how much comfort her words gave him, standing on its threshold.
"To sever a sal, I need information. So let me ask you — when we first met, you took me for a man who'd just come back from a haunted house, didn't you?"
"Ah — please forget you ever heard that."
Cheong-geum said it in embarrassment, but Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes remained deep in thought.
"About that haunted place. Was it the abandoned warehouse in Osan?"
And that was when it happened.
A sudden creeping dread washed over Cheong-geum, and the fine hairs on her arms stood on end.
The warehouse the company had contracted — and the sal. The haunted places Cheong-geum had seen more times than she could count, and the people ridden by ghosts within them.
"Don't tell me..."
Kang Hyeong-seok held her gaze as he turned his head toward Osan.
Cheong-geum, still meeting his eyes, stretched out her hand toward the region where that haunted place stood.
Both of them were pointing the same way.