The Hour of the Ox
Hsssssssss.
The old man gazed at the humidifier through dull, clouded eyes. It was as worn out as he was — fished out of the recycling dump by his daughter and used for years since. Its only upkeep was a scrub with a vinegar-soaked cotton swab whenever the steam stopped flowing. And every time he looked at that machine, running on the barest minimum of care, liable to give out at any moment without anyone finding it strange, the old man thought it looked just like him.
"Father, are you lucid today?" His daughter — hair gone entirely white, age spots mottling her face — asked in a hoarse voice.
"Uuuuuh... uuuh..."
A one-room studio falling apart at the seams. The bathroom was outside, and reaching it meant climbing a flight of stairs. None of it was theirs, either — a monthly rental. The old man, once the owner of a sprawling spinning mill, lay in that corner of a room atop a comforter stiff with dried discharge, his trousers pulled off, wearing nothing but an adult diaper.
"If you can hear me, grant me one wish."
His daughter, now on the doorstep of her seventies, glared down at him with venomous eyes as she went on. "Today, why don't you just die. Just like that."
Once, she had been a daughter so precious he could hardly bear how much he loved her. That same daughter was now raining curses down on him.
"Uuuuuh!"
When the old man flailed an arm drained of all its muscle, she flicked her hand away as though shooing a fly.
"How long are you going to live? Clinging to me like a parasite, dragging my life down to this — how much longer are you going to live, huh?"
"Uuuuuuh."
"You got scammed like a damn idiot and blew this family to pieces! Mom and my brother couldn't stand you either — they ran off in the middle of the night and died in a car crash for it. So why are you the only one still breathing? Why!"
"Uuuuuuuuuuh!"
"Aaaagh! Please!"
Overcome by the surge of emotion, the daughter twisted where she stood, wringing at her eyes. She wept for a long while, then rose like a corpse, and left the room leaving nothing behind but a word about taking his medicine on time.
This was the daughter he had once hired tutors for. And now that daughter pulled a handcart through the streets, collecting scrap paper for coins.
'I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. Daddy is so sorry.'
The old man wept. Everything had come unraveled in the wake of the day he burned down the factory — with Kim Soon-hee inside it. For about ten years, things had gone smoothly. But looking back now, that was simply how long it took to prepare the hell that had been waiting for him.
"Uuuuuuuuh!"
Death in the family. The scam. A life spent running from loan sharks. Not once, even on the holidays, had he dared visit the place where his son's and wife's ashes had been scattered — too afraid the debt collectors would seize him if he showed his face.
"Uuu! Uuuu!"
The old man wailed, waving his arm without a shred of strength left in it. His daughter was the only family he had left, and it gnawed at him that his sickness had shackled her future.
Rustle.
Bedsores, perhaps. A cockroach scrambled up onto his body, twitched its antennae once, then drove its head straight into the festering flesh.
"Uwaaaah!"
Eaten alive, the old man thrashed his arm — but the cockroach paid him no mind, far too busy gorging itself on his rotting meat.
'I want to die. I want to die.'
Unable even to chase off a single cockroach, the old man begged for his life to end. But cruelly, it went on and on. As if he'd been made to live long and be punished for it.
"Uuuuuuuh." Tears burst out of him all at once, and the old man howled like a beast.
That was when it happened. A flicker of light spun back to life in the old man's clouded eyes.
"Uu! Uuuu!"
This room was supposed to hold no one but him. Yet something else was here. And the presence watching him was not just one. Shapes like black mist. And standing among them — a woman he knew.
"Uuuuuu! Uuuuu!"
The moment he recognized her, the old man thrashed like a madman. His breath turned ragged, his face burned scarlet — and still he could not tear his eyes from her.
Kim Soon-hee. The woman he had burned to death.
"Uuuuuuuuuu!"
Kim Soon-hee stared back at him with the face she had worn in life — peaceful, even. The black shapes at her side were terrifying too, but it was Kim Soon-hee he feared most of all.
"Uuuuuuuaaaaargh!"
He understood. Now was the moment the life he had begged so long to end would finally end. And he understood why Kim Soon-hee had come looking for him. She had come to collect him. To hell. To a place where pain that never ended and never grew familiar was waiting.
"Aaaagh! Aaaaargh!"
A terror he had never once known tore the screams out of him as he stared at Kim Soon-hee staring back. He had thought his life was hell. He had thought it was punishment for killing her. He had been wrong. Heaven's punishment was only now beginning.
"Kiiieeeeeeaaargh!"
Mouth stretched wide, spewing foam and despair, the old man convulsed — as if the sight of Kim Soon-hee gazing down at him were more than he could bear.
Pop.
The pitch-black screen filled with a bright, cheerful sky blue.
"Welcome, my dear Sarang-gwi!" Draped in a long traditional overcoat like some Korean shaman, the man beamed a greeting at the viewers on the other side of the camera.
"Sorry for going live with zero notice. Whew — and yet look at that, plenty of you showed up anyway."
BJ Yoon-sang. Five years into the job, averaging 300 to 800 viewers — a streamer who could live off internet broadcasting alone. And also the man whose collar Kang Hyeong-seok had once grabbed.
The reactions scrolling up his sub-monitor spread Yoon-sang's smile even wider. Paid chats erupted amid the fervor of his female viewers. But it wasn't long before his brow creased.
"I am NOT staged! That's literally why I turned this stream on! Anyone here who missed the earlier broadcast?"
"Around 1 a.m., but there was some trouble, so I shut it down pretty quick. And for anyone new here — this is a channel for haunted house visits, horror story readings, shaman interviews, that kind of thing."
New viewers trickled in like this from time to time. Yoon-sang pointed a finger below the camera — to the viewers, it would look as though he were indicating the info banner beneath the stream window.
"There's a link to our private chat room. Go ahead and apply through there."
Click.
"Little commotion there."
Having ejected the troll with practiced ease, Yoon-sang scanned the chat.
That set Yoon-sang off harder than the troll had.
"It was NOT a schooling! What about it — why on earth would that be a schooling! Anyway, short version: I went to the haunted house in Osan, things went sideways, and I killed the stream on the spot."
"I'm not staaaaged, I said."
Yoon-sang buried his face in his hands and sighed, peering out at the chat between his fingers. Half the messages were chanting staged, staged.
"Ugh! My dear Sarang-gwi, I've been streaming for five years — has even one thing on my channel ever been staged? No, right? There isn't even an incidents section on my TreeWiki page."
"I'm genuinely hurt. Anyway — sure, I cut the stream, but it's not like I didn't see the haunted house."
Planning to say something serious now, Yoon-sang adjusted the angle of his webcam. Framing his face a little more prominently, he folded his arms and continued.
"You know I haul a whole pile of gear to haunted house visits, right? Heat-sensing camera?"
Click.
"Anyway — a thermal camera lets me see from far away. You all know I normally bring infrared sensors, even sound detectors, on haunted house visits."
"I watched the whole thing from a distance through that equipment — and from what I saw, this guy had something going on."
"Yes. From what I saw, it was a gut — a full shamanic rite."
Yoon-sang stole a glance at the chat. The message count had dropped — which meant the viewers were hanging on his every word now.
"Exactly! So I was half in doubt myself, but he was doing something inside. I heard the sacred bells, too."
Yoon-sang studied the chat window with eyes gone genuinely grave. What he had witnessed was anything but ordinary. Five years had already passed since he'd traded generic guy-cam streaming for horror, and he had seen just about everything — yet even to him this had felt deeply wrong, and the viewers' reactions brimmed with the same hungry curiosity.
"My dear Sarang-gwi, it was 1 a.m. at the time. Those who know, know — nobody holds a gut at that hour."
As expected of a channel that had run this long — his viewers knew their stuff.
"No."
Yoon-sang's answer came down firm and flat, as if he refused to let his viewers drag Kang Hyeong-seok's name through the mud.
"I watched him all the way to the end — to the very moment he sat down in front of the storage shed. And here's the thing. The haunted house wasn't a haunted house anymore."
Question marks poured in, just as expected. Viewers demanded explanations, even shelling out for paid chats. Still, arms crossed, Yoon-sang silently replayed the image of Kang Hyeong-seok and the haunted house in his mind. A thousand won here, two thousand there — the paid chat meant nothing. This could be the greatest find of his entire broadcasting life.
"A haunted house has its own energy. That grim, greasy feeling — the atmosphere that makes your skin crawl and your feet refuse the doorway. But the moment that man walked out, it was gone. Every last trace of it."
Probably because he'd set the serious tone. The trolls, the staged-bird parrots, even the ones cursing Kang Hyeong-seok — all of it had evaporated.
"Plenty of streamers have visited that place."
Yoon-sang narrowed his eyes, glaring at the chat.
"Go watch their VODs sometime. 'Something's off about that place.' 'Doesn't feel like a haunted house.' I promise you, that's exactly what they'll say. A hundred percent."
The instant Yoon-sang read that last line, his eyes flashed. An image he had never been able to put into words crystallized in a single stroke.
"That's exactly the feeling! Nailed it. You know how in ghost stories, it's never the shaman who solves the case — it's the friend beside them who helps or figures it out?"
"And every time we hear one of those stories, we all think the same thing, don't we? God, I wish someone like that were real. I wish they were right here next to us. That thought."
Yoon-sang thought so too. The crown of this genre belonged to Gashiri's Horror Radio, while he himself hovered somewhere around eighth place — and this long-stagnant board, he sensed, might finally be flipped. To do it, he needed a figure with a razor-sharp persona and genuine star power.
"And from what I saw, that man is exactly that kind of figure."
Lost in thought, Yoon-sang fell briefly silent. And that silence became a piece of stagecraft all its own.
Yoon-sang ran his tongue over his lips, then opened his mouth.
"Yes. I'm going to find him."
As doubt burned away, the viewers ignited at Yoon-sang's declaration.
"I'm going to hunt for him in earnest — so if any of you have someone suspicious in your own lives, send tips my way. Letting a man like this slip through my fingers is something I'll regret for the rest of my life."
The reactions detonated. Seven hundred viewers — a huge turnout for an unannounced stream at such an awkward hour.
Did Kang Hyeong-seok have any idea? That this many people were out there looking for him?
"That's it for today's stream! Thank you for showing up at such a weird hour — and please, everyone, pray that I can find that man!"
With a face full of steel resolve, Yoon-sang moved his mouse. Let's truly give this everything. Played right, claiming the number-one horror spot wasn't out of reach. Keep rattling every haunted house, abandoned building, and ghost-rumored ruin in the country, and one day, surely, they would meet again.
Thinking exactly that, Yoon-sang clicked the mouse.
Click.