The Door That Should Never Open

Crunch! Crunch!

The farther up the mountain he climbed, the more a prickling sense of wrongness welled up inside him. Kang Hyeong-seok made his way upward, treading ground that could no longer be called a path at all — rocks jammed in at every angle and tough, low-growing brush had become traps, lying in wait for his feet.

He was losing far too much time. When he lifted his eyes to the sky, the sun had slanted westward to a startling degree.

'How much time do I have left...'

He held his hand out sideways beneath the sun, then counted how many fingers fit between it and the ground. Each finger meant roughly thirty minutes. An hour and a half from now, the light would be gone.

"Hooah!"

Forcing out a scalding breath, Kang Hyeong-seok marked the route he had to take and cut off to the side. Climbing like this, winding back and forth, he'd be lucky to reach the middle of the mountain just before the sun dropped out of the sky.

'Tighter than I'd counted on.'

Then again, maybe he should count himself lucky to have a bearing at all. Walking in the direction the monk had pointed out, he worked his phone as he went. This really was a fine country, he thought — you could pick up a signal even in the guts of a mountain like this.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

But no answer to what he'd asked came back right away. The thought that she might be somewhere she couldn't reach out at all knotted through his mind—

Bzzzzt!

The phone shuddered in his hand: a message from Shin Jeong-ah had arrived.

'A photo?'

He tapped it open and spread thumb and forefinger across the screen. The long-range shot ballooned, and the man at its center swelled as if he were walking closer.

"...Found him."

The shaman stripped of his power. The man from that memory — the one who had passed the liquor around. It was his face, all right.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!

He hammered out a message and hit send without a second's pause.

Bzzt!

The message rattled her phone, but Shin Jeong-ah smothered the vibration under both palms, the way you do when you saw it coming.

She opened her map application and tried to send her position by GPS, but even she could tell the pin had landed somewhere absurd.

'This is driving me crazy. Is it because we're on a mountain?'

She checked where the man had been and shook the phone, but the pin simply bounced off to yet another random spot.

Shin Jeong-ah slipped behind a tree and eased out nothing but her ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠face. From there she studied the man's retreating figure with meticulous care. Aside from a somewhat ferocious set to his eyes, there was nothing remarkable about him.

'Then why is he carrying that thing?'

What rode in the man's arms was a glass vessel — one of those jar-shaped bottles used for steeping liquor.

Fixing him with a puzzled stare a moment longer, she turned her head toward the place he had come out of: a ramshackle wooden warehouse that looked ready to collapse on the spot.

Tap-tap-tap.

Unlike the replies that had come back in a flash, the phone went dead quiet. Shin Jeong-ah put on the face of a woman who'd just won the argument — until the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠answer dragged on so long that she started waving the phone this way and that. She'd assumed the signal was too weak to carry a text; as it turned out, a reply that was simply, plainly late finally set the phone buzzing.

At the plea, Shin Jeong-ah wound her fist up tight and scanned the direction the man had gone.

'He's out of sight.'

Once she was sure he had gone far enough, she crept toward the warehouse, doubled over at the waist.

Creeeak.

Rusted hinges groaned as the door swung heavily open. Stepping inside, she switched on her phone's flashlight and swept the interior: a pickaxe, hoe handles, sacks of dog food, traps.

"Hmm."

The dust was punishing. Muffling her nose and mouth with a sleeve, she probed the space this way and that. For all the world it looked like an ordinary shed heaped with junk — and yet the certainty that something was genuinely here refused to leave her.

Slowly, Shin Jeong-ah moved toward the heart of the warehouse. That was when it happened.

Creak.

Exactly at the center, the wood beneath her feet let out a moan — and with the sudden sensation of her body sinking, she looked down. There was a hollow underfoot.

She glanced once more toward where the man had vanished, then crouched to examine the boards.

Clunk.

Her fingers slipped between them. Pressing her lips into a hard line, she slowly lifted the floor.

Creeeak.

A door that had no business opening. With precisely that feeling, the panel rose, and a black, lightless dark came up to greet her.

Gulp.

Shin Jeong-ah stared into the dark and forced down a mouthful of nothing. Then, with the slowest of movements, she began to lower herself into the space beneath the warehouse.

It was the hour when the sun, hung heavy in the west, watched her through the window.

Crack!

A dry branch snapped underfoot, and Kang Hyeong-seok stopped in his tracks.

'How can this be?'

The sun seemed to be dying faster than he'd calculated. The shadows had grown long, and the darkness settling in bit by bit was twisting the forest into something grotesque.

"Hoooooh."

Every breath he pushed out felt like warmth and life draining away with it. Not a good omen. This sense of drawing near to something that must not be approached was no stranger to him — the same feeling as when he had gone to that derelict warehouse turned house of death, closing in on something wicked and foul.

Swallowing hard, Kang Hyeong-seok hurried his steps. Then—

Flap-flap-flap!

A crow came sweeping down and perched on a tree close by.

"Caaaw! Caaaw!"

As if aping a human's laughter, the crow let out a great, funereal din. Gooseflesh raced up his arms — but Kang Hyeong-seok raised the sacred shaman bells. He could not ring them carelessly, though.

'This is the mountain's midpoint.'

He was already close to his destination, and what he had to face here was not a ghost but a person. Ring the bells rashly, and it would amount to announcing exactly where he stood.

"Caaaw! Caaaaaw!"

At the crow's demon-like shrieking, Kang Hyeong-seok shut his eyes, opened them, and began to speak.

It was the best he could offer.

With the Tae-eul Body-Guarding Sutra shielding his body, Kang Hyeong-seok fixed his gaze on the crow and thrust the shaman bells out, as if to bare them.

That was all he did, and yet the crow snapped its beak shut. At the same time, the air around him seemed, just a little, to lighten.

Glaring at the bird, Kang Hyeong-seok started forward again — and the crow burst skyward and flew off west.

He had walked perhaps three minutes more when—

Thud.

Kang Hyeong-seok was forced to a halt yet again. This time it was a structure of old, weathered wood that barred his way. A single-story building that looked for all the world like a warehouse, with no windows to speak of — or rather, there were, but they had been sealed over with blue tarps, as good as bricked up.

'They said this was an ancestral burial mountain.'

In all his wandering so far, he had found few traces of anyone else coming and going here. And yet neither was the mountain numinous enough to draw shamans up to hold rites. No shaman's prayer ground, and surely nothing raised by outsiders — which meant the structure had to be tied to the people who owned this mountain.

Gulp.

His mouth had gone inexplicably dry; he forced a swallow and approached the building with slow, deliberate care. Then he nudged the tarp over a window aside, trying to see within.

Damn it — nothing. It had grown far too dark all around. And just as he leaned in to search deeper, Kang Hyeong-seok wrenched his face from the window and strangled down a heave of nausea. A vicious stench had smacked him across the nose.

'Ghost-stink.'

The reek of the dead. The raw, fishy smell of the departed tangled with other foul odors into a stench so thick it was hard to keep a clear head.

Something was inside this building — he was sure of it. Glancing once at the sunset bleeding red over the ridge, Kang Hyeong-seok moved for the door.

Bang!

Thankfully, it wasn't locked.

The stench came lunging in with the dust, and Kang Hyeong-seok stopped breathing. Then—

"Seok-woo... hey."

A thick, phlegm-clogged voice drifted out. Not a young man's voice — something far older than that. Thrown by the turn of events, Kang Hyeong-seok peered inside with a rigid face as the voice went on.

"Stop... just... let's stop this now."

The pleading voice was soaked through, damp and heavy.

"Stop it, I said... Seok-woo, stop it now. You have to stop. Stop. You'll come to ruin, you damn fool."

Moving only ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠his eyes, Kang Hyeong-seok swept the interior. The tarps were too dark and thick to see past, but the walls within were slathered with talismans, layer upon layer. They differed one from another, as if they hadn't all been fetched from a single shrine — yet he could tell what kind they were.

'Talismans for driving off ghosts?'

He found more besides: salt and sweet rice flour scattered across the floor. It made no sense. Who was the man lying there? And why was he this terrified of ghosts?

"...Who are you?"

At the sound of his voice, the old man lying on the floor flinched hard — but whether his body would no longer obey him, he neither rose nor lifted his head.

"Wh... who... who are you?"

There was something about the terror-stricken old man's words that strangely only tangled his thoughts further. Kang Hyeong-seok stood silent for a long while, then spoke in a low, careful voice.

"I came because of the liquor."

It had all begun with liquor. A single bottle delivered to his uncle — drink that dealt out calamity like a plague, and it had led him here.

Kang Hyeong-seok waited quietly for the old man's reaction. And after a moment, the old man began to weep like a small child.

"Uh... uhhh... uhhhh! Uwaaaaaah!"

A low, grating wail, as though his breath kept breaking halfway. The crying — for all the world like an infant's — rolled through the cramped old building. And in that moment, Kang Hyeong-seok knew.

He still lacked the reason. The proof wasn't there yet. But instinct was roaring at him that he had closed in on the thing's true shape — that the end was near.

"Uwaaaaaah! Uwaaaaaah!"

So he stood there inside the warehouse, the old man's desolate wailing carrying on and on without end.

CRASH!

The floor door slammed shut the instant she was through, and utter darkness swallowed her whole.

"Hii—!"

Eyes brimming with tears, Shin Jeong-ah clawed for her phone. She aimed the flash at the ceiling, confirmed it was only the door that had closed, and then — face crumpled to the verge of tears — swept the light around her.

"God, this is terrifying. Mom."

She murmured it, half whimpering — then had no choice but to fall silent. Face rigid, she shone the light across a shelf buried under drifts of dust.

The shelves were packed edge to edge with bottles. There had to be more than two hundred of them, at the very least.

Clink.

Reaching for one, she wiped the dust from its surface, fear and curiosity warring on her face. The grime came away, and what lay beneath revealed itself.

She choked on a gasp.

The bottle slipped from her hand and shattered against the floor — and out rolled the stench of alcohol and a jet-black snake, steeped in the liquor, tumbling loose across the ground.

"Y-you're kidding. Th-this is... so this is what..."

Hundreds of bottles — every last one of them liquor steeped with animals.

Shaking uncontrollably, Shin Jeong-ah stared at the bottles that pressed in around her from every side. She had no business being here. The conviction struck so hard her legs began to tremble.

Mugo. In other words, gu poison — the art of gathering things of potent power inside a single jar, letting each one's energy suppress and madden all the others. This underground cellar was one enormous Mugo.