The Uninvited Shaman
In Korean shamanism, there is a thing the door symbolizes.
Severance.
A closed door is a blockade; an open door, an opening. Naturally, whoever stands outside cannot see within — and the reverse holds just as true. That is why the thing closest of all to the door is death.
Only death forms the boundary dividing the land of the dead from the land of the living. And so, East and West alike, the door has always been described as an object imbued with occult power.
Creeeak.
The door swung open on a man about Kwak Young-ho's age. He wore a neat set of indoor clothes, but his face was clouded over with worry.
"We've been waiting for you."
The man receiving the shamans seemed to be the owner of the chicken farm. But the moment hardly called for business cards, so Kang Hyeong-seok read his mood as he stepped into the house.
'A house with a patient in it...'
Not every such home, perhaps, but a house with a sick person in it carries a smell like a hospital's. He couldn't say exactly what it was — most likely medicine and disinfectant.
"Your father?"
Lee Geum-kyeong asked after her friend, and the son pointed with both hands toward the master bedroom. Of everyone gathered, she had brought only Kang Hyeong-seok in with her.
Bang.
The other shamans were made to wait outside, and not one of them breathed a word of complaint. It was a matter of standing. The virtue, the renown, the standing Lee Geum-kyeong had built over a lifetime — and the standing held by the Momjusin dwelling within Kang Hyeong-seok.
Click.
With the door shut behind them, Lee Geum-kyeong drew a deep breath in through her nose.
"What do your eyes see?"
She put the question to Kang Hyeong-seok as though expecting something of him, and all he could do was shake his head.
"Nothing in particular catches my eye."
"Just so. A shaman whose god has departed."
Lee Geum-kyeong moved toward the bed set in the room. On it lay an old man withered gaunt as a dried husk, IV bags dangling in bunches from his arm.
Hoo...
Gazing down at the unconscious man, Lee Geum-kyeong put on a look of quiet pity.
"This is the end that waits for every shaman. Even one who has received a god is not watched over forever. Sooner or later, all of us arrive at that end."
"I've never thought about it."
That a god departed only from those who had sinned greatly enough to deserve it — that was what he had always believed.
"Your face has gone heavy. Does it grieve you?"
"If the end is fixed, it seems there'd be no reason to grieve."
"Just so. That is the correct answer."
Lee Geum-kyeong nodded faintly and took the hand of the man on the bed.
"All his life he lived as a shaman of no great account. And for all that, he was more a shaman than anyone."
Kang Hyeong-seok studied the man's face, dry as deadwood. It was hard to imagine him young. But the heavy brows and the hard set of his jaw, out of all keeping with his age, spoke to the sort of man he must have been.
"He reached to help far more people than his gift allowed — and help them he truly did. There were many shamans who mourned that such a man had never received a great god."
Never a Mansin, and yet he had lived just so. The man Lee Geum-kyeong remembered was a shaman like that.
Hoo... hoo...
Rubbing the man's hand firmly between her own, Lee Geum-kyeong let out a small sigh.
"I will see your road well paved. But when you go on ahead, see to it that a place is made ready for me to rest as well."
What must it feel like — the heart of Lee Geum-kyeong, sending a friend on ahead of her. And the heart of one who knows that she, too, will come to that same end someday.
"Let's go."
Out of the master bedroom, Lee Geum-kyeong at once set about preparing the kut to wash away defilement. Thirteen shamans were present. Ten of the trade, plus Lee Geum-kyeong, Kang Hyeong-seok, and Hong Gyeong-soo.
'Did the teacher intend this?'
The thought came to him unbidden — had she called forth thirteen on purpose? No. Lee Geum-kyeong had not welcomed Hong Gyeong-soo. Which meant the number she had intended was twelve, and it was his attendance that had made it thirteen. In the ways of Korean shamanism, thirteen was no kindly number.
"Hong Gyeong-soo. You will wait outside."
As expected. When Kang Hyeong-seok turned to him, Hong Gyeong-soo nodded as though he had seen it coming from the start and stepped out the front door.
"Wasn't he one of the people who came to help?"
The bewildered son asked, and Lee Geum-kyeong held her lips firmly shut for a moment before answering in a tone that allowed for no worry.
"There is nothing to fear. It is so that this may be made certain — down to the last thread of a chance."
"Ah... yes."
For a shaman's son, he seemed strangely ignorant of such things; he nodded with a dazed face, apparently satisfied that there must be some good reason for it all.
Hoo... rustle.
The twelve of them, Hong Gyeong-soo excluded, began to ready the kut. A spectacle like this was rare in its own right. When else would a man get to see so many shamans gathered in a single place, preparing a rite together?
"I'll help too."
But where a crowd grows large enough, someone is always left with nothing to do. Kang Hyeong-seok was that someone.
"Aigoo, no, no! Please — rest. Rest!"
"We'll see to all of this ourselves. You just take a seat over there."
Even with Kang Hyeong-seok offering a hand, the shamans jolted and waved him off in a flurry. From the look of things, they found it daunting to be near the man whose patron deity stood on a wholly different plane.
And so Kang Hyeong-seok ended up helping the son stir coffee into paper cups instead.
"Young as you are, I take it you must be quite the great shaman."
The shamans must have been fawning over Kang Hyeong-seok like some precious young lord, for the son to say such a thing. He smiled awkwardly and shook his head.
"It's nothing like that."
"Oh, but it is. My father's a shaman too, you see — I know what I know."
The son had heard the story of his father the shaman from Lee Geum-kyeong herself. And so, in his eyes as they rested on Kang Hyeong-seok, there was pity for his father — and envy of the man before him.
"You're the host — please, sit. I'll carry these around."
Saying so, Kang Hyeong-seok loaded the paper cups onto a tray and made his rounds, but the son's gaze stayed fastened on him the whole while.
The preparations took a full hour. Over that time Lee Geum-kyeong put on her ritual robes, and two other women among the shamans arrayed themselves in the shaman's dress as well.
'So this is a form of the Ssitgim-kut.'
Ordinarily, a ssitgim-kut is a ritual for the dead. But the subject of this one had not yet finished his life. The stage that consoles the departed had been left out entirely; what remained looked to be a kind of defilement rite, washing away only the karma the man had piled up in his years of living.
Doom-doom-doom.
Seated along the living room wall, the shamans opened the kut with traditional Korean instruments.
Flap.
Two of the shamans raised a straw mat upright. Then they dressed it in the subject's clothing, packed its head with rice, and set a broad-brimmed gat upon it — and at a glance the thing took on the shape of a person.
Swish!
Lee Geum-kyeong drew her broom across the effigy the two shamans held steady between them. Then, in a slow, drawling melody, she began to sing the muga.
"Bar the calamity, bar the calamity, bar the calamity.
Bar the calamity, ward it away, turn it aside — eo-heo-eo, eo-heo-heo, let us turn it — through the first and seventh months, the second and eighth, the third and ninth, the fourth and tenth, the fifth and the winter moon, the sixth and the year's last moon — ehehe, ehehe — let us bar the calamity away."
The melody was sorrowful and still. It made the whole thing feel less like a kut than like something else entirely — at moments a solemn religious rite, at others something like a performance of traditional arts.
Hoo...
Lee Geum-kyeong wet the broom with water and swept the effigy clean.
"Do you know what this is?"
One of the shamans who had shown keen curiosity in Kang Hyeong-seok since the front of the house spoke to him in a low voice.
Kang Hyeong-seok smiled faintly and nodded.
"A ssitgim, isn't it."
"Impressive."
Whether the answer pleased him or not, a quiet smile spread across the shaman's lips. A young one — above all, one early in the calling — might well have failed to recognize it.
The ssitgim unfolds in three stages, all told.
Swish!
Lee Geum-kyeong dipped her broom in mugwort water and drew it over the effigy as though washing it clean. They had come as far as the second stage; all that remained was the scented water.
Kang Hyeong-seok watched the other shamans prepare the scented water and breathed slowly, evenly.
'Peaceful. Going smoothly.'
Soon the ssitgim would come to its end, and once Lee Geum-kyeong sang the muga that closed it, they would put this kut to rest. In that easy warmth, the household would sit down to a meal and a little revelry after the work was done, and Lee Geum-kyeong would finally see the chicken farm's owner and Kang Hyeong-seok introduced. And then it would all be over. It would be. It had to be.
Splatter!
Suddenly, Lee Geum-kyeong stopped the broom in midair, and the scented water spilled. In the same breath, the warm air that had wrapped the room went cold.
"Who is it."
A voice cold as ice. And a gaze colder still.
While the shaken shamans darted glances at one another, Kang Hyeong-seok felt it too — the very thing she had felt.
Whoosh!
Kang Hyeong-seok cut straight across the living room.
"Wh-what—!"
One flustered male shaman leapt up to bar his way, but Lee Geum-kyeong's voice cracked out.
"Stay where you are!"
The instant the shaman froze, Kang Hyeong-seok reached the window. He flung it open and swept the surroundings with his eyes. Every fine hair on his nape and forearms stood rigidly on end.
"Hyeong-seok! Have you found it?"
It was at that moment — the shamans, and even the subject's son, turning to Lee Geum-kyeong in alarm —
Drip. Drop.
Dark crimson blood came pouring from Lee Geum-kyeong's nose.
"Tea—Teacher!"
One of the shamans who had been aiding the kut rushed to her side, but Lee Geum-kyeong shook her head violently and clamped a hand over her nose. Only now did the other shamans seem to feel it too. Someone had laid hands on the ssitgim.
"What kind of lunatic..."
A thick-browed male shaman ground the curse out between his teeth, while the shamans beside him scanned the room, faces gone stiff. And some among them stared at Kang Hyeong-seok's back, wide-eyed.
These were the shamans Lee Geum-kyeong had summoned. Every last one the genuine article, each outstanding in the craft. Even they had caught on a beat late — and that young man, Kang Hyeong-seok, had sensed it at nearly the same instant as Lee Geum-kyeong herself. A shaman of another order entirely.
It was just after the shamans had gone rigid or shuddered where they stood, eyes fixed on him —
Shrrrring!
Kang Hyeong-seok drew the sacred shaman bells from his breast and shook them hard. In a flash, every shaman's gaze converged on him. They could tell, too. That the bells he shook were nothing ordinary. That it was a divine instrument befitting one who had received a great god — and permitted to him alone.
Shrrrrrring!
Even as everyone's attention — respect and wonder mingled — bore down on him, Kang Hyeong-seok shook the bells with his molars clenched tight.
'I have to find it. This is no ordinary interference.'
This was a ssitgim for a shaman said to have lived his whole life for the sake of others. A ritual that must never, ever be disturbed. And that ritual had been fouled by something thoroughly vile.
Shrring! Shrring! Shrrrrrring!
As Kang Hyeong-seok shook the bells, arm thrust out the window, Lee Geum-kyeong pressed her two hands together into one and closed her eyes. It came right on the heels of that.
Shring!
Kang Hyeong-seok stilled the bells and slowly lowered his gaze. He had not found the wellspring of the interference — but something was making itself felt, aimed straight at him.
Haaaaah!
Before the building, in a parking lot without so much as a painted line. In front of the car parked there, a man with his hair tied back was burning a cigarette as he looked up at Kang Hyeong-seok.
A shaman uninvited to the kut. A shaman robed in black.
It was Hong Gyeong-soo.