The Hour of the Ox
Doooooom.
It might have been a drum, sounding from somewhere far away.
The darkness had thickened until there was no telling sky from ground, or ground from the surface of the water.
Kang Hyeong-seok stood where he was, staring out across Anmokji Reservoir, and a thick, raw reek of fish blood seeped in through his nose.
He knew next to nothing about fishing.
But a spot as deserted as this, he thought, ought to hold at least one or two anglers who fancied themselves masters of the rod.
Ssssssssssss!
Wind combed through the leaves and grass, and they answered with a bleak, mournful hiss. It was the kind of sound that made the mind go murky.
The instinct that no living person could switch off was sounding its alarm. This was a place where no one should be. That he had to leave—right now.
"Dong-gwan!"
At Hong Gyeong-soo's voice beside him, Kang Hyeong-seok turned his gaze toward the man, very slowly.
In his hands were a wooden stake about a meter long, and a crowbar.
"Keep a hard grip on your mind! You slip even once, and it'll drag you under."
Even in that darkness the whites of his eyes gleamed, wet and slick, as he spoke in a low voice—and Kang Hyeong-seok gave a heavy nod.
THWACK! THWACK! THWAAACK!
Hong Gyeong-soo began driving in the stakes.
Even at a glance, the wood was scrawled with a dizzying sprawl of red characters—some mirror-script of curses, by the look of them.
THWACK! THWACK!
Staggering, breath rasping, Hong Gyeong-soo hammered the stakes home one by one. The ground was sodden and clinging, and each stake sank in with a soft, squelching thud—and each time one did, the pressure gnawing at the mind seemed to ebb.
They were stakes for cutting the current off at its root.
THWACK! THWAAACK!
Fourteen stakes driven into the ground around the reservoir, Hong Gyeong-soo lifted his sweat-slick face and looked up at the moon, just once.
"We finish this before the Hour of the Ox. No matter what."
The Hour of the Ox—the hour that belonged to the ghosts. If they were still standing here when it came, tomorrow was nothing anyone could promise.
"What would you have me do?"
At the question, Hong Gyeong-soo—already turning toward the car—stopped stock-still. Then his head came around, slow as a corpse's.
The dark had swallowed his face and his expression with it, but the silhouette made it plain enough: Hong Gyeong-soo was looking at him.
"You've got the important work to do, Dong-gwan."
Kang Hyeong-seok held his silence, and Hong Gyeong-soo went on.
"Evil feeds on evil, and water draws in the dead. So a mudang must be the one to dredge it up—wouldn't you say?"
The words came out in a strange singsong, and Kang Hyeong-seok threw them straight back at him.
"...What did you do here?"
Hong Gyeong-soo said nothing. Even so, Kang Hyeong-seok kept going.
"What was it you did here, in the past?"
This was ground where ghosts had swarmed until the border between the living world and the dead wore thin—where the mind no longer stayed anchored to the flesh, and even the line between a mudang and her patron deity grew shallow.
Communed with his Body-Governing Patron Deity in a place like this, Kang Hyeong-seok fixed Hong Gyeong-soo with his spiritual eye.
"That jar you carried down there."
What rose in Kang Hyeong-seok's mind was the image of Hong Gyeong-soo under a noon sun, a single jar in his arms.
The place had been here.
Hong Gyeong-soo had been walking down into the reservoir, and a man and a woman had stood watching him.
The man was the one who had traveled with him.
The woman he had never seen before—and yet instinct told him who she was. Kim Mi-suk, the woman Lee Geum-kyeong had spoken with on the phone.
"What did you put inside that jar?"
Hong Gyeong-soo, silent until now, began to answer in a low voice.
"The thing you must dredge up, Dong-gwan."
Kang Hyeong-seok's brow bent—and Hong Gyeong-soo went on.
"A bibang, sir. A jar with nothing inside it."
A jar that is already full can hold nothing else.
That was why Hong Gyeong-soo had sunk an empty jar here in Anmokji. So that everything the righteous mudang could not handle would come pouring into this reservoir. So that the jar could hold it all fast.
"Dredge it up for me."
Toneless, stripped of every trace of singsong, the words were not meant for Kang Hyeong-seok. They were meant for a mudang true and proper—and for the Body-Governing Patron Deity who kept watch over him.
Kang Hyeong-seok answered with a nod, a slow dip of his chin, and Hong Gyeong-soo turned back toward the car.
Thud. Thud. Srrrrrip!
When Hong Gyeong-soo returned from the car, he had changed from the clothes up.
Black ritual robes.
The Sinjangkal held at his mouth and in his left hand.
In his right, a long roll of unbleached cloth, wound tight.
"Round your waist."
He held the cloth out to Kang Hyeong-seok. But Hyeong-seok didn't take it straight away; his gaze moved from the man's hands up to his eyes. Then it dropped to his legs.
A leg that dragged as he walked. A leg that looked in no condition to enter a reservoir greased with water moss. Bent crooked as a fishhook—had that leg truly been injured, after all?
"Move. We've no time."
At the urging, Kang Hyeong-seok set his teeth and looked into the man's eyes. Eyes always say more than mouths do. So he searched Hong Gyeong-soo's intent there—and found only a hollow dark, as if nothing looked back at all.
Tsk. Tongue clicking against his teeth, Kang Hyeong-seok nodded.
"Is this a soul-retrieval gut?"
Hong Gyeong-soo closed his eyes and nodded.
That was what snagged in his mind.
Kang Hyeong-seok let out a long breath and looked back at Anmokji. Is that what hell looks like? So many wandering souls were tangled together in a mindless sprawl that the thought came unbidden.
And the place was saturated with shrieking and wailing—the kind of sight that freezes the heart of anyone who can see it.
And Hong Gyeong-soo meant to send him down into it.
Kang Hyeong-seok clenched his molars and gave a heavy nod. He had to go. Only then could Lee Geum-kyeong's friend pass on from this world without a single regret.
Hong Gyeong-soo's intentions were unknowable, and they stank of suspicion. But there was a trust in him larger than that: Lee Geum-kyeong, and his own patron deity. Even if Hong Gyeong-soo tried to harm him, there were those who would protect him. And they were stronger than Hong Gyeong-soo.
"Much obliged."
Somehow, the words carried the feel of sincerity. Hong Gyeong-soo tied the cloth around Kang Hyeong-seok's waist, then wound the other end around his own body, over and over. The two men were joined now by a single length of unbleached cloth.
Step. Step.
Kang Hyeong-seok walked slowly out toward Anmokji. The cloth lying on the ground unspooled smooth and endless behind him, trailing at his back, while Hong Gyeong-soo watched him go.
And then—
Splash.
The instant Kang Hyeong-seok's first foot sank into the water—
Shhwoo.
With the Sinjangkal in both hands, Hong Gyeong-soo began to swing his arms in the slow, rolling arcs of a dance. Shoulders heaving in the dark, blade sweeping left and right—it was, unmistakably, a gut.
The same moment.
Kim Mi-suk began her gut as well.
Shadowing Hong Gyeong-soo's every movement, identical down to the last twitch, she swept her Sinjangkal—and beside her sat a man.
A shrine hall. A gut held in a hall that received no visitors, where nothing existed but the sanctum and the two of them. Everything about the rite spoke of meticulous preparation.
Kok! Kok! Kraaawk!
There was a rooster, trussed everywhere but the head. A goat with its hide already peeled back. And a great straw effigy woven in the shape of a man.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Doom!
The moment the man began to pound the drum, Kim Mi-suk's movements turned wilder, fiercer. The god had descended—her eyes rolling white as she severed the rooster's neck.
Blood sprayed. The headless bird thrashed inside its wrapping of cloth.
Doom-doom-doom-doom-doom-doom-doom-doom!
The drumbeat swelled and swelled, stoking the air to a fever.
"Eh-heee—! Eh-heooooo!"
Doom! Doom! Doom! Doom!
"Taihao Fuxi and Emperor Shennong!
Yao and Shun, Yu and Tang!
King Wen, King Wu, and the Duke of Zhou!"
The man was reciting scripture. A scripture for those who would wish for great things.
"Confucius and Mencius, all the perfected sages!
Discerning a thousand li at a glance, reading the pulse of every vein!
The harmony of heaven and earth, the transformation of the ten thousand things!
Nine-nine, eighty-one—the grand cord of heaven and earth!
Eight-nine, seventy-two—yin and yang in accord!
Thus it is done!"
Nearer and nearer to her god, Kim Mi-suk brought her blade against the goat's body as well. Flesh split away in heavy slabs, and a rank, violent energy came seething up.
This was a gut staged for Hong Gyeong-soo's sake. Kim Mi-suk's will and her purpose were one with his.
"Hoooooh! Eh-heooo! It's here. He's coming down!"
Kim Mi-suk hauled up the effigy propped against the wall. A human shape plaited from straw and dressed in a man's clothes.
Climbing astride it, her eyes swimming up dark with bloodlust, she tore open the effigy's breast. Inside was a slip of paper with a name written on it in red.
Kang Hyeong-seok.
"The Great Sal enters!"
Doom! Doom! Doom! Doom!
With the man drumming harder than ever, Kim Mi-suk took the Sinjangkal between her teeth. Then she lifted a wooden stake and the crowbar from the floor and set the stake's point against the effigy's chest.
THWACK! WHUMP! THWACK!
The stake began to drive home.
And in the same instant, the drummer's mouth tore wide open.
"One!"
The mid-slope of the mountain whose energy ran clearest for miles around.
Doom-doom-doom-doom! Piriri-riri! CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
Gathered amid that riot of traditional instruments were Lee Geum-kyeong and the other mudang.
FWOOSH!
No sooner had the stacked firewood caught than the flames leapt skyward.
Watching the embers rise and tumble like dancers, Lee Geum-kyeong opened her mouth.
"Begin."
Her word had barely faded when the male mudang at the drum lifted his voice.
"As it has been spoken, amen!
One word cast, four realms bound; seven calls raised, swift succor given!
The scripture of the hundred-thousand sal ghosts and spirits!"
A scripture for barring the sal.
Gong, flute, every instrument tangling into one climbing roar—and Lee Geum-kyeong swept her five-colored cloth in great, snapping arcs.
She had long since expected that a sal would fly at Kang Hyeong-seok.
Doom! Doom! Doom! Doom! Piriri-riri!
Before the eyes of the watching mudang, Lee Geum-kyeong stilled the five-colored cloth and raised the Sinjangkal. And into the ears of her—now merging into one with her god—came a sound, a voice.
THWACK! THWACK!
The dull thud of something being hammered. And through it—
"Two!"
The sound announcing that a second sal had been loosed by those who hunted Hong Gyeong-soo. However loudly the instruments shrieked into her ears, it came through with perfect clarity.
"Homage to the Great Ghost-Sal Spirit!
Homage to the Middle Ghost-Sal Spirit!
Homage to the Lesser Ghost-Sal Spirit!
Homage to the Year Ghost-Sal Spirit!
Homage to the Month Ghost-Sal Spirit!
Homage to the Day Ghost-Sal Spirit!"
The male mudang's chant quickened and quickened, and Lee Geum-kyeong rapped the Sinjangkal against her own face and forearms.
The blade was honed to a true edge. And yet no mark appeared on her anywhere. Even when she set the blade between her teeth and spun the hilt with both hands, it left her untouched.
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! Piriri!
As the music climbed higher and the prayers of the mudang converged upon a single point, Lee Geum-kyeong whirled once around the circle in a wide, dancing turn.
Then she stepped up to the pig waiting at one side and laid the blade against it.
Shrrk!
Before the edge had finished passing, the pig's hide split open, baring naked red flesh. Lee Geum-kyeong carved away a sliver and put it in her mouth, then cut off one of its legs and hung it from her shoulder.
She was conducting two guts at once.
The Great Sal Gut, and the Sal Gut. One to bar the sal streaking toward Kang Hyeong-seok—and the other to hurl the sal already launched at him straight back to its sender.
"Homage to the Kalpa Ghost-Sal Spirit of the Empty Void!
Homage to the Great Ghost's Ghost-Sal Spirit!
Homage to the Middle Ghost's Ghost-Sal Spirit!
Homage to the Lesser Ghost's Ghost-Sal Spirit!"
The male mudang's chant was just rising to its peak when—
Fwhiiiit—!
Lee Geum-kyeong gave one long, piercing whistle and planted the blade upright over the pig. Then she hammered down on the pommel, driving the blade in to the root.
And in that same instant, a different sound reached her ears.
KYAAAAAAAAAGH!
GUOOOOOH! UOOOOOOGH!
A woman's scream, and a man's.
Kim Mi-suk—and the man who trailed after Hong Gyeong-soo. Screams tore like rending fabric, and images unspooled before her eyes.
"AAAGH! AAAAAAAGH!"
Kim Mi-suk, howling as she clutched the hem of her skirt—scarlet blood dripping from it in fat, steady drops—and beside her the man, his drum flung aside, doubling over to spew out everything in his stomach.
The sal they had loosed had come home to them.
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG! Doom-doom-doom-doom-doom!
Lee Geum-kyeong slowly raised one hand. At once the mudang's hands fell still mid-note, and a silence poured in—so complete it was terrifying.
"Teacher..."
One of the mudang made to speak to her, but Lee Geum-kyeong gave a slow, weighty shake of her head. Then, staring into the darkness, she murmured a prayer in a low voice.
That Kang Hyeong-seok would come through unharmed. That Hong Gyeong-soo would be given no room for treachery.
It was a prayer that the calamity her friend could not resolve might, at last, be untangled.