Cruel Beyond Understanding
He had a rough idea now of why the blacksmith kept shamans at arm's length. A child gone mad from the shaman's work — a father, and his daughter. Everything about it would be bitter to endure, worthy of curse and lament; if it had been the doing of a person, at least there would have been someone to hate.
But of all things, it had to be shamanism. By now the very word — the bare sound of it — was probably enough to turn the man's stomach.
"You're eating. What's with all the brooding?"
Scrape. Shin Jeong-ah, seated across the table, pushed the ceramic bowl of raw fish toward Kang Hyeong-seok.
He let out one long sigh and picked up his chopsticks.
"Still... I suppose I'm glad it's you I'm sharing a table with, Section Chief."
Shin Jeong-ah, who had been about to lift a slice of fatty flounder belly, stopped her chopsticks dead in midair.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, this and that. The fact that we can't even manage dinner on our own, for one."
"Ah."
Understanding dawned on her face, and she popped the flounder into her mouth before glancing at the menu.
Orders available for parties of two or more.
It was a raw fish house on Gangneung's Coffee Street. The sea spread out unbroken before them, so the view went without saying, and the lighthouse and the water offered their own quiet comfort — while the faint scent of coffee threading through the salt air lent the place a strangely pleasant feel on top of it all.
"Come to think of it, I couldn't have ordered at all if I'd come alone."
Shin Jeong-ah nodded at that, her face clouded with some thought or other. Then he went on.
"I did some looking — everything right next door is guesthouses. You can take a room there, Section Chief."
"And you?"
"I'm going back to the forge. One more time."
"What? No wonder you didn't order any alcohol. You move in daylight. Daylight. The sun's about to drop — where the hell do you think you're going?"
Kang Hyeong-seok shook his head, unmoved.
"The whole reason we came here is the ritual implements. Going home empty-handed doesn't sit right with me."
"I said, move in the daylight... Tsk."
Her appetite visibly gone, Shin Jeong-ah looked at him a moment, then dug through her pocket. Out came a cigarette — but she didn't light it, only set it down on the table.
"Anyway, nothing's going to happen to me, so turn in ahead of me. You can carry on with your trip just as it is, too."
There was a seafood market close by, and the sea beyond it. It wasn't holiday season, so nothing was crowded — if she wanted to rest, she could rest to her heart's content. By any measure it wasn't a bad arrangement, and still Shin Jeong-ah's face stayed sour.
"Already forgotten nearly getting a sickle swung at you this afternoon? Go on, get caught by that old man again at night. You're telling me that wouldn't be dangerous?"
"I won't do anything to him. No — I couldn't."
"What?"
Shin Jeong-ah stared at him wide-eyed, and Kang Hyeong-seok pointed at the cigarette on the table.
"Care to step out and burn that first?"
"No, uh, um—"
Perhaps because it wasn't an offer easily refused, she promptly gathered up the cigarette and her lighter.
"Brrr."
The sea wind at sundown must have been chilly — Shin Jeong-ah put a flame to her cigarette and rubbed both her forearms.
"Cold? Light up quick, then let's head in."
"Talk first. What is it you're planning to do, exactly, that's got you so sure nothing will happen to you?"
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at her for a moment — then broke into a wide smile.
"Why did you follow me out, Section Chief?"
"Hm?"
One eyebrow climbed as she took a long, deep drag.
He noticed it from time to time: Shin Jeong-ah had a gift for saying whole paragraphs with her eyes alone.
"You told me to light up — what's with the sideways talk?"
"Yes. Exactly that."
"Hm?"
Watching the red glow of her cigarette, Kang Hyeong-seok began.
"For a person in desperation, the greatest mercy is having that desperation heard. Even if danger comes, if I say I will help, it won't be able to do me harm."
Tap. The ash clinging to her cigarette broke loose and dropped.
"Help how? Help with what?"
"The blacksmith's child."
The bond between parent and child runs deep — deep past all measuring. A parent cannot turn away, and for their child's sake a parent will do anything at all.
"She ended up that way doing the shaman's work. If my hunch is right, I believe I can help her. Enough, at least."
"...You?"
"Yes. And that way, my own desperation gets settled too, doesn't it?"
A blacksmith who could forge ritual implements. Resolve the man's desperation, and — like karma circling home — the blacksmith would resolve Hyeong-seok's. A profoundly simple law of the world.
Kang Hyeong-seok chose to believe it.
Kang Hyeong-seok drove back to the village alone. It was a night riotous with the cries of grass insects; the moon looked unnaturally large tonight, and the wind off the sea came in sharp and mean.
Click. He pressed his phone's power button to check the time, then set his jaw hard.
Let's move.
First he had to see for himself the state of the shaman said to have gone mad. Only then would he know whether this was something he could help with at all.
Out of the car, Kang Hyeong-seok closed in on the village with his footsteps deadened. Somewhere far off a dog barked, and the wind came keening past his ears.
Damn it. Like walking straight into a horror film.
Thump. Thump.
And still his feet carried him toward the forge while a thought needled at him — did it really have to go this far? But his hands and legs kept moving, as if they had no say in the matter.
"Hoooh!"
Having let out a long breath near the forge, Kang Hyeong-seok leaned his back against the wall and listened. Perhaps because of the late hour, there was no stir of life anywhere.
Judging the blacksmith to be asleep, he crept toward the shed he'd seen earlier that day.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Regular as a metronome, the shaman shut away inside was beating her head against the wall. And then an image sketched itself across his sight — the figure of someone seizing the shaman by the hair, driving her head into the wall.
A phantom spun up by the night? Or an image sent by the Momjusin?
His feet strangely heavy, Kang Hyeong-seok dragged himself forward and stopped directly before the shed door.
"Can you hear me?"
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"I humbly ask that you lend your ear to my voice."
Thud. Thud. Thud.
He swallowed drily and went on in a voice low and heavy.
"Who are you?"
Then it happened. The sound stopped.
"Who are you, that you would turn your face from this one's suffering?"
Kang Hyeong-seok was not speaking to the shaman. He was speaking to her Momjusin. A patron deity shields the shaman who serves as its vessel — yet this one, far from shielding her, had abandoned her to madness.
"Has this shaman committed sins so grave that she must suffer divine punishment? Or is there a reason you cannot help but look away?"
His eyes on the door, Kang Hyeong-seok kept speaking.
"This is not right. If you have not lost your strength, then protect your shaman, as you must."
He knew. He knew exactly how dangerous this was — a single mortal holding a god to account for its wrongs. He knew such words and deeds could well invite divine punishment, and he trusted that his own Momjusin would shield him.
And they were words he ached, badly, to say. They were the same, he and her — both shamans. That woman's plight might be his own.
"If you can hear my voice, answer me."
It came right on the heels of that.
"Uuuuaaaaaaaaagh!"
A scream burst out — like limbs being snapped one by one.
Thud!
A grimy black head slammed against the frosted glass pane.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
"Gagagagak! Aaaaagh! Keeeeaaagh!"
The shaman began slamming her head in a frenzy, and it looked as though she were writhing in agony.
Kang Hyeong-seok's mouth twisted.
Something had just made itself known. A vast presence. The thing he had taken for a god was heaping agony on the shaman as though to mock him.
This was a first. He had never once heard of a Momjusin that taunted and toyed with its own shaman.
"What is your reason? Why do you act with such cruelty?!"
Suffocating, he shouted as though rebuking the god itself — but the only answer was a gaze from beyond the clouded glass. The shaman ground her forehead against the pane as if to pulp it, her huge eyeballs fixed on him.
Kang Hyeong-seok shuddered — then turned at a light flaring suddenly behind him.
"Who the hell is that?!"
The sleep-slurred voice belonged, unmistakably, to the blacksmith.
His breath caught. Impossible as it should have been, his breath frosted white as in midwinter.
Gods did exist, then. There was one, right here.
Before a god anything but kind, watching through the shaman's eyes, Kang Hyeong-seok turned and bolted.
Damn it all.
He fled past the blacksmith and out into the night — and gazes stabbed into his back like awls. The shaman's, begging for help. The god's, glaring murder.
"Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!"
Out at the village's edge, Kang Hyeong-seok gulped air with both hands braced on his knees. The road was black as if someone had thrown a blanket over the whole world. A streetlight would have been a mercy — no, there was one, but its head hung crooked and the bulb inside was shattered.
In that lightless gloom he caught his breath, then rubbed dry lips with the back of his hand.
This is insane. Genuinely.
A Momjusin that tormented its own shaman. And yet she was no fraud channeling stray ghosts, either — going by the energy of the thing, it was a true god. Which made the whole business harder still to fathom.
"Cruel. Cruel beyond all sense."
The thought had swollen until it filled his skull and spilled out loud. But there was hope yet.
"There's a way."
A sickness born of a god could be cured through that same god.
He would have to separate the god from the shaman.
The effect would show at once — and that possibility would become the blacksmith's hope.
Kang Hyeong-seok sucked at his lips and glanced back toward the forge.
Perhaps he should have at least said something to them.
No. No, he shouldn't have. Say it back there, and the god would have heard.
He shook his head — then snapped it up, glaring hard into the dark.
"Who's there."
He had felt a presence. With his senses honed razor-sharp by what he'd just endured, Kang Hyeong-seok stared as if he would cut the darkness open, and spoke.
"Been peeping from somewhere, have you? Come out."
A rustle came in answer. The hair on his nape stood on end as he kept his eyes locked on the dark — and then, from the far end of the alley, a figure staggered out, head ducked low.
Not a ghost. A person. A young man, at that, who had jammed a ball cap down hard over his face in the dead of night.
"What do you think you're doing? Take off the cap."
Kang Hyeong-seok's words bore down on him, and the man pulled off the cap that had hidden his face.
"...What the—?"
Bewilderment crashed in. Partly because he knew the face — but mostly because the look in the man's eyes made no sense to him. The eyes of someone reunited with a dear friend after long years. Not the look one gives a stranger.
"Y-you — you're the one from before, aren't you? Right?"
With features that bold — the kind that brand themselves into memory — how would anyone forget? As Kang Hyeong-seok combed his memory for some earlier meeting, the man thumped his own chest and gave his name.
"H-hyung-nim! You don't remember me? Really?"
"Who is this?"
"Agh! Hyung-nim, it's me! Me! Yoon-sang! BJ Yoon-sang! The sky above and the earth below know how much I've missed you, hyung-nim!"
Chirr. Chirr-chirr. Chirrrr. The grass insects sang on, loud and indifferent.
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at Yoon-sang with eyes that understood nothing whatsoever. And still Yoon-sang simply beamed — the very picture of a man about to lose his mind with joy at seeing Kang Hyeong-seok again.