Look at Me, Living One
Yoon-sang's help proved invaluable when Kang Hyeong-seok readied himself to enter the burrow.
"Hyung-nim, here's the hemp cloth you asked for. And the pure water."
"And the salt?"
"One sec—I'll have it out for you right away. Oh, did you want the coarse kind or the fine?"
True to form for a man who could walk out of a haunted house without a single stray spirit tagging along behind him, Yoon-sang carried far more gear than anyone would have guessed.
Glug-glug.
As Kang Hyeong-seok poured water thick with dissolved salt over the hemp cloth, Yoon-sang's eyes followed his every movement.
Why does he bother with stuff like this?
The look on the kid's face said he thought it would make prime material for the stream, so Kang Hyeong-seok kept the explanation short.
"It keeps the bad things out."
The eyes are windows to the heart, and foul things slip in through them, straight into the mind. Salt and pure water both held the power to repel the unclean, so binding hemp cloth soaked in the mixture over his eyes was, at its core, the bare minimum of a safety precaution.
Plop. Drip.
He was lifting the salt-dripping cloth toward his eyes when—
"Hyung-nim, um. So, about that."
Yoon-sang began, excruciatingly careful about it.
"What?"
"Come on, honestly—haven't I always gone along with exactly what you wanted?"
"Turn that stream on and you're dead."
It was less a threat than friendly advice, the way Kang Hyeong-seok said it. This place was more dangerous than any ordinary haunted house; so much as switching on a camera could have brought Dongti, the backlash of broken taboos, crashing down on Yoon-sang's head.
"I would never, Hyung-nim! No broadcast without your say-so, I promise. I even posted an announcement—told everyone I'm taking a break."
"Then what is it?"
"It's for the stream later, so... this..."
Shooting anxious glances at Kang Hyeong-seok's face every few seconds, Yoon-sang held out a small recorder.
"Could you just take this in with you?"
Kang Hyeong-seok moved his gaze from the compact recorder—already switched on—to Yoon-sang. The man had one of those faces that would be popular at any gathering, women and men alike. When a face like that fixed him with a pleading look, a decision made once got made twice over.
"Use it on the stream or don't, I don't care. But my voice doesn't go out."
"Does it bother you?"
Internet broadcasts were fine as long as people were content just to watch.
When Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes made his meaning unmistakable, Yoon-sang nodded hard, as if to say he understood perfectly.
"Just trust me on this one. I'll slap the heaviest voice modulation on it, I promise."
"Whew... tsk."
"I swear on heaven itself, no harm will come to you over this, Hyung-nim."
"I'd rather we never have to fall out over it."
Kang Hyeong-seok waved the recorder Yoon-sang had handed him and slipped it into his inner pocket. Then he laid the salt-soaked hemp across both eyes and tied it tight at the back of his head. His eyes stung, and the brine ran down his cheeks like tears.
With that, the preparations were done.
"Whoooooh."
Pushing his breath out through it, Kang Hyeong-seok set his steps into the burrow. Pitch-dark and half-blind, his footing wobbled badly enough to worry Yoon-sang, who watched from behind.
Crk—fsssssh!
The moment his hand met the burrow wall, the soil crumbled away without resistance, baring gnarled tree roots. And yet what stabbed at his nose first wasn't the smell of earth. It was salt.
Exhaling through his mouth, Kang Hyeong-seok inched deeper into the burrow.
Bigger and deeper than I expected.
It felt like descending into the bowels of the earth. Worse, a chill pricked at his skin with a sharpness that defied belief for the inside of a burrow. A bad sign. Haunted houses and places crawling with evil spirits felt exactly like this.
A dokkaebi.
By its other name, the One-Legged Ghost. A kind of ghost, at that. And contrary to its familiar, folksy image, the dokkaebi he had studied at university had far more faces than most people ever learned. Some brought sickness. Some brought calamity. Why else would there even exist a dokkaebi gut—a rite performed for the sole purpose of driving dokkaebi out? The dokkaebi was, beyond argument, a familiar presence to humankind. And it lacked nothing whatsoever as an object of terror.
And he was walking straight into such a being's burrow.
Wa-rarang!
The sacred shaman bells tucked inside his backpack chimed out, and it didn't surprise him. If anything, he had been half wondering when they would. Fumbling the bells from his bag, Kang Hyeong-seok shook them with a hand gone trembly from the cold.
Warang, warang, warang.
"General Deity of the High Heavens, Great General Deity—General Deity of the World Below, Great General Deity—General Deity of the Five Directions, Great General Deity—General Deity of the Four Seas, Great General Deity!"
A numinous force fanned out from the bells, but the feeling was different from before. It wasn't pushing evil away so much as force slamming into force, energy grinding against energy head-on.
"Star Lord of the Great Sun, Star Lord of the Great Moon—homage to the Boundary Citadel, to the Mountain of Three Peaks—Star Lords of the Twenty-Eight Mansions, all—Treasury of Heaven and Earth, Holy Envoy of the Three Waves!"
Kang Hyeong-seok poured everything into reciting the Okchun-gyeong, the Jade Spring Scripture. Which was why he failed to notice.
Thump. Thump.
That the deeper he walked, the darker the hemp over his eyes was turning. The salt that purified evil was spending itself to the last grain, blackening as its power bled away. Weeping salt water gone black like tears, Kang Hyeong-seok kept shaking the sacred shaman bells.
"Original Envoy, Vanguard of the Ten Heavenly Envoys, General Deities of the Four Directions—every ghost, every evil spirit that steals in to intrude, harm, and defile—be bound in haste, be sealed fast, and be reduced to nothingness!"
It was right after this.
Someone had recited the next verses of the Jade Spring Scripture. Backwards.
Kang Hyeong-seok froze mid-step and, sacred shaman bells thrust out before him, forced open lips gone blue.
"...Are you a dokkaebi?"
"Welcome, living one."
A thick, low voice whispered it with a lilt of laughter. It was not a human voice. It was as if something inhuman were doing an impression of humanity—and beneath the imitation ran a power that woke primal dread.
"My name is not 'living one.'"
"All the living are just living ones to me, living one."
Krrtch! Something twisted with a grating, wrenching screech.
With his vision sealed, Kang Hyeong-seok couldn't tell where the sound had come from—though something in him whispered that he was better off not knowing. It felt as though something that must never be seen stood directly in front of him.
"I've come to ask a favor of you."
Kang Hyeong-seok had meant to demand the release of the mudang shaman. But then came the sound of a long, slow breath drawn in right beside his ear, and his words died with a flinch.
"So the living one is a mudang. A mudang of three mingled traditions, without a root of his own."
The voice went on beside him, flicking like a serpent's tongue.
"You took a god into yourself, the way a spirit-called mudang does. You earned your learning, the way a trained mudang does. You inherited your ritual implements, the way a hereditary mudang does. You were fated to become a mudang who one day decides the fortunes of this very nation—and that is exactly what will make your life wretched."
Kang Hyeong-seok felt his heart careering wildly. This was no ordinary restless spirit. A dokkaebi. A being powerful enough to serve as a Body-Governing Patron Deity was reading him through to the marrow of his soul.
"So the beast-tamer has set his sights on the living one, has he? The living one will be robbed of what must never be taken—and every day left to him will turn to misery."
What could possibly be so delightful? The dokkaebi laughed in halting bursts, its voice thick with phlegm.
"In 422 days, the living one will be given a daughter—though she will not be born in the shape of a person. When 842 days have passed, his parents will die. On day 1,253, the living one too will lose the use of both his legs in an accident."
Kang Hyeong-seok clamped his hands over his ears. He must not be beguiled. He must not lend it his ear. He must not believe.
"When 1,301 days have passed, the one he loves will die. On day 2,598, he will fall ill once more and be left waiting out the days until he dies. And on day 4,000, the living one will breathe his last in a house seething with worms—though no one will find what is left of him for another 100 days."
Even with his ears stopped, the voice came through vivid and clear. Gritting his teeth, Kang Hyeong-seok thought, and thought again.
This is a lie. None of it was true. A god's word was not always right. It is trying to beguile me with false words.
"The living one will end up gnawed hollow by worms, stuffed into a sack. Burned with no name at all—reduced to ashes no one will ever come looking for."
"Enough!"
Kang Hyeong-seok's roar made the burrow ring. Then, breath frosting white, he shook the sacred shaman bells with everything he had.
Warang, warang, warang!
"General Deity of Thunder at the Great Central Formation! General Deity Supreme Commander of the Heaven-Piercing Vanguard, Successor of the Host! General Deity, Commander of the Soldiers of Heaven's Myriad Armies! General Deity who summons the legions and holds their command! Iron Net General Deity—descend this very instant, and answer my call!"
The Cheolmang-gyeong—the Iron Net Scripture. A war scripture, one that could strike not only corrupt restless spirits but gods themselves. Perhaps even a dokkaebi could not simply brush it aside: the serpent's tongue had gone still.
"Haah... haah... haah."
Eyes bound in hemp cloth black as ink by now, Kang Hyeong-seok stared hard into the direction of the dokkaebi. He couldn't see it, but he knew exactly where it was. Its vile, malignant energy kept stabbing at him like an awl.
"A great god walks with me. Hear me, dokkaebi."
Feeling his Body-Governing Patron Deity rising within, Kang Hyeong-seok went on in a voice of grave depth.
"Cease what you are doing and gather in your wickedness. Return the mudang you drove mad to as she was."
Silence fell. All the while, Kang Hyeong-seok heard a high ringing in his ears. Then came a sound that felt somehow, subtly wrong—and just as he moved to open his mouth again,
"Khek... kheh... ha, ha, ha."
the dokkaebi's repulsive sneer burst out.
"Ha, ha, ha. Have you forgotten, living one? I am a god too. And what can a half-made mudang—one who hasn't even gathered all his implements—hope to do to a god?"
The dokkaebi's voice snapped from his left to his right.
"Return the mudang? She was the one who came looking for me. That bitch wanted to be a mudang so badly she dropped to her knees and took me in."
Now the sound was coming from inside his very ear. Kang Hyeong-seok shook the sacred shaman bells in fierce bursts, clawing his mind back by force. Even so, the dokkaebi's devilish voice went on and on.
"The living one is racking his brain for some way to stop me. But living one—you know nothing at all."
Warang! Warang! Warang! Warang!
"As payment for helping that mudang bitch, I am playing with her. No other reason. And so, you see, there is no way to stop me."
Wa-rararang! Wa-rarararang!
The dokkaebi was, unmistakably, laughing at him. Shaking the bells, Kang Hyeong-seok began backing slowly away.
This is bad.
This dokkaebi was like an evil spirit. And yet it was a dokkaebi, not an evil spirit—and because a dokkaebi's nature was its own, the sacred shaman bells held little sway over it.
"Living one, where do you think you're going, leaving me behind?"
Chk.
The strength coiling through that abnormally huge hand was nothing a human being could resist.
"The living one is mistaken. He believes he came looking for me—but in truth, it was I who called the living one here. Did you not chase the dokkaebi fire all the way to this place?"
Kang Hyeong-seok gulped down air that froze bone-white in his chest. The mad dokkaebi, it seemed, had no intention of letting him go.
"So before you go—at least show me your eyes."
A finger thick as a man's forearm began drifting toward Kang Hyeong-seok's face. Then a huge, razor-sharp nail flicked once, and the hemp cloth over his eyes was cut clean away. The cloth, blackened as if steeped in ink, drifted down to his feet.
"Look at me."
Eyes screwed shut, Kang Hyeong-seok refused with everything he had. And once more the dokkaebi's low, loathsome voice came sliding in, laced with mockery.
"What is there to be so afraid of? Look at me, living one. Hurry now."
Damn it all.
Teeth clenched, breath sawing in and out, Kang Hyeong-seok slowly opened the eyes he had kept shut. First, he had to get out of here. Only from outside could he do anything at all about this mad dokkaebi. And when his eyes were fully open, he saw the dokkaebi's face.
"Hahahahahahaha!"
Skin black as soot, seamed with wrinkles. A huge, broad, flattened nose. Eyes crinkled so far shut that the whites had vanished. The dokkaebi was laughing with a face like a wooden Hahoe mask gone to rot.
"Hkk... hoo... hhh..."
Foul things enter the heart through the eyes.
Fighting with desperate strength to keep his mind from being devoured, Kang Hyeong-seok retreated out of the burrow in stumbling backward steps.
"Hahahahahahaha."
The dokkaebi's laughing face receded into the deep, deep dark.
"Hahahaha! AHAHAHAHAHA! Hahahahaha!"
That face never stopped staring after him—and not once, all the way out of the burrow, did he dare turn and look back at it.