To Summon and to Banish
It happened just after Kang Hyeong-seok had made his way fully out of the cave.
"H-Hyung-nim!"
"Wh-what's the matter with... heok!"
Yoon-sang recoiled in horror at the sight of the dried black streaks of salt water caked across Hyeong-seok's face.
Even without a shred of spiritual sight, he could feel it plainly — this was no ordinary state of affairs. Hyeong-seok's lips had cracked clean past dryness, his complexion the pallor of a corpse; to anyone who looked, the man was visibly not all right.
"H-Hyung-nim, are you okay?"
And yet Hyeong-seok refused Yoon-sang's supporting hands, holding out instead the device he had drawn from inside his coat.
"Check this first. Quickly."
"H-Hyung-nim?"
"There's a dokkaebi's voice on it. See whether anything else got recorded — and fast."
A recorder with a dokkaebi's voice on it. For Yoon-sang the internet streamer, that alone should have set his blood racing. But Hyeong-seok looked far too unwell for even that, and Yoon-sang pressed play with a face gone rigid.
"...Huh? Uh...?"
Kang Hyeong-seok's voice had come through clean and clear. The dokkaebi's voice, however, was smothered under a vicious wash of static.
It was an unintelligible monstrous racket — and yet here and there, fragments that were unmistakably, presumably, the dokkaebi's voice bled through. Then Yoon-sang's upper and lower teeth began to knock together.
Something bone-chilling had just come through.
"Play that part again."
"Y-yes, sir! Right away!"
Yoon-sang wound the recorder back and played the problem section at full volume. This time, it rang out clear.
A woman's voice.
The voice of the shaman who had gone mad.
In the driver's seat, Kang Hyeong-seok sat with his eyes closed and his head bowed. Yoon-sang lay sprawled asleep across the back seat, and every last piece of their gear had been loaded into the trunk. Hyeong-seok, too, looked for all the world like a man asleep — but he had not slept a wink. Instead, he was offering up a prayer.
'I need Your help.'
The shaman's soul was being held captive by the dokkaebi.
'My preparations fell short, and I could not subdue the dokkaebi. But with Your aid, I am certain I could destroy it.'
A half-made shaman who had not even assembled a proper set of sacred implements. The dokkaebi's words came rushing back unbidden, knitting his brow. If only he had possessed more implements. If only the Sinjangkal had been in his hand — the situation might have turned out entirely different, and the thought stung his chest all the more.
'Lend me Your strength. But if this is a trial of Yours, meant to temper me into a greater vessel...'
The Momjusin would not lend him its strength. It would watch him with a cool, detached eye — exactly as it had in the dokkaebi's cave.
'Then watch over me in silence, that my heart may not break.'
A shaman whose heart has crumbled can save nothing. Not even himself.
'I am not begging to borrow Your power. Only watch over me, and pray that I may carry what I must do through to the end.'
Even as I am doing for you right now — so too, I ask, may You pray for me with an earnest, pleading heart.
With a heart deep and clear, Kang Hyeong-seok offered up his most devoted prayer to the Momjusin.
"Mmmnngh."
Behind him, Yoon-sang tossed and turned. Morning had stolen in at some point, and the sunlight slanting through the windshield was tormenting him.
"Nghaaah... dokkaebi... uuuuugh..."
Yoon-sang's sleep-talk shattered his concentration, and Hyeong-seok opened his eyes. He glanced back once, then stepped out of the car with his phone in hand.
The sunlight really was pleasant. Last night the mountain had looked fit to crawl with ghosts; now it looked like any ordinary mountain.
Hyeong-seok gave the dokkaebi's mountain one long look, then searched his contacts for a single name.
Professor Kim Jae-sik.
The professor who had taught him folklore back in university and recommended him to his company. At the same time, he was a man as close to him as any relative — and erudite enough to be of real help with this affair.
Rrrring, rrrring.
"Well, look who it is! If it isn't Hyeong-seok."
Even at this early hour, Kim Jae-sik answered with a voice bright as morning.
"Professor, hello. How have you been?"
"Oh, same as ever. What brings you calling at the crack of dawn? Don't tell me the CEO's been running you ragged?"
The mischief threaded through Kim Jae-sik's voice eased the weight on Hyeong-seok's chest. The corners of his mouth lifted, and he spoke in a tone far looser than before.
"It's nothing serious. There's just something I wanted to ask you."
"What is it? Got a research topic for me, hm?"
"Not research exactly, but close to it. I need your counsel on something. Do you happen to know how one drives out a dokkaebi?"
"A dokkaebi? Oof, now that's a thorny one."
"Why...?"
"There's no creature in the world with a more famous name and a more obscure nature. You studied under me — you know that much."
True enough.
No sooner had Hyeong-seok nodded and said, "That's right," than Kim Jae-sik's voice pressed on.
"There's an entire field of study on the forms of Korean dokkaebi, you see. And the forms documented there are all over the place. Some describe them as outright monsters, some say they're like fog, some catalog them as perfectly human-shaped. They do as they please, top to bottom."
For an instant, Hyeong-seok caught himself wondering how the professor would react if he admitted he had laid eyes on one. The man would probably fly straight to wherever Hyeong-seok stood and shove a recorder in his face before anything else.
"If their very shapes are that inconsistent, their temperaments differ just as wildly. Which is why every region chases dokkaebi off in its own way."
That, he needed to hear closely. Hyeong-seok pressed the phone tight against his ear and drank in the professor's next words.
"On Jeju Island, they soothe the dokkaebi and feast it — the Yeonggam-nori. On the mainland, they threaten it and drive it out — the dokkaebi gut."
"Why would such a difference come about?"
"My, look how fired up you are?"
Kim Jae-sik sounded even more excited than Hyeong-seok was.
"Quit the company and come work under me! It's not too late even now. Hyeong-seok, let's live the wise grad-school life together. Stick it out a few years and I'll make you a professor myself."
"Ah, Professor, no."
He was busy enough as it was, juggling corporate life and a shaman's calling. Honestly, on his days off, his whole heart was begging — please, just let me rest.
"Being a professor isn't a bad life, you know. The research funding comes through nicely. And the student cafeteria beats any halfway-decent company mess hall."
"I'm truly fine, Professor!"
"Aww. Really, truly not?"
"Really."
"Haah. It's men like you who ought to be wearing a professor's chair. What a waste. Tsk, tsk."
A line he'd heard on and off since his university days. It left him feeling like a student again, and he smiled into the memory, his fatigue forgotten.
"Thank you — even if it's only words."
"Anyway, this is just my own two won, mind, but I'd wager the whole difference between the mainland and Jeju comes down to one thing: how vicious the creature is."
A difference in viciousness?
Hyeong-seok's brow creased as the dokkaebi from the cave rose in his memory. Vicious was, indeed, the only word that thing deserved.
"Jeju has always been a little apart from the mainland. Perhaps because it sits so close to Japan and drank in those cultural currents, they say the spirits of Jeju run stronger."
"You appease the strong ones, and... that settles them?"
"Great dokkaebi are classed as beings on the order of spirits — of gods. Some scholars even hold that the yaksha of Buddhist scripture are dokkaebi. How would you propose to chase out a thing like that?"
It was a somewhat deflating answer. And yet he could feel a thread of a clue drawing itself tight.
'The Yeonggam-nori that calls them forth. The dokkaebi gut that drives them out.'
Two rites that could scarcely coexist fused into one inside Hyeong-seok's head — and at last, a lead took shape.
"Professor, one last question, just this. Do dokkaebi keep ranks and followers, the way people do?"
"Is there any stone you'll leave unturned?"
"It's something I truly need to know."
"Hmm. I know some shamans say as much. I've heard tell of a great dokkaebi dragging lesser ones along in its train, too."
In that instant, it felt as though electricity were running down Hyeong-seok's spine.
That was it. The threads had caught. He had his clue — a way to bring that ghastly fiend to heel.
"Thank you, Professor."
"Hm? For what?"
"You've been an enormous help. I think I've got hold of something."
"Seok-ah."
Whenever Kim Jae-sik meant to lay bare his heart, he always called him just so.
"Yes?"
"You haven't gone and gotten tangled up in something strange, have you?"
"No, Professor. Not at all."
"You had the Sin-nureum-gut performed on you as a boy, didn't you. Don't tell me you've gone and received a dokkaebi god...?"
"It's nothing of the sort, Professor."
"Bah, you rascal. Still — Seok-ah, take this one thing to heart. I may be a professor of folklore, but shamanism itself I hardly know. Even so, this much I can say."
Kim Jae-sik continued in a voice calm and low.
"Shamans who take in a dokkaebi suffer for it, bitterly. Plenty of them come to ugly ends. So rather than receiving any dokkaebi, just come be my assistant professor."
The tag tacked on like a punchline burst a laugh clean out of Hyeong-seok. He laughed until his eyes stung with tears, and when it subsided, his heart felt lighter than it had before the call — beyond all comparing.
"I'm quite all right, Professor!"
"There — that's the spirit, good to hear. Anything else you're burning to know?"
"Nothing. And truly — thank you for picking up at this hour. I can't tell you how grateful I am."
"Oh, knock it off, you rascal. You'll give me gooseflesh."
"Haha. My apologies."
"Shall I hang up then? I've no idea what you're about, but give it hell! Seok-ah! And don't you get hurt!"
"I won't!"
Hyeong-seok ended the call and pressed the phone to his chest.
How many truly good people I have around me. The thought surfaced unbidden.
'All that remains now is to take the dokkaebi.'
Tucking the warmth Kim Jae-sik had left with him into the deepest chamber of his heart, Hyeong-seok turned over what came next. The dokkaebi gut, and the Yeonggam-nori. He would need every piece of both. That creature had burrowed into the cave as a great dokkaebi — and he would have to drag it out into the open.
'I'll need many hands. And there is so much to be done.'
Hyeong-seok lowered the hand gripping his phone and shifted his gaze toward the direction of the village. There was a mountain of preparing ahead. But before all of it, there was one thing that had to be brought to a close first.
Kang Hyeong-seok crossed the village at the slowest pace he could manage. This was the village where the shaman had been driven mad by the dokkaebi, and the hour still hung in mid-morning, so that his shadow walked on ahead of him.
Yoon-sang was not moving with him. When the boy had tried to tag along, Hyeong-seok had shoved him bodily back into the car.
Thump. Thump.
Had Yoon-sang known what lay in Hyeong-seok's heart — known whom he was on his way to meet — would the kid have followed anyway? Probably. Because that was simply who he was. Whatever he might want for himself, he was a fellow who never once failed to show his loyalty. Men like that were rare.
"Haaaah."
With a face taut with tension, Hyeong-seok clenched his fist, loosened it, and closed in on the smithy. Whether by fortune or misfortune, the blacksmith was awake, and the moment Hyeong-seok came into view, their eyes met.
"Master. There is something I must say to you."
A decidedly unfriendly glare came flying at him like a thrown stiletto.
"Why, you rotten little..."
Clack.
The blacksmith snatched up a sickle first of all and poured out a look fit for a murderer.
"You're the one who came creeping last night too, aren't you? You goddamn wretch!"
Waving the sickle in open menace, the blacksmith strode toward him in great strides. One blow of that to the head, and he would be a drooling fool who couldn't recall his own name. Yet Hyeong-seok did not stir an inch, holding his ground against the blacksmith.
"Why, you son of a bitch!"
The attitude was markedly different from before, and it only stoked the blacksmith's fury; the sickle whistled as it swung.
"You fucking punk — back to bleat about sacred implements again, are you? Get lost, you son of a bitch! Over my dead body will I ever forge a thing for the likes of you! You lousy mutt!"
"I didn't come today about the implements."
"Then what!"
Vulgar as his mouth was, the blacksmith showed no true intent to harm him. He had halted his advance at a distance comfortably beyond the sickle's reach — on that point, at least, there could be no mistake.
"I have found a way to cure your daughter."
And at that very moment—
The blacksmith's eyes, brimming over with murderous venom only a breath ago, wavered with a sliver of hope.