Before He Was a God
He had summoned the Great Dokkaebi. But there was no time to lose. He had to get back to Park Sang-cheol as fast as the road would allow.
Click! Rrrrumble! With Shin Jeong-ah in the passenger seat and Yoon-sang laid out in the back, Kang Hyeong-seok started the engine without a second's delay and surged out onto the night road.
Vrrroooooom!
Tearing through the darkness without pause, Kang Hyeong-seok kept his eyes locked on the road ahead. There were no streetlamps on the lonely mountain path, and the night was black as the bottom of the sea.
Thump! Even with the speed bump taken at nearly full speed, Yoon-sang showed not the slightest sign of stirring awake.
Is this the Dokkaebi's doing as well?
Kang Hyeong-seok found himself acutely aware of Shin Jeong-ah beside him. Tangled hair. Fingers that reeked of raw pork. Red bean paste packed under her nails like dirt. At a glance she looked like a vagrant or a madwoman, and yet her expression was grave and her gaze unfathomably deep.
“Might I address you as ‘Elder’?”
The Dokkaebi dwelling in Shin Jeong-ah's body answered with an expressionless face.
“Speak to me as you please, Kim Seobang.”
It was a voice nothing like Shin Jeong-ah's — a low rasp that scraped the throat raw. The sensation was uncanny. People said shamans were those who drew close to the gods, and that by receiving his Momjusin he had stepped into a shaman's domain, but who could possibly have foreseen this: driving down a mountain road with a Dokkaebi riding shotgun?
Kang Hyeong-seok let out a breath heavy with tension, then opened his mouth.
“Forgive me for asking a favor the very moment I welcome you.”
Dokkaebi understood propriety. Treat one generously, and it repaid you in kind. And there was only one thing Kang Hyeong-seok wanted in return.
“There is a woman suffering at the hands of a wicked Dokkaebi. Subdue that Dokkaebi, I beg you, and save the woman who suffers though she is innocent.”
His voice was so grave and earnest that the air inside the car grew heavy with it.
Then the Dokkaebi said something he did not expect.
“There's no need for all that ceremony. I knew your Momjusin back when he was still alive — so you, Kim Seobang, the vessel that holds him, are as good as an old friend of mine.”
Clunk-rattle! The car bounded over another speed bump and lurched as violently as Kang Hyeong-seok's heart.
“...You knew my Momjusin?”
“You didn't know?”
“He never showed me a name. Or a face.”
“Pwahahahaha!”
Roaring laughter burst out of it — something the Shin Jeong-ah he knew would never once have let loose.
“What manner of being was he?”
“He's watching me right now. Telling me not to say.”
At that moment Kang Hyeong-seok felt the gaze too. Someone inside the car was most certainly watching him. But there was nothing chilling or uncanny in it. It was a warm gaze — the look of one quietly proud of how far this man had come.
“Someday your Momju will tell you himself. Until then, think of him simply as a great god.”
Kang Hyeong-seok smiled bitterly and tilted his head.
“I couldn't say. Just how great he might be.”
“Even as a human, he was already close to being a god.”
The Dokkaebi smiled with its eyes alone, as if to say that was the last it would give. Kang Hyeong-seok answered with much the same smile.
“Strange — that's all anyone ever tells me.”
“Nothing else you're curious about?” The tone implied that any other question would be answered freely.
Kang Hyeong-seok kept the corners of his mouth lifted as he watched the road — then slowly let the humor drain from his face.
“What is that Dokkaebi, exactly?”
He wanted to know where it came from. There is no grave without its story, and no Dokkaebi without substance. They said old things became Dokkaebi — or old things stained with blood. What on earth could this one's true form be, that it had become a Dokkaebi which tormented people? What history did it carry, that it had become a devil?
“Long ago, when a great famine swept this land, many a Kim Seobang died.”
The voice was calm, like someone tracing the shape of an old memory, and it drew Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes to it before the Dokkaebi went on.
“You could find corpses wherever you looked. A plague broke out on top of the famine, and the dogs and rats that gnawed the dead spread the sickness even further.”
The Dokkaebi seemed to be speaking of the Gyeongshin Famine — the Gyeongsul year, 1670, and the Sinhae year, 1671. All Kang Hyeong-seok knew was that a lean year of record proportions, along with plague and swarms of crop-devouring insects, had left the land strewn with those who starved and those who died of disease.
“Those who caught the plague and those who died of it were herded into a cave far from the villages. Among them was a Kim Seobang who made masks — and him they threw into that cave alive.”
“...You're saying that man became the Dokkaebi?”
A Dokkaebi, by its nature, was an old object that had transformed with time. That was why he had never once heard of a person becoming one.
“They bound his hands and feet so that the one still clinging to life could never crawl free of the cave.”
“......”
“That cloth became the Dokkaebi.”
At last, every question dissolved. The face like a mask. The nature like a demon's. The appetite for human suffering.
“If it hadn't become a Dokkaebi, it would have become something else entirely.”
It was cloth steeped in the resentment of a sick man forsaken by his own people, left to die among corpses. Had it not become a Dokkaebi, might it not have turned into something far more terrible still?
It was a Dokkaebi with a story weighty enough for pity — and yet Kang Hyeong-seok felt none.
“There is one more thing I must ask of you.”
Turning the wheel through the curve, he continued in a voice gone heavy.
“Please destroy that Dokkaebi.”
That Dokkaebi had no right to exist. Even sealed away, it would break loose one day — and when it did, the innocent would suffer all over again.
“So you're asking a Dokkaebi to destroy a Dokkaebi, Kim Seobang.”
Kang Hyeong-seok spared a brief glance for the Dokkaebi's profile, then nodded without a shred of hesitation.
“Yes.”
Dokkaebi were capricious beings. Even one that had agreed to help him might turn and threaten him instead. Yet there had been no hesitation in his answer — and that, more than anything, pleased the Dokkaebi.
“Then hurry, Kim Seobang.”
The Dokkaebi moved its gaze from him to the darkness that swallowed the road ahead.
“The one who suffered is on his knees before the thing that made him suffer. We must save him.”
Kang Hyeong-seok pressed his lips tight and squeezed the wheel. Then he bore down harder still on the accelerator — toward the village where Park Sang-cheol waited.
Wrrrrooooooom!
They said a shaman was the thread that bound humans to gods. To bind Park Sang-cheol to the Dokkaebi, Kang Hyeong-seok drove with everything he had — and at some point the moon slid free of the clouds, and as if in answer to him, its soft light began to silver the road.
Screeeeeech. The shed door that had been shut fast swung open.
The Geumjul rope that had sealed it lay sprawled across the dirt floor, and Park Sang-cheol sat slumped where he was.
“Ah... aah.”
Along with the rancid air that had gone stagnant inside, the things within the shed revealed themselves. His daughter — and the Dokkaebi. The Dokkaebi that had taken his daughter's body. The sight of it looking down at Park Sang-cheol through bloodshot eyes was nothing human. A deep madness, the very mark of a possession victim, hung over it, making it seem like something that had merely put on the shape of a person. And that was what tormented Park Sang-cheol so — what terrified him most of all.
Scrape.
Park Sang-cheol dropped to his knees and pressed his palms together toward the Dokkaebi.
“Spare her, I beg you... spare her, pleeease.”
Weeping, he bowed his head to the floor and rubbed his palms together. Blood poured from the wounds the Geumjul had scraped open, but he had no room left in him to feel the pain.
“I was wrong! I've committed a sin worth dying for, I know it — so please, please, just spare my daughter!”
All his grief and desperation poured out as Park Sang-cheol wailed. And still the Dokkaebi did not stir, while the silence pressing in around them tightened like a noose around his breath.
“Three years of torment — surely that's enough! If there's a penalty to be paid, I'll pay it. Me — I'll pay all of it! Just let my daughter go, please!”
Clear fluid dripping from his mouth, his nose, his eyes, Park Sang-cheol rubbed his hands together as if his life depended on it.
He knew how wretched he looked. Even so, he could not stop begging. For the sake of their children, there was nothing parents would not do.
“If you want my hands, take them! If you want my feet, they're yours! My eyes too! My life — I'll give you everything I have!”
Having wrung the cry from the very bottom of his throat, Park Sang-cheol curled in on himself like something shriveling.
“...Please let my daughter go.”
It was a small, crawling voice. But of every word he had ever spoken in his life, it carried the deepest truth of all.
“UhhEEEAAAGH! AAAARGH! Please!”
As Park Sang-cheol, despairing before the silent Dokkaebi, gave way to open wailing, its lips finally moved.
“Mortal.”
Park Sang-cheol's head snapped up and he stared at the Dokkaebi. It gazed back at him through eyes burning like fire, one hand pointing at a single spot.
The rusted sickle. The very one it had threatened Kang Hyeong-seok with.
“Don't end this with words.”
Borrowing the daughter's mouth, the Dokkaebi told the father to die.
Park Sang-cheol looked at it, face trembling. Then, his features hardening with resolve, he staggered upright. His daughter's life or his own — there was nothing to weigh.
Thk.
Desperate eyes fixed on the Dokkaebi, Park Sang-cheol set the blade against his own throat. He made to drag it across in a sawing motion — but the Dokkaebi shook its head.
“Don't go gently.”
For as long as its anger burned — until that fury cooled in blood. The Dokkaebi commanded Park Sang-cheol to die slowly.
Gasping for breath, Park Sang-cheol held the Dokkaebi's gaze as he lowered the sickle to his knee.
“Just let my daughter go!”
He raised the sickle high and, without a moment's hesitation, drove it into his own knee.
Crack! Crunch-crunch!
“Nnnnnghh!”
In an instant blood soaked through his trousers and stained the ground red. But Park Sang-cheol wrenched the blade, buried to the bone, back out of his leg — and lifted it again to strike his knee a second time.
And that was when it came.
Screeeeeech!
From beyond the yard, where not a single sound had stirred until now, came the shriek of brakes. Park Sang-cheol's head whipped around, and the Dokkaebi turned to the same place.
Click. Twice came the sound of car doors opening — and a moment later, Kang Hyeong-seok and Shin Jeong-ah stood at the front of the yard.
“Mr. Park Sang-cheol!”
At Kang Hyeong-seok's voice, Park Sang-cheol collapsed where he was. Strangely, the moment he laid eyes on the man, every ounce of strength drained out of him — he could not so much as twitch a finger.
“Don't move! It's over now — it's all over!”
Park Sang-cheol lifted his bloodless, bluish face to look at him, and Kang Hyeong-seok pointed toward Shin Jeong-ah.
“I've brought the Great Dokkaebi! It's — it's all right now! For you, Mr. Park, and for your daughter too!”
Park Sang-cheol could not make sense of the words. Even so, he could feel it somehow — the end of this calamity was finally drawing near. He hauled in one enormous breath and, wringing out the last of his strength, screamed:
“Save our daughter! Please, Master Exorcist!”
The plea reached the Great Dokkaebi as well. Kang Hyeong-seok looked to the Dokkaebi lodged within Shin Jeong-ah — and it began walking toward the daughter, its face a blank.
Wararang! Kang Hyeong-seok shook the sacred shaman bells.
“The North is Gamjungnyeon — call forth the Captain of the Rest Gate who guards the Gan quarter — let Gabja, Byeongja, Muja, Gyeongja, Imja assemble — let Jaoja take the left formation — call forth the Captain of the Rest Gate who guards the Gan quarter, close the gate and raise the formation — and with the Rest Sentinel, stand the gate in strict watch.”
Chanting the sutra felt different this time. It was the sensation of his Momjusin sunk deeper within him than ever before, and the sacred verse poured out carrying far greater force for it.
“The Gan quarter between Chuk and In is Gansangnyeon — call forth the Captain of the Life Gate who guards the Gan quarter — let Eulchuk, Jeongchuk, Gichuk, Sinchuk, Gyechuk assemble — let Chuk-oja take the left formation.”
Wararang! Warararang! Wararararang!
Ringing the sacred shaman bells, Kang Hyeong-seok advanced on the Dokkaebi. The thing that had tormented the shaman glared back at him through bloodshot eyes.
“Mortal... how dare you—”
All the Dokkaebi could do was bare its teeth in savagery. It could not flee. It could not even break the possession.
“Call forth the Captain of the Harm Gate who guards the Jin quarter — close the gate and raise the formation — and with the Harm Sentinel, stand the gate in strict watch.”
It was the Eight Gates Formation Sutra flowing from Kang Hyeong-seok's lips — a sacred verse built to cage what is evil.
With the Dokkaebi held fast, Kang Hyeong-seok kept purifying the air around them with his bells, pouring strength into the Great Dokkaebi all the while.
This is my role.
To bind god and human together, and offer prayers on their behalf. To stop the guiltless from suffering.
Warararararang!
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at Park Sang-cheol's face and ground his molars together until his lips thinned to a line. Then he raised his head and watched the Great Dokkaebi close the distance to the wicked one.
The Great Dokkaebi's hand, spread wide like a net —
Thk.
— settled over the face of the shaman the wicked Dokkaebi had claimed.