The Slain God
The headlines were old ones, dating back years — accounts of incidents from the surrounding area, every one of them dated to before the elephant statue had been put up.
Reading the articles on his phone, Kang Hyeong-seok could understand exactly why the residents had been so afraid. 'The coincidences are repeating themselves.'
The incidents shared nothing in common. And yet, just as coincidence repeated often enough hardens into inevitability, this region had seen an extraordinary number of strange events.
The incidents had stopped after the elephant statue appeared. Now that the statue lay broken, though, it was possible to read them as having simply resumed — Professor Jang Jun's death might not be the end at all, but the beginning.
He swallowed drily and beat back his fatigue with a can of coffee from the convenience store. 'What a mess. In every way there is.'
However he turned it over, this did not feel like a problem that belonged to the real world. The surest cure for the anxiety was to solve the case — and for that, nothing beat seeing it with his own two eyes.
Vrrrm! With the barn where the mass die-off had occurred set as his destination, Kang Hyeong-seok drove.
He drove a long while, past two villages and deeper and deeper into the hills. When his phone finally announced that he had arrived, he took it with him and stepped out of the car.
Crunch. Crunch. There didn't seem to be so much as a house nearby. A chill hung over the place, like the one that settles over you walking into a house where someone died, and though the sun was up it had been devoured by gray clouds, leaving everything dim and colorless.
Creak. Clambering over the wooden fence and into the barn, Kang Hyeong-seok let his eyes drift slowly across his surroundings. The floor was thick with dust and fallen leaves, and, of course, there were no animals to be seen.
No — there was one. But it was nothing more than the carcass of some small beast, nothing left of it but bone; hardly evidence of the livestock this barn had once held.
Crunch. Crunch. He pressed deeper inside, then stopped short, struck by a sudden wrongness — and slowly turned his head toward the place where a presence seemed to gather.
There stood one of the barn's pillars. 'Claw marks...?'
Brow furrowed, Kang Hyeong-seok crunched across the leaves and dust toward it. His eyes had not been playing tricks. Time had dulled the marks, but scratches like a cat's claws would leave were still plainly visible — at right around his own eye level, no less.
Skritch. He raked a fingernail across one of the gouges, then pulled out his phone. This had been a pig barn; marks like these, at that height, did not simply happen. It was clearly nothing he could afford to ignore, and he was just raising the phone to photograph it—
"Who's there?"
A voice that sounded to be a man in his sixties whipped in from outside the barn. Kang Hyeong-seok lowered the phone and turned to see a human silhouette beyond the cracked, fogged window.
"Hey! What are you doing in there?"
A person. Only then did Kang Hyeong-seok let out a breath and slide the phone into his pocket. "Just passing through."
"Don't go in there. Come out. Now."
Fair enough — it was private property. Kang Hyeong-seok emerged from the barn looking sheepish, and found a man in a fluorescent hiking suit scowling at him.
"What's a young fella going in there for? Turn around and go home. Do you have any idea where you are?"
"No, sir, I thought it was abandoned, so I only stepped inside for a moment."
"Not from around here, huh? Must be why. On your way now."
"Excuse me — do you happen to know where I could reach the owner of this place?"
Sharp wariness flared across the man's face. So Kang Hyeong-seok did his best to radiate harmlessness. "Someone I know is thinking of moving out this way. I just wanted to be sure we could actually get in touch with the owner, that's all."
It wasn't entirely a lie. When Kim Jae-sik had gone to look at Professor Jang Jun's house, after all, he had grumbled, 'When exactly am I supposed to move out to a place like this?'
"The owner, well..."
"You don't know, then?"
"No, I... look. I'd tell whoever it is to move somewhere other than here."
"It's just so quiet and out of the way around here. If you don't know, I'll go ask further in myself."
The moment Kang Hyeong-seok ducked his head to take his leave—
"He passed away. Years back."
"I'm sorry?"
"Passed away, I said. So quit poking around a place like this and go look somewhere else."
A silent lament slipped through the thin gap between Kang Hyeong-seok's lips. So it was just as he'd suspected. And then the man lifted his hiking pole and pointed it past the barn, to the far side.
"You see that tree over there? Young fellow like you might not know it, but that there's a seonangdang. Not exactly the kind of ground you'd want to build a house on."
"...A seonangdang?"
"That's what I said. Over that way — that tree with all that stuff hanging off it."
Kang Hyeong-seok told the hiker he'd take a look, then all but sprinted for it. The hiker, clearly not expecting a reaction like that, gaped after him, and the stare prickled hot between his shoulder blades. Even so, Hyeong-seok's mind was gripped fast by a single word.
'That's impossible. A seonangdang, this close?'
A seonangdang was no ordinary tree. It was a sacred tree — a shrine that sheltered a god, a signpost marking out the god's domain, a tree planted in prayer for the village's safety. That such a thing stood within sight of the barn made it all but impossible to believe that such a grisly death had occurred there.
'Did the god, enraged at having the barn raised on its ground, turn its back on this place? Is that why calamity fell upon the village?'
He could not say how much he had hoped for exactly that. If it were true, the whole affair might yet be settled with a single full-scale ritual to soothe the god's anger. But the moment he laid eyes on the seonangdang, Kang Hyeong-seok knew the hope had been hollow.
Whoooooosh. A wind heavy with moisture came gusting through, like the breath before rain. Cloths of every color hanging in thick clusters from the branches snapped and fluttered, and the heap of stones piled around the roots lay silent as corpses.
Kang Hyeong-seok's face crumpled into hollow despair. Because on the trunk there was something that had no business being there.
A ringer — an IV drip. The kind hung on trees that were dying or sick, as if to put the tree itself on a drip, swung there empty, tied on with plastic cord.
'The god is gone.' The god who should have watched over this village was not here.
And as he stood staring at the hollowed-out shrine, something else slammed into Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes — a trace of wrongness he could not miss. "Fuck. Seriously."
Spitting the curse, he strode up to the seonangdang and ran his palm over the thick, gnarled bark. The mark was old, yet it had survived vivid and clear — the same mark that scored the barn pillar. Claw gouges from an enormous beast, carved so grotesquely deep they might have severed the tree's throat.
Hand still tracing the wound, Hyeong-seok lifted his gaze up the trunk. Against the murky sky, the seonangdang's branches stood gaunt and blackened, and not an ounce of the sanctity a guardian tree should carry remained. In its place hung a strange, crawling unease.
He stared up at it for a long, long moment. Then the corner of his mouth twisted. Now, at last, he understood. The god hadn't abandoned this place.
"...It wasn't a chang-gwi."
This was sinsal — deicide. The slaying of a god. No chang-gwi, however vile a cursed spirit, could manage such a thing. Hyeong-seok's head snapped around.
Mountains, the same kind found anywhere in Korea, rose wherever his eyes landed. The tiger that dwells in the mountains is called the Mountain Lord. Those taken by a tiger become chang-gwi — and the mountain that cradled the beast reared up all around him now, closing like a ring.
"...The tiger killed the god."
The tiger ghost — the thing the elephant statue should have been pinning down. It was roaming this village.
Damn it all. Cursing through clenched lips, Kang Hyeong-seok pulled out his car keys and broke into a desperate run.
It was early morning. The sun had risen, but the curtains were drawn and the sun itself sat caged behind cloud, and so the motel room was dark as the middle of the night.
Perhaps the shock had simply been too much for his mind to carry. Long past his usual hour to wake, Kim Jae-sik lay in bed, sunk in sleep as deep as death. Or perhaps he simply did not want to wake. It was that hard to endure — the fact that Professor Jang Jun, his dear old friend, was gone.
And then—
"...Pro... fessor... Kim..."
A voice barely holding on, as though it would sever at any moment. Kim Jae-sik's eyelids twitched, but he could not drag himself up, and the voice came again. "...It's me. Open... the door... for me."
Kim Jae-sik forced his gummed-shut eyes open. He had only just torn free of sleep, and his head was still half underwater — and so he registered nothing strange in a voice drifting in from outside the window. Nor in the fact that the voice was not the least bit unfamiliar.
"Pro... fessor Kim."
"Mmh... uhhh..."
"Open... the door."
Adrift between dream and waking, Kim Jae-sik pushed himself up in bed. Then, on arms and legs inexplicably heavy, he stood fully and shuffled toward the window like a zombie. "Professor Jang — what is it?"
"Open... the window."
Behind the light-blocking curtain, the voice belonged to Jang Jun. Kim Jae-sik, who had forgotten even that the man was dead, took hold of the curtain. And the moment he drew it slowly back—
"AAAAGH!"
He screamed and threw himself backward, went down hard on his backside, eyes bulging fit to burst. Sleep had been blasted out of him completely, and still he could not have sworn that what stood before him was reality and not a dream.
"Pro... fessor Kim." Jang Jun was behind the window. Nothing of him but the face, floating in midair — blood streaming from the empty sockets where his eyes had been — clinging to something vast and jet-black.
"Open... the window... for me."
Jang Jun had no jaw. Which meant the voice was coming from something else — something joined to him. Kim Jae-sik's eyes crawled slowly upward toward it.
It hung directly above Jang Jun. Eyes a brassy yellow, spilling a deep and dreadful light; a face blotched and mottled; fangs packed tight behind its lips. The thing that held Jang Jun clamped in its jaws was warped out of all true shape, like something stepped out of an old folk painting — and yet Kim Jae-sik could see straight through to what it was.
"A... a tiger."
Among the folk paintings — the minhwa — there is one where a magpie and a tiger are painted together. Unmistakably, an enormous thing wearing that very tiger's shape was glaring in at Kim Jae-sik through the window.
"Pro... fessor Kim... open the door..."
It spoke through Jang Jun's mouth, caught in its jaw. But when Kim Jae-sik showed no reaction at all, it loosed a low growl in its throat — and then, from beneath its arm, something unnatural began to reach out.
A human arm, painted over with blood.
Skreek. Skreek. Watching the hand rake its claws down the glass, Kim Jae-sik gulped air in ragged bursts. And even as he watched, the fingers kept wriggling closer, inch by inch, toward the window frame.