The Mountain Lord
Creeeak. Creee-eak.
The swollen old window began to grind open with something like a scream. Kim Jae-sik's face had drained to a ghastly blue, his hands and feet frozen where he sat. Terror bloomed in his bulging eyes.
His mind knew he had to run. But his body had locked up solid and refused to obey. He had looked into the tiger's eyes — and those flickering pupils held a strange power that made the very thought of escape impossible.
Creeeeeeak! The window swung wide open, and just as Kim Jae-sik's teeth began clacking together, the tiger started hauling itself inside like a beast vaulting a courtyard wall.
But the tiger's paws stopped short. Of the salt and blood Kang Hyeong-seok had scattered there.
—Grrrrrrrr.
Its throat rumbling with displeasure, the thing tried to borrow the hands of a Chang-gwi to sweep the salt away. But salt holds the power to purify the unclean — and there was something that barred evil even more forcefully than salt. A shaman's blood. Kang Hyeong-seok's blood, drawn with the single-minded wish to protect Kim Jae-sik, was holding the tiger back like a talisman.
"Uu, uuuuuuh!"
Kim Jae-sik barely pushed himself upright and stumbled toward the door.
—GRRRRRRRR!
At the tiger's roar the strength ran out of his legs, and he crumpled back to the floor. And in that moment, other arms began reaching out of the tiger's body.
Smack. Smack. Smack-smack. Smack. Smack.
Blood-soaked hands crawled across the window. Dozens of them, every one a different color, a different size — all of them belonging to people the tiger had taken, and among them was Professor Jang Jun's. The more the palms slapped and groped at the glass, the faster the bloodstains spread, swallowing the window whole.
At last, the window began to squeal in its frame—
WARA-RARA-RARA-RANG!
The sound of the Mudang Bang-ul, the sacred shaman bells, rang out from beyond the glass. It was Kang Hyeong-seok — he had sprinted over in a frenzy and was shaking the bells the instant he leapt out of his car. Wara-rang! Wara-rara-rang!
It was morning, outside the motel. Passersby stole glances at him as though he were some strange figure, then hastily turned their heads away, giving him a wide berth as they passed. Through it all, Hyeong-seok shook the shaman bells for his life, gazing up at the tiger.
He would not dare call that thing a mere evil spirit. It was something close to a god. Seen through his Yeongan, the tiger looked like that certain something which could kill even gods.
Wara-rara-rang! And so he had no thought whatsoever of subduing it. He only wanted to remind it — that now was not the hour for it to roam.
Hyeong-seok rang the bells with every ounce of earnest pleading in him, and for a long while the tiger stared back with those blazing yellow eyes. Then its form blurred, dissolved into wind, and was gone.
"Hoooooh!" Hyeong-seok expelled the breath that had pooled in his lungs. He wiped the sweat from his face, looked up at the window one last time, tucked the Mudang Bang-ul into his bag, and made for the motel.
Knock, knock.
He rapped, then opened the door wearing the calmest expression he could manage.
"Professor?"
Kim Jae-sik, slumped on the floor, looked up at Hyeong-seok with a face half drained of sense.
"Hye-Hyeong-seok."
"What's wrong, Professor? Did something happen?"
He spoke as though soothing a startled animal, then helped the man up and eased him onto the bed. That was when it happened. Kim Jae-sik seized his forearm and rasped:
"A t-tiger. I saw a tiger."
Hyeong-seok crushed down the emotions threatening to rise across his face. The Kim Jae-sik he knew was an ordinary man. That wasn't to say he had no spiritual sense at all — for a folklore scholar to have spent decades poking through every haunted corner of the country and come away unscathed meant either uncommonly sharp instincts or a formidable guardian spirit. For even those eyes to have seen it meant the thing's presence was that overwhelming, and that it had marked Kim Jae-sik for death. It was no different from a man who had never once seen a ghost starting to suffer sleep paralysis and glimpse things that weren't there after moving into a cursed house.
"Professor, what do you mean, a tiger?" Hyeong-seok kept his voice soft to ease the man's panic, but Kim Jae-sik's eyes only tightened further.
"I saw it. I saw it, I tell you. I really saw it."
"You must be mistaken, Professor. You're under terrible strain right now."
"Professor Jang Jun saw it too. I really did see it, Hyeong-seok." Kim Jae-sik's grip closed around his arm even harder.
This is bad. The mere fact that he was carrying on like this was itself proof that he had been ensnared. The influence had taken hold — and the tiger could come for Kim Jae-sik at any moment. Or the Professor might go looking for it himself. The bewitched could never judge rationally; sooner or later they committed acts that defied all reason.
Watching Kim Jae-sik, who looked one breath away from insisting they hunt the tiger down together right now, Hyeong-seok spoke. "Professor, you know my story, don't you?"
Anxious as he was, Kim Jae-sik turned a frown of confusion toward him. "What story?"
"The fact that I underwent the Sin-nureum-gut — the Divine Suppression Ritual."
"...I know." Meeting the eyes of Kim Jae-sik, who murmured it like a groan, Hyeong-seok went on in a low voice. "Which is why I was always so unusually drawn to shamanism, and why I once thought about studying folklore. You remember that much, surely."
Kim Jae-sik nodded, slowly but without hesitation. His mind, pinned to the tiger until now, was gradually shifting onto Hyeong-seok.
"I know a little about phenomena like this. I won't tell you that you saw nothing. But if you keep fixating on it, Professor, it could become genuinely dangerous."
Perhaps it was the low, even cadence. Kim Jae-sik was still afraid, but life was returning to his eyes, as though he were finding his way back to himself. Swallowing a silent sigh of relief, Hyeong-seok pried the hand from his forearm and continued. "I'll go and confirm things myself. You stay here."
"Wh-what?"
This was the motel where he had seen the tiger. Being told to stay in such a place, Kim Jae-sik flinched as if seized by a fit.
"You saw the tiger — and you're still here, unharmed, aren't you?"
"B-but still... how can I..."
"It couldn't get in, Professor."
The tiger resurfacing in his memory, Kim Jae-sik turned a fearful face toward the window. The hands pressed against the glass. The force of them, as though they would shove their way through at any moment. And yet the tiger had clearly failed to enter this motel with any ease.
"If anything, this is probably the safest place you could be. So please, don't work yourself up over it."
"...Hyeong-seok."
"You said you would hold Professor Jang's funeral. For that, you can't afford to get tangled up in anything strange either."
Kim Jae-sik clenched his teeth in silence for a long while, then gave a small nod. "All right. You're right." He seemed at last to be pulling free of the tiger's terror.
Exhaling a long breath through his nose, Hyeong-seok looked at the window with its curtain still drawn back, and spoke. "Professor, do you happen to know anything about tigers?"
"Tigers...?"
"Yes."
Hyeong-seok had to hunt down the tiger ghost. For that he needed a trail to follow — and more than anything, he needed Kim Jae-sik's knowledge.
"Even the smallest detail would help. Is there anything you can give me?"
"Hold on. Hold on, Hyeong-seok." Kim Jae-sik rubbed his mouth and sank into deep thought. In that brief span he displayed a frightening intensity of focus, scratching the corner of his lip with his thumb — a habit that surfaced whenever he was trying to dredge something up. "Honestly... why does this kind of thing keep happening to me..."
His head plainly a tangle, he shook it hard, fished a bottle of water from the motel fridge, drank it down, and opened his mouth. "Yes. I do know something." Kim Jae-sik nodded, relief washing over his face.
"The Chang-gwi that come out of it — the descriptions are a striking match for the tiger I saw. Not that it was a living tiger. Damn it, how am I supposed to explain this..." Kim Jae-sik clawed at his hair, and Hyeong-seok waited patiently for the man's emotions to settle.
"Whew! Anyway — the Hojil, the old records on tigers, even mentions beings that hunt tigers down and devour them. The Biwi, the Jugu, the Bak, the Five-Colored Lion, the Jabaek, the Pyeogyeon, the Choui — creatures like that."
Every one of them a beast of legend — and beings as rarely glimpsed as the tiger ghost itself. Perhaps they had once existed, only to vanish after tigers went extinct on the Korean Peninsula.
"Is there nothing else?"
Kim Jae-sik let out a thin, strained groan and rubbed his forehead. "Tigers have been called the Mountain Lord since ancient times. The Mountain God, as well. They're objects of fear — but they're also depicted as beings that test a man's courage."
Calling a few such tales to mind, Hyeong-seok nodded without a word. The settings varied, but there were plenty of stories in which a scholar who crossed paths with a tiger escaped through quick wits — or, just as often, brought the beast down instead.
"The point is, our people feared the tiger and yet regarded it as something above the common beasts. That's why they called it the Mountain Lord, the Mountain God — why they even raised buildings in its honor..." His words trailing off, Kim Jae-sik seemed struck by a sudden thought and pulled out his phone. Then, opening the web browser, he spoke quickly. "They're called Sansingak. Mountain God pavilions. One moment."
Kim Jae-sik searched for Sansingak and showed Hyeong-seok the results. The structures were smaller than he had expected — roofs of black tile, four wooden pillars painted red, doors and walls coated in a color scheme reminiscent of dancheong, the traditional temple paintwork. Raised off the ground and far too small to hold a person, they were plainly not buildings made for human use.
"Sansingak are Buddhist architecture. And here in Yeongdong, Chungbuk, there's a temple that harbors the energy of a tiger." Kim Jae-sik's words came fast and full of force; he seemed to have already arrived at his conclusion. "Banya Temple."
"Banya Temple?"
It was a large temple. But what caught the eye was the mountain behind it. A tiger. The Mountain Lord. Behind Banya Temple, the shape of a tiger with its tail flung high stood out so vividly that no deliberate hand could have recreated it. Kim Jae-sik added that it was a place where potent tiger energy had settled.
"Thank you. I'll go and see it right away."
"Hey — hold on, Hyeong-seok." Kim Jae-sik hastily grabbed him as he turned to leave. In the jostle, the Mudang Bang-ul tucked in his bag gave a soft chime, though Kim Jae-sik seemed not to hear it. Instead, his face crowded with too many thoughts, he hesitated to speak.
"Yes?"
"You... don't tell me you've received a god?"
Why would Kim Jae-sik ask such a thing? Hyeong-seok watched him in silence for a moment, then lifted the corner of his mouth in a weary smile. "Not in any formal sense."
He could not keep lying to Kim Jae-sik forever — that was the answer he gave. And a flood of emotions swept across Kim Jae-sik's face.
"You..."
"Please. Stay here, I beg you."
Bowing his head in farewell, Hyeong-seok walked straight out of the motel. Left alone, Kim Jae-sik stared at the window frame with eyes caught between shock and confusion. The curtain was drawn back, and the handprints the Chang-gwi had stamped on the glass had vanished without a trace — but one thing remained in view. Salt, scattered along the sill. The salt Kang Hyeong-seok had scattered there.