Part 4. What Must Not Exist (1)
A petty ghost had latched onto Shin Jeong-a.
It was proof that her energy had weakened and that a foul thing had worked on her.
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at her without a word, then turned toward the espresso machine.
"You smoke, don't you?"
"Huh?"
"I saw a cigarette pack while we were sorting yesterday. Shall I show you where the smoking area is?"
"Oh, sure."
There is no smoker who refuses a smoking area.
POUR.
He made an americano and handed the coffee to Shin Jeong-a.
"And you?"
"I have some I made this morning. Go on ahead. I'll bring it."
Having sent her out of the pantry, Kang Hyeong-seok returned to his own desk and opened a drawer.
'There it is.'
The container he kept salt in.
Salt has the effect of driving off petty ghosts.
So Kang Hyeong-seok, long tormented by them, always kept a salt container close at hand.
CLATTER.
He took the salt container and his tumbler and went up to the roof with Shin Jeong-a.
Then he drank his coffee and watched her put a cigarette in her mouth.
More precisely, he stared at the old woman still strangling her neck.
"Manager, one moment."
"Hm?"
"There's something on your shoulder. Shall I get it off?"
"No, it's fine. I'll......."
With the cigarette in her mouth, Shin Jeong-a moved to bring her hand over her shoulder.
"It's a bug."
But at his words her hand stopped short, and she sent him an urgent look asking for help.
"It's big. Don't move."
"Q-quick. Do something."
CLICK.
He opened the container in his pocket and brushed off her shoulder with salt-dusted fingers.
"That's it."
"D-did it fall off?"
"Yes."
As Kang Hyeong-seok shook the remaining salt from his fingers, Shin Jeong-a caught her breath, her face gone ashen.
This person was quite seriously afraid of bugs.
"Ah, ugh."
"You must really hate bugs."
"Anything with a lot of legs is out of the question for me."
Whether from relief or from thinking a bug had been on her, Shin Jeong-a touched her shoulder and then narrowed the space between her brows.
It would seem strange to her.
Since the stifling weight and the fatigue would suddenly feel lessened.
Kang Hyeong-seok spoke carefully to her as she lit her cigarette.
"That nightmare you said you had last night. What was it?"
"Just a strange nightmare. Nothing to worry about."
"Was it a nightmare with a ghost in it?"
It was then.
About to draw on the filter, Shin Jeong-a looked at him with widened eyes.
"Hyeong-seok, do you believe in that sort of thing?"
"I majored in folklore studies."
"Folklore studies? Do we even have a department like that in this country?"
It was a question he heard often, and Kang Hyeong-seok nodded with a bitter smile on his face.
"I came across shamanism and superstition along the way, so I developed a bit of an interest. I'm asking just in case."
People divide broadly into two kinds.
Those who believe in shamanism and those who do not.
To those who do not, it is absurd superstition, a culture that must be stamped out; to those who do, shamanism is science and religion.
As Kang Hyeong-seok saw it, Shin Jeong-a belonged to the believing side.
"That's surprising. You don't look the type."
Shin Jeong-a muttered it to herself, tilted her head to the side, and spoke.
"Maybe it was because of what you said yesterday, but I dreamed I saw a ghost."
"What kind of ghost was it?"
Shin Jeong-a smoked in silence for a moment.
It was a ghost she did not want to picture again.
But he had helped her yesterday, so it was hard to ignore the question.
"It was crawling around on the ceiling. Nothing below the knees."
"...Is that so?"
"Why is your face so serious? It was only a dream."
Kang Hyeong-seok drank from his tumbler in silence.
Whether it was a dream or not mattered little.
She had seen a ghost, and she had turned up with a petty ghost attached to her.
Shin Jeong-a had been affected by a ghost.
That ghost was probably the being the shaman's bells had told him about.
"I happen to know a secret remedy."
Sure enough, she must have frequented a shrine house, because the word remedy changed her eyes at once.
"How do you know about that?"
"I told you. I know a bit of this and that."
Kang Hyeong-seok sipped his coffee deliberately as he went on.
"On your way home after work, buy red beans."
So his words passing on the remedy came across like everyday conversation.
"If you boil the red beans in a pot until you go to bed, it will help."
"Boil red beans?"
"Yes. It will be considerably better. If you want to go a step further, sprinkle salt along all four sides of the small room so that the line is never broken."
Red beans and salt have the power to drive off unclean things.
Salt works on the floor; the steam from boiling red beans works on the space.
It was one of the secret remedies easily carried out at home.
"I was going to go get a talisman later......."
"It's Friday. If you go after work it'll be too late, and with the weekend in the way you wouldn't go until next week, and that's far too late."
Shin Jeong-a thought it over, nodded, and typed his words into her phone.
Watching her, Kang Hyeong-seok sipped the last of his coffee.
He felt he was beginning to understand.
What Lee Geum-gyeong had meant by telling him to become a shaman among people.
But it was not only because of those words.
'This doesn't feel like someone else's business.'
Not because it was Shin Jeong-a in particular, or because she was the Director's niece, but simply because he wanted to reach out a hand.
Kang Hyeong-seok knew well the pain of being tormented by ghosts.
He knew how hard it was, so he could not bring himself to look away.
"What was your phone number again, Hyeong-seok?"
"My number?"
"Sorry, but I've never done anything like this. Can I contact you if I have questions?"
"Please do."
They were in the same department anyway, so having a line of contact was for the best.
Kang Hyeong-seok took her phone, punched in his number, and pressed call.
Even so, he hoped no call would come about ghosts.
He hoped the remedy alone would settle it.
***
BUBBLE, BUBBLE, BUBBLE.
The smell of red beans boiling hard in the pot filled the house.
Shin Jeong-a turned down the heat and eyed the closed window.
She wanted to fling it open, but she felt that would weaken the effect.
BUBBLE, BUBBLE, BUBBLE.
Watching the pot where the beans boiled and gave off red water, Shin Jeong-a folded her arms.
Then she took out a vape, put it in her mouth, and sank deep into thought.
'Strange. There's definitely something about him.'
At first he had seemed like an ordinary office worker.
But now she had the feeling he was not.
'Why would he know a secret remedy......?'
Plenty of people were simply interested in shamanism.
But people who knew actual remedies were exceedingly rare.
Boil red beans, and lay down salt in an unbroken line?
How many people knew things like that?
BUBBLE, BUBBLE, BUBBLE.
Like the seething beans, Shin Jeong-a's head grew crowded.
She remembered glimpsing a strange air about Kang Hyeong-seok as he passed on the remedy.
It had truly been fleeting, but it was the particular feeling one gets from a shaman.
'Is there really something to him......?'
HISSSS.
Shin Jeong-a drew deeply on the strawberry-smoothie-scented vapor and shook her head.
It seemed like too much thinking.
SHHHHH.
Having laid a thin, long line of salt in the small room, Shin Jeong-a folded the bag and looked up at the ceiling.
Before dawn she had seen a ghost crawling across that ceiling.
It could not have been real, so she had called it a dream, though in truth she wondered whether it really was one.
SHIVER.
Recalling its shape raised gooseflesh on her.
Shin Jeong-a pulled her eyes from the ceiling, checked that the salt was laid properly, and then turned off the light and shut the door.
Praying earnestly that nothing would happen.
***
BZZZZZZ!
A phone buzzing as if begging to be answered woke Kang Hyeong-seok.
"Nnngh."
Half asleep, he picked up the phone and moved to turn off the alarm.
But it was not the alarm.
It was a call from Shin Jeong-a.
The call cut off before he could press answer, and a moment later a text arrived.
「Hyeong-seok, sorry, but please call me.」
He sat on the edge of the bed and let out a heavy sigh.
So the remedy had not worked.
Otherwise she would not be calling like this on a Saturday morning.
He cleared the sleep away entirely with a glass of cold water and called Shin Jeong-a.
CLICK.
The call connected at once, and her voice came through.
(Hyeong-seok, I know it's rude to call on a day off, but I'm just so scared.)
"Calm down, Manager."
That was after Shin Jeong-a, pouring out words in a frenzy, shut her mouth at his calm voice.
"What's happened?"
(Th-the thing is. That method you told me about yesterday.)
"Yes."
(I was tired last night, so I slept right through without waking up.)
Shin Jeong-a went on in a voice so unsteady that her expression could be drawn from it.
(But I checked the salt this morning and the shape is different from yesterday.)
"...Haah."
(Do you know something? This is strange, right? Isn't it?)
"You're at home now, aren't you?"
(Yes.)
She did not say it, but he could feel in her voice how badly she wanted him to come.
Kang Hyeong-seok closed his eyes, opened them, and looked at the dots on his palm.
The three dots were the precept marks that had appeared when he gripped the shaman's bells.
Do what is right.
At the meaning the precept marks conveyed, Kang Hyeong-seok pressed his lips firmly shut, then opened them.
"I'll come."
(...Really?)
"Yes. I'm leaving right now, so it will take about twenty minutes."
(Okay. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, and thank you.)
"Wait outside the house."
He hung up and took his car keys.
***
VROOOOM.
In the car, Kang Hyeong-seok drank the coffee in his tumbler.
It was black coffee made at home, and beside the cup holder, on the passenger seat, sat his backpack.
The backpack with the shaman's bells inside.
'I hope this is not a big case.'
A living person had been affected by something dead.
On that alone, it had already passed out of the category of a small matter.
But let him not give up hope.
'It could be the influence of her Four Pillars.'
The Shin Jeong-a he had seen clearly had a hot-tempered streak.
And she frequented a shrine house, and she had shown deep interest in ways of driving off ghosts.
People who frequent shrine houses fall broadly into two kinds.
One, to learn an uncertain future.
The other, to put an end to their suffering.
He suspected Shin Jeong-a went for both reasons.
'The Ghost Gate Malefic. The White Tiger Great Malefic.'
As he saw it, those were the malefics lodged in her Four Pillars.
Neither was a good malefic.
When those two sat together in particular, a person could suddenly be affected by ghosts, exactly as she had been.
Kang Hyeong-seok let out a heavy sigh between his teeth and parked near Shin Jeong-a's house.
Not knowing his car, Shin Jeong-a was looking around the alley with an anxious face.
CLICK.
"Manager."
"Hyeong-seok!"
The moment she saw him get out with the backpack, Shin Jeong-a let out a breath of relief.
It was always like this.
Suffering connected to ghosts was the kind that was hard to have understood by anyone, and hard even to ask help for.
To Shin Jeong-a, caught in such a thing, his arrival was as welcome as spotting a rescue worker in the middle of a fire.
"What happened to the salt?"
Shin Jeong-a showed him a photo she had taken with her phone.
"I-I laid it in a straight line, right? But the salt ended up like this."
The salt in the photo was scattered.
Exactly as if a wind had blown out of the wall and pushed it aside.
It was a wall away from the window, with the rack installed against it, so by common sense such a thing could not occur.
"Let's go in together."
"I-inside?"
"Whatever you decide to do later, it has to be dealt with, doesn't it?"
Shin Jeong-a flinched, then nodded with a hardened face.
It meant that if it came to it, she might have to move out.
TRAMP, TRAMP.
Kang Hyeong-seok walked along with Shin Jeong-a.
It was a Saturday morning walk into a quiet house.
And yet not a speck of calm or ease could be felt, only a strong sense of unease.
With Shin Jeong-a swallowing dry and watching, Kang Hyeong-seok took hold of the front door.
CREEEEAK.
And when he slowly opened it,
JANGLE-JANGLE, JANGLE-JANGLE, JANGLE-JANGLE.
the shaman's bells inside the backpack began to ring, as though warning of ill omen.