Part 8. O Soul, O Soul, O Soul (2)
An image rose fiercely in Kang Hyeong-seok's head.
It was not something his guardian god had passed to him.
It was what his folklore studies major and his years of studying shamanism had told him.
"A Bane Charm......?"
The woman was plainly thinking of a Bane Charm.
If she had actually been standing before him, he would have taken her by the collar or thrown a fist to stop her.
'So it was you who made Mr. Ha Jang-seo ill.'
A Bane Charm is a ritual implement made from a living person.
The materials are a bamboo tube and a young child.
The child is confined and starved, and when its fixation on food has grown large, a bamboo tube holding food is held out.
And when the child reaches in, that hand is severed and the spirit and the resentment are sealed into the tube along with it.
It is an implement that uses a Crown Prince Ghost, and merely possessing it grants a shaman uncanny power and efficacy.
The strongest of those powers is the ability to sicken a person to death.
SSSSSSS.
As the surroundings sank into darkness and turned toward another vision, Kang Hyeong-seok looked at the greedy woman and shook his head.
***
RUSTLE, RUSTLE.
It was late at night, but Ha Jang-seo could not sleep and was rummaging through the wardrobe.
"Dear, what are you doing?"
"We're going hiking tomorrow, aren't we."
Even as his wife grumbled from the bed, Ha Jang-seo pulled out his hiking clothes with a face full of anticipation.
"Give it up. A man in your condition."
"I wasn't the one who suggested it."
"Go to a hospital. Mountains, what mountains."
She was right, so Ha Jang-seo smiled sadly. His hands paused briefly, and then he moved them again.
"How could I refuse. A young man asks an old wrung-out fellow to walk a mountain with him."
At his voice going low, his wife could only let the corners of her eyes drop, unable to say more.
"It's a kindness. It really is. Not an easy thing in the world these days."
He had told the man he would give up farming, and out of that shame Kang Hyeong-seok had proposed a hike.
He had always been glad to see Kang Hyeong-seok, though in a corner of his mind he had put it down to the man being in sales.
So the proposal had surprised him, and moved him.
"If you're that grateful, then get your health back fast. You have to be well to keep farming, and to put in a good word with the young man's superior."
"You're right. You're right."
Ha Jang-seo smiled, gathering the sun-darkened creases of his face.
"Of course. That's how it should be."
Ha Jang-seo ran his hands over the hiking clothes he had not taken out in a long while, then shrugged off his shirt.
Skin the sun had never touched showed white.
And so did the red blotches the clothing had hidden.
The ugly red blotches, whose exact name not even a doctor at a large hospital could give, covered the whole of Ha Jang-seo's back.
Unable to bear the sight, his wife had to lower her troubled face.
***
CLATTER, CLATTER.
The changed vision began with the sound of stones giving way.
A dark mountainside, a place without a single thread of light, like the bean field where Kang Hyeong-seok stood.
CLATTER, RUMBLE-CRASH!
A pile of stones was cleared away, and with the moonlight the woman's greedy face appeared.
"Baby, Mother's here. You're hungry, aren't you?"
The girl, her hands, feet, and mouth bound, had wasted to the bone and could barely move her eyelids.
"I said Mother's here. You brat, when you see your mother you greet her."
The woman was giggling away, as though it were all so entertaining.
A Bane Charm.
An act a shaman must never commit.
And she was working it on a daughter, though no blood ran between them.
SLIIIDE.
The woman pushed a bamboo tube through the gap.
It was the length of a forearm, thick enough for a person's hand to enter.
"Mother brought you food. Food. I brought the kimchi pancake you like."
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at the hand of the woman standing outside the hollow.
However long she had honed it, a hand axe glinted blue-cold even in the moonlight.
"Come quickly and eat. There, that's it. That's it! Good girl."
The child squirmed and moved.
And worked her bound hands awkwardly into the bamboo tube.
It was then.
RUMBLE-CRASH!
The woman brought down the rest of the stones, and Kang Hyeong-seok squeezed his eyes shut.
THUNK!
"Nnnghhhhh!"
The sound of something parting, and the girl's scream forced out through a stopped mouth.
Every hair on his body stood up.
So in the end the Bane Charm had been made here.
GRIND!
Kang Hyeong-seok ground his teeth to keep from hearing the axe as it went on swinging.
CHOCK! THUD! SCHUNK! THUD! THUD!
But the sound of it, damnably, would not stop, and it stabbed at his ears.
Kang Hyeong-seok turned his trembling face toward the woman and slowly opened his eyes.
It was not the face of a person.
That woman's face was in no way the shape of a human being.
"Ehehehe! Hehehehek! Heheheh-hahaha!"
The vision vanished on the sight of her laughing like a madwoman as she sealed the bamboo tube with clean mulberry paper.
CHIRRRR, CHIRRRR!
The insect song he had not been hearing came back, and the noise of cars running on the distant road.
Above the pitch-dark bean field, Kang Hyeong-seok gasped for breath and then dry-heaved.
He had seen something foul, and his arms and legs shook.
But it did not last long.
"Haah, haah, haah!"
Kang Hyeong-seok raised his head, his eyes lit.
This was no time for that.
The place where the Bane Charm had been made was here, this bean field.
And Ha Jang-seo had said his health turned after he bought this land.
"I have to find it."
He had to find the Bane Charm in this field and release the girl's soul.
TRAMP, TRAMP! TRAMP!
With the shaman's bells and the cheap lantern out in front of him, Kang Hyeong-seok began to run across the pitch-dark field.
***
"...What happened to her mother?"
Head in her hands, Namgung Min-a spoke in a low voice to the friend on the other end.
(It was long ago, so I'm not certain.......)
"Tell me anyway. I don't know any of it."
Her voice was far lower than the always-bright Namgung Min-a's.
At a voice that sagged too much to turn away from, Seo Jin-a spoke with a sigh.
(I don't know exactly either. We were so young, and everything I have is what I heard from my parents.)
"That's fine. Tell me anything."
(Her stepmother. She died, apparently.)
"...What?"
Namgung Min-a lifted her lowered head, and Seo Jin-a's voice continued.
(I heard it from my mother. The parents had some kind of phone chain, I think. Word came from her father.......)
Namgung Min-a rubbed her forehead with a face of tangled feeling.
Her friend missing, her friend's mother dead.
It was not easy for a thing to twist this badly.
Above all, what bewildered her was that she did not even know what expression to make.
(They called it a disappearance, but her mother was apparently a suspect. And after her mother died the investigation just fizzled out, they say.)
"Ah......."
(I don't know how she died, mind. It isn't the sort of thing you tell children.)
Namgung Min-a nodded with a bitter face.
***
SWISH-SWISH-SWISH! SWISH!
Kang Hyeong-seok ran across the bean field, sweeping the lantern this way and that.
"Haah, haah!"
His breath rose to his chin, and sweat gathered in the hand holding the lantern.
It was hard work, finding a Bane Charm buried in this field more than a decade ago.
But he could not stop.
There was Ha Jang-seo's health, but more than that, he had seen the girl's end with his own eyes.
Whether the Bane Charm had succeeded or failed, the girl's soul had been caged in a bamboo tube.
He was the only one who could release it.
JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE!
Shaking the bells, he opened his blanched lips.
"The Supreme Lord Lao speaks the sacred True Scripture of the Yellow Wonder. The Supreme Primordial Ultimate Great Way. The Supreme Honored Scriptures of the Thirty-Six Divisions. The Supreme Lord Lao. The Jade Emperor. The Honored God of the Earth."
He carried the scripture on with the feeling of a man begging help from every divinity of heaven and earth.
"Great Emperor Ziwei of the North Pole. Ziwei, Great Emperor Who Governs Birth. True Lord of the Left Wing. True Lord Dokgang. True Lord of the Three Offices. True Lord of the Four Sages."
It was then.
JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE!
As if to tell him where to go, the shaman's bells rang.
Running that way without hesitation, Kang Hyeong-seok gripped the lantern hard.
Why would the Bane Charm be here?
Had it failed?
Or had she been unable to bear the Bane Charm and hidden it in this field?
Either way, the end of the woman who made it would not have been a pretty one.
'She deserves a thousand chastisements!'
A shaman is one who helps people.
Such a shaman had harmed a person, so she would have taken the god's punishment, and its end would have been more brutal than he could imagine.
Let that woman's death have soothed even a little of the murdered girl's grievance.
Hoping for it earnestly, Kang Hyeong-seok pressed on in the direction the shaman's bells gave him.
SWISH! SWISH-SWISH!
The low bean stalks wound at his ankles like the soul of a girl begging to be saved.
The cold night wind coming down off the darkened mountain fell over his body.
He had to find it.
He had to find it.
He had to find the soul bound in this field for more than a decade, and free it.
Only then would the calamity tangled in this field come undone, and Ha Jang-seo recover.
JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE!
The shaman's bells rang out loudly.
Kang Hyeong-seok dropped to his knees, set the bells down beside him, and pulled up the bean plants by the roots.
It was some way out from the center of the field.
THUD! THUMP!
Kang Hyeong-seok dug into soil that gave off a chill.
The origin of the alien feeling he had had from the field was certainly here.
The higher the soil piled beside him, the closer he felt to the thing itself.
Please, please, please.
It occurred to Kang Hyeong-seok to wonder what he was praying for.
Whether he wanted the Bane Charm to be here, or wanted it not to be, he could not tell himself.
If it was here, he had to face it.
He would come face to face with a Bane Charm that scatters calamity and sickens people to death.
SCRAPE!
Having come this far, what was there to hesitate over?
With that feeling Kang Hyeong-seok dug hard into the soil.
The earth, soft at first, grew steadily harder, and he turned the lantern upside down.
SCRAPE! SCRAPE! SCRAPE!
When he drove the base of the lantern down into the soil like a pick, the light flickered and went out.
Complete darkness closed around him, but he did not stop his hands.
He had been digging a long while when it happened.
JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE-JANGLE!
The shaman's bells rang violently and drove the wicked energy back.
Kang Hyeong-seok gasped, paused his hands, and then cleared the soil again.
CLUNK!
At that, his fingertips met something hard.
Smooth-surfaced and round; not a stone.
Kang Hyeong-seok took out his phone, switched on the light beside the camera, and shone it on the thing.
There lay a bamboo tube gone black on the outside.
"Hoo, hoo, hoo."
Kang Hyeong-seok, panting, clenched his back teeth and held his breath.
Then, with careful movements, he drew the tube out of the soil where it was packed fast.
The mouth the woman had sealed with mulberry paper was still as it had been.
"...Seventy years of human life has been rare since of old; and the span of eighty is but a passing play."
Reciting the Gateway Scripture of the Dead, which releases and comforts the dead, Kang Hyeong-seok moved his hand to the paper.
"Soul scattered and spirit fled, how pitiful; moon pale and wind clear, how desolate. Pitiful. O vengeful soul, whom will you follow, on whom will you lean?"
To be called forth to the far cliffs, is that not a wind-blown soul?
The blossoms that fall in the east wind bloom again next spring.
The green grass of the prince's fragrant fields is green year upon year.
SWISH.
Kang Hyeong-seok looked up at the moon that looked down on him.
Deep in his eyes was the wish that it would soothe and take in the Crown Prince Ghost inside this bamboo tube.
"The bright moon of the fifteenth night fills and wanes again."
Kang Hyeong-seok took hold of the mulberry paper sealing the tube.
"Heaven and earth are but an inn and life a mayfly; a human span that does not reach a hundred years."
Riding upon those white clouds, arrived at the realm of the Emperor.
Returned to the Paradise Realm, reborn into the human world.
CLENCH!
Squeezing his eyes shut hard enough to make a sound, Kang Hyeong-seok tore the paper away.