Chapter 10
The rites continued late into the night. Even after the last creatures disappeared into the sea, the people who remained didn’t leave the beach. Youths who had covered their bodies in mud, lovers and families who hadn’t met for a long time, they all sat huddled together with no thought of leaving.
Blasted by the cold wind, I was forgotten, discarded, alone by the sea. The rain picked up, and in the cold night wind, rain became snow, and snow and hail mixed, pounding my body bitterly.
I itched all over, as though my skin was teeming with bugs.
Having lost everything, there was no need for me to temper the urge to scratch.
My nails tore into my skin. I continued to scrape at patches raw and bleeding.
My eyes itched unbearably. Then, something occurred to me.
I raised my head to look out at the rocky islet towering from the sea.
Beyond the beach heaped with trash and fish corpses, beyond the undulating sea gloopy as rice porridge, on the rocky mountain that had reared its dismal head like a huge beast, there rose a dark shadow.
I saw it clearly now. Some vast body was on that island, twitching, lumbering, alive.
With eyes that seemed to contain unfathomable depths, it was watching me. The monster.
Above its long beard, I read the message in its eyes.
“You are as insignificant as the fish carcasses scattered on that beach. An insignificant, meaningless thing, no more than a speck of dust that deluded itself into thinking it was born with meaning. Now you are going to your meaningless end, oblivious to why you were born and lived and went through agony and held onto desires and flailed in struggle. You will never exist again and will leave no trace on the world. Your life or death makes no difference. Just by encountering me today, your mind, your body will all shatter and become nothing. No different than the child you tried to save today, or the child of mine you killed.”
More than the fact that I was facing an ultimate being I couldn’t fully fathom let alone influence, my heart was frozen solid with the certainty that the vast being contained no transcendent spirituality, no sympathy or altruism, not even a vague philosophy about how the world should be.
That being would claim my life and gain nothing from it, not pleasure, not anything, with the indifference of a raging storm. With no regard for the life I lived.
The hailstones fell harder. Just then the phone in my pocket vibrated.
I took it out and stared at it for a while before I registered anything out of the ordinary.
This familiar object did not belong to me.
I had picked up this battered phone from the ground without a second thought in all the chaos, assuming it was mine.
I began looking through the contents and became engrossed in reading a plethora of official-looking documents I had never seen before, all the while being pelted with snow and rain.
I felt an unsettling presence from behind. I heard a low, dismal sound that wasn’t human. Looking up, among the snow and hail falling all around, I had been surrounded again by three of them. Monsters with gills, webbed feet, and fins.
Why are they still here? Aah, right. I guess these jerks must still have work to do. Since the enemy is still here. An enemy who has taken the life of one of their kin.
I understood. It made sense. Tonight, all human laws had crumbled in this village.
Everything was unfolding according to their laws, not mine.
But understanding and accepting were separate issues.
I shoved the phone back into my pocket, and shoulder-tackled the closest creature. As it fell, I started to run.
I fled up a narrow winding alley that climbed into the village.
On a cement stairway one of them launched itself onto me with its mouth open wide.
I looked the monster right in the eye and stabbed my knife deep into its calf.
The monster rolled on the floor clutching its leg and I continued up the steps, almost crawling.
Another monster scrambled over its colleague and ran at me, grabbing me by the ankle.
I stabbed its hand and kept running. Seems like you stinking fishlords haven’t learned how to use your limbs properly out of the water.
Well here on land we have tools too. How about that?
As I turned into another alley a different creature blocked my path.
I kicked a stone cairn that was piled up beside me and it came crashing down.
My apologies to all the wishes made by the devoted people who piled stone after stone here.
As the creature shielded its head, I turned and rolled into an empty house.
The clatter of footsteps passed by outside the door. I crouched down into a ball.
A miraculous silence settled. It couldn’t last long. I put my jacket over my head so that no light would seep out and turned on my phone.
There were a ton of messages and missed calls from Sergeant Hyunjun.
Muyoung, it seems some patients have escaped from the hospital.
Compared to what I’d been through, the message was so simple it felt completely divorced from reality.
It’s an emergency situation so I’ve requested backup.
Stay at home, or if you’re outside right now, come straight to the station. I’ll protect you.
Enemy, us, enemy, us …
I lowered my head. I gave up on thinking. Which side he was on didn’t matter. Let’s just believe he’s on my side. That would feel a bit better.
With a hunch that it would be a final farewell, I sent a message.
Take care, Hyunjun.
Muyoung? Nunim? Where are you?
I blocked Hyunjun and made a call to someone else.
It rang, but no one answered. I’d expected as much. I waited until I heard the words “Leave a message after the…” then hung up and called again and again. After a while it sounded as though someone had picked up, and then the line went dead. I called again.
I heard someone pick up again. This time, instead of hanging up, there was silence. Through the cracked phone gushed loathing as deadly as poison. It felt as though the hatred in that silence would dry up my vitality and kill me.
“Yoonhui, it’s alright if you don’t say anything, and it’s alright if you curse me, but whatever you do, don’t hang up. I’m going to send you a document. You need to open it, please don’t just delete it.”
Hailstones pounded the slate roof. I took a different phone out of my pocket.
A crab scuttled out of a cracked plastic bowl, and a mouse scratched its way into a corner.
The phone I’d found had gotten wet, and my hands were cold and damp, so it didn’t respond to my touch.
There was only one bar of signal, and the battery was running low.
I turned the phone here and there and wiped the screen with my sleeve over and over, pressing hard to get a response.
When it finally began sending documents to Yoonhui, the progress bar was still for a long time. A low sigh sounded from my own phone.
“… come to my place. I’ll hide you here,” Yoonhui said.
Please send. It’s fine if you never work again, but send, please.
“Once the night is over, the people who started all this will be rounded up. You can hide out until then. Come and shelter here.”
No.
“It’s not that…”
“… Just come. When all is said and done, the living have to live.”
The moment “sent” popped up on the other phone’s screen, that phone died. A moment later, Yoonhui ended the call. All strength drained out of me. I collapsed, almost hitting my head on the wall. It’s done. I won’t move again. If a monster comes in through that door right now, that’ll be it.
After a long time, my phone rang. I tried shaking it but the screen was dead so nothing came up.
Whatever punk removed buttons and receivers and dials from telephones surely didn’t get into heaven.
I guessed where the slider to answer a call might usually have shown up and swiped. I heard Yoonhui’s voice.
“Muyoung, what is this?”
I had picked up that scuffed phone from the floor thinking it was mine.
When I looked inside and found the documents, formatted like reports, I realized it was Woojin’s.
It seemed the frontal lobe of that enthusiastic young researcher kept functioning, even after the rest of his brain was laid waste.
Or maybe the fact that he had written so many reports in such a short time was clearer evidence that he had lost his mind.
The documents contained extensive and detailed descriptions of every scene and event he had observed in the village.
If you were to erase all the superfluous additions like “bestial” and “risen from the depths of hell,” or “unforgettably terrible,” “dread that could stop your heart,” “nightmarish,” and “evil-shadowed,” the content was pretty close to the truth.
Fear had grabbed that man by the hair and shaken until everything was mixed up.
In every sentence that fear raged like a storm of hatred toward the entire village.
Every document ended with such stupid sentiments as “strengthening of quarantine is required,” “if they cannot be contained, the army should be deployed to suppress them, or else supplies cut off to induce starvation,” “control of media necessary.” Judging by his call history, this man with a tiny lump for a liver had experience in seriously influential roles including, astoundingly, as an aide to a national assembly member.
Based on the fact that he hadn’t used a fake business card, this man was, at the very least, someone with connections that reached into the upper echelons of state power.
“Yoonhui, make sure that man, Woojin, doesn’t get out of this village.
” I was shocked by my own words, but I went on.
“That man’s story mustn’t get out. Our version has to get to the outside first. Use the excuse of treating his mind and body to hold him up somewhere.
If needed, restrain him by force. I have his phone, so he won’t be able to contact anyone. ”
I finished what I had to say and curled up, clutching my head.
Haven’t I done enough now? God damn it, whatever higher power is out there, isn’t this enough?
Haven’t I hung onto my mind longer than could ever be demanded?
Please let me go, set me free. If I’ve clung onto my mind as it rampaged as ferociously as a wild beast for this long, surely God, or something, should come down and reward me?
My wet clothes stuck fast to my skin and the cold was seeping into my bones.
I shouldn’t have given Hyun up. Even if we were thrown into the sea together, I should have stuck by her until the end.
If I’d done that, the last straw of my spirit would have remained intact at least. I wouldn’t have to be feeling this emptiness.
A while later, I woke to my phone ringing again.
“That man…”
“I spread the word to catch him,” Yoonhui cut me off. “Anyone looking that clean-cut in this village will stick out anywhere, so he’ll be caught in no time.”
I had nothing more to say.
“Muyoung, come to my place.” She spoke with a much kinder tone than before. “Oh no, our home would be a bit scary, wouldn’t it? I’ll go to you. If I’m beside you, there’s no way you’ll be hurt. I’ll protect you, just for tonight. I can do that much.”
I shook my head. I burst into tears and couldn’t speak properly.
“Yoonhui, can … please, let me … use your boat.”
“Muyoung, this isn’t a day when we can launch the boat. And it’s no good trying to escape by sea. The coast guard patrol near the village, and…”
“It’s not about escaping. You know why.”
Yoonhui was silent.
“Please, let me go … I beg you…”
I’d descended into such madness, who could possibly understand me? But, perhaps, each of us in our respective madness could begin to comprehend the other.
After a long silence, Yoonhui responded, “Come to the dock at Haewon Port.”
I waited until I heard there was no one around, then stepped out. Hailstones slid off the slate roof like small beads, and fell on the stone steps, piling up in heaps at the corners. The dandelions and new shoots that had only just sprouted from between the rocks were wilting in the gusting cold.
I checked my surroundings with eyes blurred with tears.
The lighthouse on the mountainside was silently illuminating the village, as though all was well, as though it had seen nothing.
Haewon Village after nightfall could be distinguished from the outside by the lights.
On the other side of the mountain, neon signs streamed like stars, while this side of the mountain was shrouded in gloom.
In the middle of it all I noticed a pack of people coursing someone, like hounds after a hare.
Out at the very front, a man was sprinting for his life.
Even in the darkness, Ha Woojin’s sleek white shirt and shiny gray suit stood out.
I wondered whether Woojin’s terror or the villagers’ loss of reason had begun the chase, but what did it matter?
Good luck, you pathetic man.