Chapter 12
Ha Woojin
PhD in Biochemistry, [REDACTE D] University
Researcher, Korea Contagious Diseases Society
Budget Consultant, National Treasury Support Initiative for East Sea Disease Sufferers
Director, Association of Intellectuals for Protecting Humankind from Ancient Species
[REDACTED]
Your Excellency the President,
After I made a narrow escape from Haewon Village, I ran to the nearest police station.
At the station they threatened to send me to jail or a psychiatric hospital.
Who could blame them? Later, when I examined the photograph they took at the station to confirm my identity, I saw how fearsome I had looked.
I couldn’t even recognize myself in the mirror.
My hair was disheveled and it had turned white overnight, so I looked about twenty years older than I was.
Having witnessed such abominations, my eyes had sunken into my skull, and my clothes were torn to rags.
One of my shoes was missing, but I hadn’t even noticed.
I’d made it all the way there on a bloodied foot.
I heard later that I had splayed out on the floor of the police station and screamed, foaming at the mouth, that Haewon Village must be quarantined forever, and that if it couldn’t be cut off, the residents should be wiped out with missiles.
Then I passed out, and when I came to, I took up screaming all over again.
I loudly proclaimed that I had evidence, and handed my phone over to the police officers, but it was nothing but a wet pack of cigarettes.
Clearly the cultists must have stolen my phone and had it destroyed.
But I saw it all, with my own eyes. Those ghastly monsters, the sinister rites where the believers send human sacrifices into the sea, to worship their fearsome god from the bottom of the ocean that revealed its detestable form on the rocky islet.
After I escaped the village, I was unable to set foot outside the house for months on end.
Whenever I fell asleep, I would suffer nightmares of the monsters hunting me, and wake screaming that a devil was coming from hell to kill me.
Within those few months, I lost over forty pounds.
I am now only skin and bones, so frail that I cannot leave my bed.
I foresee that, before long, this horror will take the last of my vitality from me and I will die.
Gathering all my remaining strength, I have been submitting civil complaints to every institution that may be able to intervene.
The district office and city hall, government agencies, the courts, major media outlets.
I even contacted a whole host of popular scientists, in the hope it could make some difference.
I didn’t hear back from most of them. It seems likely that the influence of those monsters has spread throughout the government.
A few media outlets have requested an interview, but when the articles came out, most of what I told them had been sanded down or distorted.
Their articles merely say that the director of the local hospital was illegally confining and abusing the infected, and that he died at their hands before he could kill them to destroy the evidence.
By focusing on the hospital, they miss the most significant parts of what went on.
Ah, every time I think of the events of that day my heart pounds like crazy, and my hands shake so violently that it’s hard to type.
A couple of days ago I saw a newspaper article about Haewon Village.
After reading its hideous distortions I was so enraged that I rang the news desk and lodged a complaint.
How could someone with a medical degree utter such ludicrous statements?
In the article, it said that East Sea Disease does indeed cause skeletal abnormalities, facial deformity, and the excretion of a strong odor, but it does not threaten human life.
It claimed that aside from needing moisture and cool temperatures, the villagers are very healthy.
It said that transmission didn’t occur between humans, but rather that infection arises from unidentified bacteria buried deep underground that was brought to the surface when water levels changed.
They had statistics that purported to show that, after a fire occurred on that islet when a sailor crashed a boat into it, the geothermal heat subsided, and there have been no new occurrences of the illness since.
Accordingly, it called for the quarantine of Haewon Village to be lifted and the villagers who have been through such hardships to be accepted back into our society.
Your Excellency, please believe what I must tell you.
This can never be allowed to happen. The volcanic eruption and the flood brought to the surface an otherworldly species that had been living in the deepest depths of the sea.
The people in that village lived alongside them, had aberrant intercourse with them, rubbed flesh against inhuman flesh.
Now they are giving birth to young that will become a new species.
The monsters have taken advantage of East Sea Disease to replace dead villagers.
They have gone into their families and are living among them.
If the quarantine is lifted, their filthy genes will be mixed into the blood of our human race like poison.
Their monster DNA will mix with ours like microplastics or synthetic chemical compounds and circulate within humanity for eternity.
Imagine a distant future, when it is not humans living on earth but a teeming mass of glistening, writhing forms, more amphibian or reptilian than human.
If only I could impart this horror to someone, anyone!
By spending just one day in the pit of hell, lured there by my childish sense of adventure, my life has sunken into the depths of despair.
Until I hear with my own ears that those horrors have been completely burned out of this world, there will be no end to my agony.
Government organizations and the media didn’t listen to me, but my efforts have not all been in vain.
There are over ten thousand members now gathered together on my Daum server, people who support my work.
My supporters overseas are also growing in number.
Five different satellite groups have been formed by server members.
They are all brave people who do not compromise their principles and keep fighting despite threats and baseless rumors.
Through YouTube and in-person conventions, we are working to inform the world of all that I witnessed.
Your Excellency, I know that my activities have made me many enemies.
I live every single day with the fear that they will kill me.
Threatening emails from anonymous senders are piling up in my inbox.
Most of them demand that I cease what I am doing.
Occasionally they are filled with abuse, urging me to kill myself.
They have been surveilling me for a long time now.
Last month I saw as clear as day that the driver from the Chinese food delivery service who came to my home had mottled skin and bulging eyes.
I disinfected the entire house and checked for wiretap devices.
I contacted the restaurant to demand the identity of the delivery driver, but there was no response.
Recently, when a virus notification popped up, I became certain that someone had hacked into my computer.
I requested personal protection from the police, but, again, I didn’t get any kind of response.
Demonic shadows flicker at my window. I hear someone tapping on the glass.
A thick hand comes in through the window and tries to open the door by force.
The skin on the hand is splotched with dark patches like a corpse and knobbled like a toad, the fingernails rotted black.
Horror claws at my heart, and it’s as though my blood is being drained to the last drop.
It must be that, as my life force dwindles, the hallucinations I suffer from are growing more severe. I’ll have to increase the dosage of my medications. But until this life of mine dries up completely, I will not cease my fight against th …
Th … th …
Those eyes, those eyes…!!