Chapter Text
勸善懲惡
to encourage virtue and punish evil
❀
When tragedy strikes, there are no signs of it in the sky, the land, or at the bottom of the tiny banana milk carton Park Jisung finds in the drinks compartment on the fridge door. Even if there were signs, Park Jisung wouldn’t have been able to read them. Therefore, he doesn’t notice anything.
He finishes his breakfast and washes up, brushes his teeth, packs his books to go to school. He has never been too careful about this stuff, and he ends up forgetting the English materials for cram school, but he will only notice later, once he’s on the bus. It won’t be a big deal because that only means he will need to return home instead of going directly to cram school after classes end. It won’t be a big deal (until it will).
Sooyoung is in the backyard, talking to Jihyo about this client visiting from Ilsan. They’ve been preparing for this gig for a while - they even went to Ilsan last month to do some recog - so even Jisung, usually the least interested in the family business, knows about this job. Mrs. Kim, once their grandmother’s helper and now Sooyoung’s helper, almost knocks him over as she brings over a broad basket of flowers and other decorative paraphernalia they will use to decorate the back garden for the gut.
“What are you doing standing here? You’ll be late for school,” she scolds him gently, patting him on the back while she holds the basket one-handed.
That attracts Sooyoung’s and Jihyo’s attention, and they both turn towards their little brother. Sooyoung is not wearing her work clothes yet, but there’s a big box overflowing with white silk next to her, meaning she’s just waiting to finish her drink before someone helps her into the ceremonial robes.
“What are you still doing here? You’ll miss the bus, you rascal,” she says.
“I’m going, I’m going,” he whines, before they start nagging at him and make him late for real.
Sooyoung snorts at Jihyo’s loud, “Be good, tokkaebi child!” and whispers a tired, “Be safe, Jisung-ah,” over the lid of her hot Americano, and the rusty metal gate covers Jisung’s “See you later” when it slams shut at his back.
It’s an unremarkable morning, a little grey, a little windy, with fine dust swirling quietly over the roofs of the cars and smudging the view of Namsan in the distance. It only gets a little better between English with Mrs. Kim and respite, when the sun peeks behind the clouds and shines holes through the morning fog, and by lunchtime the weather is hot enough to shed the jacket of the school uniform as students swarm the cafeteria. Jisung sweeps the classroom with Kim Mingjae after classes are over. They talk about last year’s questions of the CSAT. Mingjae offers to walk to cram school together, but Jisung remembers his English materials are still on his bed, so he just tells Mingjae he’ll swing home first.
When he does, he finds a black Lexus parked in front of the old gate. It’s a big car - takes up half of the street on its own. It’s the kind of car Jisung’s family could afford but does not need for, what with both Sooyoung and Jihyo preferring smaller hatchbacks tailored for rush hour in a big metropolis like Seoul. The contrast between the shiny lines of the Lexus and the well-lived gate in front of it, more rust than blue at this point, makes the car look a bit out of place, like it’s ended up in the wrong neighborhood. Yet, someone with a less flashy car would probably not be able to afford the services of either of Jisung’s sisters. After all, a single branch of the giant spirit tree from the backyard of the Park’s estate, separated from one of the most expensive neighborhoods of the capital by just this rusty gate, is definitely worth more than an entire garage full of shiny Lexus.
Jisung is too busy musing about wealth and looking for his house keys, so that he doesn’t immediately notice the boy standing next to the car. Suddenly, he looks up, and there he is, as if he appeared out of thin air, and Jisung almost drops his keys from the scare. When he looks up again after securing the keys, the boy’s eyes meet Jisung’s. He smiles. He’s so pretty he could be an idol, but he has too many teeth, and they all look too sharp, almost like they could close around someone’s wrist and snap it off, bitten clean.
Jisung bows, and when he looks up, the boy is still there, still smiling, a perfectly normal, non-threatening, polite, handsome smile. Jisung blinks and walks past that smile, forcing himself to look calm as he pushes the metal gate open and slips inside the garden. From the back garden, he can hear the slow, rhythmic drums of the juk, the drum calling the time for the rite his sisters are performing, and Jihyo’s voice rising as she sings in old Korean. When he turns to close the gate, he throws a final look at the street, but the boy must have gone back inside the car because there is no one smiling at him next to the black Lexus. The street is still deserted when he leaves again, the English materials secured and safely stored inside his bag and his sisters’ voices loud in his ears, Sooyoung having joined Jihyo as they chant the words of the rite. They’re clear enough Jisung could swear they’re next to him.
When he comes back hours later, one of them is no more.
❀
“And what does that mean?”
Jihyo’s voice is dangerously low, which in Jihyo language might as well mean she’s screaming at the top of her lungs. Jisung finds her at the emergency ward, wearing a hoodie over her white silk shaman dress. She’s not wearing any make-up - that was Sooyoung’s role today - and she looks tired and unbreakable in a way Jisung hasn’t seen her since the day their parents died, like she’s the only thing in the ward that’s actually real, more physical than the dark green linoleum and cream walls, more real than the receptionist frowning at her in her pale pink uniform.
“Do I have to curse you all to death to get an answer?”
The nurse looks torn.
“We’re still running some tests, but there seems to be nothing wrong with her for now. You should wait for the time being.”
“We’ve been waiting for hours. Why is my sister not waking up?”
“Noona,” Jisung calls feebly, and her expression falls, deepdives, when she sees him.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, and the way she looks behind him is a distorted echo of four years ago, when she glared at Mrs. Kim and asked her, “Why did you bring him here?”
But Mrs. Kim didn’t come today, and Jisung is nineteen, not twelve, only a few months from adulthood. And his parents have already been dead for seven years. It’s not his father in the hospital room, waiting to be transferred to the morgue to be with his wife forever, but Sooyoung. Jisung doesn’t need supernatural precognition to know that. He can see her from the little square of glass on the door, lying on the bed with her face as white as a sheet, the paleness even more striking against the pig blood on her face.
“What happened?"
Jihyo swallows and seems to shrink under his gaze, her striking appearance dimming down to a little candle in the dark.
“Something went wrong during the ritual we were performing. Jihyo fainted and we couldn’t wake her up, so we immediately brought her here.” She looks down to smooth out the wrinkles on her shirt. “We still don’t know the cause, and the doctors are not helping.”
“Why would she faint while working? Did you let her perform while she was sick?”
Jihyo sighs and shakes her head.
“No, she was perfectly fine this morning. It was an easy ritual, just a ghost wedding, nothing particularly complicated or dangerous. I wasn’t even there when it happened. She told me she and the crew could take care of it, so I went to man the office. I went down when I heard the music stop and she was… there.”
Jihyo shivers. Jisung feels so tiny, tinier than her, even though he’s now taller than his sister by a whole head. He takes off the jacket of his high school uniform, even though he’s aware of how thin and useless it must be against the harsh air conditioning of the hospital. Jihyo sniffles and closes the two hems down on her neck with her left hand, then she thanks him. After that, they wait.
❀
Later, Jisung will try to pinpoint when it happened. When exactly he realized that something was wrong, not wrong in a normal way but in an ominous way. Because, in the beginning, there was still the possibility things were just… normal. It could’ve been fatigue, or in the worst case, even a stroke. Shamanic rituals put a heavy toll on the shaman’s body, after all. Both of Jisung’s sisters follow a rigorous training routine just to be able to dance and chant for so long, surrounded by the fumes of incense and the rhythmic call of the drum, let alone the treacherous whispers of the family gods. It could’ve also been something trivial, the flu, a stomach bug, food poisoning.
But time ticks away slowly and test after test, every doctor in the prestigious medical facility - only the best for one of the best shamans of the country, someone employed by chiefs of state, conglomerate heirs, la creme de la creme of Korean society that lives in Jongno, in the houses that once belonged to the top nobles of Joseon - tells Jihyo the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with Park Sooyoung. Her body is in top condition. Her brain waves are stable. She’s even dreaming, they say. Jihyo wrings her hands with a miserable sigh.
“Mom once performed a fertility ritual for the mother of the director of this hospital. I never thought I would be calling in favors just to get a CT scan done, but if that’s what it takes, I will do it, watch me.”
Jisung can only nod, head lolling down on his knees on the chair next to the bed. Mrs. Kim already called the school, so Jisung is excused for tomorrow. Jihyo wasn’t happy about it - if you don’t want to work in our line of business, she always says, you need to study your ass off and find a way to make money elsewhere, don’t even think of leeching off us you little tokkaebi child - but even she had to bow down in front of his wish to stay next to Sooyoung. They cleaned her face of the chicken blood together, and Mrs. Kim brought a fluffy blanket from home and her favorite bunny plushie. (“Just in case she wakes up, I can’t bear to make her wake up in such an unfamiliar, anonymous room.”)
With her face clean and soft from the serum Jihyo insisted on putting on her, wrapped in a fake fur blanket and with Mr. Gildong sitting on the windowsill, looking over her, Sooyoung simply looks like she’s sleeping. There’s no sense of dread around her. Yet Jisung can only feel the restlessness oozing off Jihyo with every single test result that doesn’t bear any answer. It wraps itself around his ankles, weighing down his legs and making them tingle. Jihyo still hasn’t taken off his uniform jacket, even though Mrs. Kim brought one of her own when she came. Jisung feels cold without it, but he doesn't want to ask for it back. He doesn’t think she can bear to part with it anyway.
It’s almost four in the morning when he realizes he needs to get up. He doesn’t know if he can’t feel his legs or if he feels so much pain it’s numbing out anything else. His throat is parched. He can faintly hear Jihyo’s voice coming from behind a closed door. It’s low, yet so full of authority that it even seems to filter through solid PVC. He waits for the nurse doing the nightly rounds before he gets up and holds the door for her, receiving a smile and a soft thank you in exchange.
At night, the hospital is quiet but buzzing with unshed energy. Every light seems to blink with impatience, and the mirrors in the elevator seem to close on Jisung instead of making the prison-like box feel bigger. He’s relieved when he finally sneaks out of the automatic doors. He heads towards the vending machines on the fourth floor and hesitates between the different power drinks, all equally brightly colored, before choosing a Gatorade.
The machine drones weakly as it pushes out the blue bottle, and the clang it lets out as it hits the metal compartment seems thunderous for such a quiet place.
Jisung retrieves it feeling like a criminal.
Just as he worries that someone will come to scold him for making such a racket, he hears heavy footsteps and a whistled tune. He turns around just in time to see a black shadow and a strip of black fabric, the flapping of someone’s coat, through the open door of the emergency staircase. It disappears behind the wall, and all that’s left with him is the soft whistle, an almost familiar tune, amplified by the emptiness of the staircase.
He swallows his anger. Why would you even whistle in the middle of the night in a hospital full of sick people? But as someone who just made a lot of noise himself, he feels guilty for even thinking about complaining.
Fuck it, if I hear noise when I come back to Sooyoung’s room I’ll just ask the nurse to do something about it.
The world seems to become more vivid after he gets some sugar in his blood, as if something raised the contrast setting in a video game. All contours become sharper, the whites blinding and the blacks bottomless. The blue Gatorade looks like alien blood trapped in a plastic prison. Jisung has to fight back a wave of nausea as he makes the trip back to the sixth floor, this time by foot. The idea of getting into that elevator and being trapped between its mirror walls seems… haunting, to say the least.
The nurse is checking her cart at the end of the corridor when Jisung reaches the ward. He sends a brief look towards the door of Sooyoung’s room, just to make sure she’s still there. The doctor is inside, bending down towards her. He is probably merely checking her vitals, but Jisung still reaches out for the nurse.
“Was everything alright?”
He asks as quietly as he can.
She nods.
“Nothing to report. Your sister is so pretty. She looks just like a doll.”
“Can I get back in?”
She offers him another smile. She’s pretty too. It makes her look a lot more comforting. In a hospital of this level, they can certainly afford to skim nurse applicants for their abilities and looks.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t you be able to?”
“Ah, I saw that the doctor was in there. I was afraid of being a bother.”
Her smile twitches in confusion.
“Doctor? You must be mistaken. We don’t have any other checkups scheduled for tonight.”
“Then who was the man in my sister’s room?”
The nurse, Kwon Miho, says her nametag, doesn’t lose her smile, but it’s as if it’s not a smile anymore, even as it still has all the characteristics of one.
“Mister Park. There’s no one in your sister’s room.”
Jisung’s eyes widen. He looks back to the room again, and just as the woman said there is nothing in there.
He blinks, speechless.
“Ah, I must have…”
The furious beeping on the nurse’s watch interrupts him. It matches the one coming from Sooyoung’s room.
The nurse gasps and leaves him there, rushing towards Sooyoung’s room, slamming the door open to crowd over the bed where Sooyoung is shaking uncontrollably, foaming at the mouth like one of the girls she often exorcized in the past.
“Doctor Lee, Doctor Lee,” the nurse is screaming in her phone, “Room 613, I need you to get here immediately.”
“Can I do anything to help?”
“Help me move her to the side, she’s going to choke like this.”
In the years to come, Jisung will never forget the feeling of holding his sister’s body, so lifeless and yet so violently animated. He weighs down on her wrist when she tries to slip away like a captured eel, he feels her sweat, cold under his palms. The whistle is back in his ears, and this time, he recognizes the tune. It’s one he heard so many times, from the closed window while he did his homework. It’s one of the songs his sisters use in their shamanic rituals.
The doctor arrives at that moment, together with other nurses and Jihyo. They bodily move Jisung out of the way as they attend to Sooyoung, throwing him out of the room.
“Wait outside,” they order, and he can only look as the door is wrung shut right in his face.
In the quiet of the night, he hears another dingle, not a whistle this time, but the dingle of the elevator doors sliding open. They’re already closing again when he looks up. Between them is a boy with too many teeth open in the sharpest smile he’s ever seen. He waves his hand at Jisung before he disappears. The whistle of Sooyoung’s song accompanies the elevator as it heads down. Jisung doesn’t chase him. Even if he did, crashing down the emergency stairs that head to the ground floor, he’s quite sure he wouldn’t find anyone inside that elevator.
The clock on the wall tells him it’s a little past four in the morning. The time of death. The time of ghosts.
❀
Jisung comes home at the first lights of dawn, when it becomes clear that Sooyoung will not be coming out of the ICU soon.
He has enough money for the taxi fare but chooses to take a bus instead. He huddles in the back seats, pulls the hoodie up on his cap so that only the lower half of his face is visible, and leans against the fogged-up window, watching hazy lights chase each other as a bleary day breaks behind the cityline.
As far as he can remember, Sooyoung has always refused to take the bus. Too many souls hitching a ride, she’d say. Wanderers are not usually strong enough to be seen, not even by a shaman as talented as her, but she could perceive them nevertheless, lingering in the shadows, challenging each other for the free seats at the rear end of the bus. Jisung wonders how many of them might be around him right now. He’s never shown any signs of having the Sight. Both his sisters got it - Jihyo’s not as strong as Sooyoung’s, but still strong enough to let her handle the easier jobs - but Jisung is a man, and men tend not to inherit these abilities the way women do. They can stumble upon divinity in other ways, often traumatic, life-changing incidents, events you can never recover from without turning into something else. For men, shamanism is a rebirth that implies the experience of death. If that was the price, Jisung never had any ambitions of being part of his sisters’ world. And yet. Too many teeth. An itch under his skin. An otherworldly beauty.
At the bus stop, waiting for the connecting bus that will take him home, a first ride that will only come in forty minutes, Jisung messages Jihyo.
can regular people see ghosts?
like, in special circumstances?
Jihyo doesn’t answer. Of course, she must be fretting outside Sooyoung’s room. She certainly cannot entertain Jisung’s curiosity right now.
Jisung swallows a mouthful of cold morning air and spits it out in a puff of white breath.
He sends the same message to Minjeong.
i heard your sister has been hospitalized!!!
He clicks his tongue, annoyed. Focus, Minjeong.
what happened? was it a job?
Not even a moment later, his phone pings again.
wtf you park jisung you saw a ghost?
no
just curious
He worries at his bottom lip for a moment before sending a new wave of texts.
don’t wanna talk about my sister
too worried
distract me, please
He must sound desperate and a little forlorn. He may be. He has every reason to be, yet he doesn’t know what is it that he’s feeling. An unnatural calm has washed over him. Like a lake that doesn’t move. (Why wouldn’t it move? Oh, everything in it must be dead.) Jisung shakes his head, surprised by the gloominess of his thoughts, and focuses on the explanation coming in fast little messages sent by Minjeong’s number.
it’s rare but it can happen.
there are conditions
liminal places
liminal times
liminal situations
like a lot of people see ghosts in hospitals because they are places of departure
or in train stations
graveyards
and during special times
new year, chuseok
that sorta stuff
what about four in the morning?
it’s possible
four is the number of death
you didn’t see a ghost, did you?
you should come here, I’ll ask eonni to purify you
Did he see a ghost? Jisung is not sure. He was tired. He hasn’t slept in so long. He’s never seen any inkling of a shadow among shadows before, and suddenly a ghost?
it’s alright
i’ll come to hang out with you later, noona
He can already see Minjeong bristling in his mind. She’s always hated being called noona by him. Says it makes her feel old.
Jisung ignores the text tantrum she unleashes on him and focuses on the colorful flashes of the noraebang sign beside the station until his bus finally arrives.
❀
The black Lexus is parked in front of their blue gate again.
Jisung looks at it warily. The last time it was here, his sister fell sick. And now, here it is again. Like a dark omen. There is no strange boy in sight though, so after a close look, Jisung walks past the car to open the gate and enter the driveway.
He’s halfway through the white dirt path that leads to the main entrance house when he hears the thud of the car door opening, then closing violently, and an impatient voice calls up to him.
“Young man! Wait!”
He turns just in time to see an old, wrinkly man wearing an unassumingly expensive tailored suit walking towards him. Behind him, the door on the passenger side also opens, and an old lady comes out. Unlike the husband, she’s wearing traditional clothes, a deep burgundy hanbok befitting her age, but she’s also wrapped in a dark brown fur coat. Very elegant, very distinguished, but not flashy. Their clothes, the car, the way they carry themselves like the sea should part in front of them, whispers old money. Jisung has seen many like them. They’re precisely the kind of personalities who’d come seeking the services of a shaman. The rest of Korea might have moved on, becoming a country of science, of technology, of modernity. But the elites still know where to go when things go awry. It’s too bad that Jisung is not the person they’re looking for, nor is he in the mood to show any friendliness toward this couple and their ominous car.
“We’re closed today,” he announces. “Please come back another day.”
“Is this how you treat your clients? We’ve been calling since yesterday! You took our money, didn’t you?”
Jisung doesn’t smile. His sisters wouldn’t have either. No one can afford to be rude to a shaman. For centuries, his family only had to bow their head in front of their god or spirit guide.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I merely live here, I’m not in the family business. And the family business is closed, so please go back.”
“Where is Miss Park? I want to talk to her.”
Jisung’s voice is as cold as the brine covering the windows of his sister’s office.
“She’s in the hospital.”
That, at least, shuts him up. Jisung hopes it’s enough to make them leave. And if it isn’t, well, it’s not his business if they want to wait here until his sister gets discharged. Which could be a day, a week, even months. He doesn’t like entertaining this possibility, and he’s certainly not in the mood to entertain guests or customers either.
He turns around to leave, but the old woman’s voice stops him this time.
“Then what about our son?”
“Your son?”
“Did she finish the wedding or not?”
Jisung stops on the threshold of both the house door and a very uncomfortable conversation. Jihyo did mention a ghost wedding. And then Sooyoung fell sick. Weren’t ghost weddings easy? Did he really see a ghost, twice even?
After a moment of hesitation, he holds the door open for the two.
“You can come in. I’ll take your message to my sister if you tell me what’s going on.”
❀
The boy’s name is Jaemin. Was Jaemin. For he died more than twenty years ago.
A great tragedy, his mother explains, nervously clutching the beads of the Buddhist bracelet wrapped around her wrinkly wrist. Jaemin was the couple’s only son, strictly raised to follow in his father’s footsteps. Prosecutor, then judge, and one day he would make his debut as a politician just like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him since the foundation of the country.
“Our family dates back to the Joseon Dynasty. My ancestors served under the king of Joseon, then fought for independence against the Japanese. We have a long history. It’s just a pity my only son was…”
The man’s voice hardens for a moment, so suddenly he has to clear his throat after that. His wife picks up after his grumble.
“Our Jaemin was born sickly, weak. A congenital problem, the doctor said. Since he was born, we knew he wouldn’t have long to live. Still, we loved him so much. Even if he wasn’t… he wasn’t like other children. We gave the best of the best to him, the best doctors, the best caretakers, the best schools. He was our only son, how could we not love him?”
There’s a plea in her voice. Jisung cares very little about it.
“How did he die?” Jisung asks.
“He…”
“Disease.” This time, it’s the husband who answers. “The weakness who plagued him all his life took him, in the end.”
Jisung stares at his face for a moment, puzzled. It’s a familiar face. One he has certainly already seen, although he couldn’t pinpoint where. He stares for a long moment, but that old, wrinkly face reveals nothing, not of where Jisung might have seen it, not of whether its owner is telling the truth. Yet he isn’t, Jisung can’t be sure but…
“Someone who died of disease doesn’t turn into a yuryeong.”
“It’s not because he died of disease,” insists the woman. “It’s because he died young. A young man like him, dying without marrying, without having children, wouldn’t he have some grievances? I told you he wasn’t of sound mind, but he’s also never been of strong constitution. Every gust of wind would give him a cold and fevers that lasted for weeks. He was delicate. And he left us too soon. Before he could learn what it was to be a man.”
It makes sense, in theory. But many boys die young. Most of them don't turn into a yuryeong, and Jisung has never heard of any yuryeong strong enough to threaten his sisters being born from something as trivial as… a weak constitution?
“Was he… Did he ever… display violent tendencies?”
The two exchange the swiftest glance.
“He was a good-natured child.”
The woman answers diplomatically.
“Your good-natured child sent my sister into a coma.”
She wrings her hands nervously, again, and the rings on them flash gold and colorful stones.
“We were also… surprised when it started. We went to other shamans before visiting your sister. When things started happening. In the beginning, it was little things. The magnolia trees would die. All of them, in our garden. Then, birds started dropping dead. Squirrels, mice. We would wake up to find dead moths paving the clearing in front of the house. After that, the family pets started dying, one after another. We called a Buddhist monk, a Catholic priest. We moved houses.”
The woman’s voice trembles, just like her hands still spasmodically clutching the Buddhist beads.
“It was my sister who suggested a shaman, and that shaman who suggested that the boy might have been restless because he died so young.”
“Who did you visit?” Jisung asks, and it doesn’t take long to realize that the right question is who they didn’t visit. Seems like the entire shaman community of the capital is on these people’s payroll. And for how much money they threw at all those foxy old ladies, none of them was able to solve their problem.
“So you asked my sister.”
“The eldest Miss Park wasn’t the one who suggested a ghost wedding, but she was the only one who accepted to perform one, as long as we were able to bring her the information of the girl our son would have to marry.”
Jisung frowns. He’s not that knowledgeable, but even he knows that ghost weddings are not complex rites.
“Ghost weddings are quite common. Even one of those tarot reader quacks could officiate one. Why did so many people refuse to help you?”
“Oh, well… It’s because a ghost wedding is a parting ceremony. But they all said that our son needed not a wedding, but an exorcism.”