Setting aside the midwinter alert in autumn, it said the fireworks show was canceled, then next said there would be congestion because of the fireworks show, then said the fire was suppressed, then said the news of the fire outbreak was false information…
“Is there no way to turn it off?”
“Captain!”
Son Yowan whipped around.
“Uya?”
Seeing the actor at the open door, pale as a sheet and at a loss, the three characters ‘oh my’ flashed across Son Yowan’s face, then he hurriedly made excuses.
“It’s not that I forgot you were there, I…”
“The, the, the, the alert! I was in my room and suddenly from the radio an alert came, I was so startled I came like this…!”
“You went to your room. I was surprised thinking you were waiting for me outside. But an alert? Ah, that was a bit strange. Maybe someone made a mistake, hmm…”
Mid-sentence, Son Yowan went “Huh?” He looked at the actor’s face again. A complexion as pale as if he’d seen a ghost, eyes wide open and filled with terror…
The alert Son Yowan had heard earlier was certainly strange, but it wasn’t content that would make someone who heard it end up like that.
“Sometimes, such cases occur.”
That’s when the Detective spoke like that.
“Pardon?”
“Depending on the place, or the person there… there are cases where sound arrives late. It seems this time the Godam circled the upper floor first, then came down to the lower floor…”
Son Yowan rolled his eyes once, then understood.
“If a Godam circled around.”
“Yes.”
The Detective, who answered in a voice soaked with fatigue, pressed his fingertips firmly against his eyes again, then slowly raised his body. As if that were some kind of signal, the antique radios that had briefly stopped began broadcasting.
Crackle, crackle-crackle. Crackle, crzzz…
「…do you know?」
At first, Son Yowan thought it was ‘that’ Goeidam.
Crackle. Crzzzzz. Crzzz. Crzzz…
「My… do you know?」
Eyes. Nose. Ears. Hands. Feet. A voice coming from who knows where, naming body parts and asking ‘Do you know where my ○○ is?’ That ‘Goeidam’. The Goeidam that had attacked them once before.
Crzzz. Crzzzzz. Crzzzzz…
「My ankle…」
Then suddenly Son Yowan felt dissonance.
‘Noise.’
A low sound that occasionally scratched at his ears. He’d definitely thought it was noise coming from the radio.
‘It is coming from the radio, but.’
Somewhere… it seemed a bit… different from the crackling sound of machinery…
Before that thought could even finish, a clear ringing laugh burst from the radio.
「Kyahahahahahahahahahahaha!」
“Wh-what, suddenly.”
「Do you know where my ankle is? You know, right? You know, don’t you? You should know, right? Right? You cut it off, my ankle!」
「It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you! It’s you! It’s you!」
「Do you know where my ankle is? Do you know where my ankle is? Do you know where my severed ankle is? Do you know where you hid my severed ankle? Do you know where you threw away my severed ankle?」
「Do you know where my corpse is?」
「You should know, right? You should know, right? You should know, right? You should know? You stole my life, took everything, you should know, right?」
「You don’t know? Don’t you know? You don’t know?」
「Should I tell you?」
Crzzz. Crzzzzz. Crzzzzz.
「I’ll tell you.」
At that moment, Son Yowan suddenly realized.
“It’s a dragging sound.”
Not noise, but the sound of something being dragged on the floor.
He looked at the Detective with a startled face and said.
“Could it be a person…”
“It’s a person.”
Son Yowan had been about to say that someone might be getting dragged, but the Detective stated it outright. That someone was being dragged.
“Yo, Yowan. Yowan.”
That’s when the actor called Son Yowan. He pointed outside while trembling.
“Wa, water. Let’s go to the waterway. It’s there.”
Son Yowan didn’t want to ask, but hearing such words, he had no choice but to ask.
“What is?”
“The, the victim.”
***
03
Manghyang wasn’t a facility of one or two buildings, but quite a large site containing about ten buildings, a mountain, and water. The ‘waterway’ the actor mentioned was the latter of the two—the reservoir used as a fishing spot within the site and the lake beyond the wall surrounding the left perimeter of the site.
When the actor brought both Son Yowan and the Detective to the crime scene, near the wall, all the people currently staying at Manghyang were gathered. Though saying ‘all’ meant only VIP guests, so the number didn’t even reach ten.
“Ah…”
A few of the people kneeling on the ground looking at something turned around, sensing a presence.
Through the gap created as people turned around, the victim became visible. The victim, in terms of the name used at Manghyang, was the ‘Assistant’.
Son Yowan almost took a step back the moment he saw the victim.
Actually, he did step back.
“…!”
He just couldn’t go further because he bumped into the Detective standing right behind him.
‘When did this guy get behind me?’
Thanks to that, he avoided embarrassment, but ungratefully, that was Son Yowan’s first thought.
‘What kind of person has no presence at all?’
He hadn’t noticed at all that someone had come right up behind him and was standing there. Son Yowan now felt confident that if the Detective confessed right now ‘Actually, I’m a ghost,’ he’d slap his knee and say ‘I knew it!’
‘Honestly, both the impression and vitality are closer to a dead person than a living one…’
“It’s an ankle.”
Because the Detective spoke, Son Yowan escaped from his idle thoughts.
That was right. As he described, near the Assistant lying on the ground was a severed human ankle. That was also the reason Son Yowan had been startled the moment he saw the Assistant.
“I heard the broadcast and rushed over, but already…”
The person who said that, in terms of names used within Manghyang, was the ‘Magician’.
“Already like this…”
The Magician muttering like that was kneeling at the victim’s feet, tightly gripping the clothes covering the victim’s lower body. Even to Son Yowan standing far away, he could see the hands gripping the clothes trembling.
The Magician seemed very shocked. The face was pale as a corpse and the wide-open eyes didn’t even blink. Though no more words were said, only the lips kept twitching as if in spasms.
“For now… let’s do something about this first.”
Then, the Director, who had been standing with a complicated expression, approached and carefully wrapped the severed ankle with a cloth.
‘Huh?’
Out of nowhere, he thought what big feet they had.
But since he couldn’t keep looking at that, Son Yowan immediately shifted his gaze to the Director. Unlike usual, the Director was dressed only in a dress shirt with a vest. The outerwear covering the victim’s lower body seemed to belong to the Director.
Meanwhile, the Director approached the dazed Magician, patted that shoulder, and whispered a few words. Judging by the expression, it seemed to be words of comfort.
“Actor-gun.”
The Director called the actor without turning around. The actor, who had been hesitating and approaching Son Yowan, jumped in surprise.
“Yes?”
But what would surprise him more was what came next.
“Could you help? We need to move them to a room.”
“Th-th-that person?”
The ‘that person’ the actor was referring to was naturally the Assistant.
“If not? You don’t think I asked you to carry me, do you?”
The actor who’d been scolded couldn’t quite answer and was hesitating when he suddenly stole a glance at Son Yowan.
“?”
Son Yowan just looked back at him, not understanding, but strangely at that moment the actor made a determined expression and stepped forward.
“I, I understand.”
“Good, well done. And since it could be dangerous, stay with them for a while.”
“Yes, yes.”
While taking the Assistant back to the lodgings, the actor’s eyes met Son Yowan’s. He nodded, so Son Yowan tactfully nodded back, but actually Son Yowan was looking at the Assistant, not the actor. With the eyes covered with an eyepatch and the lower body covered with clothes, it looked like watching a corpse being carried from an accident scene.
‘Not that different, I guess.’
At least this place was similar to an accident scene.
When the actor disappeared, Son Yowan approached the Director and spoke in a low voice.
“Director hyungnim, what happened to that noona?”
Here, ‘noona’ referred not to the Magician but to the victim, the ‘Assistant’. The Assistant looked at a glance to be close to Son Yowan’s grandparents’ generation, but for Son Yowan, most older men were ‘hyungnim’ and older women were ‘noona’.
“That noona has been lying down the whole time, right? She can’t move by herself yet, so why…”
Once the shock of seeing the victim’s condition subsided a bit, such questions immediately arose. It was natural.
The Assistant, after inadvertently making a sound when confronting the Goeidam they’d encountered not long ago and losing her eyes, had been staying indoors and unable to do anything by herself.
“Ah.”
Then Son Yowan recalled the hair-raising sound he’d heard just before rushing here and realized.
Crzzz. Crzzzzz, crzzzzz…
“Don’t tell me she was enchanted by the Goeidam and came out, then in the middle…”
