Author: Suhyeon Lee; 이수현
Date: 2020-05-30 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: Minsuh, an anthropology student researching shamanistic rituals and the mudangs who perform them, has dismissed the supernatural her whole life. To her, mudangs are performers skilled at pleasing researchers. But as she gets deeper into her research, she's afflicted with a mysterious shinbyeong— a holy sickness unique to Korea—causing her to start losing her mind. In her desperation, she turns to a "real" mudang, but will she find salvation for her affliction or will she be driven further into her madness? Alien Gods is part of the Lovecraft Reanimated project, where leading Korean speculative
Publisher: Honford Star

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Alien Gods

LEE SUHYEON

Translated by Anton Hur

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Contents

1. Title Page
2. Alien Gods
3. Copyright

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Alien Gods

to me, becoming a crazy woman was a fear worse than death.

Most women in this world live in fear of becoming their mothers, but I was especially afraid. I’d never told anyone this, but my very first memory was that of my mother sitting on the floor, too out of it to recognize me, while someone wearing colorful clothes spun round and round as she sang a weird song. I later learned that this colorful, spinning woman was a mudang shaman performing a “goot” ritual, information conveyed to me by my grandmother with a bonus commentary track of curses layered over it about my mother having brought it upon herself by being so foolishly gullible.

Naturally, I came to value logic and rationality and constantly examined myself for any signs of craziness. I took pride in my skepticism. Fanatics and passionate believers, of whatever religious stripe, obviously got into that kind of mess because they were weak. Whatever happened when I died or whether there was a god or not—such worries didn’t even cross my mind. Fortunetelling and ESP were just cold reading or sleights of hand. The possession of mudangs by gods? A combination of mental disorders and con jobs. I learned 6there was a whole industry of debunkers in America devoted to exposing these lies, and I wished that Korea had something like that, too. Maybe I could become a debunker myself.

So I guess it was pretty cynical of me to be attending goot rituals in the name of research toward my degree, but as for all the weird things that happened to me after … well, I found that even cynicism couldn’t protect me in the end.

But in the garbage dump of what are now my memories, the scene I do recall with the most fondness is one of myself standing dramatically in front of a ruined house as the sun slinks down to the horizon, and there stands an old woman next to me, armed with a fan and bells and disinfectant and a gas torch, the flaps of her hanbok robes fluttering in the wind.

Largely, three kinds of researchers go around chasing goot rituals: scholars of Korean literature take the lion’s share, then amateur folk tradition enthusiasts, and lastly—there actually aren’t many of the third kind—professional folk tradition specialists. There are fewer academic departments in Korea that have to do with folk arts than you might think, only two in all the country, and one of them recently shut down. Most folk specialists study the folk arts under a specialization with a different name. And that specialization, more often than not, is Korean literature. 7

If you were to ask what kind of “literature” one studies in mudang traditions, I’d answer that we mostly deal with the recording and analyzing of songs that mudangs recite and the Korean mythologies linked to them. My memories from when I was little made the whole business of the goot seem wretched at first, but once I was a bit older, many of my prejudices fell away. Mudangism was, in the end, almost disappointingly mundane. There was nothing mysterious about it, or suspicious or creepy, either. But the reason scholars continued to transcribe their recordings was very simple. Money. Transcription was a pretty good way of getting your hands on some easy research funding. And for some reason, the mudang songs most people found hard to understand weren’t that difficult for me. Once I’d stepped foot in the work, I kept getting more of it.

It’s unfortunate how you kind of fall into professions. Graduate school had been my safety net during a period of high unemployment, and I didn’t have any special passion for Korean literature or even academic talent. Nor did I have the resources to start from scratch in a new field. The only route for me was to use whatever comparative advantage I had, and that meant my connection and, dare I say, affinity to mudangism, tenuous as it was. My advisor seemed to think so at least, tactfully suggesting that since I hated critical 8literature so much and didn’t even seem to like books in general but had some experience with mudangism, why not keep on doing that? That slight barb about not liking books aside, there was no clear reason for me to object. Especially when funding was relatively high, considering the state of the humanities, for anything to do with mudang studies.

But what was I going to write my thesis about? That was a completely different set of problems.

As I mentioned, our Korean literature department focused on mudang songs. To look through piles of research, record my own tapes, and add my little contribution to what the people who had come before me had done—that would be the path of least resistance, the very path every good grad school guide urges students to take. The only problem was that the songs were so boring.

But the goot rituals themselves were fun, which made me think I should center my research on them. Live goot rituals were more powerful and moving than what I could have imagined. Even just watching these rituals, armed with my skepticism and not a few snacks, was exhausting. But the mudangs themselves, who had to change their clothes multiple times and keep singing at the tops of their lungs as they danced around, positively radiated life-force. As the apprentice mudangs and musicians and I sat on the floor around 9them, doing the callouts, I could feel their energy transferring into me and the other spectators. Once I got to understanding their language, I often burst out laughing at their witty banter. Goot, at the very least, is an excellent form of performance art.

Was that what my thesis was going to be about? It seemed too off the mark for a Korean department thesis. Unable to make a decision, I simply hung around the goot rituals and waited for something to strike.

The mudangs would say all the time that not just anyone could do goot. They took great pride in the songs and dances that they had learned, and sometimes claimed the effort they put into their art was superior to their ability to tell fortunes. Their disgust was evident when they mentioned mudangs who were popular as fortunetellers but didn’t do goot rituals and would pass on the work to them. Then I would carefully ask, were you not great at fortunetelling yourselves, and they’d mumble something about them being better at other things. At which point, I don’t know, the fact that they didn’t seemingly believe in their own clairvoyant powers made me feel like we were in it together.

Here’s an example. The first mudang that I befriended in my efforts was named Byeonghwa Manshin. She pushed her business card right up to my face and cheerfully said she 10would help me with any questions I may have, and I got to watch a few of her goot with as open a mind as I could manage. The manshin was a middle-aged woman, but very vivacious and disarming.

I thought by befriending mudangs, I’d get to see the kind of goot rituals that laypeople rarely saw. I hadn’t seen a huge variety of them, just the usual that were commissioned by local municipalities at public events, and maybe a few of the please-bring-good-fortune-to-our-family-type deals. And even those were possible to attend only when the people holding the goot were amenable to my presence. The really meaty goot, the ones I was highly skeptical about but still held a strong fascination for, dealt with possession or ventriloquism or vanquishing diseases and the like. This last one was called the byeonggoot, and who would gladly show you a byeonggoot that was supposed to cure you of a disease in this, the age of modern medicine? Much less allow me to record it for an archive.

But Byeonghwa Manshin’s easygoing attitude gave me hope. Over drinks one evening, when I carefully broached the subject, she talked about it in her usual boisterous fashion.

“Oh, the byeonggoot? Sure, if you want to see it, I’ll do it for you. But it’s not anything special. It’s not like those stories 11where they try to beat a demon out of someone and end up killing them. We only help those who are ailing from causes that are not medical, we’re trying to unburden them. If they did something bad to a god, we pray to the god to forgive them, and if they’re possessed, we try to see if we can drive the spirit out. It’s all just support or guiding someone to a better path and making them feel more at ease, nothing that different from other goot. What was that about putting a straw mat over them and hitting them with a flaming stick? Or half-burying the sick person? I think I saw that somewhere. On the TV, perhaps. Or was it photographs? You ever seen such a thing? No? I can’t think of any mudang who would do that kind of thing these days. It’s all just a spectacle the media puts on for ratings.”

What she was saying made sense, but I was a little let down all the same.

Byeonghwa Manshin also had some interesting opinions regarding fortunetelling.

“I’m only telling you this because you’re a friend, but the kind of thing we mudangs do isn’t that different from psychological consultation and that sort of thing. On occasion you do get a real possession by an angry god, but the people who come looking for me are pretty much the same. They’re frustrated and have no one to talk to. So I help them. Throwing 12in a few nonsense words and fooling them and taking their money, that’s not a mudang, that’s a con artist. If we make our money like that, we’d be cursed by the gods ourselves. I’ve seen quite a few sisters get greedy and end up in an accident or some mishap. That’s the thing about money, right? Take only what you need, just a little. The money for the goot I did today was gathered from many people to give strength to that exhausted client, but it doesn’t cover all of my expenses. By helping, we mudangs also engage in the spiritual betterment of ourselves. As you can see, there’s nothing really strange about what we do.”

She had a point. It was rational and logical, even. But a suspicion reared its ugly head. Was this little world of the mudang really so rational? Wasn’t it weird in itself that she was saying exactly what I thought was reasonable and wanted to hear?

Gichan, my sunbae two years above me in school, laughed at my concerns.

“You ever heard of cold reading? That’s what most fortunetellers and so-called psychics do most of the time. Magicians, too. It basically comes down to how quick-thinking and observant they are. Even if they have never seen that person before, they can read their little cues and micro-responses to get an idea of what they’re like. I guess it’s a kind of superpower, 13since it’s not something most people have. Keep that in mind when you deal with these people. Never underestimate them. You’re nothing but a snack to the likes of them.”

Obviously, I knew what cold reading was. I wanted to tease him back and say, Do you know what hot reading is, but I simply thanked him for his sagacious advice and moved on with the conversation.

He was right, though. Mudangs were extremely clever. They were clever to begin with, but their difficult life experiences gave them street smarts to boot. Education levels didn’t affect them much. They knew all the nomenclature that researchers used and immediately understood what we wanted and changed their behavior to deliver that. A nerdy academic who knew nothing of the world except book-learning was like putty in their hands.

Which meant an experienced and skillful mudang would probably be much better than me at picking out a research question that the academic community would find intriguing, as well as at procuring the necessary data. A folk studies professor I met at a goot essentially told me the same thing. That just because I wrote down everything the mudangs said to me, it didn’t mean that research was fake.

He wasn’t wrong.

But that was precisely what bothered me. 14

This might’ve been typical beginner’s arrogance, but I didn’t want to just surrender and walk the same path as everyone else. The more I heard of these approaches, the more I wanted to try something different. I wasn’t expecting anything completely mysterious and fascinating. It was more of a case of wanting to go beyond the fancy presentation that everyone else seemed to be satisfied by, a wish to glimpse what was behind the curtain. The true face of the mudang, the hidden side, that sort of thing. The “real” behind the roleplay.

But trying to figure out what I would have to do to make that happen was a conundrum. Did I have to go out drinking with them more? There was no way I could outdrink the boisterous mudangs at the cool-down after their goot rituals; it was impossible to imagine that I could keep my mind intact until the end of an evening. But letting myself go and showing them how ridiculous I got when drunk to get on more intimate terms with them was just as difficult as staying neutral whenever they threw in dirty jokes while resting during goot. I was not unaware that among the sweaty mudangs lifting their skirts and repeating some bawdy joke in their loud voices, there were also male assistants present at the goot rituals, which made me careful. Not that I was particularly good at making friends or rolling with the punches to begin with.

I figured if I went to enough goot rituals, something was 15bound to be useful for my research—but after a month of doing just that, I was beginning to feel anxious. Perhaps I needed to let go of my ambition. There was no reason to spend more time writing my thesis than necessary, but despite this, I clung to the hope that all the money and time I’d spent on my efforts in attending goot rituals and befriending shamans would pay off with impressive results.

And just as I was getting nervous about the prospects of my research—something happened.

I’m not sure when exactly it started. Maybe it was at the periphery of my attention for a while. Like when you know you’re forgetting something but can’t quite remember what. Or it’s in some spot in your mind where you can’t see into, but you can feel it. Or you take a photograph and realize there’s something in it that you hadn’t noticed at the time, right there in the corner of the frame. Similarly, it might’ve been there at the corner of my mind, away from my consciousness that was preoccupied with other things.

But such thoughts occurred only much later.

One night, I’d been worrying over what to do with my thesis and flipping through useless folk traditions magazines, unable to fall asleep yet again, when I got up and left my room to use the bathroom. 16

Sa sa sak.

A sound like fabric being rubbed against itself—or exactly like a giant insect running away from me. I froze in place, and all other thoughts fled my brain with the onset of terror.

Holding my breath, my eyes darted back and forth across the kitchen floor, but there was not so much as an ant crawling on it. Still, one could never be sure, so I picked up a heavy book and carefully approached the table. No matter how hard I looked, there was nothing there. Certainly nothing that moved. I took two turns around the kitchen before finally sighing with relief as I sat down on a chair—and then screamed.

On the small secondhand wood table I’d bought for cheap online was a bag of bread I’d eaten two slices from and retied, firmly. Now, a corner of the bag was torn, as was the edge of the slice nearest to the tear.

I tried my hardest to remember. Had I taken a bite of a third slice and put it back in the bag? But that didn’t explain why the bag was torn. All thoughts of sleep evaporated then, and an itch crept all over my body. Breathing deeply, I slowly extended my shaking hands, grabbed the plastic bag, and threw it upwards.

Nothing scurried away. The only things that dropped from the ripped bag were the slices. But I couldn’t let my guard 17down. I picked up all the bread, tossed it in the food waste bin, frantically wiped the table and floor of any crumbs, turned on every light in the house, and began to clean. I couldn’t use a vacuum cleaner so late at night in an apartment building, which meant I stuck wipes on a stick and mopped the floor instead. I also put cleaning powder down every drain and poured in hot water. There was insecticide I’d forgotten about in the shoe closet that I sprayed in a few places. Any gap I found, I taped over. Then, even knowing that it wasn’t trash pickup day, I threw out all of my trash and recycling.

The alley where I took out the garbage in my cheap townhouse apartment block was dark and eerie. A streetlamp I usually thought was very bright seemed dim and sullen that night. I had a strange feeling of being dropped off somewhere unfamiliar. Like in a dream, where you’re in a place that’s your home, but you suddenly think, Wait a minute … this isn’t my home at all.

I bounded up the seven flights of steps up to my apartment as if I were running away from something, took a hot shower, and finally managed to fall asleep. It was already morning.

I’d only been down an hour or two when the doorbell yanked me from slumber. Peering through the peephole, I saw a man I’d never met standing outside the door. 18

“What do you want?”

“Hey, you were really loud last night. Be a bit more careful, yeah?”

Thankfully his tone was polite enough, but his expression of irritation made my shrunken heart crawl even more into itself. Well, I did clean the house in the middle of the night—there was no way that would’ve been completely silent.

“I’m sorry. I really did try not to be too loud. I’ll be more careful.”

I moved away from the door, feeling horrible about everything. The bright sun in the sky made my behavior from the night before seem even more absurd; it wasn’t as if I’d never encountered an insect before. Why had I made such a fuss?

Such a strange start to the day. I bet if I meet some mudang today, they’ll immediately go, Did something happen last night? and I’ll fall for whatever trick they follow that with.

I rubbed my face with my hands and made an effort to smile. They did say that forcing yourself to smile actually made you feel better.

No matter how bad a mood I was in, I didn’t feel like staying at home. The more frustrated I was with my research, the more I wanted to go out there and try to move things along. That afternoon, buoyed by momentum, I went to a small goot. 19

It was an ordinary jaesugoot for good fortune, about three or four hours long. This was held by Byeonghwa Manshin, and there wasn’t anything new about it. I tried to shake off the weird thoughts in my head. I went to the bathroom and then ended up at the courtyard with a cigarette dangling from my lips.

“You’re here again.”

A man’s voice. I’d almost jumped out of my skin; when I turned around, I saw it was Mr. Hwang.

“Ah, yes. You’re here, too.”

Hwang was a photographer in his fifties and unaffiliated with any university—simply an amateur researcher. A face I kept seeing at different goot rituals. Whatever he did for money, he truly was dedicated to documenting the goot in both photographs and video. I’d heard he was going to have an exhibition soon, but according to my sunbaes, he’d been saying that for ages and had gone no further than squirreling away over ten years of material.

“Young lady, you sure do have dedication. I thought you’d be bored of it by now, but you never miss a goot.”

Gathering up what meager social skills I possessed, I smiled at him. “It’s all thanks to people like you. I’m learning a lot.”

Being called “young lady” was nothing at this point. And I 20was, after all, the newest addition to the world of goot watchers. Hwang seemed to think I was completely ignorant and needed teaching, an attitude I could use to my advantage. He really did know a lot and was well-connected, after all. As long as I listened to his rants about scholars who “never took the time to see the rituals in person as they wrote their books and showed their faces on TV,” he was willing to share his contacts and had even offered to share photographs of stuff I hadn’t been able to capture. Not that he had actually given me any of said photographs.

“You say that now, but once you get what you want, you’re going to forget you ever knew me. Think that’s never happened before? I’m not going to fall for that again, nope, I am not.” (Rants like this one.) “That girl who begged me for help and was all bows and smiles when she didn’t know anything about goot, now what was that women’s college she went to? That Shin or something who’s a professor there was like that in the beginning as well. I treated them well. Introduced their clueless selves to all the important people, got them the best seats at the best goot. All for nothing. Once she became a fancy professor, she went on KBS and said something wrong, so I called her up and said, You’re wrong, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you shouldn’t say anything—she actually had the gall to say that while she understood I’d 21been on the scene for a long time, there were many things I couldn’t understand from having studied on my own. She never comes out to the rituals anymore and makes her living as a blabbermouth.”

At appropriate intervals I would interject things like, Oh my, How disappointed you must be, Oh I’m sure they mean well, I would never do such a thing. It was all very exhausting. He’d called me up a few times to introduce me to some interesting goot rituals going on but never crossed a line or tried to be friends, but even my relief from that turned to exhaustion. It made me think that all the scholars he’d helped hadn’t stopped taking his calls simply out of ingratitude, but also something else.

“Women are all the same …”

This was my cue to sigh deeply. And before he could launch into another rant, I quickly changed the subject. “Truly! All the mudangs are women. It really isn’t easy making friends with them.”

“Well, the manshin aren’t ordinary women, are they.”

I was used to this by now. He always used the honorific of “manshin” whenever referring to the mudangs. It was supposed to be used only for the most revered of the calling, but this was an age where any fool was given the honorific “teacher” or “boss.” Well—a man could be called “boss,” at 22least. A woman could be elevated to “manshin,” but even if she owned her own business, she could only be called “samonim,” the same title as the boss’s wife. The tyranny of gendered honorifics.

Hwang took a few drags of his cigarette, which somehow restored reason into his speech. “Hey, do you ever feel like seeing the real thing and not these fancy shows they’re always advertising?”

His words startled me. I’d been having this exact thought. Never having been given any reason whatsoever to think of Hwang as exceptionally observant, I wondered if I should watch myself around him. After all, he was closer to the mudangs than most researchers were, including myself.

“Why are you so surprised? Anyone who’s spent some time in this field would have the same thought. But they give up. Because those fancy professors and PhDs, all they need is enough material for their thesis, am I right? They get their data, bribe a few mudangs who helped them and get them on TV, everybody wins.”

I’d gotten my hopes up for nothing; it was his same rant all over again. My sunbaes, my advisor, now even amateur researchers, the cynicism never let up. I felt the life drain out of me. Sure, I understood that just because mudangs showed us what we wanted to see and said what we wanted to hear, that 23didn’t necessarily make them fake. I was even beginning to think that such behavior was exactly what their true function was. But before I could say that, a funny thing popped out of my mouth instead.

“I’m not giving up.”

Hwang narrowed his eyes at me. “Well well well, aren’t we all young and ambitious?” His teasing tone made it hard for me to suppress my dislike of him anymore.

But just before I could smash the fragile bond that I had barely managed to forge up to that point, he said, “Do you want to go see something else?”

A suspicious proposal, but I was intrigued just the same. Shall we say it felt like I’d been pounding on a heavy door and finally it had opened a crack? Hwang sucked on his second cigarette and laid down the rules.

“Even I’ve not been able to take a photo there. No recordings, either. You can get kicked out any time. Can’t speak to them for too long. The manshin is very finicky like that.”

A mudang who doesn’t want to meet researchers and hates to advertise?

“Oddly enough, other mudangs don’t mention her too much either. Now, you know as well as I do that I’ve got inroads with practically anyone who is anyone in this field? But it took years getting to know this one. She’s like a tiger—even 24Byeonghwa Manshin is scared of her. Try it sometime. Say to her, Do you know a certain Gyeongja Manshin? That chatterbox who’s afraid of nothing in this world, she’ll freeze and go, Who? She’ll shut up like a clam.”

“She’s scared of her? What kind of person is this other mudang?”

Hwang, in a decidedly non-Hwang-like manner, seemed to choose his words carefully, shedding a layer of his usual hotheaded attitude.

“How do I say this. It’s so hard to describe. You can tell right off the bat that she’s quite extraordinary. Not just an extraordinary woman but an extraordinary person. Excuse me for saying this, but I know a lot of mudangs, and a lot of them are, well, charlatans. But this one, she’s definitely possessed by something …”

As annoyed as I was, I couldn’t help but be interested. Hwang would show up at goot rituals and be all friendly with the mudangs, but he never really seemed to believe in them. Yet what he’d just said sounded like the words of a zealot raving about his prophet. This meant that the mudang in question really had supernatural powers, or … she was an excellent con artist.

Of course, the “real thing” I wanted to see was different from the real thing Hwang was referring to. Like I’d 25mentioned before, I didn’t believe in the supernatural. Going to goot rituals and hanging out with mudangs only solidified my beliefs. Whenever they’d cluck their tongues and declare that it was my fate to be lonely or that I had a good energy and did I think of studying to be a mudang myself, I smiled on the outside but rolled my eyes on the inside.

The “real” I was thinking was not the mudang where there’s some friendly, unspoken arrangement with their clients that treated the ritual like some performance, but a “real” con artist of a mudang. Someone whose tricks I could see through, whose deeds I could gleefully upend.

Which made what Hwang said next even more fascinating.

“And her goot, I’m not sure if you can even call them goot. There’s a lot that I don’t know. I think she borrows from all sorts of traditions, but my foreign languages aren’t that great.”

“Really? That sounds amazing. All the other mudangs I know are so keen on preserving traditional approaches.”

“That’s what I’m saying. She says she uses whatever she needs in the moment, which is what really made me believe in her.” Hwang had said this with pride, but then he scratched his chin in a skeptical manner. “But I wonder if she’ll mind if I bring someone. It really took me a long time to earn her trust myself. Even that might crumble at the slightest offense.” 26

How annoying! Then why mention her in the first place and sing her praises? Especially when he was obviously using me to brag to her about all the fancy academics he knew and what clout he had, the reverse of what he was doing to me now.

But the terms of the contract had been laid out more or less, and if he wanted me to make a show of it before saying yes, I was ready to play along.

I gripped his arm. “Look, no going back when you were the one to mention it!” I pleaded, hoping my eyes looking up at him sparkled like an anime character’s. “Please let me see her. It’s not like she’ll throw me out if I show up with you. If she berates you for bringing me, tell her I forced you. I’ll make it worth your while, I promise.”

Of course, I said that last word with subtle emphasis.

Hwang feigned thoughtfulness for a moment before saying, “Well, since you insist. I’ll try to put in a good word.”

My high spirits from having made excellent progress on my thesis took a nosedive soon after.

I went to bed after two a.m. that night and had a nightmare.

The bread incident I’d forgotten about came back with a vengeance in the form of a dream of fist-sized radioactive cockroaches. They looked poisonous on sight, fluorescent blues, purples, and pinks crawling out of the cracks in the 27refrigerator and zipping toward my room. They rustled right up to my ear. I tried to get up and run, but my body wouldn’t listen to me. I attempted to scream, but nothing came out of my mouth. It’s coming. It is coming. It’s trying to crawl inside me. The bed! It’s creeping up into my bed!

When I woke up, drenched in cold sweat, it was four in the morning.

I drank cold water and took a shower.

A nightmare. It was only a nightmare. I was thinking that as I opened the cupboard when—

My hands shook.

Despite all my efforts to convince myself that it had only been a dream, a bag of snacks had been slightly torn open, and there were crumbs strewn about. I remembered, clearly, that the bag had been intact the night before. Suspicious now, I looked around a bit more and found that a package of instant noodles was also ripped at the corner. An inexplicable smell hovered under my nose.

I threw the noodles and snacks in the trash and sat down in front of the computer with bloodshot eyes. A search for a good exterminator revealed that a small apartment like mine would only cost about 200,000 won to fumigate. All I could think of at the moment was how glad I was that I had almost exactly 200,000 won left in my bank account. 28

My mental health is on the line, I’ve got to spend that money.

Swiftly, I filled out the form for the free consultation. Their call center opened at 8:30 a.m., which meant I only had to wait until then. I flipped through books in bed before giving up, looked at some webtoons before giving up on them as well, and ended up playing Minesweeper to kill time.

Seven in the morning. The neighborhood was waking up. The sound of running water, faint voices, doors opening and shutting. I could hear someone start a car outside and drive away. Occasionally, I heard someone’s clock alarm go off.

At 8:30, when everyone who was going to work had gone to work, the neighborhood became quiet again. I’d stared at the clock the whole time. Picking up the phone, I called the exterminators.

God bless the speed of service in Korea. Someone immediately took on my urgent plea for help and came over right away.

But it did not go as planned.

“There are no pests here.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t see any dead bodies, eggs, or feces. It’s actually pretty unusual to see a place this clean of any traces.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. He had gone through every nook and cranny of the little apartment and had found nothing.

I stumbled over my own words. “That, that can’t be right. 29Something ate my, my bread, there were traces. Sounds, also, there were sounds?”

And there had been pests, and he had to believe me! I was terrified that he wouldn’t.

The exterminator frowned. “That bread, did you throw it away?”

“Yes. Right away …” Oh, right, I should’ve kept it for evidence. Or at least taken a photograph. “Oh wait! The bag of snacks.”

I’d run to my computer as soon as I had found them and forgotten the bag of snacks and packet of noodles until now. Confidently, I thrust them out toward him as proof that I wasn’t crazy.

But my triumph was short-lived.

“R-rats?”

My voice cracked as I repeated his verdict back to him. The exterminator, in his neat uniform, smiled uneasily—or perhaps mockingly—and replied, “I can’t be sure. We don’t specialize in rats, and I don’t see any droppings. But insects aren’t going to make marks like this. We’re looking at proper teeth here.”

“But this isn’t some banjiha basement apartment, it’s the fifth floor! And there are no water leaks, and—”

“You’d be surprised at where you find rats. Cities are full of them. Although I must say that this is not that old a building, 30nor is it next to a mountain, so would be a pretty unusual case if it really was that. In the older buildings, they come in by making holes in the wall. But anyway, we don’t really do rats. You’ll have to call up another company for that—”

“Is there nothing else I can do in the meantime?” I asked stupidly. The thought of going through this whole rigamarole for yet another company made me feel desperate.

The exterminator thought for a moment, then said, “I can put down some rat poison for you.”

My relief must’ve been palpable because he smiled gently before hammering another nail into my chest. “But we can’t guarantee results.”

What on Earth was he talking about? My very brain rejected his words.

“Like I said, this is not our area of expertise. Rat poison is the best we can do.”

“Then, the, uh, rat bodies—”

“You’ll have to take them out on your own. Mostly they die outside, but not all of them make it out there.”

I wanted to cry, but what the exterminator said next stiffened my jaw and my resolve.

“If it’s too hard for you, you can always call your boyfriend to do it. Or your father.”

Not having the strength to retort that I had no boyfriend 31or father, I simply clammed up and nodded. Well, I thought, better to face my fears and dump the rats myself than spend my nights imagining I’d be eaten alive by them. Especially after having spent the previous night imagining I’d be eaten alive by roaches …

As he laid out the rat poison, the exterminator explained how it worked. That the likelihood of the rats dying inside the apartment was not high. Even with the slight chance that the rat died indoors, it would do so in an open space because the poison had been manufactured so that the rats would be attracted to light before dying. He added that they would be stiff, so I should think of them as stuffed animals to be tossed in the trash. I didn’t quite understand at first that that last comment was meant to be helpful.

After he was done and had left me with his bank account details, I searched for information on the rat poison he had put down.

As he had mentioned, this was not the old-fashioned rat poison that killed them instantly. It would be a mess if the rats scurried away to die in some unreachable corner and rotted there, so the poison was designed to make the rats go blind first and seek out bright places. And since they would need time to go outside, the poison spread slowly as it coagulated their blood. Because their bodies stiffened as they 32were still alive, they didn’t smell as badly and were easier to dispose of. Every element of this poison was tailor-made for human convenience.

I shouldn’t have looked it up, I thought, regretting the knowledge.

“But I can’t just live in ignorance. It’s one thing for them to eat my food, but there are also diseases to think about …”

Despite my mumblings, there was still a bad aftertaste in my mouth. For a moment I wondered whether I should get rid of the rat poison and adopt a cat, but it was hard to tell which method was crueler. Not to mention how bad of me it would be to bring in a cat just to catch rats when I didn’t even like cats that much.

But the days that followed were such a nightmare that thinking about the ethical killing of rats seemed a distant luxury.

For the next few days I saw no rats, either living or dead, but my life began to fall apart. There was a slight lull in my anxiety after I threw away all my stores of snacks and instant noodles, but then I had to toss my instant rice, regular rice, and emergency chocolate bars. Cans were presumed safe at first, but once I picked up a canister of Spam and reflexively gagged when I felt something sticky on my hand, they were thrown out as well. Even the refrigerator felt like dangerous 33territory. Terrified of dropping crumbs, I ate mostly at convenience stores or cheap kimbap places. And on the morning of the fourth day, tired out of my mind, I decided some instant coffee wouldn’t hurt but jumped out of my skin when the packet dripped little black granules onto the counter. That’s right. Coffee was food after all.

Naturally, I did not want to go back in the house. But being outside of it made me feel uneasy as well, as I’d have to quickly get rid of any dead rats if they ever appeared. Not knowing where my mind was half the time, I went from school to my part-time job and took several deep breaths before stepping into the apartment. I kept the lights on, and every time I opened a door, I took a quick look inside before going in. No matter how long I waited for the day that I’d find a rat corpse on the floor, the day never came. I taped over places that might develop into a hole, stared at the drain in the bathroom floor the whole time I used the toilet, and took lightning showers. I protected the bed with a mosquito net. While I was outside during the day, I did manage to take naps when I could, but fatigue slowly built up in my body.

The thought of having to dispose of dead rat bodies had made me gag at first, but after a few days of this, I began to desperately wish for that day to finally come. This not knowing whether the rat in question had already died prevented me 34from doing my work during the day. They say that rats dare not even tread where cats live, and I wondered, if I couldn’t bring a cat into the house, maybe I could beg someone for a little cat piss? While I pondered over whom I might ask for this very special solution to my problems, Hwang, whom I had completely forgotten in the interim, called me up.

My joy at having something else to preoccupy my mind was short-lived when I found myself in the passenger seat of Hwang’s four-wheel drive as he sped down narrow mountain roads.

I did have a bad feeling when he showed up with the car and said I’d best get in because the place couldn’t be found on navigation apps and there was only enough parking space for one vehicle. But when I realized Hwang had had a few drinks the night before, I suddenly had the urge to jump out of the car. We were also on a road so isolated that I wondered if we truly were just outside of Seoul, and the road turned into a path up God knows what mountain. My entire body was tense. Hwang had seemed like a good person underneath it all, if a bit mired in resentment, but what if he really was a bad person and a dangerous one at that? What had I been thinking? All this for the promise of meeting a true manshin?

What a fool I was. 35

I tried thinking of what I might have for a weapon inside my bag. Did I still carry that pepper spray I bought a while back? Wait, the bag itself could be a weapon in a cinch. There were several books inside, and they might as well have been bricks. My hand gripped my phone.

It was a relief when Hwang suddenly broke his long silence. “Eh, stupid of me to take that wrong turn, now we’re coming from a different direction. I mean, we don’t have to go back or anything, but there was a better route. Don’t fret. We’re here!” He sighed and turned off the ignition. “These dirty roads. And the bottom of the car is probably all scratched up.”

As he got out and examined the car for damage, I sat still in my seat, ears ringing from the sudden change in my situation. The tenseness I’d felt until that moment made my body ache. Breathing deeply, I calmed myself down and looked around me.

There before us was a dilapidated house, looking like something out of a film still.

I felt as if I’d been dropped into a strange landscape.

What first greeted the eye was the back of the house. If one imagined what it might’ve looked like in the past, it was actually quite an impressive domicile. Two stories, a pointed roof, and even an attic room, but what really looked odd from the back was how the second floor was larger than the first. 36The outer wall of the lower half of the house was made to look like that of a log cabin, the gabled windows reminded me of those on the houses in Hollywood movies, and the eaves of the roof were straight and tiled. There were wooden pillars popping out here and there on the sides.

We stood near the wide backyard. It seemed to have never had a surrounding wall, and only a few black stones demarcated the boundary between yard and road. There were no proper trees, just weeds that grew tall and obscured the earth beneath. There was sunlight, but the house still seemed in shadow, and the occasional glimpses of the grass yielded sickly, dry tips.

Hwang tsk-tsked at the sight of the house and came up to my side.

“Odd little thing, isn’t it? It’s called a jeoksangaok. Do you know what a jeoksangaok is?”

Usually at prompts like these I would feign ignorance even when I knew the answer, but this time, I really didn’t know. “What’s a jeoksangaok?”

“Look at the hanja characters. ‘Gaok’ means house, obviously. The ‘jeok’ is the jeok for enemy, and ‘san’ is the character for asset. ‘The house that is the enemy’s asset.’ Jeoksangaok’s not an architectural style, but what we call the houses built during the Japanese colonial era. A kind of hodgepodge 37of Western and Japanese architecture, you see. That wood stuff and tile is very Japanese, but the pointed roof and porch is very Western, right?”

I hadn’t been aware of it, but apparently there were still quite a few of these jeoksangaok across the country. For the first time, I was genuinely impressed by Hwang’s know-it-allness. Hwang must’ve felt pleased at my reaction because he took a step into the yard muttering, “Eheheh, I think it’s going to be a good day.”

The ground under the tall grass must’ve been waterlogged with rainwater as our shoes sank right into the undergrowth. Hwang quickly took a step back, and a bumpy branch hiding behind the tall blades whapped him in the face. A sickly-sweet smell wafted from the growth, and there were flashes of pink and purple in the gap Hwang had made in the grass, but I couldn’t tell if it was just trash or dangerous mushrooms.

I covered my nose with my sleeve. “Can’t we enter from the front or something?”

Hwang struggled with the grass before he managed to get himself back in front of the car and dusted his clothes. He looked irritated.

“No, no, we can’t go this way. Let’s go in through the front.”

Why hadn’t we done that from the beginning? Now I was the one who was irritated. I didn’t want to put my life into 38the hands of a driver who was clearly hungover, but my fear of whatever trap was hiding in that tall grass was greater by a tiny bit more. The four-wheel drive went back onto the winding mountain roads, past a fairly normal looking village, and came up to the house from the front.

The porch really reminded me of the houses on television, but that was the only part of the front that looked better than the back. The gravel path leading up to the porch was broken in the middle, and there were slices of the garden wall missing as well as the front door. A part of the foundation was exposed to the light from the erosion and some of the surrounding earth being dislodged from the construction of the road, which made the entire shape of the house unwieldy. What was left of the front yard was overrun with weeds, and the statues standing along the gravel path were decapitated or otherwise dismembered, impossible to tell what they were originally. The only thing more reassuring here than in the backyard was that there were no dangerous-looking plants.

The house faced south with the mountain to its back, which made its location in accordance with feng shui. I mean feng shui, of course, in terms of Korean real estate in that it had enough light and a good location, not in terms of anything occult. Its high location made it unlikely to flood during monsoons, and the mountain behind it hadn’t been 39denuded in the name of development, which made landslides also improbable.

I then frowned. It was a house with its own sense of uncanny beauty and a good location, but wasn’t it dangerous to leave it neglected like this, to rot? What if someone went inside and got hurt?

This made me anxious again.

“Why have we come to this house? They’re not going to have a goot here, are they? It doesn’t look like anyone lives here.”

He looked annoyed. “How should I know? I’m only here because you were so desperate to come. I’m doing you a big favor here.”

I couldn’t believe it. When did I beg him to bring me here? He was the one who kept saying he would provide a valuable opportunity for me, and I hadn’t been the one to tell him to get drunk and then drive to the wrong place.

I tried to think non-violent thoughts and said, in as nice a tone as possible, “I had no idea it was such a difficult place to get to. I wish you had told me, then I would’ve driven and asked you only to tell me where to go.”

Hwang, who had opened his mouth to let out his annoyance at me, suddenly closed his mouth and bowed to someone behind me. I instinctively turned around.

There was still sunlight but I felt a chill. For a moment, I 40wondered if what I was seeing were a ghost. Hanbok dress, hair tied to a bun, an expressionless face that had not a trace of makeup.

“You’re late.”

“Aigo, please forgive me. I was bringing Dr. Kim here, which took more time than I thought it would. And we got lost along the way.”

The young mudang ignored his excuses and the exaggerated title he just conferred on me. “Shut up with the prattle and follow me. After all the trouble I went through to get Mother’s permission for you.” She tsk-tsked.

The word “mother” made me wonder if she were the manshin’s apprentice. I was about to say hello and hand her my business card when the woman turned right back around and began to walk away.

“Who is …?” I mouthed at Hwang as I tilted my head at her, but Hwang mouthed back, “Later,” and pushed me to follow her. I did find myself reassured by her mudang-like demeanor, the fact that she was a young woman, and even her inhospitable attitude.

The house itself was not so reassuring. Close up, it smelled of rotting wood. It made me nervous that the house may look fine on the outside but was rotted on the inside. There was another smell that hit me when I neared the front door, 41which made me gag. A stench that could not be explained away as coming from wood or mold—a more unpleasant, nauseous smell.

Had something rotted here? My god. Unhelpfully, my mind played a movie reel of all the roadkill I had seen driving to this place since the morning. My face drew itself into a grimace.

I wanted to turn around and run, but I couldn’t possibly back out now. I took out a disposable face mask from my bag and put it on. It couldn’t keep out all of the smell but surely it would help.

An upturned palm came right up to my face. It was Hwang’s, and he looked irritated. Why did he feel so entitled? Reluctantly, I gave him a mask as well. This seemed to mollify Hwang somewhat as he nodded his thanks and put it on.

It was a good thing we put on the mask beforehand. The second we took a step into the house, clouds of dust rose from below. The thin rays of sunlight in the dimness made the dust very visible in the air. My clothes were going to be ruined.

Just a beat after the dust, a chill descended. All abandoned houses have a certain coldness, and this was coupled now with the dampness of old wood.

My face insisted on maintaining its grimace, but I 42nevertheless took a good look around me. Nothing shattered underfoot, and for a house that was well on its way to falling apart, the building seemed sturdy enough. But I did not want to lay my hand on a single thing and dreaded something would pop out at us at any moment.

Were they really going to do a goot here? If they were, they should’ve called a cleaning service in advance.

I pressed down harder on the nose bridge of my dust mask.

The façade of the house was intimidating enough, but the inside was just as unsettling. Beyond the dark foyer was a wide room that was much bigger than most contemporary living rooms. There was a chandelier hanging on the high ceiling, which gave the room the feel of a hotel lobby. The windows were larger than they looked from the outside, the dusty panes filtering pale sunlight.

I followed the lacy cobwebs from the chandelier to a thin strand of smoke floating up to the ceiling. There were several women in white hanbok dresses under the chandelier, silent and waiting in the incense smoke, not doing any goot as far as I could tell. There were three of them—no, four. There was none of the bold primary colors of red, blue, or yellow, just the short white tunic and long white skirt in hanbok style.

The young mudang who had brought us in, expressionless as ever, joined the other women in the room, and I shuddered. 43

They looked exactly like a group of ghosts inside a haunted house.

As we stepped into the room, the floorboards creaked in protest under our feet. I could hear rhythmic murmuring when we got close.

Are they doing the dokgyeong?

Mudang ways included the reading aloud of texts, or dokgyeong, which sounded like chanting. They didn’t always read aloud from a book, and the practice where the reading was memorized was more common in Chungcheong Province. The most often-used texts were the Buddhist Dharani Sutra or the Daoist Scripture of the Jade Pivot. My guess is that it’s because they sound important and dramatic while being hard to understand but nevertheless are filled with good words. But the dokgyeong I heard now was really beyond my comprehension. I listened hard. It didn’t sound like Korean.

I recalled Hwang saying that Gyeongja Manshin incorporated foreign shamanism into her practice.

“Ni—alla—keu—”

I couldn’t understand any of it. My mind raced. Did they appropriate some minor language to sound mysterious or something? Or maybe it was nonsense …

I came to a stop about a meter away from the gathered mudang and took a deep breath. There were four that stood 44in a circle, about an arm’s length from each other, and a tall, white-haired woman who stood in the middle. She had her back to me, and her head was slightly bowed, and I realized she was the one who was chanting. This had to be Gyeongja Manshin.

The mysterious stench mixed in with incense was making me dizzy. The slow chant also made me sleepy. To gather my wits about me, I lifted my mask slightly to pop in a piece of caffeine gum. I tried deciphering the chanting, and my hand crept into my pocket for my phone, so I could get at least a partial recording and analyze it later.

I was looking for the recording app on my screen when my hands froze. The manshin was staring at me. There it was, the tiger’s gaze of legend. No, not a tiger. The golden irises that seemed to burn, the black slits sliced through them. They were the eyes of a serpent. Serpent eyes paralyzing me, growing larger and larger until they covered the ground and sky …

And then, suddenly, I was jolted out of it. The manshin had her back to me and was chanting as if she had never turned around. Her apprentices stood unmoving around her.

I felt a great fear roll toward me like fog, a fear that had no rational basis. Terrified, I took a few steps back and ran out of that house. No one had asked, but I kept saying “Bathroom” through my mask as I made my way out of there. 45

At the porch, I ripped off my mask, and the powerfully nauseous stench hit me in the face. Why wasn’t I getting used to this smell? I ran to where the car was parked, flung open the door, and grabbed the bottle of water I’d left there. Chewing the gum like it was an antidote, I splashed the water on my face and slowly felt my mind come back to normal.

I rubbed my eyes.

Had I dozed off on my feet? When? And for how long?

I placed my hand on my chest and could feel my heart beat fast.

It had to have been from not sleeping well. From those goddamn rats.

I checked my phone just in case I’d remembered to press record. I hadn’t. There were notifications from a group chat of my friends, just memes. I opened the group chat for my graduate lab and sent a message:

Hwang took me to an abandoned house to see a goot, and I think I hallucinated.

There were responses right away. Mostly laughing or surprised emojis. My sunbae Gichan posted, Then you’re in luck, Kim Minsuh. This could be a bestseller. Were there also hallucinogenic mushrooms?

I didn’t feel so great, but that comment did make me laugh.

There was once an American anthropologist named 46Carlos Castaneda, who in the 1960s went forth on a research mission for his thesis and met a man from the Yaqui tribe named Don Juan, under whom he apprenticed as a shaman. He wrote about the experience, and his book became a bestseller. A Korean translation had been published, but the publisher was more of a hack operation than a legitimate academic press.

In any case, the people from my lab who read the book would jokingly lament about the lack of mysterious shamans in Korea and how we couldn’t take exotic drugs or go on vision quests and therefore would never be able to write a bestseller.

Well. Almost never. If this happened to be as real, it was as good a chance as any.

I’d decided I was going to snap the mask back on and march right in there when the women in white came streaming out of the house as if the ritual was over. I quickly moved out of their way. Hwang looked glum, and the women looked even colder than before. I wondered what had happened in the brief moment I’d stepped away from them.

There was so much tension I could hardly ask Hwang. Had I ruined something by dozing off in their presence, saying something weird, or loudly stumbling out of there?

The manshin, who had been striding away, paused.

“And who might this be?” 47

Hwang quickly stepped forward. “I brought her here, Manshin ma’am. As I said before. Ms. Kim Minsuh, studying at that university.”

“I didn’t ask you, Hwang. I’ve already warned you about this. How can you be so uncouth?”

Her voice was full of ice. Hwang flinched and bowed his head. He looked not like a man in his forties but a fidgety, ten-year-old boy. I flinched myself. Had all his blather been hot air? Hwang clearly had no place among these women.

But the manshin turned to me and spoke in a voice so gentle it was like a lie.

“Kim Minsuh, was it? Glad to meet you. I’m Im Gyeongja.”

“Yes, my name is Kim Minsuh, and I am a graduate student. I am so honored to make your acquaintance, Manshin-nim.”

When this elderly woman, as handsome as a falcon, shook my hand and nodded, I instantly liked her. She was strict, neat, and formidable, the bearing of an army general. But she was not scary. Well, she was scary, but not in the sense that she would harm me. There was something reassuring about the way she was dignified and confident and yet considerate and polite to me, a younger woman. I even liked the way she had no business card or stated job or position and simply said her name. The two scary eyes I thought I had seen slowly faded from my mind. 48

“But what brings you here to this house?” I asked. “I don’t think you were doing a goot in there.”

“It wasn’t a goot, more like … preparation.” The manshin looked to the side. The gesture meant something evidently, as some of the women in white scattered instantly. One headed toward the village, and two of them went back inside the house to bring out the incense urn and other possessions and fetch a chair so the manshin could sit. The fourth stood by the manshin the whole time.

Meanwhile, the manshin talked to me in a leisurely tone.

She told me that house was said to be a hundred years old. It had been built with the best materials of the time, a true labor of love. But once it was completed, an abnormal number of people died in its premises. One inhabitant went mad. It changed hands several times until in the 1980s, a young woman fell down the stairs and died. Her husband never returned to the house, and it had stood empty since. For almost forty years.

The people living near didn’t brand it a haunted house. There were none of those rumors of blurry shadows passing the windows or women ghosts with long, messy hair staring out into the darkness from the premises. As it grew more dilapidated, the house began to be known as not “the Haunted House” but “the Forbidden House.” Which thankfully meant it escaped the interest of boys who went searching for thrills. 49

But I was puzzled—if the house was so unlucky, shouldn’t there have been a goot conducted here ages ago? Or at least a remodeling, or the house knocked down to build a new villa?

The manshin answered my questions easily enough. “The inheritance and ownership issues are very complicated here.”

After a long legal battle over the rights to the house, the owner was finally doing something about the cursedness of the residence. In such a case, a goot or cleansing ceremony or whatever would be just the thing to reset the aura of the house. It was a dangerous and creepy house, but for being abandoned for four decades, it was in remarkably good shape. A little cleaning and some major remodeling would turn it into a café or restaurant in no time.

“Then are you doing the goot in a few days? May I ask when?”

Implicit in my question was the one of whether I would be allowed to attend. The manshin narrowed her eyes for a moment before nodding.

“Fine. You’ve seen this far, you might as well see the whole thing. I also get the feeling I should know you better, Ms. Kim Minsuh. How can I reach you?”

“Yes, yes! Of course, here’s my card. Just call me and I promise I’ll be back here on time. Thank you, thank you so much!” 50

Her abrupt acceptance of my request was unexpected, but that didn’t make me think she was any different from other mudangs. Hwang’s boasts didn’t make me think there was something more about her. Even as I warned myself that this was clearly the infamous charisma that mudangs used to fool people into giving them money, the obvious favor she showed me made me giddy, nevertheless.

Things were finally starting to look up.

For the next few days, I could distract myself from the threat of rats by studying up on the Forbidden House.

They say there’s nothing more fun than studying something useless. If I had poured as much effort into my graduate studies as I did into learning about that house, I would’ve gotten my master’s years ago.

The story of the Forbidden House began in 1910 when it was built by its first owner, a Japanese trader named Suzuki.

His business prospering, Suzuki built an ambitiously modern house in occupied Korea and moved in with his young wife while she was pregnant. She soon lost the baby. Before she could even recover, their two older children, who were still very little, fell sick. The doctor diagnosed them with “children’s fever,” a catch-all term that gives us no clue as to what their ailments were specifically. The first person who 51died while the children were sick was the maid that took care of them, which implies the disease was contagious.

Suzuki soon died as well. Not of a disease, but on his way back to Japan on a business trip. The cause of death is unknown. The wife, who was still frail, lost her mind when she heard the news, and worsened when her eldest child, Yuko, died. Their housekeeper, Baek, also quit, vociferously complaining of a mysterious and unbearable stench that permeated the house. The remaining mother and son were left on their own and nearly died before they were saved by a relative who had come over from Japan to take care of Suzuki’s funeral and business affairs. But Suzuki’s wife never recovered her mind. All this happened within the space of five years.

No wonder rumors of the house being cursed began then. The rumors at the time were actually quite accurately recorded thanks to a police report of an investigation into a Korean maid who had supposedly spread stories against her former employer with the intention to harm his family. It was said that this maid, whose name was not recorded, had gone around saying Suzuki had built his house on a grave that lay on the land he had coveted, and the house smelled strange because the buried dead would rise and wander the halls of the house. 52

I made a note of this record. Vampires during the Japanese occupation?

This was interesting. Being cursed for digging up a grave and building a house over it was a very Korean-style story, but not the part where the body rises again and walks around the house. Did we have zombies back then? Or vampires? Surely this was all just stories showing animosity toward Japanese settlers?

I could find nothing on what happened to the maid and what they made of her story. Well, who would take such an allegation seriously? I had to be satisfied with the fact that there was any record of it at all.

There was no more I could find of Suzuki’s wife, and I assumed the surviving child went back to Japan to live with this relative. The Suzuki family remained the owner of the house, but none of them ever came to live there, and several renters passed through, five of which died of different diseases. In the late 1930s, there was an order by the municipal colonial authority for the house to be thoroughly fumigated.

So far, a fairly ordinary ghost story. But there were aspects of it that I couldn’t ignore. I was beginning to believe the house really had been built over a grave.

The records between the 1940s and 50s were incomplete due to the midcentury wars. To this day, there are many 53houses that disappeared from official records like ghosts but still remain standing in real life. There is quite a bit of land still under Japanese names but unclaimed by the Korean government. Thankfully, I came across some more records of this time, a collection of testimonies from people who lived in the area, and the consensus seemed to be that the last Japanese person to live in the house had gone missing, and the family that squatted there afterward died in the war.

War. How many more had lived and died in that house during those years? It would hardly be surprising, as almost every house had at least someone die during the war in that era.

The Forbidden House managed to avoid the bombs being dropped and survived to welcome a new owner.

A man named Shin, who acquired the house in the 1960s, got rid of the tatami mat rooms on the second floor and installed a new stove, which caused his elderly parents and younger brother to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. The newspapers say he was devastated, but he seems to have stayed at the house after that and fixed the stove. Some years later, his young live-in cook brought the house back into the news. For a while she had ranted that there must be another carbon monoxide leak, that there was a strange smell, that no matter how much she cleaned the smell would not go 54away, that it wasn’t her fault that it smelled so bad, that there was something in the house—then she went mad and took a kitchen knife and stabbed the whole family.

This was the point of the story where I had to rub my arms because of the chills. There had been many who died of strange circumstances, but this was the first mention of blood and gore and murder. The incident made the national news and was covered in several papers, but they were all full of vague and contradictory theories as to her motive. Eventually, the general narrative seemed to have settled on the cook being mentally disturbed. Some articles postulated that she’d been abused, but other articles were replete with testimonies from Shin’s friends declaring that the victims had always treated the cook like family.

This seems to be where the house had solidified its reputation for being cursed. I guess more than the tragedy of the Japanese businessman’s family during the occupation or the serial deaths of the renters, the deaths of one of the rare wealthy families in the postwar era would be more noticeable. Not to mention the unknown story of the thirteen-year-old girl who came up from the country to work as a cook in a strange family’s home—who knew what she had gone through.

I really hadn’t imagined the other deaths too vividly, but 55this last incident left a strong impression. So different from just hearing about how there were many people who died strangely at the house. And my curiosity over the house’s secret grew.

Not that any of it looked like it had anything to do with shamanism.

Aside from the madness of the young cook, the house’s monstrousness was well outside of traditional Korean ghost stories. Normally, the fury of the cook, bent on exacting justice for herself from the grave, should be the focal point of this narrative. Or, the motive would come from some other wronged soul that found itself unable to move onto the afterlife because of unfinished business. But in the chronicles of the Forbidden House, the main point was not the death of someone in particular. I sighed, perplexed and sorrowful, and circled the term “strange smell” over and over in my notes.

This mention of a strange smell had occurred much earlier in the timeline as well, when the Suzuki family lived in the house, mostly in the testimonies of their servants. Maybe carbon monoxide poisoning wasn’t the true cause of death then, even. There was also that order from the colonial municipality, to “fumigate the house as several people have died of disease there.” 56

If we’re talking about a strange smell … I also caught it the moment I stepped into that house. But how could it still have the same smell? If it is, then it doesn’t have anything to do with animal remains. Maybe it was of something poisonous. Was it in the wood or the paint, or in the land itself?

It wasn’t my job to solve that mystery, but if there really was some kind of biohazard in that house, all those who were to return there were in danger.

I went over the research again for any more mentions of the smell. In the 1980s, the stories of the carbon monoxide poisoning and the massacre seems to have faded from memory as yet another couple moved in. They remodeled, and everything we could see today inside the house was from this time.

The story of this couple, who were in their thirties, was that the woman fell down the stairs and died, and the man went missing. Like a murder in a mystery novel or something, annoyingly without a conclusion to the story no matter how much I dug through the archives.

And that was it. Ever since it was last abandoned, there wasn’t so much as a news item about kids going inside on a dare and falling through the floorboards.

Once I had its long history down pat, my feelings became complicated. I was astounded more than scared, and 57fascinated, but also deeply bothered. The memory of the stench of the Forbidden House stiffened my joints and gave me a headache.

And once I finished the research I had sunk so deeply into, the peace I had felt for the past few days also abruptly ended.

The nightmares returned whenever I lay down to sleep.

Now the bugs in my dreams had turned into large and hideous rats. I kept telling myself that not all rodents were as horrifying and tried to think of cute mice and squirrels and such, but it didn’t help. There were weird sounds in the walls. Hordes of rats seemed to crawl inside the walls of my bedroom or under the floorboards. There was no way a building like ours with its thin, perfunctory walls would have space to harbor rodents, but logic was no help in calming my mind.

The rats of my imagination slowly began to eat away at my brain. I even began to feel like there was a strange smell in the apartment, like the smell had followed me home from the Forbidden House a few days ago. A few days ago? Was it really just a few days ago? It felt like a month. I kept getting up every five minutes to look around the apartment. I looked down my drains and sprinkled baking soda or poured hot water; I examined my bathroom closely and added air fresheners.

But these reassurances lasted only for a moment, because 58just a minute after lying back down, I would suddenly feel I could smell it once more and get up to spritz the air with perfume.

It really made no sense. Even if there had been an actual smell, wouldn’t my nose have adjusted to it by now? Didn’t we stop perceiving a smell if enough time passed? There was no way I could keep smelling the same smell all the time.

I knew this, but I could still smell it.

When I had the thought that some rat lay in rot somewhere in the apartment yet again, I got up from the bed for the tenth time that night.

I looked, very thoroughly, for dead vermin. I pushed my small bed to the side. There was nothing there but dust. I moved my shelved books so I could move the shelves to check behind them. I trembled with too much anxiety to wait any longer. A thought occurred that it wouldn’t be so bad if I finally managed to faint from exhaustion and get some forced rest from this exertion.

If I could’ve seen how I looked in that moment, I would’ve jumped out of my own skin. My hair was a mess, my eyes were bloodshot, and I was acting like a lunatic as I moved my furniture around this way and that. I must’ve looked like a ghost. In some waking dream, I realized I looked exactly like a haunted spirit I’d read about in a book or heard about in a 59childhood story, one of those ghosts that are said to wander about the corridors on its hands.

A banging sound!

I froze.

Someone was pounding the door.

I suddenly came to as if from a dream. The apartment was in chaos. There were piles of books everywhere on the floor, and every piece of furniture from the shelves to the bed were not in their proper places, and there were dust bunnies everywhere. It was the middle of the night and I had done all that. No wonder the downstairs neighbor had come up.

I knew I had gone too far this time, but I was too scared to respond. I didn’t open the door and held my breath as I waited for the man to leave.

“Fucking hell! Some of us are sleeping!” he shouted and gave my door a good kick before plodding away.

I waited silently until his footsteps faded and began to cry softly.

Soon enough, I had melted into a pile as I sobbed. I’d never cried so much since I was a child. Even through the tears I was afraid. Was I going crazy? Was this what going crazy meant? Was I fated to follow my mother down this path? Look at the state of me now—what else could I be if not crazy? 60

And then, I heard music.

I was so surprised my tears stopped. Hiccupping, I carefully approached the source of the music. It was my phone.

The number on the screen wasn’t in my contacts. Who was calling me at three in the morning? Or had downstairs called the police? Before I could stop myself, my hand clicked the receiver button.

“Hello?”

“Is this Ms. Kim Minsuh?”

The refreshingly confident, slightly hoarse voice smashed through the black fog of my mind. I stupidly hiccupped into the phone.

“It’s Gyeongja, Im Gyeongja.”

“Man-manshin …?”

The manshin did not explain why she was calling me at such an hour. She only asked if I were all right.

“Rats, there are, there are rats, in the house, I can’t sleep, there’s a strange smell, and downstairs, they are mad, mad at me, I’m scared, am I, am I crazy?”

My words tumbled to a stop, but for a moment there was only silence on the other end. Just as the darkness threatened to descend with the silence and I was about to drop my phone, the manshin’s firm voice pierced through the night.

“Leave there at once. Leave and run to me.” 61

Thank you but I’m all right, I would hate to impose on you—none of those niceties escaped my lips. They didn’t even occur to me in that moment. I put on my coat, grabbed my wallet and phone and charger, almost walked out before remembering my car keys, walked out this time but came back for my research folder on the Forbidden House, and finally shut the front door behind me.

Scared that the neighbor below would pop out of the shadows, I carefully went down the stairs. One step, two step, three, four, five, six, seven …

Only when my car made it out to the main road and cold air was blowing through my open window could I finally breathe again.

The manshin opened her door without a word and let me in. She put a warm mug into my hands before I could even say hello, and as I sipped from it, she lay a warm blanket around my trembling shoulders.

“I don’t know why I did what I did.”

Before I knew it, I was telling her everything. About the rats, the agony they brought me, my landlord who let me sign the lease despite the rats, the exterminator who got paid despite not doing his job.

I had never so much as glimpsed a rat at this point, but 62my mind was dead set on the whole thing being rats. Rats that ate my food, that ran around my apartment, that spread disease and were just lying in wait to chew me up and rip me apart.

But even if there’d been no doubt in my mind that it was all just rats, the story my mouth told sounded crazy to my ears. My behavior made no sense, and there were too many holes in my story.

I abruptly stopped myself and asked, “Am I going crazy?”

Perhaps it wasn’t that but instead I was being haunted by some spirit. I wanted to believe I was haunted. Or even if I didn’t believe it, I wanted her to tell me what to do, that if I did just that, it would all be over. Wasn’t it her job to say things like that?

But the manshin looked at me calmly and said something totally unexpected.

“Are you afraid of going insane?”

“What? Yes. Of course. I’m really scared of it.”

“Why so?”

My mind went blank. Why would anyone ask this question? No one asked why someone was afraid of death. Such a fear was fundamental to the human condition. Wasn’t a fear of going insane the same?

“Well, uh, if you have to ask, it’s just, it’s so horrifying. No 63one would believe me, living would be so much, so much harder than it is now, and everyone around me would suffer.”

My voice crawled in on itself. My really big fear, the real one, refused to be spoken. The very thought of my mother made me clam up.

The manshin quietly said, “Going insane can mean many different things. Sometimes it can make you suffer, other times, it may make your life easier.”

“It … can?”

“I was about fourteen when the shinbyeong came.”

A common story among mudangs. The shinbyeong—holy sickness—meant a disease with a set of symptoms that defied every medical intervention, one that went away only after a special goot that allows the inflicted to accept the spirit. A mental disorder only found in Korea, and one that had an official designation in the medical world, but at the same time a phenomenon mudangs insisted was not a disease.

“I suffered for two years as I refused to accept the spirit. I was in so much pain. Enough to think I had died and fallen to hell. Sometimes, I wonder if I had actually died then and am now living my afterlife. Or that I really did turn insane when I was fourteen and have been a madwoman since then.”

She said this in her perfectly calm, very much non-crazy 64demeanor. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t believe shinbyeong was real, but the pain and suffering mudangs went through because of it seemed real enough.

“It must’ve been hard for you.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad. There were good things about it. I could get rid of my pesky husband and fight back against my father-in-law who starved me and beat me. How amusing it was when I picked up my mudang sword and began to yell and my in-laws began to back away from me.”

The manshin smiled fondly at the memory, but it was too sad a story for me to smile back.

“And once the spirit was in me, I had no fear. Tigers, diseases, all of them were nothing compared to the spirit. I feared no poverty, hunger, or the people who would wag their fingers at me.”

I wish I could say her words made my own fear dissipate like morning fog, but such miracle was not forthcoming. This brief summary of her past, however, demonstrated the underlying reasons I had long suspected for shinbyeong. How telling it was that the word “shaman” in most countries conjures men, but not in Korea, as the kind of traumatizing experiences that define the shaman’s advent are so common for women in this country. Shinbyeong doesn’t make suffering occur, it’s suffering that makes shinbyeong happen. 65Shinbyeong and shinnaerim, the acceptance of the spirit, may have long provided an exit for many a suffering woman. Even if the experience didn’t manage to help all of those who were afflicted.

These thoughts helped calm me considerably. The manshin must’ve noticed, as she then suggested we talk again once I’ve rested a little, and I let her put a blanket around me as I lay down in her spare room.

Some hours later, untormented by nightmares of rats, I woke up with more strength and clarity of mind. And I was nonplussed. Why hadn’t I thought of quitting that apartment? Sure I had no money, but there were people in my lab who’d be willing to put me up for a few nights. Why had I behaved the way I did?

I folded up the blankets and raked my fingers through my hair and came out into the living room, where the manshin sat at her table and leisurely sipped coffee.

The oddness of the situation hit me then. It shouldn’t have been too surprising to discover that mudangs lived more or less like ordinary people, but it seemed odd that the residence the manshin lived in with her four apprentices was not a traditional house but a very modern apartment. It almost made me laugh. As did the fact that I’d come running to her here. 66

This sudden mirth warmed my heart, and at the same time I felt embarrassed at how I’d acted in front of her. And yet, I kept wanting to lean on her. Not because I saw her as a mother figure or an old wisewoman. She felt more like a teacher or an elder, someone I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of. There was also the hope that she may have the answers I was searching for.

I cleared my throat and politely asked her if she’d had a good sleep. I was wondering what to say next when the manshin said lightly, “Do join us for breakfast. Orchid is quite the cook.”

The woman Gyeongja called Orchid immediately began to set a place at the table for me. She was one of the apprentices. Later, when I learned she called her apprentices Apricot, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo, I felt like I was watching a historical palace drama.

My feelings lifted as I ate the warm rice and broiled cutlass fish, and the manshin gave me a new toothbrush and underwear for after my shower. The meal was delicious, and the shower seemed to wash away my bad memories.

Not to waste my restored energy, I finally made the call I’d been dreading, to my landlord.

So let’s look at the facts. It wasn’t my fantasy that there was a rat infestation. The exterminator had come to the 67house and seen the bag of snacks himself and declared that rats were likely. Even if I turned the house inside out in a moment of panic, that much was a clear fact at least.

I hoped it was enough to go on.

The landlord had been polite only before I signed the contract. He had a nasty manner otherwise and really got on my nerves. It took him forever to resolve the slightest issue and complained anytime he needed to reimburse me over the smallest fixes, ranting about how it was completely unnecessary and that it was my fault for misusing things. Sure enough, he practically jumped at me through the phone.

“What, rats? You really want me to believe that? Rats, in a perfectly fine building? We’ve maintained it too well for that. Twenty years people have lived in it and never seen a single rat. Huh, you’re acting like this is some building that’s about to be condemned. Your downstairs neighbor called me and said you were acting crazy, you’re not just making excuses for kicking up that racket, are you?”

This would be the point where I’d shrink into myself and wonder if it was all my fault after all, but not this time. If anything, I got even more angry.

“Then what, are you saying I’m hallucinating? A professional exterminator said the same thing. I didn’t think it was a rat at first, it was the exterminator’s opinion that it was. There 68are traces of bread and cookies having been eaten, I have photographic proof and receipts. I’ve already paid for rat poison with my own money. I’m doing you a favor here by trying to resolve this without telling anyone else in the building, you really should appreciate that instead of making me out into some crazy woman. Think for a minute. Who has more to lose if word gets out this building is infested with rats?”

I didn’t speak with as clear authority as I’d wanted, nor was I as calm as I’d wanted to be. But despite my stumbling over some of the words, I managed to speak my mind.

The landlord seemed startled that I was talking back to him. His usual attitude had made me believe he’d get angry at me, but my standing up for myself led him only to mumble something about my not cleaning the apartment properly.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not going back in there until this is resolved, so you can go in with your master key to do whatever you want to do about the rats. And you have to pay me back not only for my moving expenses but for the money I paid the exterminator. I’m ready to sue you over this. And you know what, I may even be entitled to damages considering how much my work and well-being had to suffer because of this whole thing.”

After I hung up, I felt lighter but also a little regretful. It didn’t feel all that great that I had to be a bit nasty myself to 69get my way, and I wondered if I was really making the best choices in these circumstances.

But I just shook off the feeling and gathered my things.

As I bowed to the manshin and thanked her for her help, she narrowed her eyes at me as if she was trying to figure something out.

“So, is the issue resolved?”

“Well, I’m not sure if it’s resolved or not, but I think I can take it from here.” I needed to find a place to live, and there were more arguments to be had with the landlord, but I didn’t need to tell her all that.

I had just about made up my mind about things when the manshin said, “You can stay here until things get better. I’m only helping because I can afford to, you don’t have to feel so sorry about it.”

While I believed her when she said she could afford to help me, I was still reluctant to accept it. Whoever heard of a truly free lunch in this world?

“Thank you, but I really couldn’t—”

“Wait a minute, I’d actually been calling you about something else last night. Remember how you wanted to come back to the Forbidden House with us? We’re going there the day after tomorrow. You can stay with us until then.”

“The day after tomorrow?” 70

The Forbidden House! As soon as she mentioned it, the history of the house that I had so greedily uncovered came right back into my mind. As did my memory of that disturbing and unreal and yet strangely familiar house.

I couldn’t stop myself. “About that house, I did some research into it.”

“Research?”

It was hard to discern her level of interest, but I could just about detect that there was some. Encouraged, I blabbered on about everything I had found out.

“… and so I was wondering about all those mentions of the smell, and also the fact that most of the deaths had to do with diseases. Which made me think there’s some kind of poison or hallucinogen in that house.”

That last part, unlike my enthused relating of my discoveries, was offered to her with some hesitation. How could I suggest poison or hallucinogens to a mudang hired to exorcise some evil spirit? Wasn’t I basically telling her that I didn’t believe in her powers? Would she think I was wasting my time? Or even take me seriously?

The white-haired manshin seemed to think for a moment before nodding her head.

“That’s a possibility. What do you think we should do then?” 71

“If it’s all right with you, may I do some more research? Because we still have today and tomorrow?”

I wasn’t exactly itching to go back to the Forbidden House, but I was eager to pay the manshin back for her kindness, to prove that there was something I could do to help her.

And, truth be told, I wasn’t completely unaware that I had turned into a teacher’s pet in front of the manshin.

And so, this story moves onto the part that I hold most dearly in my memory.

The sun was beginning to set, and the manshin stood next to me in her jade-colored skirt and light purple jeogori tunic, carrying a fan and bells and disinfectant and a gas torch.

That wasn’t all we carried. We also had torchlights, gas masks, vinegar, baking soda, Clorox, a portable Geiger counter, and various cleaning tools. Plenty of water and snacks, too. Not to mention the full complement of Apricot, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo, as well as Hwang, who had practically thrown a tantrum over my supposed takeover of the acquaintance that he had introduced me to in the first place.

I couldn’t tell if everyone was really taking me seriously or pulling a coordinated prank on me. Since this wasn’t a question I could really ask in that situation, I moved on to the second most pressing concern on the list. 72

“Aren’t those clothes a little, uh, difficult to move in?” The hemline of that jade skirt looked like it would sweep up all the dust bunnies in its wake.

But the manshin wasn’t fazed. “This is our battle armor, after all.”

Her four apprentices, all of different ages but with the same expressionless face, nodded at this. Hwang wore the hiking clothes that were the battle armor of middle-aged Korean men, so there was no need to ask him why he was wearing what he wore.

The manshin shook her bells like she was starting a goot.

“All right! Let’s see what we shall see!”

Apricot, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo lined up and entered the house in orderly fashion. Meanwhile, I put on my rubber boots and gloves and bravely strode into the backyard. I wanted to see the environs before the sun went down.

There were no cracks in the ground or leaking gas mains, and the portable gas detectors showed zero gas. It was good to eliminate that suspicion, but the feeling of the mud sucking in my boot soles and the dark color of the clay was unsettling, as was the strange smell that gave me a headache. My face was constantly assaulted by slapping branches and invisible spiderwebs, and I kept thinking I was stepping on some dead animal instead of another clump of weeds. I wanted to 73burn my clothes and pour sanitizer all over myself. I felt this even more when I finally got back into the house when it became dark outside, because the four apprentices had cleaned up the house quite a bit by that time.

But when I raised my mask from my face, a whiff of the bad smell that still lingered made me grimace. It wasn’t as strong as when I had first entered this house, but it somehow grew more repulsive from having mixed with the smell of disinfectant. What made it so goddamn potent? It made my nerves stand on end.

“Has anyone checked the basement?” I asked.

On cue, the manshin came up the steps from the basement.

“It’s a mess, but there’s nothing peculiar down there.”

Even in that eerie house, she looked very much at ease. It made me feel a little less tense.

The Forbidden House was still dim and unpleasant, but with the rolling back of a layer of dust, a kind of beauty was evident. I’d already noticed the house seemed sturdy enough for a domicile so long neglected, but there wasn’t so much as a trace of nature having tried to take it back. All the more surprising considering the fact that the house was made of wood.

As I looked around with new eyes, the people I had researched seemed more vivid to me than ever. My first pass over the records had made me wonder mostly about the cook and 74the maids, whose names were never recorded, but looking up at the chandelier brought me to think of the families that had moved into the house with their own hopes and dreams. To build a beautiful house and a new home, to hang a gorgeous chandelier and imagine a future with as yet unborn children. How horrible it must’ve been to be met with sickness and tragedy instead. What had they thought, what had they felt? And the family that had bought and repaired this house after the war, when the whole country worked so hard to raise itself from the ashes, what dreams had they had themselves?

How devastating it must’ve been that their home, the one place that should’ve been a refuge and place of rest, had been the most dangerous place for them in the end. Home is where we’re supposed to let our guard down after dealing all day with harmful people outside, and what was one to do when the harm was coming from inside the house? Just the thought of a single rat had plunged me into several days of hell. It would’ve been much, much worse for the people who had lived in this house.

As these thoughts made me melancholy again, the manshin’s clear voice cut through the air.

“I do think this is enough, let’s have some dinner and scatter about and see what happens here at night, shall we?”

The manshin allocated our duties with reassuring alacrity. 75Hwang was stationed in the attic, Apricot and Orchid on the second floor, Chrysanthemum and Bamboo on the first, and me and the manshin in the basement.

Hwang muttered a little, but otherwise there were no complaints. The apprentices always followed the manshin’s orders to the letter, and I was happy that she had chosen to team up with me.

The prospect of staying up with the manshin in this house was exciting, but I was also nervous, even if we were about to do the classic sleepover-at-a-haunted-house experience together. I was still hesitant about starting a conversation with her, nor could I think of anything to say that might interest her.

My gaze wandered around the basement instead.

It was a particularly creepy space in that generally creepy house. It had probably been designed to let to a separate tenant, a kind of banjiha apartment almost. Half of it was a proper room and the other half was a kitchen space and a bathroom, but the exposed concrete of the walls on this level made it incongruous with the other rooms of the house. There were windows half-buried outside by dirt and a set of stairs leading outside. The walls and ceiling were not thick enough to mask sounds, but there was still a feeling of isolation from the world. Maybe it had once been a cozy kind of space, but those days were long gone. 76

There was a large stain on the cement floor and one of the walls. It seemed like a random stain at first, but upon closer inspection, it looked like the outline of a person. In the torchlight, it almost moved. A stain that made me wonder if someone was buried underneath. Wasn’t there an Edgar Allan Poe story to that effect?

The apprentices, at any rate, had made a space for their precious master to lie down comfortably, and I was able to do the same thanks to them.

I kept glancing around the room and sneaking looks at the manshin.

When I first saw her, she’d given me the impression of a handsome falcon. Closer inspection revealed strands of jet black in her thick white hair, with almost no small wrinkles around her eyes and mouth but a few deep ones here and there. Her nose was slightly beak-like, her jawline sharp, and her eyes had no folds and were long at the edges. When she was young, she probably hadn’t been thought of as cute or pretty, but she was, indeed, handsome.

To be married off at fourteen! Well, as young as she looked, she was from a different era after all. Surely such things were common then. I wondered if she ever married again or had children.

But she hardly seemed like she was older than seventy, 77and her voice sounded even younger than that. Her manner of speech was elegant, which didn’t quite seem to go with her passing remarks about her poor childhood and the awful in-laws who starved her.

I’d never seen an elderly person like this, much less a mudang. Or any woman like this, to be honest. She was so different from my grandmother or my mother.

The manshin seemed to have read my mind.

“Why did your mother refuse the spirit, Minsuh-ssi?”

Every hair on my body stood on end.

I stared at her. I couldn’t believe what she had just said.

I knew, better than anyone else, that there was no such thing as telepathy or mind-reading. My grandmother had reminded me of this day and night. That they were just stories made up by con artists and evil people.

After my mother had me, she became ill. It looked like a typical case of shinbyeong. She became scared of people and avoided them, and spoke in tongues and harmed herself. She was sent to several hospitals, none of which could help her. My grandmother resorted to faith healers, preachers who were said to have especially efficacious prayers. Only after much reluctance was a mudang commissioned to hold a naerim goot, but nothing worked. The goot managed to alleviate her physical pain somewhat, but if anything, it made her 78lose her mind. She no longer recognized me and was unable to function.

So it wasn’t true that she refused the spirit.

But more important than that was how the manshin knew about it at all. I had never talked to anyone about my mother, especially not to the people at the university. What would happen if word got out that I was the daughter of a madwoman horrified me. But more than wanting to avoid any prejudice I would face, I was on some level hoping that if I didn’t speak of it, I would forget—and it would never have happened. But how had the manshin found out? Had she done her own research into me? If so, why?

My breath began to grow rapid.

“Calm down.”

I stared at her two hands that gently gripped my own, completely at a loss. Her hands were wrinkled but beautiful. They were warm hands.

“My, my mother did not suffer from shinbyeong.”

I don’t know why I said that, or why my hand returned her grip instead of shaking her off. I couldn’t look into her eyes. Words that I’d never even said to my grandmother began pouring out of me.

“She wasn’t visited by a spirit. She was just mentally ill. Because her life was hard, so hard, that’s why she became sick. I 79don’t know the exact circumstances, but I’ve never heard her talk about my father, and there’s no mention of him in any of my documents, and my grandmother was strict, and she was unforgiving, and, and, and my mother kept saying strange things so my grandmother spent all her money on doctors and went into debt to find a cure, but none of the hospitals knew how to cure her, so they sent her to a Christian healing center where they kept beating her, so she punched a preacher there and ran away. And that’s when Grandmother decided to try a naerim goot, but she said it was no use. But the mudang said it was too late and she refused at first. Grandmother said that preachers and mudangs and everyone were all frauds, all ripping off the gullible, she said that over and over again in her life. But sometimes, I wonder. Wasn’t it Grandmother’s fault for going around to such places in the first place? What if none of these hospitals she’d put Mother in were psychiatric? What if she’d been in denial her daughter had a mental disorder and made things worse in the end?”

More than toward the mother I didn’t know very well, my resentment was larger toward my grandmother, who had actually raised me. Maybe I’d made mudangs the focus of my research as a rebellion against her always telling me to stay away from them. I know I was sick of her saying they were frauds. Or maybe I wanted to prove once and for all that 80Grandmother was right and they were frauds, which sounds like the kind of motive that was twisted enough to be true.

But why was I saying these things, things I’d never told anyone in my life, to a mudang of all people? And in this weird basement at that.

Gyeongja Manshin listened attentively to my whole rant and story. At the end of it, she gave a light sigh.

“I see. And that’s why you were so afraid of losing your mind.”

Yes. That was it. As simple as that.

She patted my back. “Some things just happen for no reason.”

“What … what?”

“Those of us who are more academically inclined tend to crave explanations that fit just so to everything, and aren’t you the same, Minsuh-ssi? That’s why you are doing this work. But things don’t always fit together perfectly. It’ll just make life harder for you if you keep thinking that way. Sometimes, things just happen. Good things and bad things both.”

The disinterested truth of the universe, summarized in a few sentences.

Of course, I understood there was no real narrative arc to life, no cause and effect to everything. We can never comprehend the complexity of the universe; the universe is always indifferent to us, and most things happen for no good 81reason. There is no such thing as intrinsic meaning. We are insignificant specks of nothing. This truth is so harsh that we normally stuff it away in some corner of our lives and live our days in denial of it.

But wasn’t the role of a mudang to tell us that the universe did have meaning? Wasn’t that what all religion was supposed to do? That we were poor and suffering because of sins in a past life, that if we were good and hardworking now, we’d reap the benefits in the afterlife, that God is love, that we must console ourselves that our loved ones would be that much happier the more we suffer—that whole collective delusion? I know that even Grandmother, who was a strong and formidable woman to the end, took consolation from such platitudes. Platitudes a mudang who conned people just enough to survive and not enough to do real harm might say, only because we really wanted to hear that our suffering had meaning.

But Gyeongja Manshin was different.

“So don’t hate yourself. Your grandmother and mother, they probably died content in the knowledge that you would be as happy even as they had to suffer. That’s enough. Their suffering is not your responsibility. Nor does it need to have any grand meaning beyond that.”

Her words were frank and direct, but also comforting. 82

“Neither is your suffering the fault of your mother or grandmother.”

That made me flinch. I felt like I was found out. I couldn’t deny I harbored such resentments. That beyond the guilt I felt over the possibility that my mother had fallen sick because she had me, or for my grandmother having been saddled with raising me, I also hated them a little too, deep down.

“I’m not saying there’s no fault on anyone’s part,” she said, “or that such fault is irrelevant. No human being can live completely independently of all others. That goes for everything else in this universe as well, not just us. Everything influences everything. But that’s all the accepting of a spirit means. To acknowledge there are larger forces than myself, to be aware that I am just a speck of dust in the scheme of things. That no matter how much we influence each other, in the end, we are all nothing. Once you know this, you are free.”

I was overwhelmed. What was this, Buddhism?

“And once you’re free,” she continued, “you’ll finally be able to see … chaos.”

The manshin smiled and made a gesture as if to shake grains of sand off her hand.

I must’ve dozed off as I suddenly woke up in a chill and was lost for a moment. But once I saw who lay next to me, I suddenly remembered what I was doing here. 83

I rubbed my forehead and looked at the sleeping face next to me and trembled.

Oddly, the sight of Gyeongja Manshin asleep made me feel dread and fear. It’s always strange to look into the face of a sleeping person, but this was more than that. She simply … did not look like a person. And her face, as she slept, was constantly changing expression. She frowned, then didn’t, then smiled, then frowned, then broke into a terrifying grin. The sudden shifts of her face made me think she was turning into different people in rapid succession, dreaming a strange dream or acting in multiple roles in a single play.

I stared at her, entranced. Perhaps entranced is not the right word—I was transfixed with horror, as if cursed to never look away. It didn’t even occur to me to wake her.

But when she suddenly grimaced as if having seen something horrible and opened her mouth wide, my heart almost jumped out of my chest, and I followed the gaze of her closed eyes.

The floor of the basement turned bumpy. At first I thought they were rats, but when I forced myself to keep looking, there were tendrils coming out of the floor. No, something like smoke. Mixed with purple and blue-black … I quickly turned to look at the stain on the floor, and it was also smoking, this time with light green and ochre. 84

As I stared helplessly, the smoke or steam began to take strange shapes, half-human and half-monster. I was hit with a horrid smell. Like rotting fish and damp mold, or sulfur and ammonia mixed with something I couldn’t identify … This had to be the origin of the smell!

I quickly came to my senses and blocked my nose and mouth with one hand and grabbed my gas mask with the other.

As I struggled to put it on, I tried to shake Gyeongja awake, but she simply would not regain consciousness. Her face that had been so animated as if superimposed with computer graphics was now bereft of life and turned into a shade of lead.

The purple smoke wrapped around the boseon costume socks on her feet.

“No! No, no, no!” I screamed and grabbed Gyeongja. “You will not take this one! Not her!”

I dragged her by the armpits up the stairs. The elderly woman was very lean, but still much heavier than I’d expected. No matter how I tried, I could only carry her incrementally up the stairs. As I saved her from the purple smoke, an ochre shadow peeled itself off the wall and started creeping toward us.

“Go away! Go away!” 85

I panted as Gyeongja threatened to slip from my grasp, and I suddenly remembered the gas torch and quickly held it up. I’d never used one before and it clicked several times without coming on. Desperate, I tightened the connection with the gas cartridge and pressed it again, and the blue flame lit up. I desperately waved the flame at the encroaching smoke. The horrid smoke seemed to hesitate at the flame, but it was a feint, as the smoke continued to nibble at Gyeongja’s edges. The purple smoke came up to her ankles and the mustard-yellow smoke wrapped her hands. In the middle of her chest, a dark spot began to spread like a bruise. I screamed and slapped at the smoke as if to put out a fire, but the smoke started to crawl up my own hand and I pulled back.

The moment I did so, the smoke swiftly snaked itself around Gyeongja’s shoulders and neck and swallowed her face.

I could hear a ringing laugh in my head. A hostile laugh that mocked me and displaced all other thoughts.

Had I fainted, or did I simply lose my memory?

When I came to with a start, I was sitting in the middle of the basement stairs, and there was no one else in the basement. No Gyeongja Manshin, no smoke.

Dazed, I blinked a little before taking off my gas mask. Why was I wearing a gas mask? 86

I must’ve had a nightmare.

“Manshin-nim?”

I got up and tried to climb the rest of the stairs—my calves hurt. Did I fall on these stairs? I limped up the steps and shouted, “Manshin-nim! Mr. Hwang! Where is everybody?”

I couldn’t see anyone. There was no one there. It wasn’t dark outside the windows, just a foggy white. The door had disappeared.

No. It couldn’t be. This had to be a nightmare. It had to be. It couldn’t be real.

I turned around and went down the stairs. I was in the attic. I walked down to the second floor, then the first floor. Then to the basement.

Proving I was in a nightmare, there were more stairs going down from the basement.

Seven steps. And then seventy-seven steps. With shaky legs, I descended.

And the moment I reached the last step, I dropped the torch I had been painstakingly holding up.

Why was my apartment in the basement of the house?

Because that was what it was, a living room with a kitchen corner. Exactly as I had left it, the bed and shelves pushed out of their places, books covering the floor, a mess. The lights 87were all on and it was dead silent. No sound of cars outside, no sound of other movement in the building. And then.

Tap tap tap tap. Like a horde of rats running. Squeak squeak. I could hear them mocking me.

Where? Where were the sounds coming from? I picked up the torch again and looked for the rats. I was determined not to run, I was going to take a stand. But despite hearing them everywhere, I couldn’t see a single one. Their sound didn’t grow louder when I approached the wall, nor did they grow quieter when I looked in the bathroom. The rats continued to laugh at me, to mock me.

Where. Where are they. Just as I was beginning to realize I could never catch the rats or even run from them, I looked down at my body and screamed.

Holes. The holes were in me. There was no other place in my apartment I had needed to seal. The rats were in my body all along. There they were, nests and all. I could block or exterminate the ones coming from the outside, but there was nothing I could do for what was inside me.

As I opened my mouth to scream, the horde of rats poured out of me and swarmed upon the others. I didn’t feel too bad when they swarmed my landlord, my thesis advisor, or my terrible sunbae Gichan. Even as they ate up Hwang, screaming in agony, I didn’t mind much. But the rats didn’t stop 88there and devoured Apricot, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo until they were just skeletons. It happened in the blink of an eye. Then, they swarmed around Gyeongja, the strong and beautiful manshin. No, come to me. Rip me apart instead. It didn’t matter how loudly I shouted. These large and hideous rats, the likes of which I’d never seen before, climbed up her boseon socks and blood began to soak into her jade hanbok dress.

My sight turned red.

No. I didn’t do it. I didn’t mean for it to.

But I did do it. It was my sin. I brought it on. I was foolish and cruel and got everyone killed.

The rat horde came back to me and tore at me. They ripped off my flesh and sucked my blood, and in place of where my flesh had been, they curled up inside and became a part of me. Underneath my skin, they nibbled at my bone marrow.

I crawled on the floor and scratched at my skin. I grabbed the rats and pulled them out of myself and killed them. Because I had no weapons, I scratched them with my fingernails and used my teeth. I ripped at the rats and the rats ripped at me …

Agonizingly, I didn’t black out; I experienced each moment of pain all too clearly. I could think every thought and feel every emotion. The worst were the whispers that filled my head. 89

This agony will never stop.

I can’t run. There is nothing I can do.

Something didn’t feel quite right. But how did I know that? I couldn’t tell if these thoughts were mine or something someone kept whispering to me. Someone, somewhere, kept mocking me. Or something. Or the whole world. The whole. World.

That the universe was disinterested, that I was an insignificant speck made me afraid—and yet this very fact would make me free, she had said. But if the universe wasn’t disinterested … If it held malice toward me and tortured me, if it enjoyed watching me be so, what then?

All my life, I was afraid of becoming a crazy woman, but in that moment, I wanted to go crazy. To not be afraid of anything, to be free of this pain. I would have given my all for that to happen.

Help me.

Help me.

A loud metal sound split the air.

Clang!

And then I heard a clear singing.

“… you are not.”

The voice was muffled and staggered and didn’t seem like it were speaking Korean. But it became louder and my mind 90clearer, and I could understand it better as it came closer to me. They were close to words I had heard before, even written down before.

“Sangsan God or Ohbang God you are not. Yukgap God or Dungap God you are not. Shinjung God or Alien God you are not. The 84,000 Space God you are not …”

The black sky opened, and slowly the manshin descended.

I had thought she’d been swallowed by the monstrous dark.

Her clothes were familiar. A long black cheollik robe draped over her jade skirt, a round black jeonlip hat on her white hair, and the obangshinjanggi banner in her hand. I realized this was a shinjanggori goot. The spirit she was a vessel for was the Ohbang God that watched over the five directions, but the spirit she was calling for was a different one.

The colors of her obangshinjanggi were blue, white, red, black, and yellow, but it wasn’t really a banner but chains. A double helix chain. Gyeongja didn’t need to shake it for it to move and embroider the air with its colors. No—they were snakes twisted into the shape of chains.

The sound of chittering metal. The manshin’s voice grew louder.

“Which god is my god! Which god is my god! Ah, you are here!” 91

The snakes turned into fireworks. Surrounded by the colorful sparks, the manshin danced.

“Uh-hoi! My god is here, the rest of you leave!”

The horde of rats screeched horribly as they tried to get away. My body collapsed, and I could feel the rats that were still trapped under my skin trying to dig their way out. I vomited blood and screamed.

The laughter in my ears turned into a growl.

This wasn’t Korean, but oddly enough, I could understand what those whispers, those towering flames were saying.

“This is no place for you.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Be gone, you crawling chaos.”

My body suddenly felt lighter. The horde of rats that had stuck to me, or burrowed into me, or had been part of my body—they fell away. That wasn’t the only reason my body became lighter. I had become nothing. And once I was nothing, my pain was gone.

Nothing above me, nothing below me, and nothing next to me. No matter where I looked, I felt vertigo. My body, or my disembodied form, floated in nothing. I was surrounded by dark, deep dark. I was in nothing. Or perhaps space?

Just when I was beginning to get used to the idea of floating in space forever, my calm and numbed mind started to 92tremble and shake. An eye blacker than darkness was looking down on me. There was no up or down, but it was clear I was being looked down on. It had me under a microscope and was trying to peel me layer by layer, and it poured upon me both cold disinterest and a mocking mixed with hostility. The pressure sent me reeling.

Something else appeared and drew the attention of the eye. Another large something. This thing was also disinterested in me, a true disinterest that gave me room to breathe. Its hostility wasn’t aimed at me but at the eye.

And as they fought and chased each other and disappeared, Gyeongja appeared in their place.

“Manshin-nim!” I shouted joyfully. “You’ve saved me!”

Everything made sense. I’d been possessed by some horrible demon. It had all been a nightmare this demon had subjected me to. The shinjanggori goot is an exorcism, the perfect cure for what I was going through.

But the manshin’s smile was bitter as she shook her head. The fear that I had thought was finally gone was slowly coming back. The prospect of experiencing all that again made it seem twice, or three times more horrible.

“Wait, it’s not over? What must I do now? I’ll do anything. Anything you tell me to!” I clung to her arm, but when her arm crumbled in my grasp, I screamed. 93

“You must know better than anyone else what ‘manshin’ means,” she said.

My brain, even in that moment, obliged. Manshin—filled with gods—meant that she was a vessel that could accept any god into herself. Just as the first mudang ever, back in time immemorial, had been able to do.

“I am especially adept at accepting even the most unusual gods, but it’s not without its dangers.” Gyeongja’s face began to age rapidly before me. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.

That was the last time I heard her voice.

I opened my eyes and vomited. I vomited and cried.

My memories were partially blank.

What part of that had been real and what part a dream? How much of it was fantasy, and how much had actually happened? There was no way to tell. I still don’t know many things from that day. Like what had exactly happened, why it had happened, and what had become of the manshin.

Later, much later, when I was better in body and soul, I tried to piece it all together.

There were some details that were different from my vivid memories of the house, but the jeoksangaok house itself, the “Forbidden House,” existed in reality. I couldn’t explain why I had gone there alone and smashed it up and set it on fire, or 94why a plethora of dead bodies were unearthed from the basement. The bones, thought to be human, were all mixed up in one pile, and I was half-buried in them when I was found, out of my mind and repeating weird words.

The mystery of the dead bodies was in the news for a while, but then people’s interests moved on.

The initial news reports postulated that they were the remains of people who had died in the war, but the Ministry of Defense’s special division tasked with identifying war remains declared this was very unlikely to be dead soldiers, not only because there wasn’t a single instance of a bullet casing or water canteen or anything that suggested they were military, but because the remains were mostly of children and women and the elderly.

A forensics investigation yielded no gunshot wounds but traces of the bodies having been dismembered by swords or saws or axes. But there were also bones that had not a trace of injury. None of them could be identified.

The National Forensics Service determined that there were bones there that were as old as a century. That meant the Japanese occupation. The internet was rife with theories about the bodies being the illegally buried remains of a medical school anatomy class or wartime human experimentation.

No one remembered the existence of the manshin. Nor 95her four apprentices Apricot, Orchid, Chrysanthemum, and Bamboo. They disappeared without a trace. The apartment they lived in, where I lived myself for a few days, was inhabited by other people. Hwang, who had been the one to introduce me to the manshin, questioned if I was going bonkers when I asked about her.

No one remembered me mentioning rats coming out of my room or that I had messed up the apartment. Maybe because it had been a few months since it had happened, as well as it being a trivial matter for everyone else. In any case, I was never returning to that apartment. I gave up the fantasy of working somewhere safe and stable.

Instead, I keep moving, looking over my shoulder each time. Maybe this is the way things always were. There would always be danger, and the thought that one is safe in one’s own home is perhaps a foolish fantasy as well.

Bad as things just happen, and good things also just happen.

I can’t understand why that eye turned to me, or why Gyeongja Manshin had saved me. According to my tattered memories, the spirit inhabiting the manshin was not exactly an altruistic one and had seemed more intent in going after that dark thing instead of saving me per se. The nature of this spirit was something I could not even try to understand. Still, 96it felt like a miracle that this battle between these two alien entities had ended up saving me.

What was truly clear to me was that the manshin had come to rescue me, risking great harm to herself.

The thought makes me want to cry every time. And it fills me with awe. Why did she do that? Why did she risk so much to save the life of a woman she’d only known for a few days? Was I worth it?

My therapist explained that no such person as Gyeongja Manshin had existed, that she was only a fantasy upon which I’d projected my guilt over my mother and grandmother. I don’t care either way.

I know, on some level, that the manshin saved me.

I was never a gullible person. I was always a skeptic and was trained to look at things from as many angles as possible. I was rational to the point of cynical, and convinced I was good at accepting what people normally hated to accept. I thought as logically, rationally, and neatly as possible to restore order to my worldview; I tried to think that way so many times I almost made myself vomit. I tried to think that the therapist was right, that the manshin was too close to my ideal to be real, that I must’ve made her up because I’d felt so fragile.

But if that were true, didn’t that mean the fear that I strove 97to protect myself from had also existed? And what of the dread I feel about it that always, always lingers with me?

So I decided to believe she was still somewhere in the universe. I made a decision to believe. And I believe that should I ever get to glimpse the truth of the universe, I would see her. This is a hope that somewhere in the cosmos, there may still be a beautiful truth that exists—this is my way of wishing for it. That even in a prison cell made exactly my size, there’s a rathole where light can shine through.

So even if I never see her again or learn what happened to her, that’s all right. If that spirit I saw back then, the one of the bright, flashing fireworks—if it would ever deign to descend upon me, then the manshin and I shall finally be reunited within it.

I no longer fear turning into a crazy woman. 98

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Copyright

This translation first published by Honford Star 2025.

Honford Star Ltd.
Profolk, Bank Chambers
Stockport
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Original Korean edition published as 외계 신장 by Alma, Inc. in 2020.
Copyright © Lee Suhyeon
Translation copyright © Anton Hur 2025
All rights reserved
This translated edition is published by arrangement with Greenbook Agency.
The moral right of the translator and editors has been asserted.

isbn (paperback): 978–1–915829–23–8
isbn (ebook): 978–1–915829–24–5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Paju, South Korea
Cover illustration by JaeHoon Choi
Typeset by Honford Star
Cover paper: 250 gsm Vent Nouveau by takeo, Japan
Endleaves: 116 gsm nt Rasha by takeo, Japan

This book is published with the support of the
Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

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Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Contents
- Alien Gods
- Copyright