BBS (78)

Translator: Wan ED/PR: Personal Ghost

 
 

〈Chapter 78〉
 

Baek Ran stretched out his hand and pulled out the thick 『Annals of Past and Present Bizarre Occurrences』.

“Have You heard a saying ‘Be careful what you say[1]’? Since the old times, people believed that words held power and were wary of them. Here, please take a look. This is a story of a father, who didn’t believe in the power of a language curse, and spoke thoughtlessly, in the end losing his daughter.”

Yu Dan looked at the drawing pointed out by Baek Ran’s finger.

A groom wearing public official hat and silk clothes, which seemed to be a common wedding attire, was just crossing the doorsteps of a tile roof house. He had slitted eyes and a gloomy shadow was cast on his face, making him appear sinister.

“He sure looks like a reaper.”

“It’s indeed a reaper. Of course, not a real one. The father had a habit of saying that if his daughter cries too often, he will marry her off to a reaper, and on the day she reached marriageable age, a being looking like a reaper in wedding clothes really came and took his daughter away.”

“What kind of being? Who was it?”

“There are just such things. Things we don’t know where they come from or where they’re going.”

Yu Dan looked at another drawing.

He saw a daughter turning her head and wiping away tears, as she was dragged away by a groom. The strong men collapsed around them, and the parents and servants fell to the ground and wailed.

“Then the daughter was just stolen like this? There was no way to defeat it?”

“The thoughtlessly repeated words already became a curse and called a monster, how could an ordinary person stop it?”

“Then how at the time did we…?”

Yu Dan tilted his head.

“Ah, I got it. The secret was in that toy. That day hyung naturally brought ‘chief’ when going out looking for me. The road at night was very scary, so he kept pressing the button to hear his voice. We must have been able to display our psychic powers thanks to the chief’s voice. How should I say?… Ah, that’s it, it was the shout of Māori people’s warriors before they fight.”

“How touching.”

Heuk-yo, who was quietly listening, suddenly spoke up. Yu Dan felt a bit flattered.

“What is so touching?”

“You’re even bringing up tribe warriors. The punk, who doesn’t know anything, mobilizes all the knowledge he has and tries so diligently to explain it. So what if he is right or wrong? You just have to say he is right.”

“That’s what you meant?”

When his face twisted, Heuk-yo stuck out her tongue and picked up a tray, pretending to leave. Yu Dan looked at Baek Ran again.

“Was I wrong?”

“I wasn’t there, so I can’t know for certain. However, I would explain it this way. No one knew about it, but those things had a language sorcery competition at that time. The thing that saved the three children was another language magic. The other side was ‘The summer guests are scarier than tigers’. This side was ‘The invincible special force is here’. If both were believed to be true, which one of them was more powerful?”

“Naturally the ‘invincible’, right? Nothing can win against ‘invincible’. So what if the opponents were tigers?”

“That’s right. It was a fight of words. And the meaning granted to each one of them became their battle power.”

Baek Ran seemed to enjoy himself. Although it was all over, he appeared to have fun reasoning out such things one after another. But he probably was doing this since ancient times to today because it matched his aptitude.

“How is it? Were all mysteries solved?”

“Ah, yea. I got all the things I was curious about.”

Yu Dan stood up.

“Where are You going?”

“It’s all solved, so shouldn’t I go? Ack, that’s not right. It was already all solved in the past, right?”

“What is solved?”

Yu Dan froze and looked down at the fox yokai, who was leisurely sitting in the shadow of a tree.

“It’s not?”

“It’s not.”

Baek Ran waved his hand for him to sit down. Yu Dan obediently came back to his seat.

“There is one thing You’re completely mistaken about. And it’s a very important thing…”

The fox yokai lowered his voice and whispered.
 

***
 

After the three children joined forces, and beat it with sticks and threw stones — surprisingly — the thing gradually grew smaller. The hem of a trench coat lightly fluttered, and the man wearing a fedora suddenly disappeared.

“Where did it go?”

“Gone! It’s gone!”

“We won!”

Everyone looked around with wide eyes. It was unbelievable. Su-hyeon fixed the glasses that slipped from the bridge of his nose.

“What was it just now? That monster…”

“Ssh!”

Mia put a finger to her lips and cautiously looked around. After confirming there was nothing around, she grabbed the hands of her two dongsaengs.

The two wandered around the mountain and somehow found Yu Dan, but miracles ended there. They achieved a victory, but there was no fanfare or applause. Only jet black night mountain unfolded before their eyes.

The three fumbled their way forward in fear. Mountains at night were too dangerous for children. With their vision dark how will they come down all the way to the town?

At that moment.

Woof woof!

They heard loud barking of a good dog. The faces of all three instantly brightened up.

“Jinsun-ah! Jinsun-ah!”

The children shouted at the top of their lungs.

“Aigoo! There you are, kids-ah!”

The town’s head and neighbor elders ran to them, waving their hands. His aunt also dashed over. With a pale, bloodless face, she grabbed a hold of Yu Dan.

“Why did you leave alone?! Why?!”

Mia and Su-hyeon quickly said:

“Dan-i didn’t leave!”

“Please don’t be angry! A monster took him!”

The aunt’s complexion changed. It may not be so for Mia, Su-hyeon was a kid that absolutely never lied.

“Who took you? What did they do? Tell aunt everything.”

Yu Dan ramblingly told the story. The words of the Summer Guest. That everyone remembers his mother every time they look at him. That they recall the incident. That they want to quickly forget, but they keep thinking about it and become depressed. So they want him out of their sight. They want him to disappear forever. That would be natural. There was nothing about it, his mother died, but he survived, so it was only natural…

He couldn’t continue.

“What nonsense is that?!”

His aunt yelled with such an absurdly loud voice. He never in his life saw her face so angry.

“Never say such things ever again! Are you a fool? That’s absolute nonsense, why did you believe it?! We’re only thankful that you’ve survived! We’re forever thankful that YOU have survived!”

And his aunt dragged Yu Dan into a hug and started to cry.

At the time he thought that adults never cried in front of kids, so seeing his aunt like this was extremely surprising. Then, Mia and Su-hyeon also started crying, and seeing it, Yu Dan ended up crying with them. Even in his young heart, he painfully felt it. The words of the Summer Guest were bad. They were wrong. He thought that he should never say it again.

After he really never once thought of saying that again…

He was blankly reflecting on that, when two palms suddenly clapped loudly right in front of his eyes. ‘Slap!’. Yu Dan returned to reality in frightened surprise.

His aunt was looking at him with an angry face.

“How many times do I have to call you for you to stand up?”

“Ah.”

At last, he quickly stood up.

It was Sunday, and the family gathered at the aunt’s house. As he was about to take a seat at the table, his uncle glanced at him.

“Where was your mind wandering off to? I don’t know about anything else, but when you’re called for a meal, you have to quit everything and quickly rush over. If not, your wife is going to chase you later.”

“Dad, you truly have things to worry about. There is no need to worry about such things. Who is going to take that kid? The girls these days are very smart.”

“What? He is very popular. Many kids like our Dan-i. Even in our hometown, someone is always ready to call him. And when I saw him at school, he was always surrendered by people. There are many girls with long hair following him.”

Yu Dan looked at Su-hyeon dumbstruck. Mia and his aunt looked at him the same.

Those were not girls?

Su-hyeon’s eyesight was very poor. When he took off his glasses, he was no different from a blind man. Perhaps because of it, though he saw strange things like it was in his maternal family history, he didn’t see them properly. So the things that Su-hyeon saw very clearly were… That summer, the ‘Summer Guest’ made up from Yu Dan’s fears, was his first and last time.

He didn’t know that at the time, but he knew now. That summer, his aunt was busy, and Mia and Su-hyeon had to attend cramming school and study, but they left their house in Seoul and parted with their friends, to spend the summer break at the countryside.

Let’s explore the countryside. Let’s go catch cicadas. Let’s watch movies. They dragged Yu Dan around to make him not think. Uncle would drop by on the weekend like it was natural, pack everyone into a car and bring them around.

He didn’t know at the time, but he knew now. Why he grew into a person, even if so screwed, and lived — it was thanks to that summer.

With that thought, he realized.

How do you remember that incident ten years ago?

He could never ask them that question.

He was so curious. Was it also distorted in their heads? He wanted to take them aside and talk. About what he alone saw, the monster with eight eyes. However, he could never ask.

Because they would worry. Because they might somehow get involved.

So he must not ask.

Instead, he rather felt relieved. Yu Dan picked up the spoon he put down for a moment.

He just finished lunch, talking about nothing in particular, and stood up. His aunt was following after him nagging, until the end.

“Got it? It’s summer, so come more often and study with your hyung. Or just watch movies. You guys liked movies when you were young.”

Thinking what he should answer to that, he looked at his aunt’s face for a moment.

When his mom was alive, he thought the two sisters didn’t resemble each other even a little, but after she passed away, he only spotted similarities. He told her that the other day, and his aunt said she thought exactly the same thing. When she was alive, I thought like you that we had no similarities, but after she died, I only see how much we resembled each other in my face.

“Alright.”

He left his aunt’s house. As he came here often since he was young, he now could quickly walk to this apartment complex even with his eyes closed.

Summer flowers fully bloomed in the flowerbed. Even on Sunday, there was no one around the complex. Suddenly, he felt like someone behind him was calling out to him, so he turned around, but there was nothing there.

Must be because of what he heard.

Yu Dan started to walk again.

The fox yokai said:

“We don’t know where they come from or where they’re going, they hide in the darkness of the world, and You can’t know when they will appear again. Right now the secret of the language curse was revealed, there is a high chance it will appear again before the last traces of fear carved into Your heart will completely disappear.”

Then the problem was this side.

“You’re not a seven-year-old child anymore, so You probably don’t believe that police uncles, riding motorcycles and jumping into action are really invincible. And the special force are just characters in the drama, played by actors. Isn’t that right? Then what should You do now?”

Yu Dan answered.

“Then naturally I need another language spell.”

“That’s right. Please think through what this one is well.”

To that usual teasing-like tone, he replied ‘Got it’ and left.

One day passed and nothing happened. Two days passed and nothing happened. Yu Dan had nothing to do, so he played a game, watched TV and took walks around the neighborhood. Even though nothing had happened, the corner of his mind knew.

When we forgot about them, when we think it’s fine now and drop our guard, they abruptly appear and reveal their wicked faces. Uninvited guests, who break reality.

Pulling his bicycle, he turned back when he realized that he took the wrong road. A broken streetlight on the narrow backstreet flickered. The door to the shops on both sides of the street were closed. Just when he turned around and was about to leave, a homeless person, crouching at the side of a telegraph pole, suddenly stood up.

It was him. Sunglasses under a fedora. Bandages tightly covering the face. Trench coat up to the neck. The Summer Guest, who made him so scared in his younger days, appeared in front of his eyes again.

A being made up from a child’s fears. Its name was a proverb of a completely different meaning, its appearance was borrowed from an old movie, he watched with his cousins. Because he knew that it was a monster made up from roughly pulled and knotted together strings, it wasn’t scary now. Yu Dan stared it right in the eye, when it gradually grew bigger.

“You died a long time ago.”

“I didn’t die. Language is eternal.”

“No.”

You’re wrong. Yu Dan mumbled inside. Someone taught him a way that could completely kill it again.

What the fox yokai said was right. He didn’t believe that the police uncles, riding motorcycles and jumping into action, are invincible. However, he felt like he knew a really powerful spell instead of that.

“Bad dream is over.”

Summer Guest’s feet caved in.

It was not a light that could dispel darkness, but another darkness. The thing tried not to be dragged in. But it couldn’t win against the power of another language spell and began to shatter at the edges.

“You will die too.”

The thing said, as it giggled. From the vortex, that whirred, turning everything into one, numerous black hands suddenly emerged. The moment those things reached out towards Yu Dan, ‘pat!’ light burst out. At some point the dokkaebi horn was in Yu Dan’s hand.

Yu Dan pointed it at the Summer Guest.

“It’s useless now.”

“Well. You might have escaped once, but you won’t do it the second time.”

“Second time? Don’t you know you’re being annihilated right now?”

“That’s not my story. Don’t you hear the calling?”

The fedora, trench coat and bandages were lumped into one and sucked in. The unknowable thing underneath them, the thing putting on the shell of a Summer Guest, became thousands of pieces and was completely swallowed by the darkness.

“Calling?”

There was just silence. He stood in place and perked up his ears, but he heard no sound.

Yu Dan turned around.

They were always like this. Putting fear deep within human hearts just as they like. Malicious words and hallucinations to try to somehow shake you.

Even worse, even though he had faced them and won, nothing in fact has changed. It was exactly the same ten years ago, when the first victory was scored with the power of children. There was no ending like ‘and they lived happily ever after’. He could just return to reality.

However, that was fine.

The broken streetlamp flickered. A cat rummaging through a trash container, sensed human presence and quickly fled.

If there really was magic in language. If then it could dominate our consciousness. Then those must be the most powerful words.

Yu Dan pulled his bicycle, slipped out of the back alley and mumbled:

“Bad dream is over.”
 

*~*~*
 
[1] Be careful what you say — In Korean: ‘Words become seeds’.
 

Translator’s note: Don’t repeat negative words or thoughts, because it will call a monster was the main takeaway of my therapy. Great rule, someone should write it in a life manual.

End of the story ‘Summer Guest’.

 

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