Chapter 28
Chodam Park—West Gate (7)
“Damn it. This place gets more fucking ridiculous by the minute.”
“Uh… Excuse me?”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
I lightly waved a hand at Park Hyeonho, who had turned toward me as though the remark had struck a nerve.
I had been talking about the park.
At first, it had produced only minor anomalies—something watching us, a visual detail changing, and so on.
But now it was openly obstructing us and getting on my nerves.
Just moments ago, a fishing line had shot out of the muddy path and wrapped around my ankle. I had only just managed to shake it off.
Blood trickled from where the line had dug into my ankle, but the wound wasn’t particularly deep.
It was exactly painful enough to be annoying.
“Mr. Park Hyeonho.”
“Yes?!”
Why was he so startled when I had only called his name?
I was merely curious about something.
“When did you injure your foot?”
He had been walking behind me, so it had taken me a while to notice.
The back of Park Hyeonho’s right shoe was caked with dried blood.
“Oh, this… It was the duck earlier.”
“Did it bite you?”
I didn’t remember it having an opportunity to do that.
When I frowned, Park Hyeonho flinched and hurriedly waved his hands.
“No. That’s not what happened… It was when I stepped off the stones. I got startled by the duck and backed away, but something caught…”
“May I take a look?”
Park Hyeonho awkwardly indicated his consent.
The back of his running shoe had been deeply gouged out, as if something had bitten through it. There was a bleeding scrape on the heel inside.
“Didn’t it hurt?”
“A-A little…? But I’m fine. It happened because I was careless… I’ll be more careful from now on.”
Given the wound’s position, it would probably touch the water every time we crossed the stepping-stones, but there was nothing I could do for him.
Something in the pond could slice through a shoe in an instant.
The pond really was dangerous.
“Oh, and another thing.”
“Yes?”
“Did anything strange happen when you first entered this park?”
It had been bothering me for some time.
Until the two men met us, they hadn’t even realized this place was a ghost story. They had merely assumed they had taken a wrong turn.
“You mean getting lost?”
“Not that. There should have been some kind of environmental campaign.”
Only then did Park Hyeonho seem to remember.
“Do you mean that booth we passed earlier?”
“Yes. It should have stopped you.”
“Uh… Nothing happened.”
Was it because they had joined us in the middle of a loop?
Until now, I had assumed that every lap on which the booth appeared was a zeroth lap—a version of the park without anomalies.
“Why do you ask?”
“You seem exceptionally lucky.”
“...That was a joke, right?”
Had I said the wrong thing?
I had just told someone who had lost his friend that he was lucky.
Still, Park Hyeonho was alive.
Wasn’t that enough?
Despite the thick mist and all the anomalies, the kiosk was still open for business.
“We made it here, but aren’t we unable to buy anything?”
“I thought of something. Start gathering what we need, but don’t take too much.”
“Then what should I…?”
“Sit quietly on this bench and try not to cause any trouble.”
I pointed toward the bench in front of the kiosk.
Without a word of complaint, Park Hyeonho obediently sat down.
Since we didn’t know what the aberration would demand as payment, we decided to purchase only the bare essentials.
“Three bottles of sports drink, three buns, and one bag of candy… Why did you add the candy?”
“You said your blood sugar was low. Candy is the best thing for that.”
I couldn’t stand against Myeong Haebin’s utterly innocent gaze.
“...Fine.”
Surely one bag of candy wouldn’t dramatically alter the price.
With no basket available, I carried the items in both arms and lined them up on the counter before the bars of the container kiosk.
Something with blazing red eyes muttered from behind the bars.
“What did it say?”
“I still can’t understand it.”
I had expected that, so I didn’t even feel disappointed.
“Was anything different from last time?”
“Uh… No. I think it said the same thing.”
Last time, I had brought only one bun and one bottle of water.
Now we had more than tripled the number of items, yet the price remained unchanged.
Did that mean it would demand the same payment no matter how much we brought?
To test it, I tried opening the nearest refrigerator, but the door wouldn’t budge.
Even the small snacks lined up nearby were immovable, as though they had been glued down.
“It seems we can’t buy anything else from here… In that case, I wonder if we can buy something different.”
“What?”
Myeong Haebin tilted her head, watching my restless movements in confusion.
“Ask the owner if we can buy the way out of this place.”
Myeong Haebin didn’t even need to repeat the question.
The scarlet eyes staring directly at me gave a small nod.
“What the owner said didn’t change from before, right?”
“Uh… No! Not that I understand any of it anyway…”
“I think we can decipher it.”
I had suspected as much ever since Myeong Haebin recited it and said it sounded like an alien language.
If the kiosk sold merchandise, then its owner had to be “saying” something.
There would be no reason for it to speak if it weren’t selling anything.
“Ask it again.”
“But I already told youuu…”
“I know it sounds strange. Take as long as you need and repeat it slowly, one sound at a time.”
I sat on the ground beneath the kiosk’s container and picked up a broken tree branch.
Myeong Haebin pouted, but soon attempted to communicate with the kiosk owner again.
“Excuse me. Could you please say it one more time? What do we need to do to buy these items and the way out?”
Myeong Haebin pressed her face so close to the bars that her nose nearly touched them, concentrating intensely.
“Kkarah… ya… eoreonreung…”
I wrote the sounds she faithfully repeated in the dirt.
The result was as follows:
[까랗야어런릉믕런쳠극서해외니묻쾨바갛릉궝운이믹곳]
Park Hyeonho cautiously approached from the bench and looked down at the writing.
“May I ask what that is…?”
Instead of answering him, I asked Myeong Haebin a question.
“Were there spaces between the words?”
“Why are you suddenly asking about spa—”
“Yes! There were! How did you know?”
Myeong Haebin cut through Park Hyeonho’s question.
I had found it.
“Like this. Then here, and here…”
She drew dividing lines wherever she had heard a pause.
[까랗/야어런/릉믕런/쳠/극서해외/니묻/쾨바/갛/릉궝운/이믹곳]
Only then did Park Hyeonho, who was staring at the characters from across from me, seem to notice something.
“These characters here, reung and meung… Are they eureum reversed?”
“That’s right.”
The clue had been there from the beginning.
The gate opposite the West Gate was the East Gate—Dongmun—and reversing it produced Gomyut.
“But many of these characters still don’t make sense.”
“They haven’t simply been written backward.”
“Gomyut” consisted of only two syllables, but even those two syllables followed specific rules.
- Reverse the beginning and end of the sentence, then vertically flip the consonants and any vowels that can be inverted.
- Do not flip consonants that would no longer form valid Hangul when inverted.
Reversing the syllable order of 동문 (dongmun, “East Gate”) produced 문동.
Vertically flipping the consonants produced 굼옫.
Flipping the vowels as well produced 곰욷—Gomyut.
Consonants such as ㄱ and ㄴ could be inverted to take each other’s forms. Others could not be rotated or flipped into valid Hangul characters and therefore remained unchanged.
Those were the rules governing the kiosk owner’s speech.
“So if we transform the final section, 이믹곳, according to those rules, we get this.”
[손님이]
The customer.
The word I scratched into the dirt now made perfect sense.
“That really turns into that…? It does. You’re not actually a cleaner, are you?”
“I am. Are cleaners required to be stupid?”
“Ah, damn. That’s not what I meant…”
Park Hyeonho awkwardly scratched his head.
“Let’s decipher the rest.”
Beneath the original sentence, I began rewriting the characters according to the rules.
But the further I progressed, the deeper the furrow between my brows became.
[손님이 공원을 한 바퀴 돌기 위해서는 몇 걸음을 걸어야 할까]
[How many steps must the customer take to complete one lap around the park?]
“That question doesn’t make any sense.”
It was Myeong Haebin.
She had noticed the problem too.
“You could walk slowly or run, and there are stepping-stones too! It doesn’t specify any conditions whatsoever. It just asks how many steps it takes. How are we supposed to guess that?”
In other words, the question was unfair.
Or was it?
I rose from the dirt and stood before the barred window.
“Meunreonsabitinaepgeotsa.”
Four thousand one hundred and twenty-four steps.
With a rustle, the items we had piled on the counter transformed into a black plastic bag containing our purchases.
The payment had been accepted.
“You got it right? How?”
Looking bewildered, Myeong Haebin opened the bag and confirmed that all three drinks, three buns, and the bag of candy were inside. Then she looked at me.
“I counted.”
“Counted what?”
“My steps.”
“When?!”
“While we were wandering around earlier.”
The question had provided no conditions whatsoever.
That made me wonder whether it was asking for the actual number of steps I had taken while walking around this park.
Well, I would have been in trouble if it hadn’t been.
“That makes no sense! You said one lap around this park was almost three kilometers!”
“How do you think I knew it was three kilometers?”
None of the park’s signs indicated the length of the route.
Even while counting, I had thought it was an insane thing to do. I hadn’t expected it to become useful like this.
I rummaged through the bag.
It contained only the items we had purchased.
More precisely, only the items that possessed a physical form.
“Haebin—”
I was about to give Myeong Haebin another question to relay when a hand shot through the bars and seized my wrist.
It looked like smoke compressed into the shape of a hand and possessed a chill no human body could have.
Then it spoke clearly enough for me to understand.
“Dasseungjeukmi-i.”
It is already too late.
“Is there no longer any way to leave?”
“Raryeobeoesumgyeonggahnyeomgwangreuniresseu.”
Blink.
“Can I drink this?”
My attention snapped away from the container.
Park Hyeonho had spoken.
When I hurriedly turned back, the kiosk window was firmly closed, as though it had never opened.
“Excuse me. What did you mean by that just now?”
I knocked on the bars, but the window showed no sign of opening again.
“Why? Didn’t we finish buying everything?”
“No. That aberration just—”
“What did it say? I couldn’t hear it clearly.”
I stopped and considered the matter.
Within this repeating loop, only one indicator could determine that we were “too late.”
The rising water-level gauge.
This is a Grade Five ghost story. Before the water level rose, there must have been an easy way to escape. But now that method is gone.
Nothing good would come from telling them that now.
“No. It was nothing.”
Instead, I turned toward Park Hyeonho, who was holding a bottle of sports drink.
“You can drink that.”
It should be safe.
We had purchased it legitimately.
Knowing nothing, Park Hyeonho drank from the bottle.
“It’s lukewarm, but…”
“Wow, Senior! I guess this one is safe to drink!”
“What do you mean, ‘this one’? Don’t tell me you people…”
“Nothing happened, so it’s fine.”
We had now confirmed that items purchased from the kiosk were safe to eat and drink.
Considering that we could never have progressed without thinking about Gomyut—or without Myeong Haebin serving as our aberration interpreter—this was an appropriate reward.
I took the sports-drink bottle from Park Hyeonho and poured it into my parched throat.
It had the distinctive slickness and sweet smell of a sports drink, but vitality spread throughout my body.
I feel alive.
I genuinely did.
That was how satisfying it felt.
“Uwaaah… I’m so happy…”
Myeong Haebin emptied the rest of her drink and stuffed a peanut-butter sandwich into her mouth. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Is it… really that good?”
Park Hyeonho looked bewildered.
Hmm. Perhaps it was safe to tell him now.
“I lied earlier. This is our seventeenth lap.”
“Seven… Seventeen… Fifty-one kilometers?!”
Leaving the now ghostly pale Park Hyeonho to process that, I put a peanut-butter sandwich into my completely empty stomach.
It was moving.
“Why did you lie?”
“I thought you might panic.”
“Then why tell me now?”
“So you can prepare yourself.”
No one knew how many more loops remained.
But I thought it would be better to make the situation clear now than to listen to him whine about how much farther we had to go every lap.
After hesitating, Park Hyeonho cautiously asked a question.
“...I saw Minhyeong’s body disappear. Is there any way to find him again?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“W-Well, you seem to know a lot about this place…”
I silently met his eyes.
There was desperation in them.
He was also struggling not to fall apart.
I wasn’t particularly accustomed to ghost stories either, but I knew the answer to this question.
“Mr. Park Hyeonho…”
I remembered the things I had left behind in the ghost stories I had passed through.
The people abandoned in spaces that had now vanished as though they had never existed in the world.
“You should focus solely on getting out of here.”
“...You said you’ve already walked fifty-one kilometers.”
“We’re getting out. We’re replenishing our energy so that we can.”
The app’s achievement had not changed, but neither had my attitude toward Park Hyeonho.
He was an ordinary civilian who knew nothing and occasionally got in our way.
But that wasn’t a reason for him to die.
Park Hyeonho looked down at me, then placed the bun he had been about to open back inside the black bag.
“Aren’t you going to eat it?”
“We should save it, just in case.”
It sounded like he wanted to live.
Of the four peanut-butter sandwiches in the package, only one remained. I shoved it into my mouth and rose.
“Let’s get moving.”
In truth, the food was nowhere near enough.
We had only put the bare minimum amount of fuel into our bodies.
Still, we should be grateful that we had managed to refuel at all.
“Senior, are you sure you don’t want to eat more? Really?”
Myeong Haebin asked indistinctly, her cheeks bulging as she chewed her own final peanut-butter sandwich.
“We don’t know what kind of question it’ll ask next time.”
We had been fortunate that this question concerned something I had already recorded.
There was no guarantee the next one would.
But on the following lap, I discovered that there had been no need to worry about that.
“Uh… This…”
“Closing the kiosk is cheating! Does it seriously not open at all? Argh, it really doesn’t!”
The kiosk had closed.
A waterproof tarp covered the merchandise, and although Myeong Haebin shook the container’s window, it showed no sign of opening.
Saving the food was the right decision.
But…
Two bottles of sports drink, two buns, and one bag of candy.
How much longer could we survive on that?