Chapter 35
Human Exhibition: The Reinterpretation of Parts (1)
Along with the acrid odor of decay setting in, the stench of blood—something I hadn’t noticed earlier—suddenly assaulted my nose.
Are these hands going to attack me?
That didn’t seem to be the case.
They were simply the hands of dead people, swaying irregularly at roughly eye level.
“Hanmu, what are you doing in there?”
I caught a glimpse of Dohyeon’s face above the swaying hands. Dohan was there too.
I asked Dohan,
“Why did you come this way instead of entering through the staff door?”
“You said you’d give us the sticker. Obviously, we should follow the guy offering us a free meal, right?”
“Don’t listen to my brother’s nonsense. The door wouldn’t open. It looks like there’s some condition you need to meet before you can enter.”
Considering Team Leader Jo and Seo Gitae had gone through it, there was clearly a way.
But without any information, we had no choice but to enter through the exhibition hall.
“Why are you standing inside that thing?”
“I’ll come right out as soon as I find my phone.”
Where did it go?
I thought it would be easy to spot because it was black, but all the hands had similar shapes, making it difficult to distinguish.
Outside the artwork, the docent and Dohan were arguing.
“He lost something inside the exhibition hall. Shouldn’t you help him find it?”
“Human Exhibition is an artistic exploration of the theme ‘The Boundlessness of Humanity.’”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“Our exhibition primarily utilizes human men and women in their twenties and thirties, seeking to draw out the beauty of the human body to its absolute—”
It didn’t seem capable of holding a proper conversation.
Dohyeon appeared worried about me being inside the artwork.
“Hyung, this won’t do. I’ll go in and quickly find Hanmu’s phone.”
“Hey, Jeong Dohyeon!”
At that moment, one of the hands touched my shoulder.
That can’t be right. They were all at eye level…
When had they descended?
Like spiders lowering themselves along their threads, the hands had dropped to the height of my shoulders.
Ignoring Dohan’s attempt to stop him, Dohyeon entered the artwork to help me and pointed in a particular direction.
“That hand from before was black, right? I think I caught a glimpse of it over there.”
“…Mr. Dohyeon, I think you should get out.”
It was an instinctive sense of foreboding.
“But your phone is over there. Are you sure you don’t want it?”
I turned toward where Dohyeon was looking.
Realizing it had been discovered, the black hand jumped down to the floor.
“Damn it!”
Foreboding or not, I had to retrieve my phone first.
The moment I stepped toward the center of Ten Thousand Left Hands, the hands latched onto me.
Hard joints, bones, and flesh devoid of all body heat felt their way across my face.
Calloused fingertips tapped my eyelids and slid down my cheeks.
Disgusting!
The harder I tried to force my way forward, the worse the situation became.
The hands, refined and arranged to conform to the framework of art, pressed down on my shoulders, wrapped themselves around my waist, and began restraining me with increasing force.
“Give me back my phone before you go!”
I knew shouting at a thief to return what it had stolen was idiotic, but caught in the hands’ grasp, it was the only thing I could say.
“I’ve got it!”
Less tightly restrained than me, Dohyeon pounced on the black hand.
Caught in his grip, it thrashed like a freshly caught fish as it struggled to escape.
“I only need the phone. Just take the phone!”
“This hand is stronger than it looks…!”
Slip!
The instant Dohyeon released one hand to take the phone from it, the black hand slipped free of his grasp.
As if that weren’t enough, it fled the artwork without so much as looking back.
“I’m sorry.”
“…You have nothing to apologize for, Mr. Dohyeon.”
It was my fault for stupidly letting it steal my phone in the first place.
After the black hand disappeared around the corner of a tall partition, the threat surrounding us became unmistakable.
“Let’s focus on getting out of here.”
Of course, we were already in the middle of Ten Thousand Left Hands, with dozens of hands clinging to us so tightly that we couldn’t even move our feet.
Outside the artwork, the docent continued giving Dohan explanations he hadn’t asked for.
“The hand you are currently viewing belonged to a thirty-four-year-old man who operated a fried-chicken restaurant.”
“The hand on the left belonged to a twenty-one-year-old woman. If you examine the gel manicure on its fingertips…”
Explanations?
I hadn’t been able to study it carefully, but I remembered the strategy displayed by the app during the brief moment I had seen it.
- We recommend listening carefully to the audio guide and viewing each artwork according to its instructions.
An audio guide.
Since this was an exhibition, there had to be one somewhere around here.
Twisting my body in an attempt to remove even one of the hands clinging to me, I shouted to Dohan.
“Mr. Dohan! Can you see an audio guide out there?”
“You mean this QR code?”
Dohan pointed toward a bronze plaque embedded in the floor outside.
A QR code was engraved beside the nameplate reading Ten Thousand Left Hands.
“Is that the audio guide?”
“It probably is! Ugh!”
Dohyeon barely managed to answer while dodging a hand trying to cling to his face.
It wasn’t as though I had ever visited an exhibition before.
However—
“It says my device isn’t supported!”
Dohan tried scanning the QR code with his phone, then turned the screen toward me to show me the message.
Why?
Was there a separate condition that had to be met before we could use it?
Or had I misunderstood the rule?
With half his face covered by hands, Dohyeon seemed to remember something.
“Hanmu, before Team Leader Jo passed through the turnstile… didn’t he take something?”
“Wasn’t that the key to the staff passage?!”
He had snatched something from the ticket booth, and when I checked it, only an empty basket had remained.
…Ah.
“They wouldn’t have left the key to the staff passage lying around in the ticket booth.”
What if the object that had been inside that empty basket wasn’t a key to the staff-only passage?
What if it was an audio-guide device capable of scanning these QR codes?
“Wow. He deliberately took the audio guide so we couldn’t catch up to him.”
Having reached the same conclusion, Dohan let out a hollow laugh.
Those bastards never stopped at just one dirty trick.
“We’re Dogs left staring at the chicken we chased away.”
I couldn’t shake off the hands persistently feeling every inch of my body.
Damn it.
If I still had [Dictionary], I could at least have searched for this artwork and found a way through it.
Just then, the docent outside made Dohan an offer.
“Would you like a paid guide?”
“Paid?”
“Yes. In exchange for a modest fee, I can provide a more detailed explanation of the artwork.”
The artwork, which had gradually descended while feeling its way across my body, finally reached my hands.
Its fingers traced the edges of my nails and followed the veins along the back of my hand. They tapped each of my knuckles before shamelessly interlocking their fingers with mine.
They squeezed tight.
A thread-thin pressure tightened around my wrist.
One of the fine wires suspending Ten Thousand Left Hands had looped around my left wrist and begun to constrict it.
It felt as if it were sawing through my wrist very slowly.
So this is how they cut them off.
“Ugh…!”
I already knew what it felt like to have my wrist severed.
They said familiar pain was even more frightening. True to those words, my left hand began trembling uncontrollably.
“Hanmu! Your wrist!”
Dohan looked back and forth between me and the docent before finally shouting,
“Fine! I need it! Give me the paid guide!”
The instant he accepted the offer, the docent held out its palm.
“The fee for the premium guide to Ten Thousand Left Hands is one tooth. Payment is required in advance.”
What?
Faced with that absurd demand, Dohan clenched his fist.
“Anomalies always pull this kind of crap.”
We were running out of time.
Unable to withstand the wire digging into it, the flesh of my wrist began to split. Strangely, however, not a single drop of blood fell.
Even so, I couldn’t tell Dohan to yank out some random tooth and hand it over.
He had no reason to go that far for me.
But Dohan looked me straight in the eye and grinned.
“Hanmu, you’d better give me that sticker. Got it?”
As Dohan turned away, I saw him place his thumb against one of his lower front teeth.
Crack.
It was the sound of a tooth anchored by gum and root being forcibly twisted out of place.
Once I realized what he was doing, my jaw fell open.
…He’s insane.
Did he just pull out a healthy tooth?
By himself?
The ivory fragment of bone Dohan had twisted free, with bits of flesh still attached, dropped into the docent’s palm.
“Give me the premium guide.”
Dohan’s lips were stained bright red, and blood flowed from his mouth.
The docent paid no attention. It simply placed his front tooth in its pocket.
“Shall I begin the premium guide to Ten Thousand Left Hands?”
“Yes!”
“Ten Thousand Left Hands was created using the distal extremities of the upper limbs of numerous unidentified individuals. To display the unique beauty possessed by each hand, we are constantly collecting new ones.”
“That’s it?”
“Ten Thousand Left Hands does not use hands that lack artistic merit.”
Artistic merit?
They cut off perfectly healthy human hands, polished them until they looked pretty, and hung them up in rows—and they called that art?
What complete insanity.
Still, I had no choice but to focus on that detail.
The hands had begun descending along Dohyeon’s arms as well.
“Hanmu, don’t worry about me!”
“How am I supposed not to worry?!”
What did it use to judge “artistic merit”?
Every hand displayed in Ten Thousand Left Hands had been severed cleanly and probably belonged to someone dead.
What else did they have in common?
Could it be…?
I wasn’t certain, but I couldn’t simply surrender my hand to this damned artwork.
With my hand still trembling, I searched through the cleaning-supply bag. The artwork kept grabbing at me to stop me, making it difficult, but I finally managed to pull out a steel scraper.
The docent standing before Dohan silently approached me.
“This is a work of art. Please treat it with care.”
It was warning me not to damage the exhibit.
“Don’t worry.”
I wasn’t about to do something as insane as vandalizing an artwork in an exhibition hall.
Instead of striking one of the hands restraining me, I brought the scraper’s sharp edge down across the back of my own left hand.
Slash!
Had I misjudged my strength?
Blood spurted from the back of my hand, which had been torn open deeply enough to expose the bone.
The hands clinging to me immediately slid away, as though they had seen something filthy.
It worked!
There was another thing the displayed hands had in common.
None of them had wounds or blood on them.
Even bruised fruit couldn’t be sold. Would they really use an ugly, gaping hand dripping with blood as part of an artwork?
“Mr. Dohyeon, I think I’ve found the solution!”
A small cut was better than losing an entire hand.
Dohyeon would understand—
Wait.
“How did you do that?”
The hands that had been showing Dohyeon the same enthusiastic interest they showed me were withdrawing from him on their own.
“I have an idea why… but should we get out first?”
The hands were no longer interested in either of us.
Perhaps they had felt us all over in order to determine whether we possessed artistic value.
We pushed through the hands that no longer welcomed us and escaped the artwork.
Outside, Dohan stood with his arms folded confidently.
“See? I told you it was dangerous to go alone.”
“I don’t want to hear that from someone with blood dripping out of his mouth.”
“But you got out thanks to me. Aren’t you going to thank me?”
“…Thank you?”
Dohan grumbled that he had practically forced the gratitude out of me, while Dohyeon pried his mouth wide open.
“Say ah.”
“Wait, wait! That hurts!”
Ignoring Dohan’s yelps, Dohyeon took a handkerchief from inside his clothes and stuffed it into the gap where the front tooth had been.
I only caught a glimpse, but it appeared that Dohan had forced the tooth inward until it snapped. His gum had torn, and the bleeding was fairly severe.
“Is your hand all right, Hanmu?”
“I can still use it.”
In truth, it bothered me.
The cut had begun to swell and throb, but the pain wasn’t unbearable.
At this level, tearing a strip from a disposable cleaning cloth and wrapping it around the wound would be sufficient.
“Still, I’m glad you’re unharmed, Mr. Dohyeon. I don’t understand why it didn’t target you, though.”
“Maybe he just got lucky. Right?”
Dohyeon glared at his brother before raising his left arm.
“I probably failed to meet its standards. I have almost no strength in my left hand.”
“What do you mean?”
“Would you take a closer look at it?”
Focusing on his hand, I noticed that the part of his palm beneath the middle and ring fingers was unusually thin.
Dohyeon very slowly closed his hand into a fist and opened it again.
“It’s a rare disease. I look fine from the outside, but the muscles in one of my arms are gradually wasting away.”
Ah.
I had thought he let go of the black hand far too easily earlier. Was that why?
At the vending machine in Hwaae High School, even with Haebin helping him, he had struggled to properly restrain Team Leader Yong.
“Come on, it doesn’t cause much trouble in everyday life. Besides, it kept that thing from taking your hand. Right?”
“…Right.”
As his twin, Dohan had evidently known about the condition already and treated it as no great concern.
The docent followed us at its distinctive pace—neither quick nor slow—and recited in a flat voice,
“What a shame. Ten Thousand Left Hands is an exceptional work of art.”
Exceptional, my ass.
We hadn’t even finished Exhibition Hall 1 yet.
And I still hadn’t found my phone.
As I surveyed the exhibition hall, something caught my eye.
“Sorry to interrupt this heartwarming family conversation.”
“Hmm?”
“May I go and retrieve my phone now?”
Soot-like traces shed by the black hand dotted the floor, forming a trail.