Cursed Bunny(44)

The youth grabbed the man’s arm and gripped his wrist, trying to make him drop the knife, but it was impossible to overpower the man, who was filled with mad strength. No matter how much the youth resisted, the man’s blade inched toward his neck.

Its tip touched him. The youth felt it pierce his skin, and blood beginning to flow.

And in that moment, the youth saw his hand that was gripping the man’s wrist was turning into a steely gray.

The man’s wrist began bending back in an impossible angle. White bone popped out from his skin. The man screamed and fell to the floor, clutching his broken arm.

The youth stared down at the man. Incandescent rage had vanished from the man’s eyes. They were soon flooded with fear.

That was the last thing the youth remembered.

XXIV

When he came to again, it was morning.

The woman and her brother’s hut had vanished without a trace. Where the shed had once stood were what looked like the man’s scattered remains, along with oceans of blood. Finding it unbearable to look at, he turned his head and quickly left the scene.

When he came down the mountain to the village, he saw that it was in ruins.

Where yesterday there had been houses and people passing by, now stood an old tree, hundreds of years old, standing there as it had since time immemorial. Where there had once been a fence thick with vines and a blacksmith’s, was now just a field of dried grass. The inhabitants were almost all gone. Two or three stragglers, wandering the scene with dazed expressions, took one look at him, turned white with fear, and disappeared from his sight.

He despaired.

He hadn’t wanted revenge. At least, not this kind of revenge. He simply had not known that the village’s survival had hinged solely on the existence of It.

The absurdity of the conclusion made him feel helpless. The strangers who stole his childhood with their sorcerer and beliefs, the despondent life he had lived on the brink of death, it had all been meaningless in the end. Mourning his years of suffering and despair, he stood there in the ruins of the village and wept.

And once his tears had finally ceased, he began to walk toward the rising sun, in search for that place in this world where his life was waiting for him.





Home Sweet Home


“Surely you must know that it’s only good manners to compensate me thirty million won in this situation, if you know what I mean, dear.” The owner of the blood-sausage stew restaurant spoke to the young woman and the young woman’s husband in an oddly unsettling confusion of polite and informal speech.

The restaurant owner’s husband chimed in, “You young people don’t seem to know the ways of the world very well. But if you can’t do this little thing, it can become a miserable life for all of us.” He glared at them meaningfully as he said this.

The man in black, standing next to the restaurant owner and her husband, nodded. Then, wordlessly, he smiled.

“Excuse me,” said the young woman’s husband to the three of them, “but the exchange of a ‘premium’ is only a traditional practice between renters, is it not? It has nothing to do with the landlord in official legal terms. And thirty million won is not a small sum of money. Would you be so willing to part with it?”

Even as the young woman was half-listening to her husband’s trembling voice as he used the proper honorifics and formal speech while trying to reason with the extortionists and their black-clad “assistant” (or, rather, their hired thug), she was watching the child. The child was in the corner of the store, sweeping her fingers along the wall, then fiddling with the pot of fake flowers by the door, but she did not venture outside. When their eyes met, the child smiled. The young woman returned the smile.

On the seventh year of her marriage, she managed to repay all her loans. Her in-laws had helped out a little (or a lot, really), but in the end, she had paid them off. Hearing that the best way to raise your children in one place was to have a larger home to begin with, she may have gone in over her head when she bought their first apartment, and she had to quickly adjust to the bitter feeling of going to the banks and giving them almost every cent they earned for seven long years. But it was money well spent in the end. After those seven years, the apartment finally belonged in its entirety to herself and her husband, and she decided they should sell it and move to a neighborhood which was cheaper and quieter. And so, on the eighth year of their marriage, she bought a mixed-use building in a cheap part of town.

She hadn’t been entirely happy with it. “Pleased” would’ve been an overstatement. The times she and her husband had made surveying expeditions into various parts of the city had been fun. The neighborhood they had settled on was quiet, not too expensive, and most of the people who lived there had the aura of calm that came from having been there for decades. As most of the inhabitants were rather elderly, the real estate agent (whose sign still used the old-fashioned term bokdeokbang, or “fortune-gainer”) seemed somewhat perplexed that such a young couple would come in itching to buy an entire building with cash.

But the woman was finally happy. How thrilling it was to buy one’s own place with one’s own money for the first time! Not to mention the fact that she wanted to leave their apartment as soon as possible. There, from the parking lot to the elevators, every time she ran into a neighbor there was tedious talk of land prices, house prices, petitions from the wives’ association, and exhortations to attend meetings of said association, exhortations that bordered on harassment.