by Mi-ae Seo
After her dad went downstairs, Hayeong lay in bed, thinking about her mom and Seonkyeong. She thought she was happier now, living with Seonkyeong. And then she fell asleep. Hayeong met her mom in her dream. Her mom was very angry. Just like that day.
Get your father here, right now!
Hayeong covered her ears. She could hear her mom’s sharp voice. Her mom grabbed her arm and twisted it, and she opened her eyes in pain. She felt relieved, realizing it was a dream.
Lightning struck again. The rain fell and the wind blew. Her mom had wanted to see her dad even more on days like this. Hayeong wanted to stop thinking about her.
She’s dead. She’s dead, so stop thinking about her, she said to herself in her mind.
On days like this, however, she felt afraid that her mom would come out from somewhere and start yelling. Hayeong got up off the bed, carrying her pillow. She felt that she wouldn’t be afraid if she slept in Seonkyeong’s arms, even if her mom appeared. She was about to leave the room, when her foot caught on the puppy.
Startled, the puppy hid under the bed and wouldn’t come out, no matter how many times Hayeong called. Finally, she reached under the bed. She felt something—something icky.
What came out from under the bed was a feather. Seeing the feather, she immediately opened the dresser drawer. She looked under the blanket, and the box that should’ve been there was gone. She could guess who had taken the box. She began to pout. It was a habit she had when she got angry.
She had to go demand an answer. But first, she decided to take the puppy out from under the bed. It must have been the puppy that told Seonkyeong where the box was. It was supposed to be a secret between just the two of them. The puppy must’ve done something wrong, to hide like this.
A puppy that doesn’t keep secrets must be punished.
Her hand caught the puppy. She dragged it out from under the bed, and looked it in the eye. With the puppy struggling in one arm, she looked for the brown bottle she’d hidden somewhere deep.
SEONKYEONG WAS IN A HUGE MANSION, looking around. She was wearing a black dress, and walking through an endlessly long corridor with a high ceiling, checking the open rooms one by one, looking for something.
Someone was standing in the sunlight at the end of the corridor. Seonkyeong ran toward the light. The moment she realized that the person standing there was Hayeong, the child ran into another room, as if playing hide-and-seek. The sound of her laughter rang through the space and spread to the ceiling.
Seonkyeong wanted to cover her ears. A rope fell on the floor in front of her as she ran away from the laughter. The rope was in the form of a noose, as if to say that she should hang herself with it. Startled, Seonkyeong pushed the rope away and ran. She turned a corner, and saw that there was a door at a dead end.
When she opened the door, Hayeong was standing there, waiting, and offered her a handful of cold medicine. Seonkyeong refused, shaking her head, and Hayeong became furious and pounced on her, and was about to force the medicine down her throat.
Seonkyeong shook Hayeong’s arms off and shoved her with all her might. Her eyes wide open in surprise, Hayeong fell down and down, her hands waving in the air. Standing at the railing, Seonkyeong looked down in shock and saw Hayeong lying still on the floor, her legs bent out of shape. Hayeong cried and reached out toward her.
Somehow, Hayeong’s arms stretched out longer and longer and reached Seonkyeong’s neck. The child clung to her. The warmth of her tender skin gave Seonkyeong goose bumps.
Seonkyeong’s eyes flew open. Her body was drenched in sweat. It was a dream, but she could still feel Hayeong’s little hands that had just been clinging to her neck. She felt her neck. There was nothing there, of course.
At that moment, she saw Hayeong standing before her. Goose bumps rose all over her body. It seemed that the touch of the hands hadn’t been a dream after all.
“What’s the matter?” Seonkyeong asked.
Hayeong was carrying a pillow. She must have come down, not wanting to be alone in the storm. The child stretched out a hand. She felt Seonkyeong’s forehead, and then her own.
“Your head feels hot,” she said.
“Yes, I’m not feeling well. Will you go upstairs to your room?” Seonkyeong asked.
“No, I’ll stay with you.”
Seonkyeong wanted to keep her eyes open, but the medicine made her drowsy. She fell back into a deep slumber. She wasn’t even aware of Hayeong slipping into the bed next to her and putting her arms around her waist.
28.
SPARKS FLEW UP IN THE DARKENED SKY; A VIOLENT GUST OF wind blew, and heavy rain began to fall.
Yi Byeongdo was tearing his hair out, with the song going around in his head again. It would never go away, even if he gouged out a part of his brain. The notes of pain had been carved into his cells through his whole life.
She grabbed me by my throat and shoved me into the tub, he thought. I saw her distorted face through the lapping water. She looked so sad, as if she were crying and laughing at the same time, and I cried as I drank the water. Maybe I cried because my lungs hurt so much, it felt like they would burst.
Yi Byeongdo continued to replay the scene in his mind: Her eyes were on me, but she wasn’t looking at me. I think maybe she was seeing the traces of him that were somewhere on my face. I’d never heard anything about my father. I knew enough not to ask.
Once, just once, she did say something about him. She said he deserved to die.
She said not to even say the word “father.” That’s when I learned for the first time. That I’d been born through the violence of a man. I didn’t even know what it meant, but I could guess, seeing the look on her face, that it was a terrible, painful, cruel thing.
You should never have been born. I think of that moment whenever I see you.
She was screaming with rage and pain that wouldn’t go away even when she shoved my head into the bathtub, he thought. Why didn’t she kill me then? Or if she had me removed before I was born, neither of us would’ve had to go through such painful times.
Sounds and light hit the prison simultaneously. Lightning seemed to have struck somewhere close.
Seeing the blinding light, he thought he couldn’t stay in prison like this. He looked at the CCTV camera in the corner.
They must be watching me through the monitor, he thought, and looked at the cuffs on his hands and feet. He had wanted to end it, even if this was what it took. And being in prison, he’d thought for a while that it was really over.
The more he killed, the emptier he felt. He killed to make the song in his head go away, but it always came back. It didn’t come back after he had killed twenty people. But now, other things tormented him.
There never had been a song.
After he killed his mother, he led an ordinary life. When he began to kill again, he knew.
From now on, I’ll be frantically roaming the streets at night, he thought. Whenever I see someone, I’ll try to find a way to get to them, and picture myself killing them. Then one day, I’ll commit murder, craving blood, just as people go to bars, craving a drink. My hands are already wet with blood. So are my feet. I . . . I’ve just been looking for an excuse to kill.
When I came to myself, I was strangling a woman, singing a song. Mom came alive in me like that. I thought I was killing people to make the song go away, but now I know. I kept killing because I wanted to hear it again.
I didn’t kill her because I hated her, Yi Byeongdo thought. I wanted desperately for her to love me. I was so thirsty for love, that I got jealous over her showing a cat the slightest bit of affection.
I wanted her to look at me with affection. I wanted to feel the warmth of her hand, stroking my head. I wanted to go to sleep in her arms, listening to her sing me a lullaby, he thought.
His soul was like a worm-eaten leaf, with holes everywhere. Whenever he felt the wind blow through the holes, he killed someone. But killing didn’t fill the emptiness.
It i
sn’t over yet, he thought.
The emptiness would fill, he thought, if he saw Seonkyeong again. She could make the emptiness, which had eaten away at his soul, go away. If only he could see her again.
Looking at the camera in the corner, he fell into thought.
How would he break through these impenetrable walls, and see her again? Security had been maximized after the suicide of an inmate. It would be impossible for a condemned criminal like him to get out, unless he was dead.
Another flash of lightning struck. Heavy rain was falling. It sounded as if the storm would sweep the world away.
He finally came upon an answer. He began to get ready to break free.
A GUARD, WHO HAD BEEN WATCHING the monitor in the security office, jumped to his feet. Another guard, who had been dozing with his legs stretched out on a chair, opened his eyes in surprise.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The . . . the crazy son of a bitch slit his throat!”
Shocked, the guard who had been dozing quickly looked at the monitor. Most of the other condemned criminals were in bed. Only Yi Byeongdo’s room looked different.
Standing in the middle of the room, he was looking at the camera, as if he wanted someone to see him. He seemed out of his mind, baring his teeth and grinning. Dark blood was dripping down his throat. The blood wet his body and pooled on the floor. He couldn’t be left to go on bleeding in that way. He would die in no time.
“Call the manager. Announce it’s an emergency.”
The security manager picked up the phone and ordered the guards to go immediately to Yi Byeongdo’s cell with a medic, and transfer him to a nearby hospital if things were critical. His voice was trembling with rage.
The medic on duty answered the guard’s call and came running. Accompanied by the medic, the guards ran to the condemned criminals’ section of the prison. They opened the door in haste and went inside. Yi Byeongdo was lying on the floor, his hands clutching his neck. The floor was slippery with blood.
The medic rushed to get a look at the neck, but Yi Byeongdo was groaning, struggling in pain. The medic tried to pry his hands off, to see the wound and stop the bleeding, but it was no use.
“He’s bleeding severely. He could die if it’s the carotid. We need to get him to the hospital, now,” said the medic to the guards. They hesitated, not quite knowing what to do, but in the end they got the key and unlocked the cuffs on Yi Byeongdo’s hands and feet.
“Tell them to park the ambulance inside. And call the manager,” said one of the guards.
An ambulance from a designated hospital nearby arrived, making it through the torrential rain.
Yi Byeongdo was placed on a stretcher brought by the medical team, and transferred to the ambulance. The two guards got in the ambulance with him. In great haste, the ambulance headed to the hospital on the rainy night street.
29.
SEONKYEONG OPENED HER EYES AND SAW THE CHILD SLEEPING next to her.
She shivered without realizing it, and turned over. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Hayeong’s face as if nothing were wrong. At that moment, lightning flashed, and the little lamp on the nightstand went out. The lightning had struck somewhere nearby and caused a power failure, it seemed.
Hayeong felt around with her hands, then clung to Seonkyeong’s waist, afraid even in her sleep.
Seonkyeong wanted to push away the little hands at her waist. She wanted to scream that she wanted the hands off her, that she didn’t want to be touched at all. But she couldn’t. She turned back over and put her arms around the child’s head. Her head felt hot, as did her body. Her hair, wet with perspiration, dampened Seonkyeong’s hands. The sleeping child smacked her lips and said something incoherent. She seemed to be saying that she was scared.
“Don’t worry. The light will be back on soon,” Seonkyeong said in a low voice. But the power didn’t come back, even after a while.
Seonkyeong had indescribably complicated feelings about the child.
She recalled her brief dream. She thought of Hayeong, handing her the medicine. What Sergeant Yu had said must have triggered the strange dream. Thanks to it, one of her questions was resolved. Poison. She had refused to believe what Sergeant Yu said, thinking that a child couldn’t have gotten her hands on poison. But the answer was simple.
Hayeong’s mother took something to kill herself. What if Hayeong found the poison in her mother’s room, and kept it hidden until now? It was likely enough. Seonkyeong was leaning more and more toward Sergeant Yu’s deduction.
Hayeong was asleep, taking shallow breaths. Her cheeks, still plump with baby fat, were so cute that Seonkyeong wanted to bite them. Hayeong seemed to be dreaming, furrowing her brow and whimpering now and then. She whimpered again. Seonkyeong patted her on the chest, and Hayeong fell back into deep sleep.
Looking at the child, Seonkyeong felt as if there were a storm raging in her heart, just as there was outside the window.
Listening to Yi Byeongdo tell his story and seeing the wounds deep in his consciousness was different from seeing Hayeong’s shattered heart.
Yi Byeongdo was a stranger, and a part of her job. Once the job was finished, there would be no point of contact between them. But Hayeong was Jaeseong’s daughter, and someone she’d consented to living with. Hayeong wasn’t a job; she was part of Seonkyeong’s daily life, someone who slept and ate in the same house, someone she saw every day.
If Yi Byeongdo was a dark soul, deep in a bottomless pit, Hayeong still had a chance. She had a chance to remove her festering wound and live a good, ordinary life like other people—if things were set right now.
Seonkyeong patted the child’s head. She wondered how deep a shadow the past events had cast on her soul. Even if the scars remained forever, Seonkyeong believed that things could change, depending on how much of the wound was healed. Seonkyeong saw herself as an optimistic person. She believed there was hope for everything. She believed that there was hope for Hayeong as well.
But was there really? She was starting to have doubts. She wondered if it wasn’t too late.
Imagine someone keeping for over a year the poison that had killed her mother, giving it to her grandparents to make them die, and setting a fire to hide the act. It was a cold-blooded method that only criminals like Yi Byeongdo would employ. It wasn’t something that an eleven-year-old child, with big eyes and peachy cheeks, still plump with baby fat, would do.
What was in Hayeong’s heart?
Seonkyeong remembered Hayeong’s face when the child shook the scissors at her. For the first time, she’d felt afraid of her. In the girl’s heart was something she couldn’t imagine. Age didn’t matter.
The left side of her head was aching terribly from waking up after sleeping under the influence of the medicine. She glanced at the clock and saw that it was past one in the morning. She didn’t want to stay in bed, lying next to Hayeong. It wouldn’t be easy to fall back asleep. She got up quietly and stepped out of the bedroom.
30.
THE SECURITY MANAGER, WHO HAD BEEN ALERTED, WAS standing at the entrance of the hospital’s emergency room. He looked pitiful, almost, drenched in the rain.
He frowned, watching Yi Byeongdo being carried out of the ambulance. His prison garb was bloody; so was his face.
Moved to a hospital stretcher that had been waiting for him, Yi Byeongdo was soon taken into the emergency room.
“What the hell happened? Why does he look like that?” demanded the security manager, upset, grabbing one of the guards who had come in the ambulance.
“I’m not sure. I was looking at the monitor, and saw him slit his throat with something,” the guard said.
The security manager rubbed his face with a hand, and heaved a sigh.
“He wants to screw us over. Why the hell is he doing this, when there’s been a suicide so recently?” he said.
He didn’t know how much blood Yi Byeongdo had lost, but things didn’t look good if he had slit his t
hroat.
The security manager really didn’t want things to get messy again.
It wasn’t long ago that he’d been summoned here and there to handle all sorts of trouble because of Seong Kicheol’s suicide. If word spread that something like that had happened again, he might really have to take responsibility and step down. Yi Byeongdo had to be revived.
Swallowing back curses, the security manager went into the emergency center.
Yi Byeongdo, transferred to an operating room, was given a blood transfusion and stitches. The medical team informed the security manager that fortunately, the cut on the throat had missed the artery, and Yi Byeongdo would be stable after the stitches and the blood transfusion. The loss of blood was mostly from a head wound, not the throat. In any case, the security manager could relax a bit.
After the surgery, Yi Byeongdo was quarantined in a recovery room. Seeing the transfusion continue and Yi Byeongdo sleeping, breathing evenly, the security manager finally looked at his watch and yawned.
He wanted to strangle him, thinking about how he’d had to wake up in the middle of the night and drive frantically to the hospital in the rain, and worried himself sick. Thinking he would make Yi Byeongdo pay for the disturbance, the security manager walked out of the recovery room.
He instructed the two guards to keep watch, one in the room, the other in the corridor. With the wound on his neck, and the loss of blood, Yi Byeongdo would have difficulty even sitting up. Running away was unthinkable.
Back home in bed, however, trying to make up for lost sleep, the security manager had a gloomy foreboding.
From his first day at the prison, Yi Byeongdo had jarred him. He was just as ostentatious as Yu Yeongcheol, and wanted special treatment. He had often caused problems with his excessive demands, and irritated the guards by filing complaints.