Off one of the busier main arteries again, a familiar sight drew Ford excitedly. Rows of bright orange, plastic jack-o’-lanterns. Stacks of black conical witch’s hats. A bucket bristling with bloodied axes, swords, pitchforks. And cheap rubbery faces hanging on a board with metal pegs through their eyes: a gorilla, a hideous old woman, a shiny red devil, various skull-like or decayed toothsome zombies. Ford smiled. Halloween in Korea! He wondered how many of them got into it, how many of their children actually trick-or-treated (for dried squid and octopus arms?). After examining the outside displays, he entered into the little store itself.
Candles, decorations, plastic bugs; nothing that he wouldn’t find at home, but that was what charmed him. He didn’t feel so much like he was missing out on October’s Halloween atmosphere, now; this made up a bit for the HORRORWOOD let-down.
One of the shop’s workers was keeping an avid eye on him, either for fear that he might steal something or out of eagerness to make a sale. Ford glanced at him and smiled, and pointed to the stairs at the back of the gift shop. “Can I go up?” he asked. The worker nodded, smiled, invited him to do so with a gesture. Ford went to the stairs, and the worker followed after him.
“Ahh,” he said, as he reached the second level. An abundance of costumes in plastic bags, and a wide array of masks covering one entire wall. The worker hovered behind him as he moved forward to study the ranked, macabre faces more closely. Again, an army of desiccated ghouls. The ubiquitous mask from the movie Scream. The grinning green mask from the movie The Mask. Werewolves, grim reapers. Images of Western horror.
But there was a single mask that seemed unique, out of place, and thus focused Ford’s attention. It was a rubber version of the wooden masks he had seen earlier, and those diminutive mask faces at the inn. It was a full-head mask, however, and was more detailed in that it even had veins bulging at its temples. As was the case with some of the heads he had seen in the frames at the inn, it had a kind of circle on its forehead like Buddha...but where the circle on those masks looked like a lump or tumor, this one was flattened like the head of a great spike that had been driven into the being’s skull. The face was painted brown like wood, and was wearing either a snarling grimace or a leering grin. It was offbeat, bizarre, and this time Ford didn’t think he could resist. He turned to his watchful companion, who seemed coiled to spring at the first opportunity to be helpful.
“What is that?” he pointed.
“Ohh...Hahoe,” he said.
“Hahoe? Is that his name? Is he a God, a devil...a folk hero?”
“Hero? Oh...hero?” The worker picked a Batman mask off a peg, and held it out to him. “Hero?”
“Ohhh yeah...Batman...yeah, he’s a hero. But that mask there...what is it supposed to be?”
Looking a bit nervous or at a loss, his eager friend turned toward another man at the opposite end of the room and called him over; Ford didn’t know if this was because that man’s English was better, or if he knew more about this particular mask.
The two exchanged some words in Korean, then the new man addressed Ford. “That mask is not for sale. Last one.”
“Not for sale?”
“It cost too much...ah, 120,000 won.”
“Wow...is that a museum piece?” Ford tried to joke. He was attempting to calculate that amount into dollars in his head. Twelve hundred won was roughly a dollar. His math skills were deficient, but 120,000 won certainly did sound excessive to him.
Anyway, he could tell the man was trying to discourage him from buying the mask. Was it because he considerately didn’t want him to have to spend so much money on it, or – as Ford suspected – that he felt Ford didn’t have the proper understanding of, or respect for, the mask’s significance?
“Hero?” the first man offered, pointing to an adult-sized Superman costume in a plastic bag.
“Um, no thanks...I’ll have to think about it some more, what I want to be on Halloween. I’ll come back again – okay?”
His friend smiled and gave something like a little bow. “Okay...come back. Okay.”
Ford left the store, returned to his wandering. He figured on the way back to the inn he should stop in a convenience store to try their ATM for money and to buy some drinks and snacks to get him through the night. He started working his way in the inn’s direction. He wasn’t too nervous about becoming lost, because in that direction loomed a rugged little mountain with a spire-like tower at its summit which was connected to a cable car system. If he had time before he left the country, he wanted to ride that cable car for its obviously impressive view of Seoul.
He found a convenience store, and an ATM inside it, but it wouldn’t give him any won. Well, he’d try another ATM or one of the banks he’d seen today, either later on or tomorrow. Right now he was tired and wanted to get back to the guest house for a nap. It was drawing close to 2 PM, the time he had settled in yesterday for his rest. He actually missed his cute little room for its safe nest of security; it was his own bit of space now in this huge alien city that might as well be on another planet, or at least in some partly-familiar but very warped alternate dimension.
Ford made it back to the inn as easily as he had hoped by using that spire as his compass needle, trudged up the carpeted steps to room 201, let himself in. After dumping a handful of exotic coins on the desk and storing his drinks away in the miniature fridge, he lay back on his bed with head propped up on both pillows, TV remote in hand, his feet feeling blistered and his brain feeling soaked like a sponge, heavy with all it had absorbed.
5: The Figure
After a short while, knowing he was close to sleep, Ford broke off from watching the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants dubbed into Korean to get up and use the bathroom before he fully succumbed. As he finished, his gaze was drawn to the little frosted window, and he slid back its panels, leaned forward to look at the brick building across the way.
Sure enough, she was there. His hard-working factory girl, the suspended spiral cord of her iron swaying with her strokes, her ponytail bobbing, her shirt riding up in back...apparently the same long-sleeved maroon top from yesterday. Ford checked his watch. 3:30 PM. Just the start of her second shift hours, then?
Again, he thought of the hard-working, married Vietnamese woman whom he had developed such a strong crush on at his job. The diligent little Asian girl in the library, years before that. He thought of An, his future “ba xa”, if he could make it into Vietnam successfully...and if they hit it off with each other. What if it turned out she didn’t like him, having met him in the flesh? He was self conscious about being twenty years older than she was, though she had assured him her father was twenty years older than her mother and thus it was not an odd concept to her. She had reassured him that she was not simply using him as a means to come to the United States – there to abandon him once she achieved her citizenship.
Look at how cute that girl was, just a humble factory worker, not even one of those model-lovely stewardesses on Korean Air flights. There were millions of them like her, here and in other Asian countries. Did their men appreciate them, realize how lucky they were? Why shouldn’t he have one of them, too? They were not all untouchable exotic princesses...nor was he the lowliest of men. And yet he still felt oddly undeserving. Oddly pessimistic about obtaining An. Were the two of them merely indulging in a fantasy?
Well, he was this close to her. Just one step further. He must not give in to a defeatist attitude now.
Ford closed the window, padded back to bed on his bare feet, their blisters swelling with every second (“Seoul, sole, soul,” he thought, drowsily), and this time when he stretched out he fell instantly into dreams that he did not remember upon waking, as he almost never did since becoming an adult.
When he awoke, the TV was the only light in the room; a look at his wrist watch told him it was just past 11 PM. Another nice long refreshing sleep. He fished around under his blanket and found the remote, surfed until a movie caught his eye. It was a decade or two ol
d, from the looks of it. When he tuned into the film, it was to see a woman squirming in agony on a hospital bed, her feet in stirrups (but the camera not facing her privates). At first it appeared she was going to give birth, but that didn’t seem to be the case as a group of experts of some kind stared at her crotch dispassionately, doing nothing to relieve her misery.
Ford rose, flicked on a light, and immediately spotted a centipede with long feathery legs poised upon one wall. It was no larger or more exotically horrible than the ones he found in his own apartment back home, but it was an unwelcome roommate nonetheless. He fetched his free travel guide to Korea, snuck up on the thing and squashed it before it could scurry out of reach. He wiped its smear off the book with a tissue and brought that into the bathroom with him. He dropped it into the trash bucket there.
The streetlight beyond made his frosted window glow like ice. Would his girl still be ironing, after all these hours he had slept? Well, this was about the time he’d viewed her last night. Once more, he pushed the sliding panes of the window to one side to let in the mild cool air of night. Once more, he leaned close to the opening to gaze toward the contemporary brick building.
Yes...still there, still ironing. Had she even taken a dinner or coffee break since he’d seen her almost seven hours earlier? No wonder she looked so stressed, unsmiling, a few stray strands of fine black hair hanging in her face. Was nobody there to help or relieve her? He saw no other bodies or parts of bodies entering into the frame of her window.
She never looked his way. Would she, if he put on the bathroom light? He played with the idea of waving across to her, a nice safe distant flirtation...like emailing a girl in Vietnam.
A faint crunching sound attracted his attention. A footstep on sidewalk grit? Ford had to practically stick his head out the window to look down toward the little alley, of which the inn formed one wall, pressing himself against the aluminum frame.
The narrow passage was filled to its brim with gloom, the air conditioners that jutted out barely distinguishable. But Ford believed he saw a figure in the alley, its back turned to him. It was motionless, and its attitude suggested a man relieving his bladder against the wall, though he listened for and heard no streaming sound. Probably some drunk who had ducked into the alley to answer nature’s call. It reminded him that he had to empty his own bladder and he pulled back from the window to do so, leaving it open, knowing that at this angle and in his own sheltering gloom, the girl in the factory would not be able to see him.
Finished, he washed and dried his hands, then returned to the window for a last peek before he closed it and gravitated back to his bed and the odd movie.
At first, what he saw seemed unreal to him, as if it were contained within a TV screen, not a window frame.
There were two figures in the window opposite, not one, and they seemed to be in a sexual embrace. But it was quickly apparent that it was a struggle rather than an amorous coupling. One of the two people was of course the girl in blue jeans and maroon top, the top riding further up her back than ever because of the way she was bent forward over the table she normally ironed at, her arms splayed out across it. The other person was larger, bulkier, a man in black clothing. His face was very dark; Ford’s first impression was that it was a black man. This figure had seized the young woman from behind, his left hand gripping one of her wrists, pressing his front against her back so as to use his weight to pin her against the workbench. Her face was contorted in terror and pain, her eyes squeezed shut and mouth open. Ford realized that her slender throat was in the grip of the man’s other hand, his arm a restraining bar across her chest.
“Oh my God,” Ford whispered. “Oh no...” Surely she couldn’t be alone in the building. Couldn’t any of her coworkers hear her cries? Or was any sound getting past the hand constricting her throat?
The woman tried to twist her shoulders and buck her body to throw him off, jerked her head from side to side, and she reached back awkwardly, desperately, with her free hand in an attempt to claw the attacker’s dark face. At the same time that he snapped his own head back to avoid her flailing claws, the figure used the hand around her throat to tilt her head up against his shoulder so as to limit its thrashing.
As she screwed her head to the right, grimacing with the effort to spread the man’s thumb far enough away to break his hold, Ford saw the woman’s eyes flash open, and he almost flinched. For the first time since he had spied on her, her eyes appeared to look directly across at his window, and to lock with his own. They seemed to stare into each other’s faces in a moment of mirrored, uncomprehending horror.
The figure let go of her left wrist, and though Ford couldn’t be sure, it looked as though he were reaching down to the front of his pants to unzip them, or maybe to the front of hers. Whatever he was doing, the young woman was more aware of it than Ford was, and launched into a greater effort of squirming. She whipped her freed left hand around behind her and scratched blindly at his hidden hand.
The figure raised his head, and he too appeared to look out the window, across the street at the window of the guest house. Directly into Ford’s eyes, and the American saw the attacker’s face clearly for the first time.
It was dark brown because it was meant to look like wood. A terrible wide grimace or grin was molded onto the visage. Though from here it was too distant to make out, Ford knew it had a circle on its forehead like a bolt driven into its skull, and veins standing out on its temples as if real blood circulated through its rubber flesh.
Then, the face looked down quickly at the girl. Maybe she had successfully raked him, and the pain had reclaimed his attention. It also seemed to replace his ardor with fury, as if he had countenanced a great rejection more hurtful than the scratches. The figure dragged the girl back from the workbench, twisted her to one side and shoved her down to her knees or at least out of Ford’s view, below the level of the window. He let go of the woman’s throat with his right hand; Ford could imagine her sucking in a loud, wheezing gasp of air. But the man had only let go of her neck so that he could reach over to the iron Ford had watched the woman use in the course of her work.
Still holding her down out of sight with his left hand, maybe crushing her shoulder in his hand or with his fingers knotted in her hair, the figure raised the iron up past his shoulder, the pointed end facing down. Then he brought the iron downward with force. Raised it again, higher this time, and brought it down even more viciously. A third arcing blow. The figure straightened up, his arms at his sides, having released the girl but still holding onto the iron. Then, the figure with his brown rubber head slowly sank out of view also.
The iron’s spiral, telephone-like cord swayed and bounced. Was that a wisp of steam rising up, like a departing spirit? The iron had still been in the figure’s hand...
“Jesus Christ,” Ford hissed, “Oh Jesus.” He was quivering violently, as if he were strapped helpless in an electric chair and a powerful current ran into him. He wanted to yell out his window at the attacker, in outrage, to bellow an alarm to the neighborhood, but found himself as choked as the girl had been. He dashed out of the dark bathroom, into the main room, with the thought of calling the police. But he didn’t know their number, or how to get an outside call. He must go downstairs, then – wake the owner of the inn, who lived on the premises...
But he hesitated, his hand still hovering near the phone, thoughts scampering in every direction like insects exposed from their hiding place under a rock. It was too late by this point, wasn’t it? Surely the blows from the iron had killed the poor girl, and now if she were being violated it must be postmortem?
If he awoke the inn keeper, and he in turn called the police, they would want to question Ford. After his experience with the stern Vietnamese immigration agents and security for Korean Air, he dreaded facing a group of uniformed Korean policemen. They would want to detain him, especially if he had to act as a witness in a trial (assuming they even arrived in time to apprehend the masked attacker). Bu
t he had to pick up his visa on October 7th, if it were truly ready as promised, and purchase a ticket to return to Vietnam on the eighth. He could not afford to be delayed. An was waiting for him; he’d already lost days he could have spent with her – in her arms.
Ford withdrew his hand from the phone. After almost a minute, in which he numbly watched the movie still playing on his TV, he crept back into the bathroom. Timidly, afraid of what he might see – or what might see him – he peeked out at that window with newspaper screening the top of it. Maybe in those newspapers’ articles was a story about some crazed rapist-murderer. Some serial killer who had been stalking Seoul’s streets. Maybe the police already knew about this man...
The room beyond the window appeared empty. The iron’s cord hung unmoving like a vine. Was the killer still upon the girl, down out of sight, or had he already left the building?
Remembering the figure he had seen lurking in the alley below, Ford twisted uncomfortably to look down along the guest house’s flank, but he saw no one. If that had been the killer before, then he hadn’t returned to hide in the alley.
Maybe when he had spotted the figure in the alley before, the figure had also seen him. Why else would the masked visage have turned and stared in his direction during the attack, so boldly, as if to taunt him? So arrogant and daring, that the killer hadn’t fled even when he’d seen Ford witnessing his deeds. As if he already knew Ford would do nothing to thwart him.
He didn’t see me, Ford rebutted himself. Couldn’t have. His window had been dark. The girl couldn’t have seen him, either. Or had there been just enough dim glow behind him, from the other room, to vaguely silhouette his head in the window? He prayed this hadn’t been the case. Not so much because he was afraid the attacker would seek him out...but because of the idea that the girl had seen him observing her attack, mute and immobile – her last impression of a human being, other than the one assaulting her.
Thirteen Specimens Page 10