Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

  Of course, the man’s intentions were a little different from what his wife thought. When it was just the two of them, the man experimented by feeding his son the blood of different animals.

  His boy seemed to have an aversion to dog’s blood. He sipped a little of cow’s or pig’s blood before spitting it out. He drank up to two gulps of chicken blood, but after that he turned his head away and would take no more.

  At every feeding, the man made a wound somewhere on the boy’s body where no one would see. The boy’s blood was crimson like any other child's. And he would cry, like any other child.

  But the man was sure of what he had seen. When his wife had scratched the boy’s forehead, trying to pry him away from his sister, what had flowed from the wound had definitely been gold.

  The man fed his son his own blood.

  This time, his son lapped it up. But even then, the blood that he shed from the wound his father made on him was red. The boy cried even louder.

  The man was lost in thought.

  His kids were growing but business was getting worse. Ever since the fox died, he hadn’t been selling as much as he used to. The hoard he had thought would be everlasting was gone, and the man lost the ability to make measured decisions. He became anxious and would make impulsive choices, regretting his misjudgments later on, and the regret pushed him into making even more rash decisions—it was a never-ending vicious cycle.

  For the sake of his household, and for the children’s future, he needed money. And since the father was working so hard, he thought, the children ought to shoulder some of the burden for the family.

  When his wife wasn’t home, the man began sneaking into his children’s room whenever he could. But his wife was an attentive mother and a hardworking homemaker—there was hardly a day when she wasn’t in the house and going into the children’s rooms to take care of their needs. Especially since the two attacks by the brother on the sister, the man’s wife tried to keep the children in separate rooms, never taking her wary eyes off the daughter.

  In the end, he had to sneak them to the warehouse in the dead of night when his wife was asleep. There, deep in a corner of that darkness where the fox had once been held captive, the man covered his daughter’s mouth so no one could hear her scream and offered her up to his son. Once his son had his fill, he then covered his son’s mouth so he wouldn’t scream, and he wounded his son where no one would see.

  Gathering, drop by drop, the golden liquid flowing from his son’s body, the man felt peace in his heart and his hope for the future was restored.

  His wife fretted over the numerous strange wounds on her children’s bodies. The man brushed off her concerns, saying that children got hurt all the time while playing. The wife said, “But still …” and glanced fearfully at the two children. The daughter always had a terrified expression on her face and trembled in the presence of others, screaming and crying whenever her father came close to her. The son had bags under his eyes, which were open wide like an animal’s, and his pupils darted this way and that as he smacked his lips.

  Then one day, the wife woke up in the middle of the night to find her husband not sleeping by her side. She looked around the house for him, and when she got to the children’s room, she found that they were also gone. Frightened and half-mad, she shouted her children’s names and ran in and out of the house before hearing her daughter’s muffled screams coming from the warehouse.

  The first thing she saw there was a sight beyond her immediate comprehension. On the floor of the warehouse lay her violently shaking daughter with her son gnawing and licking at the daughter’s leg. Crouching behind the son, her husband held a small plate up to the son’s body. Shocked, the wife stood paralyzed for a moment before her daughter’s frail “Mommy …” snapped her back to life.

  The wife swiftly gathered her daughter in her arms. She shook off her son, who was still clinging to his sister’s leg trying to drink her blood, and made a dash for the door. She was blocked by her husband. He needed his daughter’s body if he were to get more blood from his son’s. He couldn’t let her leave with the source of his gold.

  The mother of the child resisted to the best of her ability, protecting her daughter as the man lunged at her. The daughter, caught in the middle of her father and mother as they fought over her, screamed.

  Tearing his daughter out of his wife’s arms, he shoved his wife away, who then lost her balance and fell backwards. The back of her head landed on the snare that years ago had held the fox captive.

  The snare had jagged teeth of steel to prevent even the wildest of animals from escaping it once caught. These teeth dug into the wife’s head and neck. The blood that flowed from her pooled on the floor of the warehouse. The man’s son quickly crawled over and began hungrily guzzling up his mother’s blood.

  After she witnessed her mother’s death with her own eyes, the man’s daughter never cried, smiled, or talked again. The man expanded his house, built a room deep inside the new compound, and locked his expressionless and mute daughter away. Servants were hired to make meals, clean, and take care of his daughter. They were told his wife had suddenly died from a terrible sickness, which his daughter had inherited and had rendered her mute.

  And just as he had before, in the evenings when all the servants had left for the day, he took his son to his daughter’s room. The daughter no longer screamed or even stirred as her brother wounded her and drank her blood. All she did was stare at him with her expressionless, pale face.

  The man kept a close eye on his daughter and son. The more blood his son drank, the purer the gold and the greater the quantity he was able to produce. And as his son’s body grew bigger, he consumed more blood. But the man knew that he couldn’t leave his son alone with his daughter, for he might accidentally drink her blood until she died. The man needed the son, and the son needed his sister to stay alive. This was why the man kept his son from going into his daughter’s room alone and whenever they went into his daughter’s room together, he meticulously monitored her condition and the amount of blood the son drank.

  The man’s business did extremely well, and his daughter, with her pale face, continued to be quietly locked away in a dark room.

  The children grew. The man’s daughter had clear skin and large, dark eyes on her pale face, sparkling if expressionless, her black hair tumbling like a waterfall down her back. She had grown into a beautiful girl, but it was an impassive, cold, and somewhat sickly beauty. His daughter existed in a completely different way than ordinary girls her age, and thus, like a dark forest beneath the moonlight, her lack of emotion and secretive mystery exuded a certain seductive charm.

  Avoiding his father’s watchful gaze, the son began to enter his sister’s room on his own.

  This time, it wasn’t to drink his sister’s blood.

  By then, the man was crossing oceans and trekking mountains to buy and sell his wares, so great a trader he had become. He no longer had to wound his son’s body or bear the sight of him sucking his daughter’s blood. At first his reasons for going to faraway lands was to take care of his business, but when the money beget by the gold allowed him to take in the exotic scenery, indulge in exotic foods and drinks, and partake in the even more exotic women, he spent less and less time at home as his business prospered. And there were more nights than not when in the man’s large and dark house, his son and daughter were left all alone.

  When the man came back one day, his daughter was pregnant.

  The sight of his daughter heavy with child felt like a blow to the head, which soon turned into an all-consuming anger. The screaming and flailing of her father elicited no response from his daughter, who only gazed at him without expression. His daughter’s apathy enraged the man even more. Just as he raised his hand to strike her, his son, standing next to him, grabbed the man’s wrist.

  Seeing his pale and passive daughter together with his son, who now stood between them, sparked a suspicion in his mind that he immediately refuse
d to acknowledge consciously. Instead, he stormed out of his daughter’s room.

  Sitting in his study, the man calmed himself and tried to think as dispassionately as possible. It was too late to abort the child. If there was one false move and something happened to his daughter, it would be catastrophic. In this way, he was still thinking of his daughter as no more than food for his son, who in turn was just gold for his purse.

  If there was one source of comfort in all of this, it was the fact that his daughter had never been outside the house. She lived a life deep inside a large compound in a small, dark room where no one knew about her. She spoke to no one, and it wasn’t clear if she understood language or the world at all as she survived from day to day.

  Even if she had the child, it was impossible to imagine her as a proper mother. The best thing to do would be to send the child away to someplace distant where they would never hear from it again, to people who would take better care of it than his daughter would. That would be the best thing for the child, the man decided on his own.

  But the son … What to do with the son?

  He had to separate him from his daughter.

  The man needed his son. Business was going well now, but who knew what the future would bring? There might come a day when he needed money, and as anyone in business knows, there would never be such a thing as too much money …

  And in order to have enough cash on hand for a new hoard, he would need his son and daughter …

  The man pondered this for a long time.

  Then, using his money and all of his connections, he began searching for a good doctor.

  As long as he had enough money, it was easy enough to find a clever, discreet doctor. The amount the doctor was asking for was probably an exorbitant sum to the doctor, but for the man, it was nothing more than a couple of sessions of draining his son’s body. And this whole incident being his son’s fault, he was prepared to make his son take responsibility for it by squeezing out even more gold than what the doctor was asking for.

  The daughter was not surprised to see the unfamiliar doctor. For the most part, her pale face betrayed nary a trace of emotion. But as soon as the doctor opened his bag and took out his medicine bottles and surgical knives, his daughter began to scream.

  It was a sound almost loud enough to bring the roof of the house down. In the room, everyone—the man, the doctor, and the servant girl brought in to help—blocked their ears and fell to the floor. The medicine bottles cracked and smashed to bits. And when the man came to, his son was standing at the door of the room.

  The son, seeing that there were strangers in his sister’s room, tried to run in. The man jumped in his way. Turning his head, the man shouted for the doctor to quickly begin the surgery. As all the medicine bottles had shattered, the doctor did not bother with anesthesia and instead picked up his surgical knife. The man’s daughter tried to get away, but she was too heavy with child to move properly. As the daughter struggled, the servant girl quickly helped to pin her down. The doctor held his knife over the daughter’s stomach.

  The daughter shouted in a piercing voice, “Let me go!”

  Having just barely pushed his son out of the room and locked the door, the man now turned to her. His daughter looked him in the eye and shrieked once more, “Let me go!”

  The man saw the glint of the fox’s golden eyes in his daughter’s pale face.

  The doctor’s knife sliced into her belly. Her scream once again shook the house to its foundations.

  By the time the son had broken through the door of his twin sister’s room, the doctor was already trying to take out the baby from her belly and the womb it was in. Covered in blood and roughly digging away at the man’s daughter with his knife, the doctor was past the point of seeming human.

  The son lunged at the doctor and began ripping at his throat.

  As the man approached to stop him, his son cried out like an animal and this time, lunged at the man.

  The servant girl holding down the daughter screamed, and fled.

  The man fell on the floor, hitting his head. His son mounted his chest and strangled him.

  By the time the man opened his eyes again, the blood that overflowed from the bed had drenched the floor he was lying on. What met his eyes was the white, icy gaze of his daughter, whose body had gone cold, her shredded belly open to the air.

  After his daughter’s funeral, the man quit his business and holed himself up in his house.

  His son and the baby were nowhere to be found. The son did not even appear at his twin sister’s funeral.

  The man’s servants took care of him at first. That the man’s daughter had died after a long sickness and his son had left home in shock after her death was all they knew about what had transpired. Which was why, when a mad former servant girl occasionally broke into the house, screaming strange things as she tried to get into the daughter’s room, they would try to wrest her from the door.

  But not too long after, there were stories about how the servants had seen “something” in the house. At first, there were rumored glimpses of this “something” around the dead daughter’s room. Then it was seen in the corridors, the master bedroom, the servants’ quarters, the kitchen, and near the stables.

  That “something” was beautiful. A soft, golden glow that undulated slowly, leaving behind a faintly glittering fog in its wake. This golden fog was cool and pale, making one want to approach it when gazing at it, or place one’s hand inside it when next to it.

  Anyone who was seduced into going near the beautiful golden fog became insane.

  The moment one bent over and touched the golden traces on the path, the golden light paused and turned around. It had eyes and a mouth and was bleeding from its split belly, and it extended its long, white, almost clear arms toward spectators and rummaged inside them with its long fingers that were as white as the moonlight and cold as the snow on a winter mountain, muttering:

  My baby … Where is it …

  When fear and iciness suppressed any response from the victim, the ghost of the daughter would scream in a voice that shook the entire house.

  My baby … ! Where is it … !

  Even after the ghost of the daughter disappeared, those seduced by the gold glimmer would stare off into space and keep shouting about a golden ghost, or wring their hands and scrape their face raw while screaming about needing to wash the blood from themselves, or see the sunlight outside and yell, “Gold, it’s gold!” before jumping out the window, or inexplicably go into the forest in the middle of the night and be found dead the next morning with their necks caught in snares that were meant for foxes.

  The servants fell away one by one; they either went insane, were forced to leave, or chose to run away.

  In that large house, the man was left all alone.

  Every night, the man was visited in his bed by the golden, translucent ghost of his daughter, bleeding from her eyes and lips and torn-open belly, asking him the same question over and over again.

  My baby … Where is it …

  The man didn’t know where the baby was and therefore couldn’t answer her. His daughter’s ghost would ask again.

  My baby … Where is it …

  Until daybreak, the pale, golden specter of his daughter, with her bloodied face, would stand by the man’s bed, and just as she did on the day she died, she would drip cold blood from her sliced belly, drenching him in his bed as she asked and asked again the same question.

  My baby … Where is it …

  A few months after the last servant had fled, the villagers, half in curiosity and half out of a sense of duty about having to do something about this unfortunate house, ventured into the compound, where they found the man lying on his bed, reduced to skin and bones, yet somehow still alive.

  “Please let me go …”

  These were his last words. And this story is what has been passed down.

  There is an epilogue. Some years later, in a place very far from there—for
example if the man’s house was in the north-western region it would be a village in the south east—a strange something appeared on a mountain trail on a snowy, late winter’s evening.

  The days are short in the winter and the mountains go dark quickly. But this something was glowing faintly. On the snow-covered mountainside, it sat hunched over and busily moved as if preoccupied with some task.

  The person who witnessed it had lived his whole life in a village nearby, and in all his years of going to the mountains, he had never seen such a thing. Curious, he approached the pale thing from behind and looked down at what it was doing. Not long after, he screamed and ran down the path he had come on.

  According to the villager’s story, the thing was a young boy. About five or six years old, crouched over and devouring something in the dark mountain trail. For whatever reason, the boy’s body emitted a faint golden glow, which was how the villager was able to see what the boy had been eating when he went up to him.

  It was the body of a young man. The boy had ripped open the man’s stomach, dipped his hands into him, and taken out a golden lump, which he was ravenously eating. The young man’s body looked as if it had been dead for a while because it was white as a sheet, and all around glinted spots and splatters of gold.

  Because that golden lump, the scattered droplets of gold, and the faintly glowing child were all beautiful in an other-worldly way, the villager initially had no idea what he was looking at, so arrested was he by this first impression. Even after he had approached and saw the young man with his belly split open, the villager had not been sure whether that gold-covered corpse had truly been the body of a man.

  The crouching boy had looked up at the villager who approached him. The boy’s eyes held no emotion. Without a word or change in expression, he took out another cold-hardened lump of gold from his father’s belly and put it in his mouth. When the boy opened his mouth, the villager spotted sharp fangs like that of a fox or wolf.