# PROLOGUE
The black sea looked like a night sky with white foam. In the completely dark world, only the sound of waves revealed that this was the sea. As Hwiseo’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he took a step forward.
The shoreline, with more pebbles than sand, was rarely visited by outsiders. The sharp rocks posed a significant risk of injury. Having played here since childhood, Hwiseo crossed the pointed rocks like stepping stones, unconcerned about the slippery sea moss.
At the furthest point, a rock about 1 meter tall appeared. Hwiseo carefully stood on it. Waves crashed directly below the rock, spraying seawater everywhere. He wiped the salty water from his face with his forearm and pulled out the jar he had been carrying. Hurriedly, to avoid being seen, he took out the cloth from the jar and scattered it toward the sea. The bone powder was swallowed at once by the wide-open mouth of the waves.
When his father brought young Hwiseo here, he said his mother was beneath this rock. So in his innocent childhood, he thought that once he learned to swim well, he could go meet his mother.
“Meet mom there. Don’t stay alone like a fool.”
His thoughts kept breaking due to the sudden events. He heard his father had died, and the next moment he was at the funeral home. When he came to his senses again, he was standing in front of the crematorium, watching his father’s coffin burn, mumbling things like “It’s hot, come out. Dad, come out.”
He stared at the pitch-black sea as if searching for the scattered bone powder. Time passed, and he noticed that he was shivering so hard his teeth were chattering. Only then did he look down and see that his body was wet from the waves. He carefully picked up the jar and stepped down from the rock onto the pebble beach.
That’s when it happened.
He heard a sound different from the waves. Slowly looking around the deserted beach well past midnight, the hair on his head stood up.
There was a white object on a low rock a short distance away. Startled, he collapsed to the ground. A thousand thoughts raced through his mind. His body trembled uncontrollably. Pull yourself together, Lee Hwiseo. He slapped his cheeks. Dirt and sand transferred from his palms to his face, then fell to the ground.
Looking closely at the white object, it appeared to be shaped like a person laid out like laundry. Taking a deep breath, Hwiseo carefully put down the jar and began to crawl on all fours.
Someone, presumed to be a person, was making sounds like “gurk, kuk” while vomiting seawater. Hwiseo gently pushed aside the pebbles under his knees and approached very close. The person, lying face down on the rock with their head toward the ground, was stirring.
“Hey. Hey, are you okay?”
Instead of an answer, there was another gurgling sound as the man vomited more water. After hesitating, Hwiseo went behind the man and lifted his upper body. He seemed unconscious.
Hwiseo’s shoes and pants were soaked with seawater, making a squelching sound with each step. The man wasn’t particularly large, but Hwiseo, who hadn’t eaten or slept well for days, found him heavy. With a thud, his hands gave way, and he dropped the man to the ground. Placing a finger under the man’s nose, he felt a faint breath. He was relieved for a moment, but then hesitated. In the darkness with only faint moonlight, the man’s face wasn’t clearly visible. But something was wrong. An eerie feeling created goosebumps all over his body. The cold sound of waves cut between Hwiseo and the man, then disappeared.
Hwiseo took out his phone. His hands were shaking badly. Soon the screen lit up, illuminating the man’s face. Hwiseo’s eyes trembled like aspen leaves. He automatically stepped backward.
After a silent moment, when the phone screen turned off, the man disappeared into darkness again. Hwiseo’s heart was racing uncontrollably.
‘What did I just see?’
He placed his hand over his heart and took deep breaths. Again, he raised his phone over the man’s face. I’m going to look properly, straight on. He took a deep breath and exhaled. Then he turned on the flash.
“Kuk! Cough, hiccup, cough.”
He choked on his hastily inhaled breath, hiccupped, coughed, and made a fuss. The light from the phone in his hand illuminated the man’s face, then his chest, shaking erratically. Throughout all this, the man just lay quietly. Hwiseo tried to calm himself and looked at the man’s face.
‘I wasn’t seeing things after all.’
There lay a man with a face identical to Hwiseo’s.
# 1.
The sky was gloomy. Wondering if clear autumn skies were a thing of the past, Hwiseo rode his bicycle onto the main street lined with shops on both sides. Tourists in casual clothes filled the street.
The small fishing village, which used to be busy only on market days, had become famous a few years ago as the filming location for a drama set in a seaside village. Even a corporate franchise coffee shop had opened, and people were lining up in front of the bakery that the main character had liked.
Recently, it had become even more famous nationwide because of “that incident.” Perhaps it had even become world-famous.
The door of the store with a yellowed white sign reading “Bongdeok Laundry” was wide open, and angry voices were flowing out from inside. Even passersby stopped and peeked in. Hwiseo quickly ran inside.
“I definitely dropped off a top too. If you can’t produce my clothes, give me money! This damn laundry, clothes just disappear whenever I leave them here!”
The man, who had moved to this neighborhood about a year ago, reeked of alcohol in broad daylight. It was a village mostly inhabited by natives, except for outsiders who had settled by doing business with tourists. Perhaps because of this, rumors about the man spread quickly. People whispered that he was an ex-convict.
“Don’t falsely accuse innocent people. Get out, get out! Oh, oh, is that my son? I’ve prepared food, so go in and eat.”
Seeing his son’s hardened face, Hwiseo’s father made an expression of realization. The man, feeling outnumbered, threw the pants he was holding toward Hwiseo’s father while cursing. Quickly blocking the path, Hwiseo caught the man’s pants and threw them outside the store. At this, the man’s eyes flashed with anger as his face contorted. Hwiseo stood straight, not backing down from the intensity.
“Excuse me, customer.”
Sighing inwardly, Hwiseo pointed to the paper on the laundry wall that read ‘CCTV Recording in Progress’ and said, “Here, can you see this?”
Hwiseo went to the monitor inside the store and played the video. He silently praised himself for saving the footage after hearing the man claim he had dropped off clothes. Hwiseo’s hand moved quickly as he clicked the mouse. In the video, the man looked at the camera, apparently informed about the CCTV by Hwiseo’s father. In the monitor, his father received only one pair of pants, and the man then left the store.
“We installed cameras because we keep having these incidents with customers like you. It’s not just for decoration.”
Hwiseo looked at the man’s ankle with narrowed eyes. Feeling the gaze, the man hesitantly pulled his left foot back.
“If you keep looking for a jacket you never dropped off, I’ll call the police.”
The troublesome man always wore long pants that dragged on the ground, and Hwiseo had once accidentally seen an electronic device on his ankle. The man spat phlegm on the floor, picked up his pants that had been thrown outside, and left. Hwiseo’s father quickly brought salt and sprinkled it at the entrance. Then, looking cautiously at Hwiseo, he said:
“This is why I said we shouldn’t take his clothes, once someone acts like this, they’ll do it again.”
“He was complaining that because of our laundry, he became an outcast in this neighborhood.”
“He doesn’t think about what he did, just blames us.”
Dirty bastard, how many times has he spat? Hwiseo brought a mop and scrubbed away the man’s spit.
Two months ago, the man had come to the store for four days in a row, creating a disturbance while demanding payment for a suit he had never dropped off. In over 20 years of running the laundry, they occasionally had customers looking for hanbok or shirts they hadn’t actually left. Usually, the matter was resolved through conversation or settled by paying a used-item price, thinking it better to keep the peace. But that man had made a fuss, demanding 500,000 won. When the police came, he would leave, only to return a few hours later.
Even the old woman from the neighborhood soup restaurant, who could be called a local fixture, tried to stop the man, but he followed her back to her restaurant and caused havoc by spilling her soup pot. The old woman cursed and hit him with dried radish greens, but how much could plants hurt? In the end, she closed her business for the day, and the locals who had visited her restaurant heard about the soup pot incident and came to dislike the man even more.
Feeling sorry that the neighbors were also being harmed, Hwiseo’s father eventually paid the man 500,000 won. Hwiseo was so upset that after several days of deliberation, he installed CCTV in the store as a birthday gift for his father. He felt bad that he’d spent all the money he’d saved for a guitar, but seeing the troublemaker’s behavior today, it seemed worth it.
“Whose son is so capable?”
Don’t get angry, don’t be upset. His father smiled and patted Hwiseo’s bottom. Hwiseo shook his head and opened the door behind the counter. A fairly large kitchen for a shop attachment appeared. Across from it was a sliding door, and if you took off your shoes and entered, there was a small living area with a narrow living room, bedroom, and bathroom. Hwiseo roughly threw down his bag and ate the meal prepared on the short-legged table. He heard voices coming from the store.
“That bastard seems to have already run away.”
“Already gone? Did he leave?”
“Because our Hwiseo came.”
From the voices of the soup restaurant grandmother and a few others, it seemed they had formed a support team of sorts. Hwiseo half-listened to his father bragging about his son and turned on the television. He searched for news about the meteorite that had fallen into the East Sea. In the easily found special news program, the words “Gyeongbuk Chilam Meteorite” were written in the upper left corner of the screen.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
