WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Natty

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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈

Episode 30: Haunted Head Gallery (1)

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Tap. Tap. Tap.

The tip of a ballpoint pen tapped against the café table.

Coffee? A drink? I had downed a one-liter coffee in a single gulp. There was not even any ice left to chew, so this was the sound I was making instead.

I had no excuse even if I had ten mouths, so I had spent five minutes with my head bowed. The back of my neck was starting to ache.

“Haaah...”

When you work in an office, you have to develop the ability to read the meaning behind the sighs you hear in front of you. This one meant she had put out a hundred fires inside herself and was now willing to talk.

When I raised my head, I met Mok Inha’s gaze head-on. She looked as though she wanted to kill me.

“Hey.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go buy another round of coffee. Enough for those two as well.”

“...Yes.”

I had done far too much to act shameless, and I was in no position to make a difficult request.

I went to the counter and ordered the same things as before.

“Four one-liter coffees and five salt breads, please.”

When I returned, I saw just how ridiculous the scene must have looked to an outsider.

Choi Seongun, who had missed his chance to raise his head, was surrounded by Mok Inha sitting like a department head and Ryu Hyeon-u standing neatly beside her, holding several folders and waiting.

It was exactly the sort of scene you would see during an inquiry before writing an incident report.

“Let’s go over this again.”

The moment I set down the coffee, Mok Inha leaned forward.

“Cognition erasure did not work, and instead of coming back, you used your memories? You went into a ghost story on your own, smuggled out an item, and now what? You brought out an unidentified person fused with a paranormal entity, and you want us to employ him here? Is that everything I just heard?”

“Yes. More or less.”

I decided to brazen it out. Mok Inha grabbed the back of her neck again. Still, this was the best measure I could take. Entrusting Choi Seongun to the Ghost Story Records Corporation.

Even after returning to reality, Choi Seongun still had a shadow leg and smoke-like special effects. Like a game NPC that had suddenly been thrown into reality, his existence could not be proven.

Every address he remembered, his resident registration number, email account, phone, everything he used to identify himself, was gone.

I could not just abandon someone, so after much thought, I contacted the Corporation. It was the perfect place where paranormal entities and civil servants overlapped.

I picked someone up in a ghost story. Want to take him?

“...”

Another suffocating silence followed.

“Um, but... you are not asking for the thing I took to be returned?”

Mok Inha crunched down on some ice.

“That belongs to you.”

“?”

“It was originally an item we could not collect because its owner never appeared.”

Ryu Hyeon-u explained in Mok Inha’s place.

“That area was once a dokkaebi site. Seven years ago, a civilian not only discovered dokkaebi fire, but made a deal with a dokkaebi and was promised an item. However, neither that person nor anyone else ever received the promised item.”

“And then the owner turns up? We wanted to find you because we thought it might be you, but where did you carry it off to this time?”

Apparently, Haetae had concluded that I had been swept into a Distortion and set out to rescue the stranded person. Before they could even finish packing for deployment, the stranded person had called to ask, “Is that offer to get someone a job still valid?”

Mok Inha pressed hard against her brow.

“As you know, we cannot just casually take people in like...”

“I heard Haetae brought in something interesting?”

With the sound of a security lock disengaging, the glass door flew open noisily.

“Section Chief Seon-u.”

Mok Inha immediately frowned at the uninvited guest.

He was a strangely thin man with shoulder-length hair carelessly tied up. Behind his glasses was a gaze that seemed to study people in an unsettling way. He gave the impression that he wore glasses on purpose.

A playful smile sat on his lips, as though to offset an appearance that could otherwise seem sinister.

“Isn’t it about time you stopped barging into other people’s meeting rooms?”

“Oh, come on. You went around making such a big fuss about bringing in a rookie. That’s the irregular, right?”

Section Chief Seon-u strode straight into the meeting room and looked Choi Seongun and me over as if he were scanning us. It felt like he was openly judging us.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Seon-u In. I’m with Cheonrok 4. Shall we get along?”

As Seon-u In casually tried to put an arm around my shoulder, Ryu Hyeon-u swiftly grabbed him by the nape and pulled him away from me.

“Cheonrok?”

“What? You said you were recruiting them, but you did not even explain the Corporation’s structure? Really, Section Chief Mok Inha is as unfeeling as ever. Is it enough as long as nobody dies? You have no tact. None.”

“Hyeon-u, make that thing leave. Quickly.”

“Come on, let me go. Hm? Who is that over there?”

Seon-u In’s attention immediately shifted to Choi Seongun, who had shrunk into himself at the far end of the room. More precisely, to his leg.

“What? That leg is not human. It smells strange, too. Are you even from this world? Where did you bring him from?”

Seon-u In suddenly strode across the table and shoved his face close to Choi Seongun’s.

“Not a spiritual being, not a ghost, but it does not smell entirely inhuman either... Want to come to Cheonrok? Has anyone examined you?”

“No, I have not been examined...”

“Stop. He is a stranded person we rescued from a Distortion. Keep your hands off him.”

“No, we have never had a stranded person like this. You are not just a stranded person, are you?”

Everyone here gave off the impression that, if Ryu Hyeon-u had not stopped them, Choi Seongun might have been dissected on the spot.

“Why not come visit our lab? You are the sort of sample I might see once in a lifetime. I will not hurt you! You believe me, right?”

My opinion of the Corporation’s employees sank another level into the gutter.

Maybe it was a bad habit of the civil service hierarchy, but Ryu Hyeon-u was no help. Mok Inha was the one who finally sorted out the situation.

“Get out. He is ours.”

No one said I was going anywhere. Seon-u In sneered at that.

“Was it not supposed to be the recruit’s decision after we explain the divisions? Obviously, Section Chief Stone Face did not explain anything.”

“...”

“See? I, Section Chief Seon-u, will explain it to you. Let me go, Hyeon-u.”

He looked as though he could not snap a single chopstick, but after he tapped Ryu Hyeon-u a few times, Ryu Hyeon-u obediently let him go.

Seon-u In, who had seemed like a mad scientist only moments ago, began giving me a basic rundown.

“Our Corporation is broadly divided into four divisions. The three you have seen are Haetae, Ansi, and our Cheonrok.”

Seon-u In poked Mok Inha in the side. Her expression had not improved, but she sighed and began to explain.

“As I told you before, Haetae handles search, rescue, and Closure. When a Distortion occurs and stranded people appear, Haetae enters the site and resolves the situation.”

“We also handle various measures before and after incidents, such as trying to prevent regularly occurring Distortions in advance, or dealing with their resulting aftermath.”

“And we are Cheonrok.”

Seon-u In took over.

“We are basically an R&D team. When a Distortion occurs, we investigate where it originated, the origin of the ghost story, and the absolute properties held by that ghost story. We do not often enter the field directly.”

“Ansi handles monitoring. Ansi is the division that administered cognition erasure to you, Mr. Jaehyeon. After a Distortion is resolved and Cheonrok has finished its recording work, Ansi also handles organizing civilian awareness and fitting causality back together.”

“What about the last one?”

“That is not a particularly important division.”

Seon-u In abruptly cut off the explanation, despite having been so helpful until then. Then he returned to his friendly smile.

“So, why are you here, Section Chief Seon-u?”

“Oh, right. Looking at the rookie was just an excuse. I came because there is something we need to coordinate with Haetae about.”

“Why not go to another Haetae division?”

“Everyone except Section Chief Mok’s people is deployed at Distortions right now. But another one has appeared, so her team has to deploy too. I came to tell you that.”

It was clearly serious. Seon-u In, who had been playful and inscrutable the whole time, suddenly spoke in a serious voice. The annoyance vanished entirely from Mok Inha’s expression as well.

“What happened?”

“It is the H-PhG composite-type Anomaly No. 378.”

That was a classification I had heard before. H definitely meant a horror ghost story.

Seon-u In pulled a pad from inside his jacket. Mok Inha took it and looked at Seon-u In instead of the pad.

“What do you think?”

Who answered a question with no context like that?

“I think it will be fine.”

And Seon-u In answered anyway. What was this about?

“You two are coming with us.”

Mok Inha suddenly held the pad out to us.

I took it without thinking, and my gaze was drawn to the pad. More precisely, to the poster-like text and image displayed on it.

[Eve’s Langwidere] (Langwidere of Eve)

In the primordial garden where the boundary between good and evil collapses, cast off the old “me” and possess the most perfect “beauty.”

It had none of the blood-soaked imagery, warped fonts, or Dreamcore-like creepiness one would normally expect from a ghost story. If anything, it was a beautifully designed poster that might advertise an exhibition at the Seoul Arts Center.

An apple, one side rotten and sloughing away, floated against the backdrop of a corridor paved with black-and-white marble like a chessboard. Gold flowed from the rotten apple.

At the center of the poster stood a woman with her back turned. Her black dress flowed into the black part of the corridor. As though she were putting on a crown, the woman held her own head up with both hands.

“...Langwidere of Eve.”

Langwidere. Was that not the vain princess from the Oz series who changed among thirty different heads depending on her mood?

The instant I said the name aloud, the poster trembled.

My vision shook, and the head in the woman’s hands slowly began to turn. The woman turned around. Her head looked at me.

Eyes, empty where eyes should have been, looked at me.

The woman’s mouth opened black, and from within it, several eyes...

“Damn it, cover him up already! What is wrong with this guy?”

Mok Inha’s urgent voice echoed from far away. The woman’s head was now looking directly at me. From her open mouth, a voice became letters and bodies, pouring out.

Something was pulled over my head, completely blocking my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut amid a spinning sensation, then opened them.

Crunch.

The feeling of the space beneath my feet had changed.

The ordinary café floor had become a gravel path.

Before me stretched a corridor paved in black and white like a chessboard. Countless white candles hung from chandeliers on the ceiling of the immense, lengthy gallery.

Rows of displays lined both sides of the corridor, barely making their presence known through faint reflections on glass.

“...”

My vision was narrow. Come to think of it, someone had said to put something on me earlier.

Rather than taking it off, I slowly felt the thing covering my face.

Its surface was smooth but uneven. It covered more than half my face. A snout-like part extended long past the bridge of my nose, while the eye sockets were overgrown with a leather-like texture.

T-this is a horn... No, a thorn?

Beyond my hairline, I felt dry, prickly spines. Ah, I knew this. What was it called?

...A hedgehog?

So I was wearing a hedgehog as a mask. My head spun.

Jingle. Jingle-jingle.

Somewhere, I heard something like the sound of bells.

This was not the time.

I had entered somewhere unknown, so scouting it out came first. Leaving the gravel path that crunched beneath every step, I carefully stepped toward one side of the gallery.

With the sound of the scenery shifting, one side of the corridor brightened, revealing the name of an exhibition room.

《Where Whispering Sobs Become Radiant Corruption》

Oh, please.

I had not recognized it because the poster had a different name. I had to squeeze my eyes shut for a moment.

It was a ghost story I knew.

One I would never have entered willingly.

Footnotes:

Langwidere is the vain princess from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, known for changing between different heads.

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