WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 9: Mangnyang 2 Tunnel (4)
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From inside the pocket of the outer garment, where melted flesh had tangled together, I pulled out a small lump wrapped in paper.
“W-what is that?”
“Probably a stone. A stone the bus driver always had to carry when passing through the tunnel.”
Once you accepted that a ghost story was real, the way to survive it, whether a shamanic rite or a rule, had to exist as something concrete.
If this was a ghost-story world where something happened whenever you passed through Mangnyang Tunnel, then it followed that the people in that ghost story needed an item to cross the tunnel safely.
“Oh, no.”
I lifted the paper slightly and found a stone split in two. I had found one of the triggers for the ghost story. The destruction of a prayer stone used to ask for permission to pass. This was probably why the bus driver had broken down and melted first.
The drivers employed by the bus company in this ghost-story world must have carried this stone every time they passed through a tunnel that could turn into Mangnyang Tunnel.
They could not hand a stone to every passenger. So the solution must have been to treat the bus, the driver, and the passengers as one whole. As long as the driver carried the stone, everyone was safe.
That also explained the difference from ordinary cars, where people vanished while only the vehicle remained, or something went wrong after they looked in a mirror. A stone or two caught in a tire was not unusual. That was why military vehicles would be less likely to trigger the ghost story.
“What does a broken stone have to do with anything?”
“More precisely, the problem probably started because it broke. We need to make or find something that can replace it…”
The fake doll made to resemble a person had worked in Bloodwater Valley. If I could figure out this stone’s original form and make something similar, it would buy us time to escape. I ran my fingertips over the bloodstained paper. The texture felt like traditional paper…
“Isn’t that a talisman? It’s kind of yellow.”
“This part looks more like writing than blood.”
I carefully unfolded the paper as much as I could without tearing it, then shone my phone’s light on it.
Heaven ■ injustice, offering ■■ pass
“The writing has bled too much to make it out exactly.”
“Let’s assume the blurred writing caused the stone to break, and the broken stone caused all this. Then let’s find a way to remake this talisman.”
The five people left began discussing the talisman among themselves. Now that they had a goal, fear seemed to have been pushed aside. They searched the bus more actively, too.
Beep. Beep.
“…?”
The radio app brought up the Morse code frequency again. This time, the linear frequency display was drawing the Morse code as an image.
-- .. .-. .-. --- .-.
‘Mirror?’
A mirror? Why a mirror?
-- --- .-. . - .... .- -. . -.-- .
‘There’s more than meets the eye…’
Normally, it meant not believing everything you saw. But in a ghost story, the cliché would be…
‘A mirror reflects ghosts?’
Like how the eighth reflection in an elevator mirror was a ghost if it moved, or if you met that ghost’s eyes, it would run toward you from a parallel world. Or how looking into a mirror with a knife in your mouth showed you your future spouse.
I typed hashtags into my blog, skimmed titles, and searched for cases I could fit into my theory. If there was even one thing I could lean on, I had to try.
Box, curse, offering, temple, apartment, academy.
I scrolled rapidly through the posts. There had to be something. I only needed to make the logic fit. Stories could be interpreted however you wanted. Proof was possible. All I needed was material to support it.
“The Curse of the Broken Mirror
I walk while holding a mirror. I walk without looking into it. I shine a light on the mirror. It must be a light that lets me recognize myself. Now I look into the mirror. I walk along the road inside it. I must not look at myself in the mirror. The me in the mirror has been cut to ribbons, red all over. I am fine. The me in the mirror smiles. I drop the mirror. In that moment, I realize it. My face reflects the shape of the shattered mirror. I begin to break…”
‘Found it.’
A ghost story where the image reflected in a mirror was damaged in reality according to the shape of the broken mirror.
Then the opposite might work too.
Restore the talisman’s original writing.
Believe the image in the mirror instead of what was visible.
A single breakable stone could not be the only safeguard for a tunnel dangerous enough to require carrying it around.
Even folktales give you three things you are not supposed to do, then reveal the next safeguard every time you break one. If there was a backup besides the stone, it had to be a mirror.
And the mirror in a vehicle that never changed and could be trusted was…
“A car mirror!”
“W-what?!”
I must have shouted too loudly. All five people looked at me at once.
“The mirror. It’s the mirror.”
Instead of explaining, I headed for the driver’s seat again.
Large buses usually had side mirrors, auxiliary wide-angle mirrors, and rearview mirrors. They were ideal for a mirror you had to keep looking at, and no one would find them suspicious.
Sure enough.
Among the mirrors labeled Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, one stood out.
When entering on a blue light, adjust this mirror so that its reflective surface faces the ceiling.
The mirror with the warning written firmly in red was cracked. I carefully searched around the driver’s seat again and soon found several more things I wanted.
“Enter only on a red light.”
“Before departure, inspect the items in the auxiliary box at every rest stop. If there is a problem, report it and wait for the following bus.”
“If you enter on a blue light, turn the rear lights up as brightly as possible and turn off the front lights.”
“In an emergency, check the rear and have a person suitable under the Four Rules perform it again.”
It was a manual for bus drivers. The rules to follow were written in large letters on an A4 sheet. Thankfully, it was not some bizarre manual from a trendy rules-based ghost story. It was the real thing! Attached to the back were spare gwaehwang paper and vermilion ink paste, clearly packed for situations like this.
I took them and turned back to the others.
“When this mirror broke, it caused a chain reaction that affected the bus driver too. If we put an unbroken mirror here, we can find out what to do with the stone.”
“I have a mirror.”
One woman raised her hand. It was a travel hand mirror, but it was roughly the same size as the broken one. I carefully removed the cracked mirror and mounted the hand mirror in its place.
When I tilted it so the reflective surface faced the ceiling, the bus reflected in it changed in an instant. I held the bloodstained talisman against it.
Heaven knows the grievance. Let the bearer of the Offering Stone pass. (天知不公祭供養石者通)
The talisman’s original writing appeared.
Now we had to copy this onto the gwaehwang paper. What kind of person was suitable under the Four Rules? What did people care about most when doing shamanic things in this country?
Names. Four Pillars. Birth dates and times. Gender.
Information sprang up in my head and filed itself away again and again. Naming children according to their birth time, sorting out whether their Four Pillars had some kind of malign influence… I had never studied fortune telling, but I remembered filing material on name theory for research.
‘But I’ve never studied Four Pillars enough to distinguish a malign influence. There isn’t time, either.’
Besides, hiring people based on their Four Pillars would get a company sued. Then names? But I had no idea what kind of structure they had used to select people by name.
“Oh, the operating log.”
A bus would naturally have management records. I pulled a file folder from the box beside the driver’s seat. It was an analog but magnificent system for dividing responsibility, with inspections and signatures for operation reports. The papers were soaked in blood, but several readable names remained.
Park Inseok. Kim Euncheol. Seo Jingyeong. Choi Taeseok. Kim Jeongseok. Lee Seokgi…
I had to find something these names had in common. Otherwise, it was back to square one. Remember. There are several people on this bus. Reconstruct what was needed to get all of them through.
“There are a lot of Kims.”
“And a lot of names with Seok.”
Found it.
The common point.
Sure enough, with enough boatmen, a boat could drive even on a mountain. I could barely contain my excitement.
“Does anyone have the character for stone in their name? I don’t.”
They looked at me as if they had no idea what I meant. I continued.
“It doesn’t have to be Seok. Having it as a radical should be fine, too. To copy the sentence we found in the mirror onto a new talisman, I think the person writing it needs a character meaning stone or metal in their name to be judged suitable.”
“A stone in our name?”
“In Four Pillars, metal means iron, and iron has the same qualities as stone: hardness and solidity. Name theory uses the Chinese characters in a name to maximize a person’s inherent traits. It would let them deal with the tunnel even if something happened to the stone.”
Everyone pulled out their IDs and started checking them. There had to be at least one person. There had to be.
“I, I have the stone radical.”
A man raised his hand. His national ID clearly showed the three characters of his name, Ju Jaegyeong (駐材硬). I had never been so glad to see that slender stone radical running down the side of a character.
“Mr. Ju Jaegyeong, please write the talisman.”
“I’m, I’m not very good at writing…”
“Please. I know it sounds absurd, but given everything that’s happened… I think you’re the only person who fits.”
Ju Jaegyeong had suddenly gone from Passenger No. 1 to the chosen one. He sweated profusely, but accepted the talisman with a determined expression. Using a flat suitcase as a writing surface, he carefully copied the words one character at a time.
It took longer than expected to copy the writing onto the two talismans. The tension of knowing that a single mistake could cost us our lives must have been overwhelming. By the time Ju Jaegyeong wrote the last character, everyone was holding their breath.
“I-I’m done!”
“!!”
“It worked…”
The talismans were complete. While everyone rejoiced, I carefully placed the split stone on top of them.
‘Please, let us get through safely.’
When I took my hand away with that desperate prayer, the rustling paper clung to the stone like flesh. The talismans crumpled and adhered on their own, and the split stone became a single piece without a trace of the break.
The Offering Stone that would let us leave was complete.
“I-It worked!”
“We just take this and leave now, right?”
“No. We aren’t getting off.”
“What?”
I shoved the stone back into the place where it belonged. The engine, which had only been quietly idling, began to rumble.
Then the headlights went out, and the rear lights flared brilliantly. They gave off far more light than an ordinary bus could produce. The bright rear lights illuminated the place where something black had been lurking.
“AAAAAGH!!”
“What is that?!”
Screams. Terror. Shock.
And a curse that nearly burst out of my mouth.
Darkness? Shadow? Something black?
Those were far too kind.
No, they were dull, uninteresting words that did not describe even one percent of that thing’s true form.
The moment the light struck it, it was no longer a shadow. It was a sticky mass of dozens, hundreds of people tangled together. Things that had once been human had melted and fused, their eyeballs and fingers writhing in a knot. Blood and fat slowly ran down it.
Limbs and body parts of different shapes stuck out in every direction like coat hangers protruding from a trash can. One leg had been cut off at the middle of the thigh, and another arm grew from the stump. Feet sprouted from shoulders and bellies, groping through the air.
Through gaps gaping like mouths, fingers crawled out, endlessly scratching at flesh, writhing like tongues as they felt their way outside. They kept shoving whatever their fingertips caught back inside their body.
Each time, human faces pushed out like shapes pressed into mud, then swelled like boiling meat and spat foam. A familiar face emerged.
Crunch. Crunch-crunch.
The sound of bones being chewed came again.
“T-that face… That was… the one from earlier…”
The twisted faces of university students, their eyes, noses, and mouths mixed together, boiled up within the mass and melted away, as if endlessly repeating an incomplete birth. Muffled screams leaked out not as air, but as sticky breaths. It was as though dozens of voices were crying, laughing, and whispering at once from inside it. They whispered, muttered, lamented, raged, craved, screamed…
IseeyouIseeyouIseeyou Iseeyou
IseeyouI’mwatchingyouIcanhearyouyoucan’thear
I’mcomingtherewhereareyouI’mcomingtogetyouopenthedoornowIseeyouIseeyouIseeyouIseeyou
“It’s moving!”
“It’s coming this way!!”
There was nowhere to go inside the bus, but the people in the back crowded toward the front. There was no time now. I grabbed Ju Jaegyeong by the nape, sat him in the passenger seat, and took the driver’s seat.
“W-what are you doing?!”
“From now on, we’re escaping by vehicle.”
“What?”
“In this bus.”
“D-do you have a license?”
“Does that matter right now? Everyone, sit down! Mr. Ju Jaegyeong, next to me!”
Before everyone could even get back into their seats, I started the bus and floored the accelerator.
Vroooom!!
The bus that had seemed like it would never move surged forward. In an instant, the tunnel filled with a deafening roar, and the monster began chasing after us with an ear-splitting howl.
“Hold on tight! We’re getting out of this tunnel!!”
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