The Three-Inch Tongue
That night, Cha-mu sat in the shrine room, offering up a prayer. To whom, even he himself could not say.
He knew the gods existed — he simply didn't believe in them. In a way, they were pettier creatures than humans. No one knew their cruelty better than he did.
"......"
I have to forget.
Cha-mu tried to erase the image of Yu-yeong's smile, which clung stickily to the inside of his mind.
He had always made a point of committing nothing he laid eyes on to memory. Human things above all, he refused to let take root in his heart.
That was how he kept himself from forming attachments to people.
"I've gone and thrown it away."
Cha-mu stood in a corner of the filming set and sighed. He'd sworn he wouldn't come back, and here he was, setting foot on the set of Yu-yeong's movie again. Pathetic. Hence the sigh.
"That goddamn dream."
A dream — a revelation, one might even call it.
The gods Cha-mu served occasionally appeared in his dreams and sketched the future for him. They'd done it again last night.
Grandma, Grandma......
What he'd seen in the dream was Yu-yeong.
He couldn't tell exactly where it was, but she was weeping, calling for her grandmother.
It was a cry with sorrow pressed down hard beneath it, the kind that tore at the heart of anyone who heard it. If it had been acting, he wouldn't have given it a second thought. But no matter how he looked at it, Yu-yeong's weeping was not a performance.
All Cha-mu could do was stare at her as she cried.
Damn it all — what business is it of yours to show me this crap?
On days when he was shown things he never asked to see, Cha-mu's mouth turned exceptionally foul. This time was no different. Yu-yeong had appeared in his dream, and he'd woken before dawn, gone through a ritual cleansing, and entered the shrine room.
Though he never received the gods directly, Cha-mu always kept himself close to them.
It was out of fear, you see — that if he treated the gods carelessly, misfortune might fall upon his grandfather and father, already departed, or splash onto the mother who might still be living somewhere out there.
Even as he prayed before the altar, the image of Yu-yeong weeping refused to leave his head. It nagged at him so persistently that he couldn't gather his mind enough to pray properly.
Hyung, it's Cha-mu. Yes, yes...... Do you happen to have an opening for set work today?
In the end, he made the call.
You're going? Seriously?
Seong-min, who had been listening in on the call, shot back with wide, startled eyes. He knew it had been barely two days since Cha-mu declared he would never set foot in that place again.
Cha-mu was the kind of man who kept every word that left his mouth. So when that same man announced he was heading back to a film set he'd vowed never to return to, Seong-min plainly couldn't believe his ears.
To the boy's relentless pestering, Cha-mu answered only with a bark of quiet down — and eventually found himself back at the filming set all the same.
"Haaah."
A deep sigh rose up from his gut.
It was a pointless errand.
Even if he'd seen Yu-yeong weeping in sorrow in a dream, it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.
Crying humans were a sight you could find any day of the week.
And yet Cha-mu had walked toward that place. His dongti had flared up badly, and he decided that was why the things he didn't want to see kept surfacing in his head.
"Hey, did you see Yu-yeong's in another scandal?"
"With Yu-won? Apparently the two of them even went to a hotel."
"Yeah, they caught Yu-won coming out of the hotel lobby two mornings ago wearing the cap a fan gave him as a gift."
"The gall on that woman — seriously, how shameless can you get? Wearing a gift some fan gave you to a hotel rendezvous......"
The set was abuzz with talk of Yu-yeong today.
Cha-mu pretended to tidy up props while he listened. A cap received as a fan gift. In that instant, he thought of the black cap resting on the altar in his shrine room. Whose it belonged to, who had thrown it away, and who had carried it to him — the moment all of it became certain.
A gift offered to someone you loved and admired, ending up against its owner's will in another woman's hands — and then discarded. If hatred didn't bloom in the heart of the one who'd delivered it, that would be the strange thing.
Only now did he begin to grasp what that bleak, shadowy energy actually was.
"Wow, stirring up a scandal like that and still showing her face on set. Thick as a castle wall."
"When has she ever missed a shoot over a scandal? Shameless to the bone."
No kind words were to be heard anywhere. Everyone stole glances at Yu-yeong, shooting looks her way as if to say, own up to what you've done.
The entire set had eyes only for her.
Standing there under all of it, Yu-yeong wore an expression that could neither weep nor smile, feigning a review of her script to endure the weight of their stares.
Cha-mu watched her with an indifferent gaze. The way she'd wept in his dream, the way she'd stepped out of the car yesterday and smiled so radiantly up at the sky — both flickered through his mind.
The Yu-yeong standing here now was the same one who wept in sorrow in his dreams and smiled at the sky.
She was not the presence that had seeped into the cracked vessel. That presence had not yet shown its face.
A filthy, wretched fate, Cha-mu thought, and did not take his eyes off her.
"Yu-yeong-ssi, are you ready?"
The director's voice was unusually sharp. He could see Yu-yeong's gaunt shoulders flinch at it. With a face that looked ready to burst into tears at any moment, she nodded.
"No way she can act today."
"Right? Look how pale she is. Makeup can't hide that."
When a staff member muttered this from the back, voices chimed in around him.
"Then let's begin!"
But the instant the director called the shot, the light in Yu-yeong's eyes changed.
Color flooded back into her pallid face, and she wore an expression so flawless it was hard to believe she'd been nervously clutching her script mere seconds ago.
And Cha-mu's eyes saw it plainly — the yeong-ga slipping, smooth as water, into the fissures of her broken vessel. A presence he couldn't say where it came from — or whether, perhaps, it had always been inside her — seized Yu-yeong's body in an instant and swapped out her expression. The Yu-yeong everyone was watching now was not Yu-yeong at all.
"......"
Watching the scene from a distance, Cha-mu's face showed not the faintest ripple.
His gaze was utterly calm and dispassionate — the dry observation of a scholar cataloguing a phenomenon.
It wasn't as though he'd been unaware of the yeong-ga drifting in and out of Yu-yeong's body.
Cha-mu slowly surveyed the other energies hovering near her. Souls that had entered from outside — or souls that had dwelled within and drifted out again.
A swarm of lesser spirits clung to Yu-yeong's side. Yet not one of them dared enter. It might have been because something dwelled within — or because something beside her refused to permit it.
"Something dwells within."
If something truly resided inside her, it made sense that the lesser spirits couldn't slip in at will.
If the thing dwelling in her depths surfaced, took over her body, exploited it to its heart's content, and then withdrew inside again, then for a stretch of time afterward Yu-yeong's body would be little more than an extra, empty shell.
In the sliver of a gap — between the thing that had filled her to the brim slipping out, and Yu-yeong's true soul refilling the space — other things would seep in.
Something dwelling within.
Something sharing her flesh.
Judging by her expressions and her behavior, it was obvious Yu-yeong had never granted permission.
And yet the one who seized and occupied that space had no intention of stealing it away.
Even in the midst of circumstances he couldn't make sense of, Cha-mu's gaze remained indifferent. People with broken fates had always been plentiful in this world.
If you decided everything was strange, then everything was strange; if you told yourself that human life holds every manner of outlandish thing, then it was all just ordinary business as usual.
The day a horn sprouts from a calf's rump, it becomes the sort of thing that simply can happen — that's the way of it.
"Look, she's possessed again — she's possessed, I'm telling you."
Just then, a voice behind Cha-mu murmured in wonder as it watched Yu-yeong act.
Words, in the end, carry power.
The more people gaped and cried possessed at the sight of her, the stronger the presence within her would grow — and the more lesser spirits would circle her, hoping to claim her body.
The words of others — praise included — became, for Yu-yeong, a sin of the tongue.
Those fools, with their three-inch tongues, never knowing how mighty words can be.
The tongue is such a small part of the body — did they ever suspect that the power it conjures could unmake someone's destiny, bit by bit, the way a fine drizzle soaks through clothing?
"......"
Damn them all.
Cha-mu halted mid-curse.
The realization that he, too, was at this very moment using his own three-inch tongue to turn someone into a damned soul drew a sigh out of him, and he closed his eyes.