Young-hee and the Pullocho (3 page)

Free from the fox spirit, the sons and the father traveled far from their home and the sad memories it held. All three turned away from worldly things to study the scriptures and warn the world of the fox's evil.

As for Gumiho, she eventually swam to the shore of the lake to lick her wounds. She vowed to never forget how close she had come to getting what she wanted…

The metal crane zoomed high and clattery into the sky, jutting between the dingy concrete walls and dirty glass of the surrounding apartment buildings. On it, a platform stuffed with boxes and mismatched furniture rose noisily to an open window nine floors up.

It was moving day, about four months before the dokkaebi would take Bum. Before she discovered the existence of such fantastic and terrifying places as the goblin market, Young-hee's life had been mostly dull, unremarkable, and endlessly annoying.

The day she returned to Seoul with her mom and Bum after nearly five years abroad was one of the most annoying of all. They had lived in the
ático
of a beautiful old apartment in Buenos Aires for two years, then a nice home in Toronto for three years. She could even remember way back to their big, old house, high in the hills in Seoul.

Her new home was an apartment complex—sprawling, ugly, even by Seoul's standards. Twenty-story buildings, built quickly and badly before she was born, surrounded her like a concrete forest. Peeling paint, faded to rotten-egg yellow, was streaked with rust trails dripping from old window frames.
What a dump
, she thought.

On the ground, chaos reigned as scurrying movers carried boxes, furniture, and the bric-a-brac of their lives. Young-hee dodged one mover only to find herself in the path of another.

“Sorry,” she said, and then, twisting away, arms flailing, knocked over a wooden coat rack. “Sorry,” she repeated to no one in particular, and righted the rack.

“Young-hee!” said her mother, watching the slapstick awkwardness. The sharpness of her voice was tinged with exhaustion. “Try to stay out of the way. Please.”

“Sorry,” Young-hee said, dodged more movers and retreated to a tree-lined wall as her mother reappeared. She was walking at a fast clip, holding the hand of Young-hee's irritating, perpetually dirty younger brother, Bum.

“Young-hee, I need you to get Young-beom's Gangjee,” she said—“Gangjee” being Bum's childish mispronunciation of “
gangaji
,” or “puppy,” what he called his favorite stuffed toy. As usual, Bum was completely clueless—distracted in this charming instance by some snot on his finger.

“I don't know where it is.”

“It's in the car,” mom said, barely containing her stress and digging into a pocket for the keys.

“I don't see the car,” Young-hee said.

“It's down in the parking garage near the stairwell door.”

Before Young-hee could think of an excuse, in one motion her mother had put the keys and Bum's dirty hand into Young-hee's, and returned to the chaos of the move.

As Bum giggled, a greenish snot bubble popped from his nose with a sickly splash. He may have been clueless but he was happy. “
Aish
,
jigyeowo
,” said Young-hee, grossed out. “So annoying.”

Bum was bored and tired, and finding the Gangjee was their best bet if they didn't want him turning into a raging monster of sleep-deprivation. Maybe then he'd nap and she'd dig up a book to read. Or maybe a friend would send her an email. Letting Bum hold her little finger, she led him to the elevator, trying to remember the electronic lock's secret number. She found it horribly elusive, as if forgetting the number made the move less real—but, fortunately, someone had propped the door ajar with a cloth. Immediately inside, the smells of cooking and living drifted into the hallway.

A light indicated that someone, probably the movers, had locked the elevator on the ninth floor. Her floor. “Come on, Bum,” she sighed. “Let's walk down to the garage.”

Bum must have gone with her mom when she parked the car, because he rocketed down the stairs, spewing goofy four-year-old noises. Young-hee let out another annoyed sigh as she slowly followed down the poorly lit stairs, toward a spooky and foreboding darkness.
If Bum isn't scared, why should I be
? she told herself. The garage was deeper than she expected, and the stairs reversed four times before ending. At the bottom was a big, dark blue steel door, with her apartment building number written on it: 206.

Wow!
she thought. Despite the gloom the garage seemed huge. Gray concrete and unremarkable cars stretched out impossibly far. One parking garage must connect all the apartment buildings in the complex.
How many levels did the thing have?
she wondered.
Three or four, at least.

She located Bum by his
bloop
and
bleep
noises. He was playing with the car door handle, his face pressed against the glass. “Gangjee,” he said, pointing inside. Young-hee opened the door and reached in for the puppy doll. With his dirty fur and a single, dangling button eye, Gangjee had definitely seen better days, but he made Bum happy and manageable. Snatching Gangjee, Bum whooshed the toy in Superman-like flying motions. Young-hee rolled her eyes, locked the car, and led her brother back. But as she walked through the dark blue door she found herself looking back into the garage, with a feeling she couldn't put into words.

Emerging into the lobby, Young-hee noticed the elevator was un-stuck, quickly hit the button and heard a whir of response. She felt an irrational rush of joy at this tiny victory over the movers and the forces making her day so miserable.

She rode to the ninth floor, to door 901, her home—no, her
apartment
, she corrected herself.
This is definitely not home.
Inside, things were as chaotic as outside—and ugly, with that gray, poorly-fitted linoleum floor and mismatching, vaguely pastel molding and doorframes. Everything felt grimy, scratched and rundown, the depressing leftovers of years of other people's lives.

Young-hee helped Bum maneuver through moving mess to a bedroom piled high with boxes. Gangjee had been transformed from Superman to a pirate, slashing at invisible marauders; but Young-hee could tell he was mostly just fighting off sleep. Recognizing a box swollen with bedding, Young-hee found a big, soft comforter and laid it on the floor. Before Bum finished protesting her order to sleep, he had drifted off, mouth agape, holding Gangjee.

Deciding he was safe, Young-hee decided to explore, figuring her mom would prefer it if she weren't in the way. Outside in the sunlight, she passed some dubious-looking playground equipment, and near a side entrance to the apartment complex, found a waist-high gate bracketed by two totem poles adorned with strange, toothy faces and googly eyes. Their paint was flaked and faded, and the bearded figure on the right was missing half of its black hat. They were meant to evoke the traditional guardians that protected villages in old Korea, but Young-hee thought they just looked cheap.

Outside the gate was an unremarkable road lined with unremarkable buildings, four-storied and gray. It could have been anywhere in the city. Or nowhere. Restaurants and convenience stores filled the first floors, while basements were bloated with
PC Bang
Internet cafes and the occasional virtual golf driving range. The upper levels featured “health” clinics (for reshaping faces and sucking out fat) and
hagwon
, cram schools (for reshaping brains and sucking out joy), where desperate parents sent desperate kids to study math, science, and English. Aside from weekend Korean classes, Young-hee's life abroad had been wonderfully hagwon-less, but she dreaded that, soon, her days would be stuffed with extra classes.

Across the street was a small supermarket, and down the road a farmer's market, where old people gathered, buying and selling homegrown vegetables. Down the other way, the far side of a three-way intersection ended abruptly in recycling yards. There, all day long, poor people hauled in carts overflowing with cardboard and metal, and yard workers noisily loaded the scraps of other people's lives onto beaten-up trucks. But what drew Young-hee was the lonely, grassy hill behind the chaos. Overlooked by developers, it had turned half-feral.

Curious, Young-hee followed a steep path at the top of the hill and found a half-finished park with benches, a wooden gazebo, and some rusty exercise equipment.

It was a warm spring day, not deadly hot yet, and the air was surprisingly clear for the time of year, so Young-hee enjoyed the view.
Geez', Seoul is massive
, she thought,
and hideously drab.
Everywhere she looked was just more of the same. Concrete apartment complexes like hers and commercial buildings stretched in all directions, each more boastfully and strangely named than the last: Luxville, Besttown, Brownstone, Emerald. Her apartment complex was just as bad—Hanbit Mansion. She tried to remember what “hanbit” meant:
Light? Sun? Aish, my Korean's gotten terrible.
And with cracks and rust streaking the buildings, “mansion” was a joke.

It wasn't like this before
, she thought.
I used to live in a house with a yard, trees, a beautiful view.
She remembered her grandfather proudly telling them that their house, with a mountain to the north and a river to the south, had great
pungsu
—a a kind of magical geography that was just right. She missed him, even though she barely remembered what he looked like. But she knew he wouldn't have approved of the pungsu here. “
Has everything changed while I was gone,”
she wondered,
“or just me?”

She fished her cell phone from her pocket and checked for messages. Still none. Impulsively following a path that snaked down the hill, Young-hee lost sight of her apartment. The path passed a massive construction project, with high, corrugated steel walling off giant holes from which would likely grow another complex, just like hers. Leaving the construction trucks, dirt, and noise, she reached the main road, and momentarily panicked—until she spied the name of her apartment complex on the high walls of a building a block away.

At the old guard booth was, fittingly, an old guard—a
gyeongbi—
chatting with another guard inside the booth. All apartments in Korea hired old guys to act as security and keep an eye on things. The muffled sound of a television came from booth. He eyed her suspiciously. “Hey, girl. Are you looking for someone?” he asked in a thick rural accent.

She eyed the gyeongbi back, examining his blue, police-like uniform and deeply wrinkled face. Some gyeongbi could be nosy, others grouchy, and some, even scary. But all could be huge pains if you got off on the wrong foot. This one seemed gruff, rather than mean. “Um, I live here. Building 206,” she said.

“Ah, you're the ones moving in today,” he said, looking relieved. “The manager talked about you this morning. The Jo's, right?”

“Yes. Nice to meet you. I got a little lost, walking around the neighborhood.”

“It's a pretty big complex, easy to get lost, at first.” he said. Then angling his head curiously, he asked, “You're not from around here?”

“We just moved back. We've been abroad for a few years.” Young-hee squirmed, embarrassed by her own accent.

“Well, welcome back. I'm Gyeongbi Shin.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Shin,” she said with a light bow.

Young-hee figured she should head home. As in most Korean apartment complexes, the towers were separated by parking lots and small playgrounds, full of busy, gossiping housewives and bored, gossiping men. Young-hee walked quickly with her head down. She passed a fountain quietly gushing and surrounded by puddles—evidence that local kids had ignored the “Keep out of fountain” sign.

She said “Hi,” to three pretty girls about her age, wearing a peculiar mix of fancy and garish clothes. They kept walking, mimicking her “
Hi
,” and giggled—evidently finding something about her greeting or appearance just hilarious.

“
Jigyeowo
,” she said again, feeling her face flush with anger. “So annoying.” A couple of buildings later, embarrassment replaced anger. Maybe she shouldn't have talked to strange girls. Or maybe it wasn't a big deal. Maybe the stress of moving made everything seem worse.