and soon I broke the surface, gasping. Only when I caught my breath did I notice the complete stillness, save for the water lapping against the stone wall encircling me. My mind startled awake.
I had been thrown into a well.
High above me was a circle of night sky powdered with stars, illuminating the grimy wall and the ripples around me. And then I looked down at what I was holding. It was stiff and covered in fabric, slimy in places. I ran my fingers around until I felt tangles of hair.
Human hair.
My heart rammed against my chest. I pushed away from the corpse, which was floating facedown, rotating now in the small waves. I struggled to tread water, my robe wrapping around my legs, then managed to dig my nails into the crevices of the rocky wall. Please no, please no. I looked over my shoulder and stared into the shaman’s gray-filmed eyes, a hole where her nose ought to be, her lips a dark O. She started screaming; or rather, it was me screaming. In my panic I could not say which.
“She’s still alive!” the young man shouted somewhere outside the well. “Abooji, I told you!”
“Too late! We need to get back to Madam Byeol’s house before sunup. He told us to meet him there. Then we can relocate to somewhere safer and pretend all this never happened. Let’s go. Now!”
“But, Abooji!”
“Hush!” the father cried, his voice full of tremors. “Th-think. Just think! We’ll never have to shed blood again. He promised us. Promised!”
“But—!”
“She knows too much. You think we’ll survive if she lives? We’ll not only lose our fortune, we’ll lose our heads as well. Hurry, let’s go!”
Staring at the shaman’s missing nose, I reached for my own, and the moment I touched it, I felt pain. It was still there, but blood oozed from a deep cut. Shim had had every intention of slicing my nose off, but perhaps the sound of approaching people had stopped him.
I faced the wall and tried to climb up, but the rocks were so slippery I plunged back into the water, the ripples pushing the corpse up against me. I screamed again, a raspy sound, even though my throat and head pounded with pain.
I was trapped. Fear as I had never felt before gripped me. My teeth chattering, I remained still, my back to the corpse, clinging onto the wall. I dared not move, afraid that the corpse would awake, that her slimy hand would touch me, that her loosened black hair would creep around my throat.
“Orabeoni,” I sobbed. “Orabeoni!”
Sometimes we must cease feeling, he had once said, when we had lost our way in the rain, and think instead.
I took in a few deep breaths, trying to calm the shuddering in me. Then reason reached into me, asking questions to keep me sane.
Is the body dead? Yes.
So it is not moving? No.
Is there something holding your ankles? Yes.
Could it be your robe? Yes.
I became aware that so long as I did not move, my robe did not wrap around my legs, and the corpse remained still, not reaching out for me as I had imagined it was.
Breathing came easier.
I forced myself to look over my shoulder. The corpse floated, staring up unblinkingly at the sky. I had encountered drowned corpses before. Hyeyeon had explained why they were floating: When people suffocate to death, they remain floating for a while and then sink under. The fact that the corpse was still floating, after only a few hours since I’d last seen the shaman, told me she had suffocated either from the water or from being strangled.
Fear subsided, and I no longer saw a haunted corpse, but rather an innocent woman, killed because she had lived too long. She had known Officer Shim as a child, had recognized him still after so many years, and so Shim had had to silence her. Otherwise, her gossip would have traveled fast and could have reached Councillor Ch’oi in no time.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Craning my head back, I gazed back up at the sky. I would join the shaman in death if I did not find a way to escape. Already my fingers trembled, exhausted and cramped from digging into the crevices.
“I’m here!” Pain strangled my throat, like a blade jammed in. “Help!”
Only the distant fluttering of a wing answered. The hushing of leaves in the mountain wind. The water lapping against the stone wall. The unending and indifferent silence terrified me. There was no