of the Northern District, and there stood before us a lonely mansion with a wooden gate covered in white bands of paper, charms sold by shamans to ward off evil spirits. A pigeon perched on the eaves of the gate, beady eyes staring down at us. Coo-coo, it sang, coo-coo.
Woorim walked over and shook the brass handle of the gate. “It’s still locked. And I hear there are planks nailed to the other side of the gate to bar entry.”
“How do you know this?”
“Yesterday, as I was passing by this side of the district, I thought to take a peek inside the mansion, but a stranger caught me trying to enter,” she said, and when I frowned at her, she offered me an apologetic smile. “I didn’t get in trouble, though. I thought I would, so I made up a tragic tale about a long-lost family member, and about family ghosts within that we needed to visit tomorrow as part of our ancestral worship, and he must have sympathized.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said the only way in would be to climb the wall, but we can’t do that.”
We had no choice. I took three steps back, then ran, grabbing hold of the lower point between the gate and the wall surrounding the compound. I used my elbows to lift myself higher and higher until I managed to hook my knee over the tiles, straddling the lower wall.
“This is madness!” Woorim whispered, but nevertheless she followed me into the compound, biting back a smile.
There was indeed no one living here. The place was a graveyard of cobwebs and weeds. The paper-screened doors lining the hanok building were torn, and some of the frames hung from hinges, punched down by the wind, perhaps.
A shadow haunted the extreme corner of my eyes, and I turned.
An old pine tree stood in the corner of the courtyard, bent into the shape of a river. I took a stumbling step back as a memory passed through me. I had seen this tree before, an old friend from another lifetime, a stranger and yet familiar.
“This is likely the most haunted mansion in this district.” Woorim walked ahead, climbing onto the veranda, which creaked beneath her steps. She craned her head back to look around. “A place filled with so much han.”
Han. This word meant many things—unresolved resentment, helplessness, acute pain, the urge to take revenge—and these many things were expressed within one word. Han.
Woorim spoke on. “The inspector’s father was a Confucian scholar but was also a Catholic. After he was executed for possessing Western literature, his head was raised on a stick for days, guarded day and night so that no one could take it off.”
“How do you know this?” I whispered.
“I heard the mistress telling you about the gentleman. So later, I begged her for details. She was reluctant at first.”
“What more did she tell you?”
“When Inspector Han was a boy, he tried to bury his father’s body, but the magistrate ordered the corpse to be taken and laid out in the open. After that, his entire family was banished.”
I followed Woorim into the shadowy mansion, ripped wallpaper fluttering in the wind.
“None of his banished family but himself survived,” Woorim continued. “His mother committed suicide because she hated all the accusations. People called her a Catholic demon. And as for his siblings, I heard they were taken as servants, but then they all died when a plague swept through the household.”
A plague. I had barely escaped it before. Sister had voluntarily offered us to become nobi servants to the Nam household. There had been no other way to escape our crushing poverty, for the exile had stripped us of our status, respect, and fortune. But the Nams had later been forced into quarantine, for our master’s daughter and a few servants had caught the illness. Young Lady Euna had turned blue in the face, her skin shriveling, her eye sockets collapsing. Dead the next day. That night, Older Sister had dragged me out from my sleep, and we had run from the men posted around the residence to keep us within.
“Perhaps we will encounter their spirits here,” Woorim whispered. “The ghosts of the inspector’s dead siblings.” She continued to tell me about ghosts, and her voice sounded so far away, growing fainter by the passing moment.
Look-look, the pigeon called out to me, look-look.
I turned and gazed out through the broken door into the courtyard, at the old pine tree. There was no one standing beneath