Gamangnara Part 2: The Dark World

  Chapter 6 : Alone

  In the week following Iseul’s arrival in Sector 2 two things became more and more clear, one was that the shop, contrary to all logic was busiest in the late evening to the middle of the night and the second was that she had to stop sleeping on the fainting chair by the fire to avoid permanent damage to her back. Covered with soft green velvet, moth eaten and antique, the chair was still the cleanest most inviting thing in the shop. The upstairs apartment was a decent size for one person, with white mouldings and a tall bay window but every surface up there was covered in an inch thick blanket of dust. Having little experience cleaning she was intimidated by the amount of work it would involve just to make it habitable.

  So in order to address the easier of the two problems and accommodate her late uncle’s customers expectations (not least among these the elegant Yun Tae) Iseul now only opened the shop in the late afternoon as long golden shadows slowly faded to violet then grey until the only light in the world seemed to come from inside the small room where she sat with all the lamps lit and the fire blazing.

  She unlocked the door and tidied the shelves one by one, dusting and cataloguing as she waited for them to come in, reading inventory lists in her uncle’s clear, old fashioned handwriting and trying to be of use to them when they did by studying some of the most popular titles.

  There were no new titles. Nothing in the shop had been written since before the last global conflict.

  She was awake at night anyway, having trouble sleeping regardless of the furniture, and the night made her wakeful and edgy. It was far easier to drop off during the daylight hours when her dreams were merely hazy and difficult to remember with the sun on her face, not tangled with wrenching shocks and long anxious dreams of empty rooms, searching always for something that was long gone.

  As the days passed she began to remember her day dreams too, they could not be called nightmares.. she dreamed of an eclipse… slow darkness covering the sun in a curved shadow that crept over it until all the light was gone, but even this omen was preferable to the empty rooms.

  The other reason she had only gone upstairs a few times was that the empty rooms reminded her too sharply of the way her parents apartments had looked in the hours and days after their disappearance. Of course there had been no dust or mess, they were responsible academics, a little absent minded maybe but very tidy, it was something else.

  There was no sign of struggle, they had left calmly, apparently taking nothing but the clothes on their backs. These rooms held the same air of absence. She did not know what had happened to her uncle any more than she knew what had happened to her mother and father, as much as her reason told her the situations were not superficially related she could not help but wonder now if they were caught in the same mystery.

  There had been more to her family than she ever knew. Her helplessness grated on her, after being driven to the train station by the Dean she had arrived with only a few boxes, maps of the area and a phone number for a couple who lived in the academic district.

  A castaway from another civilization lost in this dark city, left to survive on her wits, by herself when she had never been truly alone before. Alone with her thoughts and her fears, without her studies to distract her.

  She wanted to help in the investigation but right now just keeping her own head above water in her new situation was all she could manage. Still she could not stop herself speculating even with hardly any proof to go on.

  Seong Temper clearly had been gone longer than a week but his rooms did not have the appearance of someone who had planned to leave and had organized his belongings accordingly. His things were spread out in a curious tableaux of ordinary and irregular; under the dust and cobwebs were stacks of books by the bed frame, feathers carpeted the floor from a ripped mattress, a cotton shirt was flung over the chair. Antique looking playing cards were set in a complex pattern on the rosewood table by the window, as if two people had left a game of gabo interrupted.

  The stillness that covered a stale sense of violence hanging in the room had kept her from examining her new living quarters too closely, instead focusing on the more welcoming though no less dusty ground floor.

  The apartment had not been cleaned prior to her arrival because the attorney who had delivered the papers bequeathing the shop to him had been under strict instructions to allow entry to no person other than Iseul including himself. The keys had passed from his hands to Iseul’s in a sealed envelope and before that had been left with the will in a safety deposit box in New Seoul for over six months.

  As the nights became colder she lit the fire in the massive hearth every night as much for comfort as for warmth, but she would have to replenish her wood stores soon. Wood cost money. As did food and cleaning supplies and toothpaste and every other miscellaneous thing she hadn’t had to worry about while living with her parents in the their lodgings at the university.

  Added over top of the deep constant ache that was her missing parents was the loss of the vast library and archives of the school that had been her home. It was a small school with under 5000 students but the library was unique, particularly in its collections of texts on mythology and religions of the world. These subjects were not popular in this time and there were strange rules about studying and teaching the arts and theology.

  Iseul had not cared much for politics, all she wanted to study were the angels and demons that fascinated her, and their various incarnations in systems of belief around the world.

  As long as she had been free to do that, she had not realized the privilege that was her access to the library. Without it she was stalled in her thesis. She could not move forward with her work without any primary sources.

  Amazingly, at the age of twenty one it was only now occurring to her that the vast majority would not have considered her thesis to be “work” at all. She was terrified to find that the inheritance of the shop - that seemed so daunting and difficult and lonely was in fact incredible good fortune that protected her from having to face “real life” so totally unprepared.

  Her great uncle Temper had owned the shop outright for many years, so long in fact that the lawyer in charge of the transfer had assumed it was a family business that he had inherited himself. There was no mortgage to pay but there were taxes and worse, a toll that would be collected by the notorious gang that haunted the area in exchange for “protection” that she would have to find some way to raise before long. The Ilmul Main would have scared her if she had the mental capacity. Right now her grief and anxiety about the future was all she could handle.

  So, naturally the hours of anxious boredom when she was avoiding cleaning and avoiding thinking about her parents, she spent with books spread out around her on the hearth rug, looking for any pertinent author or reference that could help her in her research, or at least provide a mental distraction.

  But even studying was difficult now. Without the familiar oak panelling and stained glass windows of the beautiful library at the University of Sacred Truth she felt unable to focus.

  The books in the shop were strange, many primary sources were here that had been at the library but the articles she relied on, the massive database of academia that had helped to guide her studies, answer her questions and form her opinions was a great absence. Her thesis on the concept of the personal angelic guide modelled on the concept of Jung’s anima and animus was yet half unwritten. She felt uninspired here and unmoored from everything that had made her studies seem possible and important and relevant. The concepts and arguments that had made up her world at school seemed incomprehensible here, unimportant, she could not imagine even the denizens of the shop would care enough to read her notes.

  This was a humbling realization but she tried not to take it to heart. Surprisingly most of her customers it seemed, were not academics.

  They treated magic the way no one at the university did, as if it were a real thing, and not a sort of pagan religious system, made up of beliefs compounded from many different societies from all over Old Europe and Asia and even North America at various stages of development.

  They believed in it less like a system of faith and more like the rules and practices of cooking, they acted like the ingredients for magic, real magic could be found in the shop. As if the little bags of dried leaves and small semi-precious stones Temper kept in stock could effect real change in the world, and not just the placebo effect of any other religious symbol.

  This disconnect made it hard to relate to them but she did her best to find what they were looking for on the shelves; the secrets of which she was still discovering for herself.

  Iseul’s faith, never stalwart, had suffered enormously in these days since she left the home she knew. Much of it, she thought now, had been the security of her parents presence, her professor's enthusiastic guidance, the atmosphere of the theology department, the afternoon sun through the jewel coloured stained glass, the printed images of angels and demons, western and eastern demi-gods and monsters that had captured her intellect and her imagination.

  Where was that faith now? Now that she had real need of it when she was alone, shored up in a dark world, thick with smog and shadows, far from the tidy order of the capital, here the invisible hand of the Ilmul Main moved strings that made everyone dance in obedience. So far they had not troubled her but she already knew from the lack of police presence and her attorney’s warning that to live here was to be at their mercy.

  Where was god or Christ his son now? They did not dwell in the place called Sector 2 that had been renamed to cut down the pride of the rebellious coastal city, to stamp out its traditional leanings and strange new belief systems. But nothing had been quelled here, only driven underground.

  Christianity was still the norm in the nation, slightly more prevalent than the atheism of the north, no longer enforced but still deeply rooted, redolent in the descendants of that insular regime, but many churches stood empty for fear or neglect. Iseul certainly wasn’t going to be seen going there to pray, she had enough of a target on her back with her studies and this ridiculous magic shop.

  Still, regardless of her growing cynicism she had a kind of affection for the customers, after all, it was their belief that she now traded in, their conviction that magic existed that now formed the basis of her survival, and who was she to know for sure what was real and what was fantasy?

  Suwon she now understood had been a world apart from the reality of her country, and the school was almost an island. A haven she had not appreciated so much until now when she had no way to go back there.

  She had studied angels and demons for the past three years, all of her adult life, so she was no one to judge the dilettantes or scholars who found pleasure or solace in such studies.

  On the second day of her parents absence Iseul had looked through their apartment for a note or any clue she might have missed indicating a sudden departure. Calling their phones had resulted in only the recordings of their voices asking her to please leave a message, hearing their voices had been unexpectedly distressing now that she did not know when she might next speak with them.

  She had looked through the whole space and found nothing, so when she ventured into areas she had never had any reason to like her mother’s tiny closet she did not expect to find anything other than clothes.

  And she did find her neat blouses and skirts arranged carefully in the tiny space that smelled of violets, with her gowns at the back bright red and purple inside clear hanging bags. Her things looked so small hanging on the racks that she had felt a sudden lump in her throat, surely her strong father would keep her safe, her beautiful, proud, inquisitive mother, wherever they had gone.

  She felt strange about looking into the closet but when she went to close the door he caught sight of a small cardboard carton on the floor. There was french writing along with the Hangul characters. She knelt and opened it; inside were rows of slender white cigarettes. The old fashioned paper kind with a filter that would be lit with a match, breathed in and slowly burnt up, unlike the tiny digital vapour pipes that were more prevalent now.

  She smelled them expecting tar but along with the nicotine was a pleasant spice of cloves.

  She had a sense memory then, of being very small, hugging her mother when she came in at night from a party, caught in her satiny coat was the chill of the air, and the smell of cloves..

  But her parents were very health conscious and didn’t even drink alcohol. She had never known her mother or father to smoke.

  She had thought they had no secrets between them in their small family, she had sat with the carton on her lap for several minutes before tucking it under her arm and taking it back to her dorm.

  It was such a tiny thing but it meant there could be other things they didn’t tell her.

  She didn’t take anything else from her parents rooms, which were essentially a crime scene, other than, unintentionally, her fathers watch, which had been in her pocket at the time he left. Funny she could not remember placing it there though she had often borrowed it, loving the deep reassuring weight of the silver, the ticking like a miniature heartbeat and the inscription on the back of the Seong family seal. The only time she’d ever seen it. It was meant to be red she’d been told but of course on the silver it had no colour.

  Other than some pieces of her mothers jewellery they did not own anything else so rich,

  She did not tell the sergeant about this nor did he mention the cigarettes. To do so even if it impeded their investigation would have felt wrong, a betrayal of her parents who deserved their secrets even from him.

  The realization that she had not known everything about her parents, jarring as it was had been a needful one. I was selfish she felt it now, like pain, feeling guilty about her preoccupation, caught up in my own world like a child while all the time, this danger this unknown threat had hung over us.

  She knew they had not simply left her with no word. The fact that there had been no message meant it had been safer to be silent and not contact her. Iseul was not a child though she might have been living in many ways like one. She knew how such disappearances worked.

  She had come to imagine they were on some controversial mission to find a rare manuscript or examine some ancient tomb in a dangerous part of the world and simply could not tell her. Though in her heart she knew they never would have left her unprovided for at the university. They would have at least paid the rent and tuition in advance until their return. But she had nothing else to cling to.

  Any alternative was unthinkable and she shrank from it in despair.

  A thump on the mat drew her out of her hazy thoughts and she looked up. There on the mat were several pieces of mail, grateful for the distraction she got up, from her pose on her stomach and elbows on the rugs in front of the fire. She’d been staring unseeing at a large book in latin filled with astrographs and diagrams that were enticing but incomprehensible while her thoughts circled back unconsciously to her parents. The book was useless to her without a dictionary. And the one she’d used had belonged to the university library. Her Latin was wretched.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  She picked up the mail, a pair of deep red and pale blue envelopes looked to be addressed to her uncle. On the back of one of these was a taped hand written note. She set those aside in the pile she had already compiled of mail for her deceased benefactor, most of which had been heaped on the mat and slithered out as she opened the door for the first time. As customers returned and were introduced to Iseul and updated with the unpleasant news she had had to repeat endlessly since that first night telling her first customer this had gradually tapered off.

  The rest were advertisements except for two white envelopes each addressed to her by name. One was cheap official looking stationary with printed words and the other was thick paper the colour of fresh cream that crinkled pleasantly when she held it and was addressed in deep red ink. She felt a jolt of recognition holding that one, there was no return address but something about the elegant script made her feel it could be from the customer from her first night who had yet to return, Yun Tae.

  None of her friends in Suwon had written to her yet and she did not expect them to. It was a cold reception one could expect when related so closely to people who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. They were already risking a lot attending such an old fashioned college and studying such thinly approved subjects.

  Still it hurt to be so easily forgotten.

  She set that one aside perhaps so that in the delay she could continue to pretend it was from him, unlikely as it was, and opened the official looking rectangular one.

  It was sent from the Dean’s office at the University of Sacred Truth in Suwon. After opening it she stood unmoving for a while. Inside were two cheques of outstanding wages in her father’s and mother’s names. Written under the name line of each was the qualifier,

  ‘In lieu of recipient please dispense to next of kin.’

  It had only been a week. And already the Dean was drawing up accounts with her parents as if they had simply quit or been fired. Iseul wondered what would happen to their things without her there and ripped the accompanying letter open tearing the silver wax seal of the college in half.

  “To whom it may concern, the effects of Seong Eun-Ju (her mother) and Seong Mir (her father) not pertaining to the ongoing investigation of them as missing persons will be packed and forwarded to this receiving address at the expense of the recipient within the next 8 - 10 business days.

  The apartments heretofore occupied by these individuals are to be renovated and refurbished for newly tenured tenants. Please have payment ready upon delivery in cash or cheque.”

  This was signed with the stamp of a large national moving company with a branch in Suwon.

  Under the official impersonal typed script were a few lines in the hasty dashing hand of the Dean.

  “Iseul,” it read “Your parents things have been processed by the police and are taking up space here. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging delivery of the un-confiscated materials, (No need to send thanks, I will presume to accept your gratitude in advance) to your new residence and wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

  Sincerely; Dean Beom Seok,

  Daehag ui Jinsil Sinseonghan ”

  His signature was massive as the rest of the note, loopy and self important

  “-Post Script-

  Please disregard the matter of payment for the movers, I’ve deducted the cost from your parents wages. Again no thanks are needed.”

  She stood gripping this abhorrent bit of paper for several moments, an unconscious expression of disgust on her face as though the Dean stood before her now speaking these inadequate and cold words to her face. Iseul wished she was that she might look him in the eye as he cast them off. He had actually taken the expense out the their last pay. It had only been a week and he was through with them all. The investigation was ongoing but with no leads she knew it would be difficult to sustain and with so many missing persons the expense of a cold case even one so fresh as this was not justifiable.

  Her parents were no longer considered part of the Seoul Seong clan but if they were things might have been different.

  The dean had included and sent along with Iseul the detectives contact information but living where she was now, on such shaky ground in such a lawless portion of the city, of the nation, of the world it seemed, she was hesitant even to call them.

  Of course if she had any information or found anything on her own she would arrange to meet them somewhere further uptown. It would not do to be seen communicating with New Seoul police in Ilmul Main territory, almost as mortifying as this was the thought of meeting them in her shop. How strange and grubby such a place would seem in their cold, bureaucratic eyes. They might turn their attention to her, after all studying controversial material was not so notable as selling it.

  Iseul found the newfound bitterness rise in her throat again with this development, she had always thought of the Dean as kind and protective. Her parents had always told her to call him if they were ever not around. But she was an adult now, she knew what this message meant for her; don’t contact me again.

  And this letter confirmed it if nothing else had, the man had clearly washed his hands of them all. The world was not so different now despite the peace. People still disappeared and it was not healthy to know them too well.

  Annoyed, anger replacing the low level fear she’d been walking and sleeping with for the past week she stood. The Dean had been cold with her, formal and distant in his sympathy but she had not truly believed she was so utterly adrift from her old life until now. No one is going to help me find my parents, or with anything else.

  “I’m alone” she whispered to the empty room then said it louder. “I’m alone” her eyes filled with tears but she breathed deeply squeezing them shut then let it out staring at the ceiling.

  I’m not crying right now. Crying won’t help me. Besides a customer might come in and see and if they asked her what was the matter, she didn’t feel able to talk about her parents with anyone. Not yet.

  She might be alone but she was not helpless. She had something that was just hers for first time in her life. Where she stood now was her space, land and property in her family name that, despite not having ever laid eyes on them, was the gift of a family member.

  Without it she truly would be lost. She would have nothing. And the world would not be kind. She felt a swell of gratitude for the unknown Seong Temper so great it brought new tears to her eyes and made her sway with dizziness.

  But fit that was true it was also true that without her, a Seong, this shop would stand empty and derelict which meant she was a gift to it as well.

  But she could not succeed without resources, owning the shop was a great advantage, despite the relatively quiet re-opening it seemed there were enough customers to get by for now but she would need to order new inventory before winter or they might become bored.

  Her needs and wants pressed in on her like hungry ghosts, there were of course things she could do without, she didn’t mind living very simply but she could not live on books and dust.

  Her parents debts to the school for their tenure application fees to the college and for her own tuition had just been paid off, they had no savings. She was starting over and without the shop would have had nothing at all.

  She needed money right now but didn’t want to cash the cheques yet. To do so would feel so final, almost like she were taking and using up the last pieces she had of her parents.

  Desperately, in an effort to put off thinking about money for at least another few minutes she picked up the other envelopes, first the deep red envelope for, though it was addressed to Temper, intriguingly there was a note taped to the back that read please amend for Seong Iseul. Inside the envelope was a handful of gold foil that spilled over her hands and onto the floor tiles as she ripped it open. Also inside was an invitation for a private party, located at an address in the oldest part of the downtown quarter; where the pre-war built houses extended half underground like forerunners of the now popular subterranean condos that extended stories below the earth.

  Of course Iseul had never been there but she knew more about Sector 2 from asking customers and looking at maps and books she had brought with her from the University.

  The invitation was rather vague listing the address and date (Halloween night) but the time as “dusk till dawn”, there was no sender. Iseul was confused as to how the sender had acquired the information of her name and doubtful about the taste level of attending a social gathering in lieu of her dead unknown relative. Still, it was intriguing, she had yet to meet anyone outside of the customers who came to her in the shop and, most importantly, the one who sent the invitation had known her uncle and could be a source of information.

  At least, she thought darkly, by then she would have the pick of her mother’s beautiful gowns to wear to the party.

  Setting the invitation aside, feeling marginally better about her situation with such an enigmatic social engagement pending, she took up the heavy cream coloured envelope and looked over the red slightly slanting script. She ran her fingers over it, savouring and prolonging the act of opening it, the paper was pebbled like leather and the letter was thick as though it contained many folded sheets. Holding her breath, braced for the inevitable let-down contained in the mysterious piece of mail she carefully split the seal (purple wax with an imprint of irises) and slid the folded sheet out. A letter, penned in the same red ink on the same rich paper was curled around a wad of new bills. “Paper” money was a rarity in a society that was often automated and run on slim metal cards more durable and environmentally sustainable than the old plastic versions with inset chip.

  But Iseul had grown up with old fashioned things. She knew the feel and weight of real money. The strange thing about these bills was they looked to be of an issue at least twenty years out of date, the design of the won had changed since then even if most people rarely handled the poly-carbon versions anymore. Aside from the issue or the design another feature stood out, the bill on top said 5000 and with a quick flip through she found each one underneath did too, this was clearly a hefty amount.

  Startled she set the cash on the counter and unfolded the letter.

  “Seong Iseul. Please forgive the length of this letter, and the lateness of this payment. In order to explain myself I’ll have to go on at length-”

  The characters of her name were penned prominently and larger than the rest of the script in black ink while the rest was red as though it had been marked in at a different time, but names especially of new acquaintances were difficult to write without consulting a precedent or source.

  Iseul’s eyes quickly scanned to the bottom of the page, but the letter was two pages long with an attached list. At the end of the list was a signature that streaked into loops higher than it was wide, as this was illegible she turned to the second page of the letter where at the bottom in clearer script was the ending note;

  “Yours, Yun Tae”

  She felt a slow smile spread across her face and her heart beat inordinately. The shock of these three very different pieces of mail had culminated in a feeling of gratification, her first impulsive thought that the letter was from Yun Tae had been correct. It was strange how this letter was warmer in tone than that of the Dean, a person she’d known and looked up to all of her life.

  She sat down behind the dark oak counter to read the rest of the letter, leaving all of her worries along with the flakes of gold leaf on the floor, for the moment forgotten.

  “Your uncle and I have been friends for a long time. He was a great collector of books and I often took advantage of his tenacity in seeking and talent for finding rare and even banned titles. I ordered these titles some time ago, before Temper left and as I have had no means of contacting him I have yet to purchase them properly. I was grieved to hear of his passing and I must admit the shock of finding you in his place is the only way I can account for my rudeness on the night we met, for that I apologize.

  Your presence makes it possible for me to finally pay for these costly and rare books that I ordered as a gift for my brother months ago.-”

  He went on to speak about both Temper and this brother at length, clearly they were very close. At the end of the letter he thanked Iseul for her understanding and included a long list of titles. Smiling unconsciously she carefully folded the letter. This at last was good news. She would not have to cash her parents cheques.

  The money here (strange to send it in cash in the post, but he had appeared to be both wealthy and eccentric) would be more than enough to keep her going for at least a month, she could buy food and fuel and a transit pass, she even felt better about tackling the upstairs apartment.

  She needed a place to sleep and didn’t feel bad about disturbing the rooms Temper had left, she doubted the police would even come this far into gang territory, and even if they did they could hardly find much in the way of evidence after so much time had gone by.

  Still she felt a pathos for the one who had left her something for no reason other than her name, and as such she felt it was her duty to act as a next of kin for her unknown uncle as well. There was no one else that would advocate for answers for him that she knew of. Except of course, her friend, Yun Tae.

  When he came back Iseul would ask him if he knew anything else.

  If Temper’s abandonment of her home and business had anything to do with her parents she would be the one to find out.

  Immediately she set about looking for Yun Tae‘s order. There were several bundles of recent deliveries wrapped behind the counter, most were small, two or three volumes that people had slowly been coming to collect since the shop had been re-opened, but a few were much larger, taking up whole shelves. One of these housed several small bundles wrapped in the dull brown of unbleached recycled paper and bound together with twine, written on the paper covering the top volume were the characters that spelled Yun Tae.

  With new resolve she switched the sign to closed. It was late afternoon and the market would still be open. She would take this money and get what she needed today.

  She realized she had to sort out her immediate needs before she could focus on continuing her studies in any way, let alone trying to solve a disappearance especially one that involved her only family. In a way, sorting out the shop and finding her way around the new neighbourhood simplified things for Iseul. It galvanized her to act regardless of her feelings. With the money from Yun Tae’s outstanding order she could afford to buy cleaning supplies and food and firewood for the next month.

  Customers were beginning to return to the shop in a sparse but steady stream as well with requests and smaller orders, which meant money coming in, but that brought its own difficulties. Iseul would never have called herself sheltered before she came to the city but she was now forced to admit that the types of people she encountered here were very different from the gentle faded academics and shy wealthy students she had grown up with.

  As she walked down the quiet narrow street toward the more populated square glowing with light from all the stalls despite the greyish sky overhead she considered the last few days, her first week running the shop and her customers in a more positive light.

  Some were interesting and even funny, precocious teenagers who bought cheap paperback editions of the Necronomicon, or women with lots of jewellery on who complimented her on her “rosy aura”, told her things like that she was a new soul (this made her laugh and say that’s where I’m from”) and warned her to avoid anyone with ‘concentrated past lives” she hardly understood half of what they said but they were well-meaning and talking with them was a welcome diversion.

  Most talked with her for a while about her uncle, (they typically knew even less about where he had gone but had plenty of stories about his kindness and encyclopaedic knowledge of magic and history) and welcomed her to the area and offered advice on where to go and places to avoid. But others simply scared her.

  Dark-clothed quiet men who came in on the third day she was open and left a business card with a stylized rising sun on it, red and yellow and black. They told her to call the number if she ever had any problems with the patrols. These of course were forerunners of the Ilmul Main, though why she would have issues with law enforcement she had no idea. Occult study was not exactly a celebrated path in the eyes of the government but surely they had better things to do than come sniffing around her old shop.

  Worse than all of these were the ones who came much like the elegant man had, always in the late evening, always hesitating on the stoop with a look of surprise and suspicion. She beckoned them in but if she hesitated, sometimes they immediately left again when they saw she was not her mysterious forebear. She tried not to take it personally and was often relieved when they passed on, melting into the night like they were never there.

  These appearances, though they filled her with disquiet, put her in mind of Yun Tae. After he had left it had been difficult to believe he was real, he had been so handsome and so quiet, and Iseul had been so rapt up in her own thoughts, half asleep by the time she closed up, if she hadn’t known better she’d think the man was a dream she’d conjured in her shock and exhaustion.

  As the days, or rather nights passed she became aware of a tendency to watch the doorway in the later hours, waiting for a certain tall young man with graceful shoulders and overlong black hair to come back.

  It had only been a few days, she had to remind herself, and yet he had been the only one to express genuine sympathy to her, seeming to know that despite her unmeaning indifference to her uncle and benefactor, she was sad and grieving, just for a different reason. She had spoken with a counsellor the police brought around on her last day at the university, even now she had their phone number, but she had not trusted them enough to really gain anything from the interview.

  She also felt strange about accepting any kind of charity from the Dean and his family now, even if it were for the benefit of her mental health. After all the counsellor was in the employ of the police and despite her natural respect for authority, she could not quite bring herself to trust them. Not with the things that were truly bothering her, the deepest secrets of her heart, the dawning fear she had that the Dean’s sadness was not tinged with surprise but rather guilt, the growing suspicion she could not shake that her parents had been offered as a kind of scapegoat to shield the unusual school from suspicion. Their investigation into bio-theology and experimental physics had made them easily the most controversial of the small group of professors in residence and their poor status despite the Seong name had made it a tricky thing to live there, halcyon as the environment was, because pride is important and being cut off from the rest of the family was always a doubtful cloud hanging over her father, and, by extension, his wife and daughter. If their own ancient clan had cut them loose, it was a risk for any association to take them on.

  She had known this, even as a young child. Despite her fascination with the angels and demons she was never the type to flinch from facts… and yet it had not been something she worried over. Her parents had made a world of love around her and peopled it with the beauty and wonder of the adult knowledge they studied and never hesitated to share with her. She had grown up believing simultaneously in angels and the limitless ever-expanding universe but the reality of life in their patched up wounded country was something she had only come to know by inference, conversations with the few students who had come from places other than the wealthy and protected New Seoul.

  It had felt after ten years, like the University was their home, that it would love them back the way they had always loved it. That it would care for them the way they had cared for their students and given them all of their knowledge, keeping nothing back.

  Keeping nothing back.

  Iseul stopped stock still in the street, unaware of the crowd that parted busily around her, eyes wide unseeing.

  No theory, no question would have been fielded or censored by her mother and father. They felt that information was a sacred thing, that it belonged to everyone, not only the ones who could afford it, despite this being the reality of their society at that time and for as long as they had lived.

  This she was suddenly sure, was the reason for their “disappearance”. A bitter feeling choked her. She stared around, angry, a pretty young woman on a crowded street staring daggers at no one and everyone.

  Of course things were meant to be different now. Even believing this of the government could have consequences for her, but she had to face the truth that even now people who expressed beliefs contrary to national ideals sometimes disappeared and the disappeared sometimes never came back.

  The only reason she was safe at all, she thought, was because of her age. Studying such knowledge was not a crime, only teaching it. Of course this was not official. There were no actual laws against teaching western or controversial ideas, in fact her parents research had been “officially” protected by the arts council. Some protection that had proved to be when they actually needed it.

  Still, if she had to fight, and investigate on her own to find her parents the arts council would be a good place to begin, the only place she could think of to start.

  She finally came back to herself, she’d been shoved to the side of the sidewalk by the crowd that thickened, funnelling into the narrow gates of the Moon Market, she stood now at the mouth of an alley where a black dog sat looking up at her, fur matted with dirt and what looked like ashes, curled fan tail wagging. When she looked at its amber eyes its tongue lolled out and it sneezed once before shaking itself all over, staring at her and panting happily.

  “Cute.” she made a noise acknowledging its presence but, unwilling to actually pet it in its filthy state she moved on, active and passive, letting herself be borne forward by the stream of people in through the painted wood gates into the controlled chaos of the market.