The Offering

The wind blew gently on your skin. You triple-checked your map, whose letters and notes had become faint in the setting sun. You pulled out your compass, calculated the proper direction, tested the soil for its wetness. With a single, tired sigh, you knelt down: this was the spot.

You took out the materials from your bag: your camping supplies, of course, but also a bunch of cloths, rope, and rolled up paintings. You fashioned a shrine from some rocks stabilized with soil, and bent some trees together to hang the paintings of brightly-clad deities. You laid out bowls, plates, and cups, ready to offer food neatly for the spirits. Your altar was ready.

You were a shaman. Your mother was a shaman, and her mother before her, and so on, tracing your heritage to a single male shaman, long before Silla conquered your ancestral home. Male shamans were rare, and in uncompromisingly Confucian, unforgivingly masculine Joseon, you were about as deviant as Korean society could make you to be. This ritual you were about to do would get you mobbed back in the city.

Especially this ritual — a naerim-gut, meant to call upon the gods themselves. Nobody knew you were studying how to summon spirits, not even your mom and your cousin whose job it was to do these things, and would tell you not to. This is as illegal as it gets for you, so not only were you hiding from the rich despotic scholars of your hometown, but even your family. Hence why you retreated here, deep into closest edge of the Taebaek Mountains.

Why go through all this trouble? Simple: love.

You took a mat and laid it on the ground, ready to take a brief nap, waiting for the right moment just before sunrise.

In your dreams, you found yourself in the middle of a huge crowd, with more people than you ever thought imaginable, inside a building you couldn’t fathom ever being built by the most skilled artisans in Korea or the Middle Kingdom.

Before you, a stage with mysterious pillars of light of various colors, more brilliant than any fire or gem. And on the stage, four figures — dancing and singing some gut you’ve never heard before, with some language you couldn’t understand.

When the lights flashed on their faces, you saw one of them looking directly at you: a beauty of soft features, a thin frame, and the cutest, most mischievous smile. Another light flashed into your eyes, and the dream ended.

You woke up with a jolt. The sun was starting to peek out of the horizon; it was now or never. You hurriedly prepared everything — incense, the food, your costume, and your drum — and started your song.

You allowed yourself to be taken by the moment, the atmosphere; in the mountains, the energy was strongest, and you’d found yourself in your trance much faster than you’ve ever been. You followed your lessons to the letter: how to sing, how to move your feet, how to breathe.

But in the last moments of your ritual, you couldn’t stop yourself from looking back at the dream you had — of the beautiful woman, of the way she smiled at you — and as you ended your dance, you felt your knees buckle from under you. You’d been in your trance for more than half an hour, having apparently gone through the whole dance twice.

You sat and fanned yourself down, taking off the hat and the outer robes. You were sweating profusely, downing the last of your first container of water. You waited for about an hour, until some of the fruits began to draw in flies. You needed to consume this now, and what was astonishingly way too much for one man to handle, you drifted off to sleep.

This time, you dreamt you were inside a metal carriage. It was huge with no windows, and seats that belonged in a palace (though with an abhorrent color such as it had, it probably shouldn’t). And the air was freezing and dry, more so than any winter wind, though not so much that you felt yourself in danger.

And then you saw her.

Just like earlier, there were four of them, each distinguishable by different hairstyles. Each had some aspect of beauty that you couldn’t describe; even one of them, who — you couldn’t quite explain how you knew — barely looked Korean, still had soft, beautiful features (and great hair!).

But there was, among all of them, her, the one who locked eyes with you last time. Being so up close to her you could see more of the details on her face: the softness of her cheeks, the smoothness of her skin. She wore a thick-looking top, unlike the clothing anyone in your village would wear, which covered up all but her bare legs. You averted your gaze once you noticed, but it was too late — suddenly she looked at you, puzzled.

She tilted her head, and you felt your vision start to spin. She appeared to reach out and tell you something, but all you caught was the first few words:

“I’ll be right there—”

When you woke up, you looked around you. The cicadas were deafeningly loud, though not any louder than they had already been. The moon sat high in the sky, birds and bats flitting about. The forest was still dark, the soil on your feet still cold. You came to the disappointing conclusion: your ritual was a failure.

You felt dejected. Terrified, even, of the consequences of having been gone for a whole three whole nights, unless you made it back home on time later. But you breathed a sigh of relief, since the land before you had no men to catch you, and your little “experiment” was just that: a failed one that yielded no results.

You began the trek home. It was definitely a lot more dangerous to be doing this at night with your stuff, but what could you do? By the time you made it back to the edge of the village, the sun was high in the sky.

Throughout your trek, however, you felt something different about you. At first it sounded like the brush rustling about a lot more, which you chalked up to be wild animals that, at best, had followed you out of curiosity. But when you arrived to the open roads, the feeling remained, this time as if eyes glared at you from far away. Perhaps it was your paranoia.

And then, when you got to your village, the feeling was uncanny, as if someone was practically behind you. You kept looking around, puzzled and distraught, only to find nothing. The longer you were out in the open with so much stuff, the more people would question why, so you went for your house as fast as you could.

You dropped the bags inside your house, before you heard someone call out from outside.

“Son,” your mother called out.

“Greetings, eomeoni,” you bowed.

She stopped in her tracks before she got to you. She scanned you from head to toe, then tried to glance behind you. You looked with her to find nothing.

“Did you do a ritual recently?,” she asked

You scratched your head. “Was it obvious?”

“Son, you smell like you came from the spirit world. And you’re so dirty! You went to the mountains, didn’t you?”

“Well, not all the way, so can you really say I did?,” you laughed awkwardly.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky I have no problem with it. But tell no one. And burn your clothes.”

“But eomeoni, I like—”

“I said burn it!,” she insisted. “You don’t want anything unwanted from outside into your home.” She walked away.

Well, so much for secrecy, but you still got away with it, all things considered.

“Bring home something unwanted,” your mother said. Ominous, but… could that happen?

You started shedding off your clothes to dry. No point burning it if it was still drenched in sweat. You checked it all: your coat and pants, the coat and pants from your costume, and your slippers. Now you were naked, behind the closed doors of your house.

“Huh.”

You turned to the direction of the utterance. Suddenly, you saw a woman stand in the shadows. Your heart raced; she didn’t glow, nor did the world seem to have stopped. It was just you and whatever the hell was in front of you.

In your undergarments, you grabbed the nearest stick you could find, before she walked forward to show her face.

Whatever she was, she wore strange clothing. She appeared to wear a hanbok, yes, but the designs were all weird, in a way you couldn’t describe, other than lines and flowers that weren’t usual for this part of Korea. And the way it was cut, spirits bless you, was atrocious: exposing her bare abdomen, and her legs! Worst of all, her hair — completely undone, with a foreign, impossible color highlighting the front of it.

Truly, you remarked, this had to be a demon.

“What are you?!,” you cried out.

The woman scoffed. “That’s not how this works, my guy.” Her accent was foreign, definitely not from here. Nor was it even Korean, making you all the more confused how you understood her.

“H-how can I understand you? That wasn’t Korean.”

“I don’t fuckin’ know,” she shrugged. Your heart raced at her vulgarity, such irreverent and foul language!

You started to pace towards the door. “Stay back! Or I’ll-I’ll exorcise you, demon!”

“Demon? Excuse you, I am no lesser spirit,” she raised an eyebrow. “I’m the spirit you called for. How dare you question me?”

“T-that’s impossible,” you gasped. “I called for a spirit to give me assistance to find a partner, not some whore—”