The Silence of Bones

by June Hur

  “In a letter, Lady O expressed her desire to join this troupe. So you must have been close to her. Very close.” My back stiffened as I rushed to add, “I won’t tell anyone about this connection.”

  She laid her elbow on the table, and her eyes watched me with a shocking stillness. “I trust you. I do not wish to be involved in the investigation, Seol. I have enough troubles to keep me up at night.”

  “I understand…” I took in a deep, calming breath. “Mistress, do all Catholics wear a cross pendant?”

  She withdrew her necklace. Hanging from the beaded string was a silver figure of a half-naked man pinned to a cross. “Not all wear this,” she said. “But I wear it to remind myself that knowledge demands change. I cannot live as I used to live now that I have discovered the sacrificial love of our Heavenly Father.”

  “Scholar Ahn wore it. Do you know whether he was Catholic, mistress?”

  “I saw him several times at Catholic gatherings. Sometimes I wondered if he had joined simply to be closer to Lady O, for he seemed disinterested in the teachings and was always stealing glances her way. But one day I noticed him treating Lady O with such coldness, and after that, he stopped attending the gatherings. So I was much surprised when I heard, quite recently, that he was Lady O’s lover. This I did not know.”

  My brows furrowed as I tried to piece things together. If Scholar Ahn had used Catholicism to remain close to Lady O, and perhaps to even regain her trust after abandoning her for over a year, then Lady O might have confided in him about the priest—what he looked like, where he was hiding. Then, when Scholar Ahn had learned of her decision to join the Heretical Virgin Troupe, to end their affair, he must have exposed her secret Catholic belief and her ties with Priest Zhou Wenmo. A thought seized my mind. It is the priest. The priest is the killer’s main target.

  “Have you ever caught a glimpse of Priest Zhou Wenmo before?” I asked.

  Her gaze flinched away from me as she slipped the necklace back into her robe. “I have not. Why do you ask?”

  “The priest can roam our kingdom and no one would know, for I hear he looks like a Joseon person, speaks our language, and the police do not know what he looks like. But if the police caught him—say, someone like Inspector Han—the priest would surely be executed for spreading Catholicism, would he not?”

  “Priest Zhou Wenmo is a subject of China, and so to kill him would be a terrible violation of our vassal relationship. Once he is caught, the police will deport him.”

  A sinking pit opened in my stomach. I had imagined a motive for all the suspects except for Inspector Han. But now I wondered, was Inspector Han searching for the priest in secret because he refused to deport the heretic and wanted to kill him instead? But why?

  “This inspector of yours,” Lady Kang said, raising an eyebrow. “I see you are concerned about him.”

  My breath quickened. “Neh?”

  “It is odd. Why are you so involved in the case of Lady O’s death?”

  My lips opened and closed as I tried to figure out how to answer. I rubbed my hands down my skirt. At last, staring at the floor, I whispered, “I fear him, and I fear what he is capable of.”

  She slowly nodded her head, giving me a silent look, as though she had decided on something. “You, most of all, should fear what he would be willing to do to you.”

  I frowned up at her, and I remembered her warning, about the darkness that would fall upon me. Perhaps she had indeed seen into my future, or perhaps she had seen the sparks of trouble in my character. Overly curious. Cunning. Disobedient.

  “How much shall I tell you about Inspector Han Dohyun?” she asked.

  “Everything,” I answered quickly. “Everything you know, mistress.”

  Silence filled the space. I had to remind myself to keep breathing.

  “Inspector Han’s father was executed for being a Catholic.”

  I blinked. This was my first time hearing this.

  “After the execution, his entire family was banished to an island, guilty by association. They were stripped of their status and left to be slaves. But the late king shortened the banishment from ten years to three, and according to what Inspector Han shared with everyone, when the banishment was lifted, only he returned alive from the island. From which island, I do not know. Later, the inspector’s distant uncle adopted him with much reluctance. Inspector Han’s status as an aristocrat was also reinstated. Of course, this was only possible because the uncle was from his mother’s side.”

  “You mean Lord Han, his uncle.”

  “Precisely. Your inspector severed his legal relationship with his father and took on Lord Han’s surname.”

  “How do you know of all this?” I asked.

  “I heard about the execution all the way in Tŏksan, my hometown. And when I came to the capital, I asked what had happened to the martyr’s family. That is when I learned about Inspector Han’s history.”

  Inspector Han had a Catholic past … This made his connection to the killing even stronger.

  Now I knew why Officer Kyŏn seemed to think he could prove the inspector’s guilt, and why Commander Yi had not rebuked Kyŏn’s suspicion. Inspector Han had all the motive to avenge his family by killing a foreign priest, even if it meant angering China. “I never knew this…”

  “No one likes talking about it. His past is as unspoken of as his own home—the one his family lived in before his father was executed. The new owner of it does not live there. He says it is haunted by the ghost of the original owner, Scholar Jeong.”

  The hair rose on my skin. Jeong. I mentally shook my head. Jeong was also my surname, but surely it was a common one. Another coincidence. I pressed my fingers into my eyes, trying to stop all the what-if questions from resurfacing.

  Jeong Jeong-yun. That was my true name before Older Sister had changed my first name to Seol and had ordered me to never use our last name. All this she had done to protect me from our past. But she had never explained why we had to hide. “What past? What happened?” I’d ask, and she would only shake her head and walk away.

  I also knew this: my surname Jeong meant loyalty, and the first word in my given name, Jeong-yun, also meant loyalty.

  Jeong Jeong-yun! Older Brother’s voice called out to me from a faraway memory in a teasing, loving voice. Jeong Jeong-yun, what a girl full of loyalty.

  FIFTEEN

  IT WAS RAINING still.

  When I was a child, I would have found any excuse to run outside, to laugh and shake in the falling blue rain. But now my heart lay frozen in my chest as I stared at the paper-screened door, watching the sky turn from black to gray.

  Jeong, Jeong, Jeong. The name from my past circled around my mind the way flies swarmed a carcass, attracted to the smell of death. Death was all there was in my past—the death of my given name, the death of my mother on the island of banishment.

  Just like Inspector Han’s family, my family had also been banished for ten years, which had been shortened to three years.

  The coincidences left me nauseous, and there were too many similarities now to ignore.

  Yesterday, after leaving Lady Kang, I’d asked Woorim to be my guide to Inspector Han’s old house, and if she had not forgotten our agreement, she would be waiting for me outside Lady Kang’s mansion gate.

  My curiosity overwhelmed me in such a way that I felt out of control. I could not walk without colliding into walls. I could not will my hands to work. And so I stumbled out of the bureau with my uniform loose—not tightened with a sash belt—and my hair unplaited, hanging down the sides of my face.

  In such a manner, I made my way to the mansion. It was like any other day, yet so different. Nothing seemed real anymore. Nothing made sense.

  As Woorim had promised, she was waiting for me outside the gate, rubbing her hands together against the early morning chill. The moment she saw me, her tiny lips popped open and she came running, her braided hair swinging from side to side. “You came at last. Are you frightened?”<
br />
  I could only stare at her. I’m terrified.

  “When I was younger, I would wander through the forest at night with my siblings and share ghost stories,” she said, excitement animating her whisper. “My heart would race and all the hairs on my skin would rise! Then we would run home screaming. And now to go visit a haunted mansion this early in the morning? It is when spirits are most awake.”

  “I’m sure it is not haunted.”

  “Oh, but it is. All who enter that house start shivering, as though stepping into an icehouse.”

  We traveled together through the rain and the sleeping streets, wearing our straw cloaks and wooden clogs. She chatted on, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I remembered the first day I’d met Inspector Han. When I had first entered the police bureau, thrown before his feet, I’d heard his voice high above me ask, “Have we met before?”

  I had looked him straight in the face, and on seeing a stranger, I’d ducked my head low again. “I’m sorry, sir. I do not think so.” He had never asked that question again, likely thinking himself mistaken.

  But now I wondered … had we met before?

  Woorim and I kept close to the patterned stone walls lining the narrow dirt street the mansion was on, and the street rose with the upward slope of the land, the steepness dragging the breath out of us. We arrived at the end 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 it. And yet there was someone: a woman. Her presence tugged at the stories Older Brother had told me, and as though I’d stepped into one of them, I could feel myself small enough to be held, lying in the arms of the woman under the tree, staring up at the uncomfortable bright light glaring down through green needles. The tree swayed, and I closed my eyes. I caught the smell of fresh pine in the mountain breeze.

  The smell of home.

  A thunderbolt struck my core. This wasn’t a scent that rose from Brother’s tales of our past, but I knew, deep down, that this memory belonged to me. Only me. Stunned into a deep trance, I floated through the hall and out into the courtyard. I floated over the mansion wall and landed somehow. I felt more like a spirit than a body until Woorim grabbed and shook me, her voice breaking into my trance.

  “Did you see him? Did you see the ghost?”

  I think I said, “You need to go home, Woorim.” Then my knees buckled and the next thing I knew, I was holding my head, locking my arms over it so that no one could intrude on my roiling thoughts.

  “You saw something.” Woorim crouched before me. “Don’t worry. I am here with you. Open your eyes and look at me.”

  I opened my eyes, and at first all I saw was Woorim’s face—round and kind. Then I saw a shadowy figure behind her. He wore a black robe. The lower half of his face was covered by a scarf. A bamboo hat shaded the remainder of his countenance.

  “Behind,” I whispered, panic creeping into me. “Behind you.”

  * * *

  Woorim and I stood with our backs against the wall outside the mansion, holding hands.

  “W-what do you want?” she stammered.

  The stranger remained still and silent like a corpse.

  “A-are you lost, sir?”

  I could not see his eyes, but his head was turned toward Woorim. I heard myself wheezing, thinking of the stories about the man in the bamboo hat who had lured Lady O and Scholar Ahn to their deaths. My lungs filled with fear. No, surely not the same man. Thousands of men in our kingdom wore bamboo hats and black robes.

  Taking a deep breath, I stood in front of Woorim, dread trickling into my chest and dripping into my stomach. My voice sounded braver than I felt. “You heard her. Go away. Leave us—”

  His fist hammered into my chest. My head snapped back into the wall. Stars exploded in front of my
eyes. Someone was whimpering. I blinked until my vision cleared and I found myself writhing on the ground, clutching my chest.

  “No,” came Woorim’s quivering voice. “P-please no!”

  I could not move, my limbs locked by white-hot pain; all I could see was what was before me. Woorim’s skirt flapping around her ankles, her feet resisting the forward tug. Why was he taking Woorim and not me? This question flitted by, weightless compared to the desperation balled up in my throat.

  “Help,” was all I managed to say, barely a whisper. “H-help.” This was a neighborhood of many ears. Rescue could not be far.

  But no one came to help, and the stranger dragged Woorim far out of my periphery. Her distant voice continued begging, “No! Oh please, no-no-no!”

  Her terror willed my legs to move. I rose and steadied myself against the wall.

  The stranger had grabbed Woorim’s hair, now wrenching her down the street as she half stumbled and half crawled on her knees. “No-no-no,” she kept stammering, and then she saw something at the corner of the street that I could not see, for she began shaking her head furiously. “A p-palanquin? No! Don’t put me in there! Please!”

  In a desperate attempt, she pulled his wrist down and bit into it. Then she was on her feet again, running toward me. Just like when I had first seen her today, her braided hair swinging from side to side, her tiny lips calling out my name.

  It all happened too quickly. One moment she was reaching out for me, the next moment I heard a whoosh noise as she went hurtling into the stone wall lining the street. There was the loudest thud, an impact so strong I thought I’d heard the cracking of her skull, the snapping of her bones. Then Woorim dropped and lay on the ground, mouth open, eyes staring at me. It came slowly, a stream of blood down from her temple, then all at once, pooling on the ground below her. Sticky blood glistened in her hair as she struggled and crawled toward me. She looked shocked. We were both shocked. We had only meant for this to be a simple excursion to a haunted mansion.

  Footsteps echoed in the distance. Pedestrians. The man in the bamboo hat stared at me for a lingering moment, and then his outstretched fingers seized Woorim’s hair again. The veins in her forehead protruded, her eyes reddened as she grabbed both my hands. “Seol, please help me!”