The pitch-black color of the sea beyond the glass front of the elevator had now changed to something closer to deep navy. The people trapped inside the elevator, which was less than ten pyeong, were exhausted from trembling in fear, and seemed to be clinging to the fact that the elevator was rising as their only hope. But the higher the elevator went, the more uneasy I became. It felt as though a deadline I had put off because there was still time was now slowly creeping right up to my nose.
How was I supposed to tell them that members of the Infinite Church were armed and occupying Undersea Bases One, Two, and Three? The people who knew some of the details because they had heard bits and pieces from me were silent. Once we got out of the elevator, there might be armed people gathered outside. Since Kanu was with us, they wouldn’t kill us, right? Would they kill one of their own believers? I couldn’t be sure. What if everyone except Kanu got killed?
Yugeum suddenly asked Kanu a question, and I flinched inwardly.
“Are there people who, like Mr. Kanu, want to go back to a very distant past? From what I’ve heard people say, they don’t seem to be thinking of going that far back.”
Nzadi Kanu scratched his chin, furrowed his brow, and thought for a few seconds before speaking.
“A few years ago, when the believers gathered like an alcoholics’ support group and talked, I did pick up a few things. There were people who said they wanted to go back to before their child died, or before their spouse passed away. I don’t know if there’s anyone else like me.”
“How desperate do you think those people would be?”
Extremely desperate, Geum-ssi. They’re so insane they’re armed with guns and shooting wildly at unarmed people.
“Hard to say.”
Kanu muttered the words in a low voice, then rubbed the back of his neck and thought before continuing.
“The people who join a religion like this are the kind of bastards who have a past they want to return to, no matter what they have to do. If they’re told they can go back to that exact date, there are people who’d offer up everything they own, and even if they had to carve off someone else’s blood and flesh as an offering on top of that, they’d still want to go back. The ones who bought the wrong stocks, futures, coins, or whatever would bring anything they could if it meant turning time back to one minute before settlement. This might sound like an excuse, but I’m actually one of the less desperate ones. I’m not trying to go back because someone close to me died or because of money.”
Then Kanu shrugged. Yugeum pondered for a moment, then asked again.
“If someone gained the ability to go back to the past, just as you said, Mr. Kanu, and if that person was in here, what would be the best thing for us to do? Could we ride along and go back to the past with them?”
……Geum-ssi. Isn’t that a question that’s way too easy to misunderstand? Is it all right to ask that so openly? Kanu or the others might misunderstand you.
I was so startled by the question that I barely managed to suppress the urge to cut Yugeum off. I was terrified and trembling inside, but Yugeum herself, the one who had asked it, was very calm. Besides, Yugeum hadn’t asked those questions while looking at me. If anything, she showed enough composure to glance once each at Benjamin and Carter in turn before asking.
I didn’t know whether Yugeum’s strategy had worked or not, but Kanu thought deeply for a moment, then looked at the people sitting in the elevator and said,
“I don’t know. ……If there is someone like that, shouldn’t we kill them as quickly as possible? That way, when that person goes back to the past, everything we went through can be made as if it never happened.”
If I get found out, I’ll become a corpse on the spot. ……Damn it.
Yugeum let out an “Mm” and sank back into thought. Emma, curled up in the corner, spoke to Kanu in a voice like a mosquito.
“Going back to the past is impossible.”
“Why?”
When Kanu asked indifferently, Emma pressed her fingers over her eyes with a weary hand and said,
“You can’t go back because the past has already been determined. It’s the same reason we can’t time travel. You can’t return from the present to the past. It’s none of my business what you spend your money on, but I’m telling you because it seems like you’re being fooled by that cult. ……Is there really no one here who majored in physics?”
No one answered. Whether they didn’t want to answer, or there really was no one who had majored in physics, I couldn’t tell. From the corner, Carter sneered at Emma and said,
“Says the one who believes in some demon bastard called Dagon or whatever.”
It seemed Emma could no longer tolerate Carter’s existence. She lifted her heavy eyelids and glared at him. Since she was wearing black long-sleeved clothes on both top and bottom, when she was curled up, she looked like a black box; but when she unfolded her bent body wide and stood, there was an optical illusion of her stretching and growing larger from top to bottom.
With her disheveled hair and her head tilted sideways until her neck formed a right angle, she began silently glaring at her opponent, and she looked exactly like something out of a horror movie. Everything that made up Emma was black, and among it all, only the whites of her eyes were bright. When Carter saw sparks flying fiercely from Emma’s bloodshot eyes, the smile he had been wearing at the corners of his mouth disappeared.
A woman about 170 centimeters tall, expressionless, was holding a stainless-steel flashlight upside down and silently glaring at him without even blinking. It was enough to make me imagine that she might smash Carter’s head open with the thing in her hand at any moment. When Emma, harboring a madness that seemed to have no upper or lower limit, took one step forward, Carter hurriedly said to her,
“You could believe in Dagon! Of course. People believe in the bogeyman, Baba Yaga, and the tooth fairy too! Naturally, a water-dwelling elf is perfectly believable! I think I judged too hastily!”
Without changing expression, Emma swung the flashlight through the empty air. It made a whooshing sound. My younger sibling had said that if I was going to use one anyway, I should use a good one, and bought an expensive one. If things got desperate, I could use that as a weapon too.
Emma stood there glaring at Carter for a while, until Carter was the first to slowly turn his head away. Emma stood for a few more seconds, then slowly returned to her original spot and folded her body back up piece by piece.
……I do think the tooth fairy who takes old teeth and brings new ones was probably a parent or a dentist in that era. But in this elevator, Emma almost became that fairy. I wasn’t sure about the other fairies Carter mentioned. If the tooth fairy had exchanged all the teeth I’d pulled as a dentist for money, I might have made a tidy profit. I smiled inwardly at the silly thought, then looked at Emma, who had returned to where she’d been.
I understood Emma’s opinion that, scientifically, it was impossible to return from the present to the past. But still, if one could go back to the past and live again. After worrying over it, I thought, When else, and to whom, will I be able to ask a question like this again? So I asked Emma.
“Then is repeating a set period of time impossible too?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like that story about the Haitian man Mr. Kanu mentioned. Could someone go back only half a day or so into the past and repeat it?”
“Ha. ……Time isn’t something that can break, so how would it repeat? Once we get out of here, try taking a basic physics class or something.”
Emma spoke as if she pitied my intelligence. The physics theories I knew were stuck at the level of: if you drop a probe—an explorer, the dental tool—from your hand, it falls to the floor, so you have to take out another one; or the strength to climb stairs comes not from stamina but from sheer grit.
True. Time isn’t broken, so how would it repeat? Is that how it works scientifically? Am I worrying over nothing for no reason? ……In reality, there might not be anyone out there. There might be no armed people outside the elevator, and the Infinite Church wandering around with weapons might be some violent fragment of a dream reflecting my action-movie subconscious. Maybe because I really hated Deep Blue’s interior design, my brain ended up creating a fake religion by cobbling together things about blind sharks.
But if I really did go to the past and come back. If the elevator reaches the first floor and the doors open, and bullets start pouring in, blood splatters, people die—what then?
Could these people, with their cohesion as crumbly as bean powder, stop or defeat members of an armed religious group?
The way I saw it, unless the other side was distracted by something else, or drunk out of their minds, or the distance between us and them was so close that we could easily snatch their guns away, unless the other side was an absolute mess, there was no way we could win.
On top of that, the only weapons we had were an axe and a flashlight(?). Maybe we could keep fighting among ourselves and beat one another up, but even if there was an enemy outside, could we fight together against them?
My vision suddenly went pitch black, and I was so startled I nearly jumped. It seemed I had been more frightened than I thought. Someone who had sensed my movement reached a hand toward me. In the faint darkness, that hand mercifully patted my back, then stroked firmly downward. It was only someone stroking my back, but I felt a lump rise in my throat, my eyes growing hot, and a sense of stability whose weight I couldn’t measure. Kim Gayoung slowly said to me,
“Muhyeon-ssi. It’s scary being in an elevator when the power keeps going out, isn’t it?”
The words I’ve already been in one before rose all the way to my throat, but I barely swallowed them. Kim Gayoung seemed to think I was scared because of the elevator blackout. Or else she was letting the people around us think that.
……What I was worried about was something else, but even having gone through it once didn’t make it something you got used to. A small hand flailing in the air beside me tapped my shoulder lightly. From this direction, was it Yugeum?
Kim Gayoung spoke like an office worker who had attained enlightenment about worldly affairs.
“We can’t predict and avoid everything that happens while we’re living in this world. We just live by doing our best at what we can do. Don’t worry too much about the future. Well, it’s not as if worrying or being scared will make a stopped elevator move properly, or make more salary come in.”
Kim Gayoung’s tone sounded a little as though she had reached nirvana. Was it because her workplace was being destroyed in real time that she was becoming detached from life and living too? I let out a deep sigh and tried to relax my rigid body.
When the shootout happened, there had at least been jewels or a sturdy stand capable of supporting the weight of jewels to use as cover from the bullets. As Baek Aeyoung had said, there would be nothing around the elevator that could shield us from an outside attack. I was suddenly a little surprised that I was thinking like Baek Aeyoung or Seo Jihyeok. Was it because I had seen and learned things while being with them?
But even if we reached the first floor, if we didn’t come out of the elevator—if we used the elevator doors as a shield—wouldn’t they be able to block bullets to some extent? Just like in Cheongnyong-dong, the elevator doors were incredibly thick.
A blue, azure sea came into view.