As I listened to Seo Jihyeok grumble about the design of Jujak-dong, I suddenly thought back on my own swimming ability. Surely there wouldn’t be some situation where we had to escape a leaking undersea base by swimming, right? I wasn’t exactly a strong swimmer.
“Mr. Seo Jihyeok, are you good at swimming?”
At my question, Seo Jihyeok answered in a voice brimming with confidence.
“Back in the day, I was famous as the seal of Suncheon.”
At that, Sin Haeryang, who had been walking beside us, suddenly let out a small snort of laughter. Seeing that, Seo Jihyeok grinned sheepishly and said,
“It’s a little embarrassing saying that next to our team leader. To be honest, I wasn’t a seal. I was more of a diving beetle.”
At the silly joke, Yu Geum and I also smiled faintly.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m good at swimming.”
“What about anything else?”
“It means I’m only good at swimming.”
Yu Geum suddenly sighed as if she were about to deflate.
“That’s still something. I quit while learning the butterfly, so I can barely do freestyle and backstroke. They say swimming in the sea and swimming in a pool are worlds apart. I’ve never even tried ocean swimming.”
Seo Jihyeok mimicked Yu Geum’s tone.
“That’s still something. You just swim the same way. It’s not hard.”
Sin Haeryang, who had been listening quietly to the conversation, asked me, who had also only been listening.
“Can you swim?”
I answered without thinking.
“Yes.”
“Then that’s enough.”
Was that the end of the conversation? Unease washed over me at Sin Haeryang’s words. We were currently three kilometers beneath the sea; just how good at swimming did you have to be to escape from here?
“How good do I need to be?”
“Good enough to move forward without sinking.”
“Oh, I can do that much.”
“Then you’ll be fine.”
“Can you swim, Mr. Sin Haeryang?”
“Yes.”
“How good are you?”
“Good enough not to sink.”
“Then you’ll be fine too.”
Seo Jihyeok, who had been watching our loose-screw conversation, looked utterly dumbfounded.
“Team Leader, you do freediving. What do you mean, good enough not to sink? You sink on purpose. He’s the kind of person who goes down to a depth of a hundred meters on one breath. He’s not human.”
“You just said he wasn’t human and that he was human at the same time. Which is it?”
At my question, Seo Jihyeok placed a hand lightly on Sin Haeryang’s shoulder and snickered.
“Both.”
As I listened to Seo Jihyeok chatter while we walked at a near-marching pace, I eventually became so out of breath that I couldn’t speak. Come to think of it, less than an hour had passed since I woke up, and all I had done was walk or run nonstop. Seo Jihyeok and Yu Geum kept talking endlessly about Cheongnyong-dong, and I could only envy their stamina.
“I’m just asking because I’m curious.”
At Yu Geum’s question, Sin Haeryang answered briefly.
“Yes.”
“Why do the engineers use both Cheongnyong-dong and Baekho-dong?”
Hyeonmu-dong to the north was used by the personnel working in mining. Jujak-dong to the south was exclusively for researchers, Cheongnyong-dong to the east was exclusively for engineers, and Baekho-dong to the west was used by people in other specialized occupations. At Yu Geum’s question, Sin Haeryang thought for a moment before saying,
“In the early days, when the undersea base was being built, there were far more engineers than there are now.”
At Sin Haeryang’s words, Seo Jihyeok began to laugh. It seemed that wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t the whole answer. Now that I thought about it, the Korean and Russian teams were in Baekho-dong, while the other engineering teams were in Cheongnyong-dong. Was there a reason they had to live separately? Seo Jihyeok had the look of a man who would fall ill if he couldn’t tell the story, so Sin Haeryang waved a hand as if to say, do whatever you want. Seo Jihyeok immediately said to Yu Geum,
“That’s because when they first assigned the rooms, there were quite a lot of people, and the Chinese threw a fit saying that no matter where they slept, they absolutely refused to sleep in Hyeonmu-dong.”
“Why?”
“Something about the north being associated with death. On top of that, they said the front rooms in Cheongnyong-dong, from Room 1 to Room 30, were the Ghost Gate or whatever. I don’t know if they received some oracle or all got their fortunes told together, but the Hong Kong and Taiwan teams and the Japanese team all raised hell, saying they wouldn’t stay there.”
I was dumbfounded by the sight of people believing in superstition in the twenty-first century, when we were practically approaching the twenty-second. Weren’t they engineers? After the researchers, weren’t they the people here with the most scientific knowledge? Even as I wheezed while walking, I was so baffled that I caught my breath and asked,
“They said they wouldn’t use the dorms because of feng shui?”
At my words, Seo Jihyeok nodded vigorously.
“Ridiculous, right? When the southern building was named Jujak-dong and they said they were going to paint several parts of Jujak-dong red, the Chinese teams started throwing a tantrum at the researchers, demanding they hand over the research building dorms. Of course, the researchers said no. The dorms in Jujak-dong are right next to the research center, and since they were actually built last, they’re a little more spacious than the other buildings. Do you think the researchers would just meekly give up rooms like that because Chinese engineers demanded them?”
“Of course not!”
Yu Geum shouted. Seo Jihyeok nodded in agreement with her and continued.
“Baekho-dong is where the staff who aren’t engineers or mining crew stay, so there are quite a few empty rooms. When they told them, if you don’t like Cheongnyong-dong, then get lost to the empty rooms in Baekho-dong, they said Baekho-dong’s later-numbered rooms, from around Room 60 to Room 80, were the Second Ghost Gate or something, so that was a bad place too. The Chinese raised such a fuss about absolutely refusing to use them as dorms that the Russians, who said they liked tucked-away corners, ended up sleeping there.”
So that was why the Russian engineers were using Baekho-dong.
“What they wanted was either the bright-red, spacious, newly built dorms in Jujak-dong, or rooms in Cheongnyong-dong between Room 70 and Room 80, which were close to Jujak-dong and far from the Ghost Gate. Originally, they wanted Room 8 and Room 88, but since those were apparently bad in feng shui terms, they wanted those rooms as their next-best option. But those rooms had already been unpacked by the New Zealand team, who had arrived first. Do you know what they did then?”
“What did they do?”
This was fascinating. Even if I was panting for breath, there was no topic more entertaining than real estate, money, and superstition. When Yu Geum asked with sparkling eyes, Seo Jihyeok answered triumphantly.
“When the New Zealand team went off to work, the Chinese team kids forced the doors open using the emergency override, moved their luggage out, and took over the rooms.”
“Good grief. Did the New Zealand team not protest?”
At my question, Seo Jihyeok’s eyes shone.
“Of course they did. Do you know how they settled that?”
“How?”
“Money. They gave them money. They were practically scattering fistfuls of dollars. I don’t know how much they handed over, but judging by how those guys abandoned unpacking and started drinking, it couldn’t have been just a small sum. That was when I found out Haiyun was that rich.”
When Yu Geum and I laughed in disbelief, Seo Jihyeok spoke as if the memory gave him a headache.
“When you hear it as a third party, it’s all very fun and exciting, right? But if this kind of nonsense happened once or twice a year, maybe you could laugh, curse, and move on. When weird things like this happen every day, that becomes stress too.”
I thought of my room in the Baekho-dong dorms. By now, it must be completely underwater. I had only used it for five days, but it hadn’t been bad. I hoped no one from Room 1 to Room 37 had been there and that they had all escaped safely. Come to think of it, Sin Haeryang had said he was in Baekho-dong Room 22.
“Then why does the Korean team live in Baekho-dong?”
“There’s a long story behind that.”
“Let’s save that story for later.”
I had been chatting with Seo Jihyeok, but when I turned my head, I saw Sin Haeryang’s profile. Sin Haeryang was looking at the floor, and before I knew it, I had lowered my gaze to the floor as well and closed my mouth. Drops of blood continuing down the corridor led toward the laundry room.
If you went around behind the laundry room, you reached the escape vessel right away. Like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs to find their way, the drops of blood connected to the laundry room. It seemed like someone had gone in there, or was asking us to come. Watching Sin Haeryang’s back as he headed toward the laundry room, every thriller movie I had ever seen suddenly began flashing through my mind. So I quietly asked in a low voice,
“Isn’t it a trap? The drops of blood were left like that.”
I could hear Yu Geum swallow her breath. Sin Haeryang shook his head.
“If it were, the shape of the blood drops would be different.”
Could the shape of blood drops be different? Didn’t they all look the same once they fell? As if he had no intention of explaining further, Sin Haeryang stood near the laundry room door. While the dorm room doors slid in and out like sliding doors, the other doors parted to the left and right from the center, like subway doors. They opened and closed using motion-detection sensors, and Seo Jihyeok stood at a precise distance of several centimeters from that sensor, then waved at Yu Geum and me, who were farther away, telling us to step back even farther.
Once we had moved far enough from the laundry room for Seo Jihyeok to consider it safe, he let the motion sensor detect the tip of his finger and made the door open. Two seconds after the door opened, Sin Haeryang went in, and Seo Jihyeok followed right after. The open door closed. Then it was quiet.
Even after several minutes passed, the laundry room did not spit anyone back out. Yu Geum and I waited for the two of them in the empty corridor.
The corridor was silent. It felt as if time had stopped. Waiting was the thing I hated most. The moment you become the one waiting, even time that would normally vanish in an instant slows down by more than tenfold. I think the theory of relativity is wrong. It isn’t gravitational fields that slow the flow of time, but waiting. I was a little frightened, and while trying my best to hide it, I asked Yu Geum,
“Do you think we can go in too?”
“Why aren’t they coming out?”
Yu Geum and I were throwing anxious questions at each other, but when they still didn’t come out after more time passed, I couldn’t bear the unease anymore and said,
“Geum, you stay here. I’ll go check.”
“What are you talking about? If we’re going, we go together.”
“What if even you can’t get out of the laundry room?”
“Then are you telling me to stay in this corridor alone?”
It seemed that, to Yu Geum, the quiet corridor with drops of blood fallen on the floor was scarier than the laundry room where people went in and didn’t come out. …It was scary. When I opened the laundry room door and carefully tried to go in, Yu Geum followed behind me. I stepped inside while trying hard not to tread on the bloodstains on the floor, and once I entered the laundry room, I saw that long handprints in blood had been smeared across the walls as well.