There’s something in this school. From her first day at work, she could sense it. Sadly, Eun-young was not your ordinary school nurse. She always carried in her handbag a BB gun and a rainbow-colored toy knife that extended from a funnel-shaped sheath. Why does a mentally sound woman in her thirties have to carry these things around? It upsets me to have to do it, but there’s no other way. Actually, I do it because I’m not mentally sound. Ahn Eun-young, laidback school nurse at M— private high school, teasingly called “A-neun hyeong” (the “knowledgeable type”) by her friends, had the power to see and fight invisible things.
When did it all start—should we say right from the beginning? Eun-young knew her world was different from others’ early on. She began to clearly recognize it when she was ten. Her mother had bought a house for much lower than market price and was excited to tear down a kitchen wall for remodeling, but Eun-young had strongly objected. The structure is nice as it is. If you put up new wallpaper or worse, create a lot of bother tearing things down here and there and remodeling, I’ll go and live with Dad, she threatened. There was a woman in the walls whose face was a little careworn but kind. It was better if her mom didn’t know anything about these things. When ten-year-old Eun-young sat at the table eating her cereal and milk, the woman in the walls would look down at her, quietly smiling, which was fine because there was no hostility in her gaze. People like Eun-young have to develop a sense of whether something is hostile or not from an early age.
It wasn’t just dead people she saw. Living people made things, and they looked even creepier. For example, the naked figures that floated around the school, filling the air. Oh, how I hate teenage kids. When no one was looking, swish, swish, she swung her knife at the students’ erotic fantasies and drove them away. They’re so young, and their predilections are already so diverse. So what she was really seeing was a kind of ectoplasm, the cohesive form taken by tiny undiscovered particles emitted from dead and living things. The pale, jelly-like blobs differed in viscosity according to type and life stage. Surprisingly, dead things did not cohere well. Living things were the problem—the onset of secondary sexual characteristics was nasty and repulsive.
Animated by Eun-young’s spirit alone, the toy knife and gun could fight the jelly-like blobs. The BB gun was good for twenty-two rounds a day and the plastic knife for fifteen minutes of use. In addition, if she had an Egyptian Ankh cross and Turkish Evil Eye, a rosary from the Vatican and prayer beads from Buseoksa Temple, and an amulet from a Shinto shrine in Kyoto, then these could be extended to twenty-eight rounds and nineteen minutes. The school nurse’s life revolved around totems like these.
She’d been at a university hospital until a few years ago. She wasn’t a professional exorcist, and she had to make a living somehow. Even though she hadn’t made the cutoff, she was admitted to nursing college and had stayed with the hospital continuously. Hospital or school, it was the same: They all teemed with spirits. Why did I choose to become a nurse? No, no. People don’t really choose their jobs—their jobs choose them. I believe this more as the years go by. She disliked terms such as “vocation” at their essence, so she didn’t think of herself as accepting or taking on a job. Rather, she thought of herself as having given up on living an easy life from the outset. She’d only worked the tough units at the hospital, and she’d been even more worn down than she was now. After a few years, she could no longer handle the long dragged-out fights in the corridor at daybreak. She then decided to make use of the school nurse certification she’d attained at university. If the choice was between horror and porn, naturally she’d take porn.
But at this school, quite apart from the porn jelly blobs, there is something bad pricking into the students’ necks. And I felt a strange dampness the moment I set foot here. I guess I’m bound to this destiny.
With the BB gun and toy knife tucked behind her back under her coat, Eun-young left the health room.
Translated by Kari Schenk