Chương 13: The Golden Dawn

Kichan didn't throw the envelope away. More accurately, he couldn't. The pay-as-you-throw trash bag under the kitchen sink sat there with its mouth open. Onion skins, coffee grounds, and the plastic wrapper from the grilled fish they'd had for lunch were pressed down to one side. It felt like all he had to do was toss it in and tie the bag shut. From far away, it looked like trash. Up close, it still looked like trash.

But while he stood in front of the sink with the envelope in hand, the sprout-mark on his fingertips quietly grew hot. It wasn't like he heard a voice telling him not to tear it. These days, Kichan had decided not to take every voice in his head at face value. Still, the moment he bent his fingers to rip the paper, something caught in the back of his throat like the breath you hold right before singing. Pressure before sound.

The kind of sensation your body recognizes first, the certainty that you should not let it out. In the end, Kichan couldn't tear the envelope. Instead, he took out the zip bag left over from portioning frozen dumplings. He put the white envelope inside it, then sealed that inside another zip bag.

Even that didn't make him feel safe, so he emptied the very bottom of the drawer where they kept ramen, shoved the envelope all the way down, then covered it with Shin Ramyun, Chapagetti, and the lid from an old cup noodle. The second he shut the drawer, he let out a long breath.

"I am seriously doing every ridiculous thing a person can do." A tiny metallic sound came from above the front door. Dust twitched one of its wire legs. Its little body still looked pathetic. Coin fragments, a snapped piece of guitar string, something that looked like the head of a screw torn off from somewhere—everything was clumsily stuck together. Whenever the motion sensor light by the entrance flicked off and on, the scratches on its body flashed for an instant.

And yet the simple fact that this pitiful thing was sitting above the door meant Kichan could at least catch a little sleep at night. He didn't like that. The things a person should be able to rely on in life were supposed to be family, friends, a paycheck, maybe a savings account. At the very least, not a wire bug clinging to the top of the front door. But disliking it didn't make it useless. Starting the next day, Kichan began sending Dust and the other little things outside a bit at a time.

At first, only as far as the hallway in front of the apartment. Dust made it to the crack by the elevator doors, then nearly got sucked inside the moment they opened. Sitting in his room, Kichan felt his heart drop straight through the floor. He yanked hard on the thread of sensation connecting them, and Dust rolled back across the hallway. After that came the ground-floor entrance.

Then the recycling station, the corner of the parking lot, the crosswalk on the main road his father used on the way home, even the entrance of the grocery store his mother stopped by often. Little by little, the range widened. The little things couldn't go far. They had no battery, and strictly speaking, they weren't alive. They were closer to objects moving by clinging to the sense Kichan had left inside them, a tiny memory of metal, and the direction that told them how to return.

Their vision was blurry, and they picked up sounds wrong. Still, there were things they could find out. How many times the same black car circled the apartment complex. How many minutes a strange man stood under a streetlight pretending to take a phone call. Whether a woman had started to follow his mother into the market, then stopped. Whether his father looked back more times than usual on the walk home. The little things came back carrying traces like that. Of course, not in anything as neat as a report.

On the first day, Dust came back with a receipt someone had dropped in front of a convenience store. Kichan unfolded it and pressed at the bridge of his nose. Triangle kimbap. Banana milk. Razor.

"Why did you bring me this?" Dust twitched a wire leg. No answer. On the second day, what showed up on his desk was dirt that had fallen off from the underside of a black sedan. On the third, it was a cigarette butt someone had tossed away. Kichan put on plastic gloves, picked it up, and took a moment to wonder how exactly his life had rolled downhill to the point where he was examining somebody else's cigarette butt like a piece of evidence.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. On the fourth night, Dust came back carrying a torn scrap of flyer from the mailbox area. The moment Kichan saw it, his fingertips stopped. The flyer itself was ordinary. Discount fried chicken, a new pilates studio, used air conditioner buyback. That sort of thing was layered over it at random. But one small symbol stamped into the corner caught his eye.

It wasn't exactly the same as the symbol on the paper inside the envelope. Kichan locked his bedroom door and turned on his computer. The first thing he typed into the search bar was the Voynich manuscript. Then the Rohonc copy, the Soyga manuscript, the Loagaeth manuscript. When the Korean search results ran dry, he switched to English, and when the English pages ran out, he even dug through half-broken blogs mangled by auto-translation.

Antiquarian book forums, occult message boards, caches of deleted posts, websites so ridiculous they had to be jokes—throughout the night they flickered across his monitor and vanished. There were too many results, and most of them were useless. Tarot card lectures, meditation class ads, endless comments from people pretending to be Western magicians, video titles inflated into nonsense for clicks. By the third search term, Kichan was already exhausted.

"Why do these people write everything so uselessly long?" Even so, his hand didn't stop. While his index finger rolled the mouse wheel down, the tip of it suddenly grew hot over one old webpage. The name of an old organization. A reading society. An archive of documents. London. And one comment underneath it. `The Golden Dawn fears those chosen by books more than those who merely read them. ` Even with the machine translation twisting the sentence into something odd, the meaning came through clearly.

People who were read by books. Kichan didn't like the phrase. All the strange things he had been dealing with lately kept shoving the person to the back. First the document, then the book, and he himself got dragged along behind them. That was the part he hated most. He opened the ramen drawer again. The white envelope sat quietly inside its zip bags. That made him feel even worse. If it were really just a worthless piece of paper, it wouldn't be scraping at a person's nerves like this.

Kichan set the envelope on his desk and stared at it for a long time. Out in the living room, his mother was watching a drama, and every now and then his father laughed softly. The rice cooker gave off the faint smell of rice sitting on keep-warm. It was too normal a smell. Then his phone buzzed. Unknown number. Kichan didn't pick up. A text came a moment later. `Stop searching. ` Kichan slowly lifted his head. His room was quiet.

Old-fashioned British sentences glowed faintly on the monitor, and the torn flyer scrap Dust had brought back lay dried out on one corner of the desk. Dust itself didn't move above the front door. Another text came in. `The name you are currently approaching invites unnecessary risk to you and your family. ` Family. Kichan's fingers stopped on that word. He looked toward the living room.

His mother was laughing along with a line from the drama, and his father was holding the remote, timing when to change the channel. Those two still believed this was an ordinary house. If possible, Kichan wanted to believe that too. Which only made him angrier. He picked up his phone. `I don't want to. ` Send. The reply didn't take long. `You have chosen to place yourself in direct conflict with the Golden Dawn. ` Only then did Kichan really look at the name. The Golden Dawn.

The letters shone coldly like old metal. Not to his eyes—his fingertips felt them that way. He shoved his chair back and stood up. From beneath the drawer, he pulled out the iron rod. The thing he still hadn't named. The rust had diminished a little, and the grip had changed to fit his hand, but to anyone else it still looked like exactly what it was: some iron bar he'd picked up somewhere.

"You took that out again?" His father's voice came from the bedroom doorway. Reflexively, Kichan shoved the iron rod under the desk. Too late. His father had already seen it. The door was half open, and the hallway light stretched long across the floor. His father swept his gaze across the room. On the desk lay the torn flyer fragment, cotton swabs, tiny screws, and scraps of metal with no obvious purpose. An English page was open on the monitor, and Dust clung to the ceiling molding near the window.

The instant Dust looked like it might move, Kichan threatened it silently with his eyes. Thankfully, Dust stayed still.

"If you carry that around, the police will grab you first."

"I'm not carrying it around."

"Keeping it in your room is weird too."

"The world's a little dangerous these days." Kichan tried to force a laugh, but it died at the corner of his mouth. His father didn't come any closer. Instead, he rested a hand on the doorframe and looked at Kichan for a long moment. There was worry in that gaze, but suspicion too. The face of a man who wanted to know what his son had gotten caught up in, yet was being careful because pressing now might only drive him farther away. Kichan couldn't hold that look for long.

"Don't make it sharp." His father said it simply. Kichan looked up.

"What?"

"If you start trying to hurt people with it, you'll get hurt too." The words were short. But they carried the way his father had lived his whole life. If a fight started, it was better to avoid it. If you absolutely had to stop something, stop it—but don't try to take it to the end. It wasn't just don't hurt people. It was don't cross the line you can't come back from. Kichan took his hand off the iron rod.

"Okay." His father stood there a little longer, then closed the door behind him. The hallway light vanished, leaving only the blue glow of the monitor in the room. Kichan couldn't move for a while. Don't make it sharp. For some reason, the words stayed with him. Only after a long time did he get up from his chair. He locked the door and spread a towel on the floor. When he set the iron rod on top of it, a faint rust smell rose up. To anyone outside, it was discarded metal.

Rain-roughened on the surface, slightly bent at one end where it had hit something. But the moment his fingertips touched it, he caught the hollow places inside. It wasn't empty so much as broken through in spots. After being used carelessly and thrown away for so long, the directions that had once borne weight had split apart however they pleased. When he pulled, it creaked. When he pressed inward, tiny pockets of resistance rose from inside the metal. Kichan steadied his breathing and laid his palm on it.

A little denser. A little heavier. But not sharp.