Chương 15: Rain in London

London was overcast. Maybe it felt grayer because he'd come here with expectations he didn't want to admit to. The moment the airplane door opened, the air felt different from Korea's. It wasn't warm, and it wasn't exactly cold either, but it chilled the tip of his nose first. The people waiting at immigration shuffled forward with tired faces, and the English sentences on the signs passed right by him as if they were the most natural thing in the world. Kichan moved along with the line, passport in hand.

The backpack on his shoulders wasn't heavy. The real problem was the equipment bag he was carrying. The wake-up rod was inside it. He still couldn't quite believe that one solid iron bar had made it through a Korean airport, into an airplane cargo hold, and all the way to a British airport without incident. He wasn't sure whether the world was badly put together or his luck was just strange. Either way, it wasn't a comforting conclusion.

When the bag came around on the baggage carousel, Kichan unconsciously held his breath. The black equipment bag rolled toward him between the other suitcases as if nothing were wrong. The moment he grabbed the handle, the metal inside gave a faint little hum. He'd made it this far. And as soon as that thought crossed his mind, he immediately thought of home. He sent his mother a message. `I arrived. Got my luggage too. ` The reply came a little later. It was already nighttime in Korea. `Good work.

Go straight to sleep. ` He hadn't realized "go straight to sleep" could be such a difficult order. When he stepped outside the airport, cold wind hit his face. Under the gray sky, people streamed quickly past rain-darkened buildings. Taxi stands, bus stops, wet tire tracks, license plates he still wasn't used to. Kichan adjusted the strap on his backpack and stood outside that flow for a moment.

"So I really came." Saying it out loud only made it feel less real. London wasn't so much stylish as it was an expensive city getting rained on. The pavement gleamed, and people walked fast before they'd even bothered opening their umbrellas. Kichan fell into step a beat or two late. He went to his lodgings first. They were cheap. In the pictures, the room had looked fairly spacious. In reality, if you opened both the bed and your luggage at the same time, it became a negotiation between your body and the walls.

The wallpaper was faintly peeling, and on the small desk sat a single outlet and an electric kettle that looked as if it was pretending to be clean. Kichan set the equipment bag down on the floor and stood there for a moment.

"Right. It's cheap." When it came to convincing himself, there was no logic as reliable as money. He opened the window, then shut it again at once. The wind was too cold. The smell of rain and cold dust rushed into the cramped room together. A small metal fragment on the desk trembled. Dust was back in Korea. More specifically, he'd left it above the front door. He'd also told it to alert him if anything happened around his parents. Even while saying it, Kichan had known how insane he sounded.

But in this room, what bothered him most wasn't the old Reading Society in London. It was the wire bug sitting above the front door in Korea. He had, however, brought a tiny spare component hidden in the inner seam of his bag. It couldn't move, but it could at least pass along the resonance of nearby metal. Kichan set it on the desk and pressed it with his fingertips. It felt cold and unfamiliar. The only sensation that came back was that it didn't know anything yet either.

"Yeah. First time for you too." Kichan let out a brief snort. The moment he did, the exhaustion hit him. He wanted to shower and collapse straight into bed. But if he closed his eyes, that café in his dreams would probably show up right away. And that thing wearing Suyeon's face would definitely already be sitting there, telling him to look at the next page. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. In the end, he opened a map app.

`The Aureate Reading Society` The name itself was suspicious in the most obvious possible way. On Google Maps, it was listed as a classical literature lecture venue and a rare-book research society. It even had reviews. `A quiet and dignified gathering. ` `Hard to attend without a member recommendation. ` `The best place for anyone interested in nineteenth-century occult literature. ` Kichan frowned at the last review.

"That's way too blatant." And yet people were terrible at believing this kind of thing. It had been the same when he'd first seen the Voynich manuscript. Ridiculous links, weird comments, sloppy blog posts. It all looked so flimsy that he'd assumed there was no way any of it could be real. And the real thing had been hiding behind that flimsiness. Kichan opened the equipment bag and took out the wake-up rod. On the surface, it was just an old iron bar.

Only the grip fit his hand a little too well, and the end had a dead, blunt weight to it. It was slightly shorter than before, but somehow the weight had settled further inward. He lifted it once, then put it back down.

"Not exactly something a tourist should be carrying around." During the day, the only option was to keep it inside the bag. It was heavy. The streets of London were wet. Rain came and went, and shallow puddles gathered between the stone pavement and the sidewalk blocks. Kichan moved past red buses, gray skies, overpriced sandwich shops, and tourists taking pictures, trying to look like one of them. Whenever people with cameras stopped, he slowed down too for no reason.

Since he didn't know how to act natural, he copied the people pretending to be natural. The map app sent him around once on a main road. The Reading Society was tucked into an alley a little off the streets tourists actually used. Second floor of an old stone building. A small metal plaque was fixed beside the door. `The Aureate Reading Society` Kichan stopped for a moment when he saw the name.

"I guess tacky is universal." Low voices drifted from inside the building. Phrases like classical literature lecture, member gathering, and antiquarian reading event were posted on the notice board. A small poster was bordered with decorative trim meant to look like gold leaf. On the outside, it really did look like a reading society. That only made him dislike it more. Anything truly dangerous always pretended to be normal like this. Like a company email. Like a banking app notification.

Like a white envelope tucked into his parents' mailbox. Kichan couldn't quite make himself retreat from the door. He walked past once, then came back. Standing there too long was even more suspicious. In the end, he raised his phone and took a picture of the plaque. He decided that if anyone asked, he'd insist this was the sort of thing tourists did. He'd thought he'd muted the shutter, but a soft click slipped out. Kichan swallowed a curse. At that exact moment, the door opened.

A middle-aged woman in a gray coat stepped out. She held a slim book in one hand and a folded umbrella in the other. She looked at Kichan. It was a very brief look, but not the kind that simply passed over him.

"Can I help you?" For a second, Kichan's mind went blank. He understood the English. The problem was answering it.

"Bookshop?" He showed her his phone screen. The map app was already marking the Reading Society building with a blue dot, but Kichan jabbed a finger vaguely toward a nearby alley.

"I'm looking for a bookshop. Old books." The woman looked back and forth between the screen and Kichan's face. Kichan smiled as much like a lost tourist as he could. It was the most awkward smile of his life. Even when he'd gotten lost in Korea, he'd never had to act this hard. The woman gave him one more look, then pointed toward the other end of the alley.

"There is one near the corner. But it closes early."

"Ah. Thank you." Kichan dipped his head slightly. The woman didn't ask anything else. She opened her umbrella. Raindrops ticked softly against the black fabric. She walked off down the alley, and Kichan didn't move until she had turned the corner. Only then did his heart start pounding.

"Seriously." He lowered his phone.

"Not just anyone can do this kind of thing." In spy movies, people stood around in alleys way too easily, lied way too easily, and wore unbothered expressions way too easily. Kichan had barely pretended to take a picture of a plaque and his palms were already damp. Only then did he cross the street. He sat in a café and watched the building through the window. The coffee was expensive, and there wasn't nearly enough of it. They had sandwiches too, but he didn't buy one.

The dry bread he'd eaten at the airport still felt lodged in his throat. Holding the cup, he spent a moment seriously wondering why coffee abroad was always small and overpriced. He needed pointless thoughts like that to keep his hands from shaking. Pretending to look at his phone screen, Kichan opened the sensation in his fingertips. The wake-up rod stayed quiet inside the bag. The small metal fragment was back at the lodgings, but the sense he'd created still lingered in his fingertips.

There was no crawling little body like Dust this time. Instead, he skimmed the surrounding metal in a thin, careful sweep: the threshold, the plaque, the old mailbox, even the drainage pipe below the second-floor window. Following that sensation, he caught the inside of the Reading Society's second floor very faintly. There were people inside. Low voices. The sound of pages turning. And deeper in, somewhere below the floor, the heavy grain of metal rising up from underneath. A safe. Kichan set down his cup.

His fingertips grew hot. Rohonc. The name surfaced in his mind, cold and hard. He hadn't said it aloud, but the tip of his tongue stiffened anyway. It felt like standing a forbidden sentence right in front of his throat. At that moment, a curtain inside the Reading Society twitched. Someone in the building was looking toward the café where Kichan sat. He looked away immediately. He might already have been too late. Still, he took another sip of coffee. At times like this, he had to act ordinary.

Though ordinary people did not drink coffee while quietly checking the position of an iron rod hidden inside their equipment bag. Kichan finished the calculation. There were too many people around during the day. It would be better to go in after the doors closed, when the Reading Society stopped pretending to be harmless. When he stepped back outside, the rain had started again. He didn't have an umbrella. Cold rain pressed down his hair and darkened the shoulders of his coat.

Kichan looked up at the second-floor window across the street one last time. The curtain didn't move. That bothered him even more.

"This is why I hate London." He hadn't even been in London for a full day yet. Adjusting the wet strap of his equipment bag, Kichan started walking back toward his lodgings. He would have to come back tonight.