Chương 26: A Forest Somewhere

Kichan was lying on a dirt floor. It hurt, and that was the first good thing about it. Pain meant he was alive. In the past, a fall from that kind of height would probably have taken out a rib. Now it stopped at a stabbing ache across his back and a few breathless seconds. He lay there for a while. He could see the sky. More precisely, it was blue, but not quite the same blue as the one over the square a moment ago.

Maybe because he had been lying there too long before opening his eyes, even the temperature of the sunlight felt strangely unfamiliar. The clouds were drifting by like strips of torn cloth. Kichan blinked.

"... What is this, some mountain forest?" His voice came out oddly small. He slowly pushed himself upright. There was a forest around him. But it was not just any familiar forest. The tree trunks were straight, and the leaves looked a little thicker than the plants Kichan knew. The moss on the ground was damp, and the air carried the smell of wet dirt mixed with a sweet grassy scent. The sensation from the Voynich Manuscript reacted at his fingertips.

He could read the paths of the plants and the flow of the water, but the structure was unfamiliar. Similar, but different. Like hearing the same instrument tuned to another pitch. Kichan grabbed his head.

"Ah, damn it." Once the curse came out, the world felt a little more real again. He checked his hands. The wake-up rod had fallen right beside him. It was smeared with dirt, and some kind of unfamiliar plant sap had spread over the grip, but the weight was unchanged. Kichan picked it up. As the familiar weight returned to his hand, the breath caught in his lungs settled a little.

"Right. If you were gone too, I really might've cried." What about Loagaeth? Kichan felt around inside his coat. The full pages were gone. Even the two fragments he had taken in Rome had not remained intact. Instead, a single scrap torn from one of them was stuck to the inside of his shirt. It held part of Loagaeth's opening phrase. The edges of the paper had blackened as if lightly singed. Kichan pressed his mouth shut when he saw it.

He made a very serious promise to himself that he would never make sound with it carelessly again. Then something tickled the inside of his hand. Dust. The tiny wire body was alive. But it had become strange. The piece of guitar string had grown a little longer, and the piece of coin now carried a pattern like unfamiliar leaf veins. Tiny bits of moss clung to the ends of its wire legs. Dust wobbled on Kichan's palm before it finally found its balance. Kichan looked at it.

"Did you get hit too?" Dust twitched its legs. There was still no answer. Even so, it was alive. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. For some reason that made Kichan feel relieved. The bag was gone too. So was his phone. No passport, no money, no charger. The cheap cable he had bought in New York was gone too, and so was the hard piece of bread he had shoved into his pocket in Rome. Kichan searched through his pockets one by one. Left coat pocket. Nothing.

Right pocket. One torn scrap of receipt. Inner pocket. A crumpled corner of a photocopy envelope. He only fully accepted the fact that the phone was gone after his hand searched a third empty pocket. Kichan stopped. His parents. It was not that the thought came late. It was that he had been too scared, and his mind had deliberately left it for last. What was his mother doing right now? Would his father be watching the news? Would news of something happening in Rome reach Korea? Had his face been caught on camera?

Kichan drew in a breath. His chest felt tight. That thought suffocated him more than the moment he had misread Loagaeth's opening phrase.

"I need to get back." He spoke under his breath. It was the obvious thing to say. He had no idea how. But he had to get back. His mother had told him to eat properly, and his father had told him to check in every day. If he missed a video call, they would panic. Kichan tried to laugh and failed. At that moment, a cry sounded from deep in the forest. An animal. No, too large and too low for an ordinary animal. The ground trembled ever so slightly. Dust flattened itself against his palm. Kichan slowly looked around.

All the things he had lost came back to him at once. The bag, the phone, the passport, the money. What remained was a dirt-smeared wake-up rod, one torn fragment of Loagaeth, Dust wobbling in his palm, and his own body, which by now did not break as easily as it should. The situation was awful. Except for the fact that he himself was still intact. Kichan adjusted his grip on the wake-up rod. The unfamiliar dirt and plant sap on its surface smeared slickly against his palm. He rubbed the grip clean with his thumb.

Even though it was an object he had made himself, inside the air of this forest it carried a very faintly different resonance. The Rohonc sensation tried to read that difference. Kichan shook his head.

"Not the time to analyze things." Dust twitched one leg. Seeing that, Kichan said,"Don't laugh." Dust was not laughing. Obviously. The cry came again. Closer this time. Kichan's stomach growled like thunder. The sound startled him badly enough that he went blank for a second. Come to think of it, he had not properly eaten anything since a piece of bread in Rome.

A strange forest, damp air, a missing phone, a torn fragment of Loagaeth, a changed Dust in his palm, and some huge unknown cry drawing closer from far away. The situation was awful. And yet he was hungry in exactly the usual way. Kichan rested the wake-up rod across his shoulder.

"First things first." He muttered it very quietly.

"I need to find food before anything else." Somewhere in the forest, a branch snapped. Kichan turned toward the sound. Back in Rome, nobody could speak yet. Silence remained in the square where Kichan had vanished. The radios were back on, but every channel carried nothing except static, and no one seemed able to say anything into them. The emergency light on top of one police car had stopped rotating and was pouring red light in only one direction.

A thin crack that had not been there before ran along the church's outer wall. The water from the fountain fell late. The stream that had hung suspended in the air collapsed all at once and struck the stone pavement. Only then did several tourists scream. One police officer dropped to his knees. Not in prayer. His legs had simply given out. Another stared down at the hand that had dropped his gun. He wore the face of a man who could not remember whether he had pulled the trigger or not.

Lee Seoyoon stood in the middle of the square. A tiny paper fiber from Loagaeth clung to her hand. It was a bit torn loose from the page when Kichan disappeared. The paper had not burned, and it had not flown away. It only kept trembling faintly on her palm. From inside the church, paper rang once more. The bell-sound at her ear was so small it was almost nothing. Lee Seoyoon closed her eyes at that sound. Beside her, someone asked in English,"What happened?" Lee Seoyoon could not answer at once.

There was no word for it. Explosion. Terror attack. Disappearance. Magic. None of them explained what they had just seen. The stone pavement of Rome had split. The church bell had rung by itself. Bullets had streamed sideways through the air. A man had vanished the way folded paper disappears. Someone kept making the sign of the cross while staring at the crack in the ground. Someone else cried without even lowering the phone they had been filming with.

Even the police who had been carrying guns only looked at one another's faces. After seeing what they had seen, none of them had the look of people waiting for orders anymore. Lee Seoyoon slowly closed her trembling hand into a fist.

"A breach. The boundary tore." The moment she said it, murmuring burst through the people outside the square. Someone was already uploading a video. Someone shouted at the police. Someone crossed themselves. The sky was still clear, and the sunlight was still falling warmly across the church wall. In the middle of that bright afternoon, Lee Seoyoon lifted her radio and then lowered it again. She had to report this. She had to issue instructions.

But the scrap of paper on her palm kept trembling in the wind, and she could not choose any channel. Han Kichan was nowhere. In the forest, Kichan sneezed. The tip of his nose had started itching for no reason. Dust jolted in his palm.

"Who's talking trash about me now?" Muttering that, Kichan tightened his grip on the wake-up rod again. A branch snapped one more time. Closer. One yellow eye lit up in the darkness of the forest. It wasn't one. Two. Three. Kichan shut his mouth. The fragment of Loagaeth inside his shirt gave off a faint heat against the inside of his throat. He tightened his jaw immediately. Don't make a sound. Absolutely not. The wake-up rod settled heavily in his hand. The man who had vanished from Rome.

The man who had fallen into a forest from nowhere. And the man who still did not understand even half of how badly he had messed things up. Looking at the eyes of the unfamiliar beasts, Han Kichan spoke very quietly.

"Right." His stomach growled again.

"I just hope you're edible."