Eleven in the Mine

Minjun arrived in Jeongseon for the first time in late autumn. Three hours or so by car from Seoul — once you leave the highway and wind your way around one mountain bend after another, the world begins to feel as though it is closing in. The Joyang River curled along the flanks of the hills, and where the autumn color had already come and gone, bare branches scratched at the pale sky. He was a photographer. More precisely, he was a man who had once been a photographer. After losing all desire to press the shutter amid the noise of the city, he had asked an old acquaintance to find him somewhere to stay, and the acquaintance had come back with an empty house — on the edge of a village near Gohan-eup in Jeongseon County, a place that had once lived and breathed by coal.

The village had no name of its own. The residents simply called it the lower settlement, and on the administrative maps nothing remained but a string of lot numbers. This neighborhood, which had once housed several hundred people, was down to seven households. Everything else had been left to rot — roofs caved in, walls crumbled. Weeds grew up through the slate tiles, and the wind moved freely through window frames long since stripped of glass. When Minjun stepped out of his car and took in the scene for the first time, he felt his camera stir to life in his hands for the first time in longer than he could remember.

The one who greeted him was a man named Choi, a man in his seventies who served as the village's de facto headman. His back was bent, and his voice was hoarse and rough, as though he had been breathing coal dust for decades. As he handed over the key to the empty house, Choi added a single remark: "Don't go toward the mountain behind the village at night." When Minjun asked why, the old man turned his head and said, "Shafts everywhere, all gaping open. One wrong step and that's the end of you." It was a reasonable warning. Minjun nodded and unpacked his things.

The house was small but not unpleasant. The floor vinyl had lifted at the edges and the wallpaper was blotched with mold in places, but the boiler worked and the water ran. Minjun laid out his camera equipment and looked out the window. Directly across from him, the window of an abandoned house stared back. There was no glass in it. A dark rectangle hung there like an empty eye socket, facing him. He raised the camera and pressed the shutter. For the first time in a long time, the desire to take a picture — a real one — had come back.

The first three days were peaceful. Each morning he walked the alleyways breathing air sharp with cold, and in the afternoons he moved through the abandoned houses. Crows that had returned to roost on collapsed walls watched him from above, and old footprints pressed into the coal-dusted earth had hardened there as though cast in stone. At the far end of the village stood what had once been a communal bathhouse for the miners — a building the size of a warehouse, its outer walls still tiled, exhaling a smell of rotting wood from within. Minjun went inside and photographed the place where the tubs had been. Dead leaves had drifted in and filled them to the brim.

On the fourth night, Minjun could not sleep. The wind blew hard, and somewhere in the walls the house creaked and groaned. He told himself it was just the noise of an old building. But after midnight, another sound came. It was low and steady. At first he took it for wind. Then he lay still and listened, and understood that it was not wind. It might have been a person murmuring something, or the sound of metal being struck somewhere very far away. It repeated at regular intervals. He flipped his pillow over and closed his eyes, but the sound did not stop. It finally ceased sometime after two in the morning, and he sank into a deep and unpleasant sleep.

The next morning Minjun went to find Choi. The old man was splitting firewood in his yard. When Minjun brought up the sound from the night before, Choi spoke without setting down the axe. "Anyone who lives here long enough hears that. It comes from the mountain. When wind gets into the shafts, they moan like that." Minjun understood that the explanation was perfectly plausible, and yet the unease did not leave him. "Was there ever an accident? At the mine?" Choi's hands paused for just a moment. "There were accidents everywhere. This place was no different." That was all.

That afternoon Minjun began climbing the path up the mountain behind the village. He was not defying the warning — he simply thought that if he located the shaft entrances in daylight, he might feel easier at night. The path was clear at first, but after about twenty minutes it faded to almost nothing. On a leaf-covered slope he found two shaft entrances. One was boarded over with wooden planks; the other stood open. The boarding was in name only — the planks had rotted so thoroughly that a firm push would have knocked them flat. The open entrance was a low semicircle, barely tall enough to walk through without ducking, and a few steps inside the light gave out entirely. Minjun raised his lens toward that darkness. He pressed the shutter. The flash fired.

He reviewed the photograph after returning to the house. The image opened on his laptop screen. The flash had reached only a few meters past the entrance; beyond that was absolute darkness. Minjun was about to close the file when he stopped. Deep in the dark, just inside the boundary where the flash light barely reached — there was something. A shape. It resembled a human silhouette, though not precisely. It was too long, too thin. He enlarged the image. The more he enlarged it, the more the pixels dissolved into noise, and the shape grew less distinct — yet something was undeniably standing there. Minjun told himself it was a support beam or a jutting outcrop of rock. Then he closed the file.

On the sixth night, the sound came from closer. This time its murmuring quality was more pronounced. It was not speech. But it sounded like speech. There was a rhythm to it. Minjun threw back the covers and got up and opened the window. Cold air poured in, and the village lay drowned in complete darkness. There was one streetlamp, and beneath its light there was nothing. There should have been nothing. But at the point where the lamplight ended — at the border between light and dark — something seemed to be standing. Minjun rubbed his eyes. There was nothing there. He closed the window and lay back down. His heart was beating faster than usual, but he decided it was because he had breathed in cold air so suddenly.

On the morning of the seventh day, Minjun met another resident of the village. A woman who appeared to be in her fifties; she gave her name only as Bak. She was tending a small vegetable plot beside one of the abandoned houses, and when she saw him she spoke first. "You've come to take photographs?" When Minjun said yes, she looked past the garden toward the mountain for a moment. "There was someone else before you. A few years ago. Said he was a painter." Minjun asked what had become of him. Bak shook her head. "He just left. One morning. Left all his things behind." She said nothing more. Minjun walked away unable to decide whether the story was a simple anecdote or a warning.

That evening Minjun did two things. The first was to open the shaft photograph on his laptop again and study it for a long time. The shape in the darkness was still there. He raised the brightness. As the image lightened, the dark became gray, and the shape grew clearer. Too clear. It was not rock. There were two legs, a torso, a head. The head was turned toward the camera. Minjun closed the laptop. The second thing he did was go to Choi and ask directly about the mining accident that had occurred in this village. This time the old man was silent for a long while. Then he spoke slowly. "It happened in eighty-three. Fourteen men didn't come out of the shaft. The rescue team went in — they found three. The other eleven they never found. They're still in there."

Those words circled in Minjun's mind all night. Still in there. He tried to stay awake, but his body refused. He dreamed. He was walking through a narrow shaft. The lamp on his helmet swayed. Someone was walking ahead of him. The same miner's clothes. Minjun called out, but no sound came from his throat. The figure ahead stopped. It began to turn its head, slowly. Minjun woke up just before he could see the face. It was three in the morning. The room was strangely cold. The boiler was running. And yet his breath came out in white clouds.

Minjun decided that morning to pack his things. But his hands would not move. More precisely — he did not want them to move. He would later recall that sensation with a particular unease, saying he had not been certain whether the reluctance to pack was truly his own will. He picked up his camera and walked through the village again. He photographed the abandoned houses. The collapsed walls. The bathhouse again. And then at some point he realized he was already walking up the mountain path toward the back of the village. His feet had moved before he had. He tried to stop. He could have stopped. But he kept walking.

When he stood before the shaft, the sky was still light. It was around four in the afternoon. Cold air breathed out from the entrance. There was a smell rising from underground — mineral, rotting wood, and something else mixed in that he could not name. Minjun switched on his phone's flashlight. He stepped one foot inside the shaft. The ground was uneven beneath him. Two steps, three steps. The light from outside fell away behind him. He stopped at roughly ten paces in. Darkness blocked the way ahead. He shone the flashlight straight forward. There was nothing. Only the bare walls of the shaft and the floor.

But when he switched the flashlight off, he saw a light in the darkness. Very faint, deep in the distance. A single point of light. It looked like the lamp on a miner's helmet. Minjun held his breath. The light did not move. Or rather — it was moving, very slowly. It was getting closer. He knew he should step back. But his legs had locked. The light kept coming closer. Then it stopped. He could not judge the distance between himself and it. In darkness, all sense of distance disappears. Minjun forced a sound up from deep in his throat. "Who's there?" An echo came back. And when the echo died, silence came.

The light went out.

Minjun ran out of the shaft. He fell twice coming down the slope. His palms bled. Back at the house, he locked the door and sat down and it took him ten minutes to steady his breathing. That night he called Choi and said he would be leaving in the morning. Choi was quiet for a moment, then said, "Good thinking." That was all. Minjun packed his bags. Camera, laptop, clothes, all into the bag. Then he lay down to sleep.

The sound did not come that night.

The next morning Minjun loaded his things into the car. Choi had come outside. Minjun returned the key and thanked him. As Choi took it, he said, "Get many photographs?" Minjun said he had. Choi spoke again. "After you develop them — if there's anything strange, it's better to just delete it." Minjun started to ask what he meant, then thought better of it. He got in the car and started the engine. In the rearview mirror he could see Choi. The old man stood in that spot until the car had disappeared from sight.

Back in Seoul, Minjun sorted through his photographs. The abandoned houses, the alleyways, the bathhouse, the fallen leaves on the mountain path. They were good photographs. Work he was genuinely satisfied with, for the first time in a long while. Last, he opened the shaft photographs — the ones from his first visit and the ones taken at the entrance just before he had gone inside. He scrolled through the files slowly. And then he stopped at one. It was a photograph he had no memory of taking. It was shot from inside the shaft, facing outward — toward the entrance. That is, someone standing inside the shaft had taken it. The semicircular entrance was bright with the light coming in from outside, and in front of that entrance stood a silhouette. It was Minjun himself. His back was to the camera, his phone flashlight raised, peering into the dark.

He checked the file information. The timestamp read 4:27 p.m. that afternoon. The time when he had been inside the shaft. His camera had been in his hands the entire time. He had not taken any photographs inside the shaft. He had used only his phone's flashlight; the camera had been hanging around his neck. A camera hanging around a person's neck could not press its own shutter.

Minjun remembered what Choi had said. If there's anything strange, it's better to just delete it.

He moved the mouse to delete the file. But before he did, he looked at the photograph one last time. Beyond his own silhouette, in the bright light filling the shaft entrance — Choi was standing there. It was unmistakably Choi. The old man was outside the entrance, looking in. But when Minjun had entered the shaft, Choi had been down in the village. And beside Choi, slightly smaller silhouettes — several of them. It was difficult to count precisely, but there appeared to be more than ten. They were all facing inward. Looking at Minjun.

He deleted the file. Then he closed the laptop.

That night Minjun tried to sleep in his own room in Seoul. The sounds of the city filled the window — cars, voices, light. He pulled the covers up. He closed his eyes.

In the darkness, a sound came. Very low, and very steady.