Beyond the Viewfinder

Sua first visited Gamcheon Culture Village on a weekday morning in late autumn. She was there on assignment, technically — photographs for a travel agency blog — but in practice it felt closer to simply wandering out alone. The client had said something about "a sensitive mood, good color, not too many people," and then gone quiet. Sua was used to that. The less direction she was given, the lighter her feet felt.

She parked near the entrance and began climbing the steps. The village was still at that hour. Houses painted blue and yellow and pink crowded the hillside in dense rows, and the narrow alleys bent and bent again like a maze. Tourists appeared only here and there. A cat watched her from the top of a wall, then vanished without a sound. When she raised the camera and pressed her eye to the viewfinder, the whole village flattened slightly — everything compressed into a clean, quiet rectangle. Sua liked that feeling. The way things could be contained.

The first strange thing, she found inside a photograph.

She was eating lunch and scrolling through the morning's shots on her laptop. Steep steps seen from below. Layers of blue rooftops receding into the distance. A red garment hanging at the end of an alley. And then, tucked among these, a photograph she had no memory of taking. The angle was from the bottom of a staircase, looking up. In the upper left corner, a pair of ankles had been cut into the frame — pale skin, and below the ankles, black rubber shoes. Sua tried to remember. She was almost certain no one had passed her on those steps. But someone could have, and she could have pressed the shutter without thinking. The file timestamp read 11:42 a.m. Nothing unusual in the sequence. She deleted the photo and moved on.

In the afternoon she went deeper in. Past the main alleys where tourists clustered, up steeper and narrower paths, she found the parts of the village where people actually lived. Houses with no murals on their walls, paint peeling in long strips. Underwear on the clotheslines, empty flowerpots lined up outside doors. Sua preferred these. Things that hadn't been arranged for anyone. She changed lenses, opened the aperture wide, and crouched low to shoot the steps. The angle of light slanting between walls. The rough texture of concrete. A single fallen leaf on the pavement.

She had been shooting for a long time when she looked up and realized she didn't know where she was. She had climbed steadily but now couldn't find the way back down. The alley bent at a sharp angle, and at the bend stood a house with an old corrugated roof. Its gate was half open, and just inside, flowerpots were crowded together in rows. Sua stood at the gate for a moment, then looked in. It felt inhabited. But there was no sound. She raised her camera and photographed the pots through the opening. In the instant before she pressed the shutter, something seemed to move in the viewfinder — deep in the shadow inside the house. But when she checked the screen, there were only the pots. A trick of the light, she told herself.

Back at her accommodation that evening, she went through everything she'd shot. Three hundred and forty-odd frames. She moved through them one by one, flagging the ones worth keeping. Halfway through, her finger stopped.

It was the photograph of the flowerpots inside the gate. There were about twelve of them, plants she couldn't name growing in different directions. And among them — something that had not been visible through the viewfinder. Eyes. Or not quite a face. Something in the darkness behind the pots, looking toward her. The whites were too large. Sua zoomed in. The more she enlarged it, the more it dissolved — pixels breaking apart into noise. She couldn't tell whether it was human. Her heart was beating fast. She closed the file. Opened it again. Enlarged it again. It was still there.

That night, Sua deleted the photograph. Even after deleting it, she couldn't sleep.

The next morning she went back to the village. She couldn't have explained why. The client hadn't been in touch, and what she'd already shot was more than enough. But when she opened her eyes that morning, she wanted to climb those steps. Her feet wanted to go. She told herself it was professional instinct — a photographer follows the light, and morning light was different.

The village was wrapped in fog. A white mist, whether it had come down from the hills or risen from the sea she couldn't tell, filled the spaces between the alleys. The blue rooftops blurred and softened. Sua walked in a different direction from the day before, camera in hand. Up one staircase, around a bend, up another. And then, without quite deciding to, she was standing in front of the same house. Corrugated roof. Half-open gate. The pots.

The gate was open a little wider than yesterday. Noticeably.

Sua raised her camera. This time she used the live-view screen rather than the viewfinder. Beyond the pots she could see a small courtyard, and at the far end of the courtyard, a sliding door. The door was closed. She pressed the shutter. She checked the screen. In the photograph, the sliding door was open. Only in the photograph.

Sua turned around. The alley was empty. The fog had thickened. She began to walk — quickly, but consciously stopping herself from running. On the way down the steps, she thought she could hear something behind her. But she didn't look back. She didn't know what looking back might bring, and she didn't want to find out.

At her accommodation she looked at the photograph again. The sliding door was closed. She was certain it had been open. She opened the file information. Timestamp, camera model, lens data. But below the file name, there was something wrong. A GPS coordinate was embedded in the metadata. Sua always kept location data turned off. Always. And yet there was a coordinate. She entered it into a map. The map pointed to a narrow alley deep inside the village, a spot that didn't appear on any tourist guide. It was that house.

That evening, Sua asked a young man who worked in the village about the place. He was a university student working part-time at a small souvenir shop beside the tourist information center. He listened to her description and was quiet for a moment.

"The one with the corrugated roof and all the pots? That place has been there a long time. It's been empty for over ten years. An old woman used to live there, and after she passed, it just stayed as it was. No family, apparently. Every now and then someone says something strange about it. People passing by."

"Strange how?"

He smiled — the kind of smile meant to brush something aside.

"Just — hearing things. Or seeing something. Nobody ever says exactly what."

Back at her accommodation, Sua went through all the day's photographs again. More than three hundred. One by one. And she found it. A shot from mid-morning, taken in one of the main alleys. She had pointed the camera up the staircase. She remembered no one being there. At the top of the steps in the photograph, someone was standing. White clothing. No face visible — the head was bowed, or perhaps there was no face at all. She couldn't determine which. Enlarged, it became only pixels.

Sua deleted the photograph. Emptied the trash. The next morning when she turned on her camera, the deleted photograph was there again. The file name had changed. The original name had been a date and a serial number. The new file name was Sua's name.

Sua removed the memory card from the camera. She inserted it into her laptop and opened the folder. Only that one file remained. The other three hundred photographs were gone. She opened the file. The top of the staircase. White clothing. But this time it was different. The photograph was in black and white. She had shot in color. And in the black-and-white image, the figure in white had lifted its face toward where Sua was standing.

Sua did not look at the face. She closed the laptop.

That day she went back to Gamcheon Culture Village. She told herself she needed to deal with it. That she needed to stand in front of that house. Whether this was right or wrong, she was no longer capable of judging. Her feet were already moving. There was no fog. Late afternoon, tourists drifting down the hill in small groups. Sua walked up against the flow.

She stood before the house. The gate was wide open. The flowerpots were as they had always been. Sua stepped over the threshold. The courtyard was small. A rusted tap. A cracked earthenware jar. She stood before the sliding door. There was no handle — just a groove to hook a finger into and pull. She pulled.

The room was empty. Wallpaper peeling away from the walls. The floor covering half torn up. Dust. A single empty medicine bottle in the corner. One window, its glass clouded and opaque. Sua was looking around the room when her gaze snagged on one of the walls.

Photographs. Taped to the wall. Several of them. Black and white. She moved closer. They were old. People in them. Photographs of this village, it seemed — staircases, alleys, rooftops. And people. The clothing changed from image to image, as though each had been taken in a different era. Sua moved along the row and stopped.

The photograph at the bottom. It looked less old than the others. Sharper. The angle was from the top of a staircase, looking down. And in that photograph, Sua was there. The clothes she had worn today. The blue jacket. The camera strap. The bag on her shoulder. It looked as though she had been photographed in this village yesterday — but the image was black and white, and the tape holding it to the wall had yellowed. As though it had been there for a very long time.

Sua reached up and tried to pull the photograph free. The tape held fast. When she tugged, the corner tore. Her hand was trembling. And then she saw it — beside her in the photograph, one step below her on the staircase, another figure. She had not noticed it until now. White clothing. Standing alongside her. The figure's face was raised toward the camera.

Sua left the room. She crossed the courtyard and passed through the gate. She went down the alley. She went down the steps. She did not look back once. She got into her car and started the engine. The navigation screen lit up. She pressed the route toward the highway.

About an hour after she had merged onto the highway, her camera turned itself on inside her bag. The shutter fired. Once. Sua did not let go of the wheel.

The city of Busan shrank in the rearview mirror. Sua kept her eyes on the road ahead.

She arrived home past midnight. She set the camera bag down in the entryway and did not touch it. She showered and lay down. The camera stayed in the hall. The next morning she put the camera, still in its bag, into a cardboard box without opening it. She sealed it with tape. She pushed the box to the very back of the storage space on her balcony.

Three days passed.

Sua did not open the box. She had no intention of opening it. But on the fourth night, she woke to a sound from the direction of the balcony. A shutter click. Once. Then once more.

She did not get up. She pulled the covers over her head and closed her eyes. The sound did not come again.

When she opened the balcony storage the next morning, the box was there. The tape was intact. She did not take it out. She closed the door. She intended never to open it again.

But what troubled Sua longer than the sound of a shutter firing inside a sealed box was something else. That night, lying under the covers with her eyes shut, she had thought about the photographs on the wall of that room in Gamcheon. The figure in white standing beside her. The face that had been raised toward the camera.

She had not looked at that face. And yet she remembered it. The feeling that their eyes had met in the photograph. Knowing without having seen. As though she had already known all along.

The face had been her own face.

The figure wearing that face had been standing beside her.

And here, now, in this room, Sua was alone.