Now this is a story — well, not from long ago, really. More recent than that. I heard it from someone, so I can't swear to every detail — but you know that tunnel, Malgogae Tunnel, out toward Chuncheon. You take National Route 5 and it comes up on you. Something strange happened there, they say.
Three, maybe four years back. Late autumn, the way I heard it. There was a young man, traveling alone from Seoul down to Chuncheon — don't know his name. Just a friend of a friend of a friend, that's all I was told. Anyway, it was around eleven at night, a drizzling rain coming down and fog lying thick over everything, when he drove into that tunnel.
You know how it is when you enter a tunnel. The fluorescent lights stretch out ahead of you in that sickly yellow line, and the sound of rain outside cuts off all at once, and all you hear is your tires humming off the walls. That's how it was for him. The rain just — stopped. Only the tire noise bouncing back at him from the concrete. But somewhere inside that sound, he said, there was something else.
Weeping. Not a child, not quite a woman. Just something sobbing. The radio was off, the windows were shut, and yet the sound was coming from somewhere behind him. At first he told himself it was just the tunnel playing tricks, the way sound echoes in those places. So he kept his eyes forward and drove on.
Then — right around the middle of the tunnel. He said a smell hit him. Wet earth. Not the smell of rain on soil, but something older. Like a grave freshly opened. It rose up inside the car, sudden and thick, with every window closed.
Out of habit, he glanced at the rearview mirror.
The back seat was reflected there. It should have been empty. But there was something white sitting in it. A white funeral dress. A woman. Her head was bowed forward, hair hanging down over her face entirely, and her shoulders were moving — rising and falling. That sobbing he'd heard. It was coming from her.
He said his foot moved toward the brake — and then something in him said no, don't stop, and he pressed the accelerator instead and drove. He didn't look at the mirror again. He fixed his eyes on the light at the end of the tunnel and he drove toward it.
The moment he came out the other side, a cold rush of air came through the gaps in the windows — and the smell was gone. He didn't look back. He pulled onto the shoulder and sat there for a long time with his hands shaking.
Later, when he told a friend what had happened, the friend said: Malgogae has always been like that. There's an old story that travelers used to die crossing that pass. People were dying there long before they ever bored the tunnel through, and after the tunnel opened, the accidents never stopped.
But here's the thing — that's not even the part that frightens me.
That night, when the young man reached his lodgings and was unpacking, he pulled his jacket from the back seat — the one he'd left there. The shoulder of it was wet. Not from rain outside, not from any water in the car. Wet the way fabric gets when someone has been leaning against it for a long time, crying.
