When Daegu's subway first opened, people took it as a sign that the city was finally stepping into the modern age. But certain old men had always warned against such thinking. "Beneath Daegu's earth," they would say, "something sleeps that we were never meant to understand."
Late one night, after a meeting that had dragged on past all reasonable hours, a salaryman named Minsu (민수) boarded the last train on Line 1. The train pulled away as it always did — and yet something was wrong. Outside the windows, there was only tunnel, stretching on without end. Not a single familiar station name appeared. He asked the other passengers, and he could see it in their faces: they felt it too.
The train ran on and on and did not stop. The passengers grew restless, and then frightened, and then one of them could no longer hold it in and began to shout. At that moment, the intercom crackled to life. Whatever it said, it was in no language any of them could name. The voice itself did not sound like something that had ever belonged to a human throat. It was then that Minsu understood. This train was no longer running on any track that existed in the real world.
He looked out the window and there was no sky — only a deep blue-black darkness, and shapes drifting through it. The shapes watched them the way an eye watches, enormous and unblinking, as though endlessly magnified. And into Minsu's mind came an image he had not summoned: something vast, waiting somewhere in the depths beneath Daegu, and it had been watching them all along.
He had no sense of how much time had passed when the train finally stopped. The doors slid open, and the passengers filed out one by one. The place they stepped into resembled no station in Daegu — no station anywhere. The walls were carved with symbols that meant nothing and somehow meant everything. Minsu felt it in his gut before he could think it: they could not stay here. He moved with the others, and together they found their way out.
The next morning, the Daegu news carried only a brief item about a minor train irregularity. No one seemed to remember the night for what it had been. Minsu rode the subway to work and found nothing — no trace of the train, no trace of where it had taken them. The earth beneath Daegu kept its secrets as quietly as it always had. But Minsu knew. Whatever had reached for them that night would not be content to reach only once.
