This is an old story — well, not that old, really. Happened just a few years back, or so I heard. Can't say for certain it's true. But it's the kind of story that keeps coming back to you, no matter how hard you try to let it go.
You know Wolmido, out in Incheon — that stretch of waterfront. In summer the young people swarm the place. Well, one summer evening, a girl in her early twenties was out there with friends, and she slipped on the rocks near the breakwater. Those rocks are covered in moss and barnacles, crusted thick with them, and her foot went right out from under her and her knee came down hard. It bled, it stung, but you know how it is — everyone said, "You're fine, you're fine, just clean it up," and that was that.
Only it didn't heal. A week passed, then two, and it still wasn't right. The wound itself had closed over, but deep inside the knee there was this persistent ache, and when she walked there was a sound. Click, click. Every time she went down stairs — click, click. At first she told herself it was just the joint, just the way bones sometimes sound. But after about a month, the sound got louder. Not a click anymore — more of a rattling, a clatter, as if something inside was knocking against something else. That was when she got truly frightened. She sat very still and pressed her ear to her own knee, and she heard it — movement, from within. Something small and hard, scraping against the inside of the joint.
She went to the doctor. He took the X-rays and stood there studying them for a long time without saying a word. Finally he asked, quietly, "Have you had an open wound in seawater recently?" She told him about Wolmido. His face, they say, simply went still.
Barnacles were growing inside her knee. Small, hard little things, anchored to the flesh within the joint, putting down roots. The theory was that barnacle larvae — those invisible, drifting specks — had entered through the wound and found a place to settle, deep inside her body. The doctor himself had never seen anything like it, or so the story goes.
But that's not even the part that gets under my skin.
It's what they say she saw after the surgery. What they took out of her. Tiny, white, and hard — and shaped, each one of them, exactly like the barnacles on the rocks. Grown that way, inside living flesh, in the dark.
After that, people around Wolmido got uneasy about any cut or scrape near the water. No one can say for certain, but they say every summer, new barnacles appear on those same rocks, thick as ever.
Whether the rocks hold on to you, or the barnacles come looking — nobody knows.
