Three children in the sick yellow of headlights, as the crossroads of death and future.
Three children.
Father, son, spirit.
Her mother does not come out of the house.
(No one comes out of the house.)
The broken body on the backboard is not her mother, though she recognizes her mother's face. Some things are forever, some ways of knowing, some moments in which she chose to say nothing.
Police academy does not even come close to breaking her. After that, demotions and threats are meaningless. She lives every day angry; if she laughs, the laugh is like a stone skipped on water, skimming the surface.
She will find the man who ended one life and forced her into another, but finding anything takes a very long time. Gil-Young remains sane by remaining in the present.
Is it mercy, when he has killed his mother, to see the thing that killed her behind someone else's eyes? To know that his hands are his own hands again, the twists of his thoughts his own thoughts?
His dreams will never be his own again, but isn't that a small price to pay? Isn't it?
Hwa Pyung is not exactly happy. There exists a space between memory and misery, and he occupies it well enough. If the smell of the sea sends him into a fit of cold and shaking, what of it. He will still visit his grandfather, whose eyes have never wavered when they look at him.
And if the visions are aching and vast and hollowed out by the scrape of chittering voices—well, visions pass.
(Until they don't.)
His brother does not come out of the house.
(No one comes out of the house.)
(Something does.)
Father, son, spirit.
Fear is a strange companion. It climbs his shoulders and whispers in his ears. Sometimes it looks like his brother, and sometimes like nothing at all. It is a friend to the friendless, the knife poised to wrist that nearly ends it all.
Yoon sets aside fear and puts on the collar that led his brother into the path of the something at the crossroads. He prays the same prayers, and makes the same signs, and takes the name Mateo.
Matthew, the collector, who might have well stayed in darkness—
—but who stepped into the Light.
Three children.
One who made it out of the house, one who never made it in.
One who crossed the very crossroads itself, but never had cause to believe.
Fear is a strange companion. If you feed it, it will eat you alive. Yoon's heart curls around his grief, around his loss, around his fear.
Mateo enters the room to face the Faceless thing, and knots his soul tightly together—father-son-spirit—so that no scraps fall to nipping terror.
(No scraps at all.)
Call forth a demon, and it must step into the Light.
Fear and disbelief and the space between memory and misery are not enough to save anyone.
(You must be ready.)