The Dokkaebi

by Matthew Choi

cover photo by Katelin Ayayo

Content Warning: Death, vomit, mental illness

“I found you curled up over your toilet, hurling thin streams of water and rice. You should be thankful.” He was hunched over a wooden cane, bandages covering the mound where his right leg should've been. Even with the support of his cane, his left knee shuddered. In front of him stood a low, wooden table adorned with bowls made of white ceramic and dolsot. 

“I’ve been trying to decorate lately.” He waved towards the cheongsachorongs, blue and red mesh lanterns held up on strings. “It’s not very easy to acquire these types of things.” 

“Where are we?” 

He tilted his head and smiled, flashing two rows of yellow teeth. Blisters covered his rusted red skint. “We’re in a cave. Isn’t that obvious?” 

“I get that, but where is the cave?” 

“Come, eat first. I’ll tell you as we eat.” 

As soon as he finished the sentence, the bowls began to overflow with stews and side dishes. The scent of the banquet stroked my hunger; how long had it been since I had eaten? Between the clattering of metal chopsticks and the scraping of spoon against dolsot stone, I kept my mouth full with food.

“Let me tell you about myself. I’m a prankster, for lack of a better word, who has relied on human life to entertain me, so I’ve tried to maintain as good of a relationship with them as I can. You give me fun and games, and I give you wealth and prosperity. Most of the time.” 

There was a familiarity to his words. My lullabies and nightmares were made up of creatures like him, creatures with pepper-red skin and chiseled fangs: Dokkaebis, goblins that juggled their eternal lives stripping away people’s humanities or granting them beauty and houses full of gold. Wrinkles branched out like shaky lines of mascara, tracing out his sunken eyes which were sunk into his face, hidden beneath his eyelids. Bulging bits of muscle made up his arms like footballs stacked end-to-end and his nails curled outward in round spirals from his thick, veinous hands. They shook as he shoveled rice into his mouth. Yet, his darting eyes betrayed the rest of his crooked, toiled body. There was no doubt that this was a Dokkaebi. 

“You must understand that we did not do the things we did because we hated you. We didn’t. We wanted to be with you, wanted to dabble in humanity. Our lives are like carts, rolling down a mountain. No breaks, no stops, no valley in sight to slow our momentum. Life wears you down fast. Since your first fathers, your people waged wars and murdered in the name of kings and gods, killing off hundreds of bloodlines just so one could prosper in their place. The blood spilled could fill the oceans ten times over. So we thought it would be good fun to play with you, show you the error of your ways. Instead, we fell in love with you. We fell in love with your children. Your laughter. Your women. Your kings and your scholars. We grew to idolize you, seeking mortality at the bottom of deep, dark oceans or in the skies, in mountain peaks that oversaw the very Heavens through our infinite vision, but we never found it. The search went on for millennia, and continues to this day. This cave, deep in the heart of Hallasan, is where my search brought me. Far, far away from the other Dokkaebi that litter the streets with their mischief and trickery, quiet enough that I can survey each of your kingdoms rise and fall as they all must. I watched your birth and millions of others while meditating, just listening to the water pang against the ground. Dudeuk. Dudeuk. Do you hear it?” 

Wiping away at the grains of rice on his chin with the back of his hand, he gestured around the walls of the cave like a real estate agent offering a house to a client. We sat in silence for a bit, finishing our meal together. Just like he said, I could hear the water. Dudeuk. Dudeuk. “Do you know the meaning behind Hallasan?” 

“A mountain high enough to pull the universe.” 

He smiled at me. 

“Good. That’s good. It’s not just some silly old tale either. Deep in the heart of this mountain, you can hear it all. Past the water, past the stone walls, past the greenery and snow-capped peak, you can hear all of the cries of the planet. Two decades ago, in this mountain, I heard you.” 

He cracked a walnut between his teeth, chewing through the fibrous shell and swallowing it whole. It went down with a wet gulp. 

“Your happiness leaked out of your very pores and showered the air around you with the scent of roasted chestnuts. It filled me with hope because I thought that one day, I could learn from you. Be as happy are you were then, clutching your schoolbag and toys.” 

“I don’t think that’s how it turned out.” 

“No, it isn’t. But it can be. Keep listening.” 

With the wave of his hand, the bowls of food disappeared, leaving a kettle and two cups of warm tea in their place.

“I noticed, from this very cave, that the air around you was beginning to thin out. Your happiness was subdued and the smell of chestnuts faded with it. I, for a moment, wandered from the cave to investigate. I had not seen the outside world since the last King Gojong disappeared, and I spent a great deal of time marvelling at these new technologies. There were lights everywhere so bright as if each little glass bulb contained its very own star. But I had to find you.” 

“So you found me throwing up?” 

“That comes later. I found you at your school. To me, such a grand building seemed more like a palace than a school, but times change, I guess. Your head was buried in book after book, fingers calloused from writing between the margins. I followed you that whole day, from watching you flip through those glossy textbook pages to deciding which coffee to get at the vending machine. And of course, I saw you come home to your mother.” 

My toes curled in my socks, and I closed my eyes. Sour filled my mouth and the sound of water became clouded by the drumming of my heart. There was something about the image of his skin, patterned by wrinkles and boils, next to my mother that brought back a familiar stench. I gagged. When I opened my mouth to retort back, to ask him to take me home, nothing came out. My lips were pasted together by an incredible gravity that weighed upon my whole face. “She hadn’t gone yet. Try to remember her.” 

He poured me a cup of tea, and lifted the pressure from my mouth with the flick of a finger. The cup warmed my hands. 

“It was nighttime when you had returned, but I’m sure her nightgown had been on all day. The table was already set when you entered and a mishmash of various china and plastic was spread out across the table. I tried to replicate what I saw that day at the table for our own dinner. I hope your mother would be proud.” 

I swallowed. 

“I watched you for the next few days, walking through crowded hallways and streets. You studied ruthlessly, wearing baggy eyes and headaches like accessories. You should’ve taken it slow. Waited a bit, just to breathe even once. Your mother worried about you.” 

I held back the tears by gulping down the tea until I could see ringed water stains at the bottom of the ceramic cup. He stared at me, silently pleading with me to confront him and the image he had presented.

My mother was sick more often than not. Most days, I’d come home from school and hear her call for me from the bedroom where she had been laying all day. Sometimes, she’d go weeks without seeing the sun, getting up just to make food and go to the bathroom. Her blinds were wound up tight, casting an unworldly darkness over her bed that would leak out beneath her door into the hallway. Regardless of her withdrawal, she bought me clothes and tucked metal boxes into my school bag packed with the rice and sides I loved. The house was kept clean, and all of the chores were done while I was away studying. She wasn’t absent, just vacant. 

I wish I could say that I studied to become a doctor and save my mother or to become rich enough to afford the hospitals that could treat her, but it wasn’t like that. I studied to leave the house. I committed myself to arithmetic and allegories to retreat from the dark bedroom that hosted hordes of mythical creatures with beady eyes and forked tongues. It was in that room that I first saw the Dokkaebi. In my nightmares, it stared at my mother from the ceiling, his drool and spittle landing on her sheets. I would scream for her to wake up and run away, but she was deep in her sickness, unable to hear or see anything. And then he would drift down face-first like a spider does on its string: quiet and careful, making sure its prey isn’t aware of its presence until it’s too late, molded into that silky prison. Every time he reached her bed, I would wake up with a puddle between my legs. The stains lingered on my bare mattress, and each night I grew more and more ashamed of switching out my sheets. 

“Do you want to sleep with me tonight?” she asked one morning. 

“No.” She stared at me in confusion, clutching the sheets between her hands. “I’m sorry Mama.” 

She pulled me in close and wrapped me up in her nightgown. She held me, and I heard her heartbeat against my own. Dudeuk. Dudeuk. 

“I’m sorry too.” 

The nightmare stopped the night I turned seventeen, the night my mom died. I knew something was wrong when the pile of dishes in the sink kept on growing, but I bided my time. Entering her room would mean challenging the Dokkaebi, and I wasn’t ready for that. On the second night, I called out to her from the hallway. I thought she was asleep since this type of silence was something I had grown used to, so I tried yelling louder. She didn’t respond. I called the police and entered her room while I was waiting for their sirens. The smell of acetone and feces flooded out at once like a gust of wind and I gagged reflexively. Tears stung my eyes as I stumbled to the bathtub, grabbing onto the walls for a semblance of balance, and vomited. A series of questions and apologies followed the arrival of the police, but the noise and commotion disappeared soon, and I was left with a stillness. I washed out the tub with warm water and soap and took a shower before ironing my school uniform for the next day. 

The months passed like seconds stitched to each other seamlessly, connected with no clear end or beginning in sight. Though the clock ticked onwards, the ghost of my mother’s death never moved with it. 

I moved into a college dorm just a half hour away from my home. I lived there for my entire first year and dedicated myself to literature, occupying my depression with lyrics and verses, writing essays about the contribution of folklore to modern literature. In one of my classes, I began to research the Dokkaebi and came across an old story that my mother had told me about a well respected soldier who had found a home for him and his family in Seoul. According to her, the soldier spent his first two nights sleeping in the living room but was woken up by a beautiful woman at his door. He tried to reach her, but she was always just a hair out of his reach and disappeared once he  reached the front gate. The third night, he woke to flames. The walls and ceiling burnt around him as he cried out for help, scrambling to escape  before he was burnt alive. When he reached the door, the cool night air washed away the flames and the house looked just as it was supposed to, with all of its tapestries and wooden construction intact. The soldier, who had escaped unscathed, convinced himself it was a nightmare. 

But there was just a remnant of that heat smoldering inside of him, flashing through his chest and towards his cheeks. In that fire, his mother laid asleep in the other room. She was sick, and had been since they had reached the house. The soldier realized that he would have let her burn up into the air to save himself. He cried for the rest of the night, cursing his selfishness as a son. In the end, he found out that it was a Dokkaebi who had disguised himself as a scholar’s wife and fooled the soldier with an illusion of flames. 

This was the story that I remembered, but the textbooks I read had wiped away the pain of a grieving son. He floated away in the open sea of letters with nothing to hold onto or keep him anchored. There was no mention of the son’s guilt or shame in any of the paperbound books. That was my burden alone to carry.

I cried in the library, trying to muffle my gasps between my calloused hands and failing, choking on my own drool as I tried to take back the air fleeing my lungs. I cried for my mother, and my neglect during those two nights. I cried for her burial. I cried for dishes with soft potatoes and stewed fish set on a table with two chairs. I cried for a nightgown that reeked of death. I cried because, despite all of this, I still blamed her for her absence. I cried because there was nothing else to do, because the tears had welled up over the precipice of a mountain and spilled into life unhurried and unburdened. I went home that night, my real home, after having hardly eaten and threw up thin streams of water and rice beneath a full moon. 

Dudeuk. Dudeuk. “Now, we sit cross-legged in my cave.” His face wrinkled around his yellow grin. Wood clacked against stone and he stood up, stretching out his back using his cane to support him. His bare ribs protruded from his chest step by step like a ladder, interrupted by a swollen stomach that sat comfortably on top of the table. 

“You can stay here as long as you need to.” Hunched over, he reached to me with his gnarled fingers and set his palm on top of my head. I wiped off the snot on the back of my hand and faced him. His form blurred through my tear-filled eyes, but a pair of clear black irises pierced through the watered veils of my own. 

“Have some more tea.” 

I stayed in that cave for months, with the passage of time only illustrated through the changing glimpses of sunlight along the stone roof. We ate meals together and slept beneath the floral blankets he’d conjured, listening to the winter air course through the tunnels. After that first night, we greeted each other wordlessly. He communicated by placing bits of kimchi and stewed mackerel on my plate during dinner, or by waking me up with the soft tapping of his cane against the ground. His eyes were twin stars unpolluted by the light of streetlights and electric lamps, just as clear from three feet or a lightyear away. Through the silent exchange of food, I understood just how pure his love for me was. Behind the wrinkles, the yellowed teeth coated with plaque, those crooked and disjointed fingers, behind his sickly red skin and pot-belly, there was a familiar tenderness, like little lunch boxes packed for school. 

One morning, the Dokkaebi woke me up with the same metronomic tapping of wood against stone and pointed towards a shoddy wooden door that hadn’t been there the previous night. 

“I think,” he said, his voice rasping between the syllables, “it’s time to go.”

“Will I see you again?” I asked. His tooth hung out from the side of his lips, which were bent in a childish grin. 

“Maybe.” 

When I came to, I was lying down in front of the toilet. Outside the window, the moon shone brightly, indifferent and ignorant of my time with the Dokkaebi. I cleaned myself up with a warm shower and got dressed before finding myself in that dark hallway once again. My mother’s room was still bloated with death. The air inside heaved against the door, clawing against the wooden edges and attempting to grasp the doorknob with its formless, gaseous hand. Expecting that same stench I was affronted with so many years ago, I held my breath and twisted the cold, metal handle. 

The bed was lined up in the center of the room with a bedsheet corner folded lazily off to the side. Wilted flowers bent against the lip of a glass vase, whose water had turned brown with little particles floating in the aquarium of grime. I pushed down the burning sensation in my stomach and walked to the window, which cast angled slivers of moonlight across the room. The blinds came up, and light washed over the room. For a moment, I thought of the soldier in that story who imagined he had let his entire house burn up into flames. How silly, I thought, that a young man believed he could do anything more than stare in the face of disaster. I saw the shape of moonlight cascading into the room. I heard the pitter patter of cavern water douse out the flames. I opened my window and sucked in the cold air. In the corner of the room, I saw a flash of yellow in the shape of a crescent moon grin.