We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Everything Good Dies Here: Tales from the Linker Universe and Beyond, a short story collection by pseudonymous South Korean author Djuna, translated by Adrian Thieret—available now from Kaya Press.
The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea’s most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities.
Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Djuna’s stories together form an intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was.
1
May I tell you a story? It is the story of what happened to me in 1842, the year I turned nineteen by the Western reckoning. Ah, I already see disbelief on your face. Nevertheless, perhaps you might consider setting your doubts aside for a moment and indulging me?
Have you heard of a country called Joseon? That is where I was born. It is a small, peninsular country between China and Japan that became a Japanese colony at the beginning of this century. Who knows what its fate will be once the war ends. I have heard its people are still fighting for their independence.
I wish I could tell you more about Joseon before starting my story; however, I left the country one hundred years ago, and it is insignificant in world affairs. Most people do not even know of its existence, and those who do tend to be uninterested in learning more. It is thus difficult to find books to supplement my own fading memories and knowledge. To me, Joseon will forever remain that small neighborhood where a young girl whom others called strange lived for nineteen years.
For the first fifteen years of my life, I lived with my father. My mother left this world as she brought me into it. My father, a scholar, was a member of the yangban, the Joseon ruling class. He was curious and clever, but also woefully incompetent and poor. All he knew how to do was read, write, and discuss books. I never once saw him do anything that might put food on the table. It was amazing that we did not starve to death.
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My father was a Catholic. I am not sure we would have survived the persecution of Joseon Catholics in 1839. But, conveniently enough, my father died just before the difficulties began, and his friends burned his dangerous books as soon as his funeral rites were concluded.
My future looked bleak. I had no relatives, and none of my father’s friends were in good circumstances. Yet, fortune found me just in time. A yangban household a day’s walk from the hut where I lived decided to take me in as their daughter-in-law.
It sounds like a Cinderella story, but it was not. It is true that the household was far wealthier than I would have dared to imagine. However, the man my father’s friends had arranged for me to marry was deficient in the head. Some said he had suffered a childhood injury, others said he had been poisoned by bad medicine. I do not know which explanation was true. Nearby families were understandably reluctant to give up their daughters to such a man. I, however, despite my uncouth manner and upbringing, was the educated daughter of a yangban household. The family therefore settled on me as an adequate bride for their son.
I do not mean to speak ill of my husband. He was no more or no less than the village idiot: dull, dirty, good-hearted, and innocent. His libido was too robust for his childlike manner, but I could hardly blame him for that. My only worry was that I might give birth to a child as stupid as him. It was a ridiculous thought, but before Father Mendel came up with his theory of genetics, were Westerners capable of understanding such things either?
We lived together for exactly eight months. His death was an accident. He and the neighborhood children were playing with a ball made from a pig’s bladder when a wagon coming down the hill ran over his head, crushing his skull. His family was both sad and relieved. Despite being a precious son and younger brother, he had been a burden. My husband’s mother was the only one who seemed truly grieved by his death. She also seemed to resent me for no good reason, though she did not let it show.
Most of the family pitied me for having become a lonely widow at such a young age. In truth, however, I lived quite happily for the next few years. I had not disliked my husband.But he had been a dull, annoying, and beastly person. And besides, why shouldn’t a woman like living without a husband? I had a room of my own. For the first time in my life, I was clean, warm, and well-fed, and could sit by myself and do whatever I pleased without being interrupted. And yet they pitied me. Did they really not know how truly wretched life outside our gates could be?
Our compound was quite large, palatial even, and of all the people in it, I had the least to do. The slaves and hired laborers did all of the hard work. Father was a famous scholar. His sons, all of whom lived in the compound with him, were likewise influential in the region and just as busy as their father. Mother and the women below her were always occupied with the considerable amount of housework required to maintain such a large household. I was the only person who did not quite fit in any of these categories, and so was more of a hindrance than anything else. When the women under the aegis of my mother-in-law gathered together to work, I was quietly excluded. The slaves likewise ignored my directions and would not let me join them. Everyone pitied, scorned, and avoided me.
I did not care, for I was good at keeping myself amused. Growing up in the hills without any friends, I had never had much choice in the matter. It was easy for me to find new things to do. For one, the household had plenty of books to read. To be sure, scholars’ homes always had many books in the men’s quarters, but I was neither interested in nor allowed to read those. Our household, however, also held over four hundred volumes in the women’s quarters, a huge collection by Joseon standards. Many of the books were handwritten copies of fiction and one, a sixty-volume novel set in China, had supposedly been written by the mother of Elder Sister, the wife of my husband’s oldest brother.
I also turned my attention to bards at one point. These bards were the Frank Sinatras of Joseon. They sang of the brave rabbit who deceived the king of the sea, the wife who tricked her adulterous husband, and other old tales. I enjoyed their songs so much that once I even climbed over the compound wall and snuck out to a nearby village to see a performance. When I returned to my senses and went home, I discovered that no one had noticed my absence. I wish I could recreate those old Joseon songs for you, but the rhythms and melodies were never easy to memorize, and it has been so long since I heard them. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Cole Porter have supplanted them in my mind.
When I had time left over from these occupations, I drew pictures on scraps of paper collected here and there. These drawings were nothing like what Joseon people were accustomed to. My artistic and technical inspiration came from a miniature portrait of a girl done by some eighteenth-century French painter and twelve sexually suggestive copper etchings I found in a booklet that must have come from roughly the same time period. I found both items amongst the junk left behind by my grandfather, so I presume they must have passed through the Qing Empire. Most of my father’s books had already been carted off or burned by his friends, but these two items and a small ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary I took and brought along to my in-laws’ house. I longed to see more of these “pictures of pretty women,” but pictures of women of any appearance were hard to find, so I made do with what I had.
I was not entirely friendless. Among the many people living in the palatial compound I had two friends, the twin girls who were the result of a relationship Second Brother had had with a government courtesan while on an official posting in the Joseon capital of Hanyang. Their mother had died of illness only a few months before I arrived, leaving them effectively orphans. Like me, they too had no real role to play within the family, and the three of us lived together in our own separate building. I acted the leader and took them around the household to play. When it suited me, I taught them how to draw pretty women and imitate bird songs by blowing through reeds.
I should probably pause for a moment here to explain a bit more about my father-in-law. During the four years I lived in that household—except for those final weeks—I hardly ever saw Father, and talked with him even less. As was typical for rich yangban households, the large external walls of our compound enclosed a number of individual buildings separated by walls and doorways into different living quarters. The men’s and women’s worlds were thus physically isolated from one another.
Father was a philosopher. Actually, all yangban scholars were philosophers, but even amongst this select group, Father was quite famous. He had written a number of books and could boast many disciples. I once snuck into the library and tried to read one of his books. Though I lacked the context needed to fully comprehend it, I understood the book to be Father’s attempt at explaining the difference between humans and beasts, a question that had deeply concerned him at the time. To me, having grown up in the hills, it seemed obvious that the answer would never be found by sitting indoors and redefining the meanings of Chinese characters. If you truly want to know how beasts differ from humans, shouldn’t you just go live with them?
2
In the summer of 1842, Father was bedridden with illness. He was seventy-two years old by the Western reckoning and had already lived a full life. He should have been allowed to die in peace, but his family saw things differently. Father’s followers were enormously distressed. I am not entirely sure of the details, but they seemed to need him alive for a mess of complicated political reasons. Famous and important people were not allowed to die simply of their own accord.
Numerous physicians visited the household to no avail. Watching from a distance, I saw Father slowly wither and waste away. Elder Brother also grew thin. He had a reputation for filial piety, but now that I think about it, that was not the only reason. He must have been very dependent on Father to have worried so much about Father’s health. For there is no other way to explain what happened next.
Several days after Chuseok, the autumn moon festival, a suspicious box was delivered to the house. I snuck a glance over the wall of my quarters and saw that one of the two delivery men had a brown face and wore strange clothing I had never seen before.
When morning broke, four physicians descended upon the household and kicked the women out of the kitchen. I soon smelled the familiar smell of medicine boiling. There was however one particularly pungent odor I had never before encountered. As the medicine continued to boil, the unusual odor faded away until I wondered if I had imagined it. I remained curious, however.
Several hours later, the ingredients from the box had been reduced to a dark liquid. Elder Brother poured this into a bowl and took it to Father’s room. The physicians followed closely behind, leaving the kitchen empty. My curiosity getting the better of me, I entered the kitchen. The twins followed at my heels like shadows.
Most of the medical ingredients I saw scattered around the kitchen, such as small pieces of twigs, roots, and berries, were familiar to me. Half were things out of Father’s own cabinets that he took for minor illnesses. The only strange and unfamiliar thing in the kitchen was a pile of what looked like brown leather bands that lay spread out lengthwise on the cutting board. This was the source of the pungent odor.
I picked up one of the bands and examined it more closely. It appeared to be a thickly sliced piece of root peel. Twisted back into its original shape, it resembled a snake coiled around a stick. Red liquid seeped out from its fleshy inside when I turned it over. I dabbed my finger in the liquid to taste it. It was sour. Then with my front teeth, I took a bite from where the liquid had seeped out. It tasted of pear and radish, with an added a tinge of iron, like blood. Without thinking, I and the twins each took a piece of the peel and ate what was left of its flesh. We did not stop to wonder why it was the only non-dried ingredient in Father’s medicine, or why it had been added to Father’s medicine in the first place. It smelled and tasted good, so we ate it. In retrospect, it was quite a foolish thing to do.
I ate dinner and went to bed to the sound of men talking near Father’s room. I felt rather tired, but assumed this was from all the tension in the household.
I awoke to Elder Sister’s worried face peering down at me. At first, I thought I was dreaming. Elder Sister was a renowned poet, and by my standards, the most beautiful woman in the compound. Naturally, I modeled some of my pictures of pretty women after her. Her face thus frequently appeared in my dreams. Her large, hungry eyes and the way her mouth turned upward slightly at the corners led some to ask whether she might not be more alluring than was entirely appropriate for a lady from a respectable family. This was not something Elder Brother ever complained about, however.
I was not dreaming. Elder Sister had indeed come into my room, and was wiping my forehead. The shock of this realization startled me awake, but it was nothing compared to what she told me. She said that the twins and I had slept for three and a half days since that evening. I had spouted nonsense in my sleep and turbid sweat had oozed from my pores. Elder Sister had wiped the sweat from my face, but it had dried and stuck to other parts of my body, making me feel as if I were covered in some kind of thin membrane.
Also, Father had passed away while we slept.
The funeral of a family patriarch was an extremely important affair for Joseon men of the yangban class, one that involved much more than the interment of the corpse. The dead man’s sons were all expected to resign from their various positions and build a mud hut in front of his grave where they would hold vigil for three years. During this period of mourning, they were not allowed to bathe or have sex. People’s opinions about this custom differed, and not everyone followed it, but for Elder Brother there was no real choice. He needed to uphold his reputation as a filial son and set an example for Father’s enemies and followers alike.
Furthermore, Father’s various political and scholarly battles were all suspended when he died, and Second Brother was forced to quit his government post and return home. As I already mentioned, the timing of all this could not have been worse.
Funerals were men’s affairs. Women played only a supporting role, providing the loud, wailing expressions of filial piety and grief required by the noisy ritual. Neither the twins nor I were required to participate, we had never been considered members of the family, and besides, we still had not completely recovered our senses. While the funeral rituals took place, we holed up in a corner of our separate building playing marbles and reading the new stories that the old book merchant had brought us a few days earlier.
But the marbles kept slipping through our fingers and all three of us kept accidentally biting our tongues, which made reading out loud rather difficult. We lost five days in this half-drunken state. At one point, a physician visited us to ask about our symptoms and the root scraps we had eaten. I am not sure he learned anything from us.
Little by little, the world returned to normal. For me, at least, because I was neither wife nor mother to anyone, and had no particular contact with the men in the compound. People were still gossiping about Father’s death, but that was no concern of mine. My body recovered, and I learned a lesson from the affair: avoid medicinal ingredients brought in by suspicious men to save dying old people, even if they look tasty. And I thought that was enough.
Until Father came back.
3
On the fifteenth night after Father’s burial, I was woken from sleep by the distant sound of someone pounding on the main gate accompanied by the low-pitched rumble of a man’s voice.
It was after midnight, and someone was pounding on the gate and yelling, “Open
up!”
Annoyed, I crawled out from under my blanket. This man was shouting so loudly that I could hear his voice all the way in my quarters. Why was no one from the slaves’ quarters responding? And more to the point, why was someone disturbing us in the middle of the night?
Still yawning, I made my way to the main building. Something was not right. Through the open inner gate of the compound, I could see the women of the household whispering together in the entryway with the slaves and hired laborers, yet none of them went to open the outer gate. Each time they heard the pounding, they briefly froze.
Once the night air had brought me to my senses, I realized why.
It was Father’s voice.
The people in the entryway were scared and confused. Many Joseon people believed in ghosts even though that belief clashed somewhat with their Confucian worldview. Yet, the ghosts they believed in did not pound on doors and ask to be let inside. The people of Joseon knew nothing about “premature burials” or catalepsy. What they experienced that night was more than just frightening: it simply made no sense.
Mother was the first to move. Nearly in tears, she walked out through the inner doorway, crossed to the main gate and, with the assistance of the old family steward and a slave, unbolted the latch. As soon as the bolt had been fully withdrawn, the gate creaked loudly open.
Father’s corpse stood in front of the gate. It stood firmly and glared in our direction, but we all knew it was a corpse. It emanated the horribly unpleasant aura of a dead thing.
Despite this, Father looked far healthier than he had in the last few months of his life. He had gained weight, and a bulging stomach was visible between the edges of his dirty open robe. The ends of his fingers were covered in dried blood and all his fingernails had fallen off, probably as he had clawed his way out of his coffin and through the earth above.
Father staggered forward through the gate and headed toward the men’s quarters. He sat down in the main hall and began to shout the same short word over and over. After three or four repetitions I could finally make out what he was trying to say: “Drink!” Upon a gesture from the old steward, one slave immediately rushed out of the room. Meanwhile, Mother sent two slaves out of the house. Later I learned that she had sent them to check on her sons, who had been holding vigil in the hut next to the grave.
The slave returned with a bottle of alcohol and a cold meat pancake. Father grabbed the pancake with his bare hands, took a large bite of it, and chewed three or four times before spitting it out onto the floor. He then gulped some alcohol straight from the bottle, but he could not tolerate that either.
He spewed the alcohol out and threw the bottle to the floor. The only thing he seemed able to keep down was the well water hastily fetched by Mother.
No one spoke. Father’s three sons were the ones who should have been talking to him to figure out what had happened, but not one of them had come home. Had they seen Father rise from his grave? If they had, why had they not followed him back home?
The brothers’ absence was perplexing. Father’s return home fifteen days after his burial was, on the other hand, unexpectedly easy to explain. The unusual medicine he had eaten before dying had, belatedly, worked. It was a strange idea, but plausible, because Joseon people did not demarcate life and death as neatly as their more religious counterparts in the West. My own father had taught me some of the Bible and, being reminded of the story of Lazarus, I was perplexed by Father’s return. In the Bible, had not Jesus been the only one who could bring people back from death? Did it happen more often than I thought?
More troubling was Father’s beard. It had been gray with one or two strands of black mixed in, but now the hair around his mouth had all turned black. Or so it looked under the lanterns brought by Mother and the steward. And speaking of suspicious occurrences, the stains on his fingers also bothered me. They were not dried mud. More like some sticky dark red substance.
Several hours passed without much change. It was like watching a tedious but ghastly drama. Father kept trying to force his stiff tongue and lips to say things to us, but we were unable to make out any words. When we failed to understand, he grew angry, spitting at us and throwing things. We could never have imagined Father acting this way before.
Unable to stand it anymore, Mother finally ran up to Father. She moved her lantern across his face and screamed in a trembling voice. “Where are my sons, you old man! My sons were at your grave, where are they now?” Father shook his head as if to indicate his own bewilderment. Of all the people in this ridiculous scene, he seemed the most confused.
Another loud noise came in from the main gate. I feel I should let you know at this point that I might repeat certain descriptions as I continue this story. The main gates of Joseon compounds were always loud. It was not that they were poorly made or anything like that. To the contrary, it was a deliberate ostentation. As I recall, every time something decisive happened in that household, the main gate would always sound with a loud and upsetting creeeeeeak.
The gate had only been closed, not bolted, and now the three sons Mother had just been worrying about opened it and entered. Since all the lanterns were pointed at Father, his sons looked like shadows at first. But it took only a moment to differentiate them. Each brother was slightly shorter and fatter than his elder, and with the three of them standing in a line, we could tell them apart by their silhouettes.
Mother ran towards them, relief on her face, but just before reaching them, she froze and dropped her lantern. The lantern’s paper wrapping caught fire, and in the resulting blaze of light I could see them clearly for the first time. Blood oozed from their mouths and necks, staining their clothing, and their cloudy pupils were visible only through eyeholes torn in the greasy gray membranes that covered their heads.
They stood in the gate like scarecrows and glared at the family and slaves.
I quietly backed away. I did not understand what was happening. But there were four corpses walking around, so my top priority was to stay away from them and protect the children. Although there were four people in the household young enough to call children, I am of course referring here only to the twins.
I had barely managed to retreat to the inner gate before it started. I was unable to witness the events for myself since everyone’s backs blocked my view, but putting the pieces of the story together from what I heard later, it seems that Third Brother, the laziest and dullest of the sons apart from my dead husband, had been the first to attack.
He threw his mother to the ground and bit into her neck. Chaos ensued. Like starving foxes in a henhouse, the brothers and Father began to attack everyone trapped inside the compound walls. Screams filled the night and blood spurted from torn arteries. The slaves were helpless when faced with this onslaught. For them, the mere idea of standing up to yangban men was unthinkable. I thought I glimpsed one large young man run toward the shed and grab a pickaxe, but I cannot be sure he ever swung it. I ran, sprinting off as fast as I could through the women’s quarters and toward the room I shared with the twins. They were still asleep when I opened the door. As I shook them awake, I felt someone grab my neck. Twisting around, I saw it was Second Brother. He threw me to the ground and, holding my chest down with both hands, sunk his teeth into my neck.
I thought that was the end. To my astonishment, however, Brother let out a cry and pulled away. Something that looked like steam rose from the mouth that had just bitten me. He stood back a few moments before attacking once more, this time biting one of the twins, but again he immediately screamed and withdrew.
His cries drew the attention of his brothers, who rushed over to us, their mouths gaping open like children with stuffy noses. Inside each of their mouths I could see a pair of long, sharp teeth. These were not human canines. They were the fangs of venomous snakes.
The scene of moments ago repeated itself. First and Third Brother attacked me and the twins just as Second Brother had. They too screamed and drew back as soon as our blood touched their lips. Since all three bit me in the same way, I was able to distinctly feel their new teeth touch and enter the holes in my neck.
The three brothers circled us, growling. I had no idea what to do. Were it not for the twins, I might have considered slipping out of the house, over the wall behind my building, and away into the hills. But it would be impossible to do that with the twins, and I could not imagine abandoning them and running away by myself.
Second Brother grabbed my neck once again. This time, instead of biting me, he dragged me out of the building by the scruff of my neck, as if I were a sack of rice. The cries of the twins behind me indicated they were being subjected to the same treatment.
Bloody corpses lay strewn across the yard in front of the men’s quarters. They looked different somehow in the dawn twilight. The corpses of the slaves and hired laborers were covered in blood, their necks torn, but the bodies of family members had much smaller neck wounds that were covered by a viscous liquid. Had I had time to check, I am sure I would have found a pair of needle-like punctures at the site of each family member’s wound. The brothers had unconsciously divided their prey into two groups, food and family. When biting family, they had released something from their fangs and into the victim’s bloodstream. The twins and I had been a meal for them. I got chills when I thought about it later. Me, I could understand, but why the twins? Were they not Second Brother’s own children?
Father sat in the main hall rubbing his bloody hands together and stared at me.
His face was ghastly, yet I found myself beginning to relax because, unlike the three brothers who were behaving like beasts and could not be reasoned with, Father still at least resembled a human. I enfolded the twins in my arms and stared back at Father. I did not speak. Words seemed unnecessary given the circumstances. Father opened his mouth, but again I could not make out what he was trying to say. Just as his consonants and vowels seemed to be coming together into something approximating speech, they were torn apart by screams. It was not only Father; his three sons also cried out in agony. I blinked, confused. It took several seconds for me to understand what had happened.
4
Vampires. They were vampires.
Excerpted from Everything Good Dies Here, copyright © 2024 by Djuna.
