For a brief second, she sees clearly straight ahead—her own self sitting in a car that’s lost control, barreling toward her, her expression frozen in fear, her hands ineffectually grasping the steering wheel where a third set of five fingers, mockingly casual, are holding the wheel between her two hands.
Then, darkness again.
“—eacher.”
A woman’s voice, thin and frail. She opens her eyes. The voice calls for her again.
“Teacher.”
It’s the voice again. She tries to turn her head to the direction the voice is coming from. Her neck, however, doesn’t move.
“Teacher Lee.”
Before she can speak, a familiar voice answers.
“Yes?”
Hearing her own voice answer the thin voice, she feels like her whole body is convulsing underneath the car. But her body doesn’t move. A slimy mud, or something that is like mud but nothing she can ever know for sure, is making its sticky, stubborn, and ominous way over her ankles to her knees, thighs, stomach, slowly but ceaselessly crawling up the rest of her body.
She can hear conversation from afar.
“Are you there? Who are you? I’m over here!”
“Teacher Lee, are you all right?”
She tries with all of her might. Her right arm is pinned down beneath a wheel. She just about manages to free her left hand. It grips the bumper. Trying to pull herself from underneath the car, she puts all her strength into her left arm.
Suddenly, cold fingers touch her left hand. She makes a fist. But it’s too late. The cold fingers have wrested the round, hard, and smooth ring from her hand.
“No …” She tries to shout it. But her voice has crawled down her throat.
The thin voice whispers into her ear, “You’ve been hurt badly, you really shouldn’t move. Tea. Cher. Lee.” It cackles softly as it moves away from her ear.
She feels slight vibrations from the car that covers her.
“Be careful. One step at a time, slowly.”
It’s the thin voice, from a distance.
She opens her mouth. With all her strength, with all the fear and rage and despair pooled in her heart, she screams.
“What’s wrong?” she can hear the voice ask.
“Did you … hear something?”
“Hear what?” the voice asks again.
“Someone … I thought there was someone there …”
She can just about hear heavy footsteps coming down on soft ground. The conversation becomes more and more distant.
The car sinks. She hears the sound of bones breaking somewhere in her body. Strangely enough, the sound makes her realize she no longer feels pain.
All she can feel is the enormous weight of the car as it drags her down into the unknown abyss.
Snare
This is a story I once read long ago.
Once upon a time, a man walking through snow-covered mountain forests came across a fox struggling in a snare. The fox’s fur meant money, and the man, thinking he would kill the fox for her fur, approached the animal with a knife in hand.
The fox then lifted her head and spoke in a human voice, “Please let me go.”
The man was taken aback. At the same time, he noticed that from the fox’s ankle where the snare dug in, a shining liquid flowed. The fox bled not blood but something that resembled gold. The surrounding snow had made it hard to notice at first, but now he saw the area around the snare was splattered with the glittering substance, some of it hardened in the cold snow.
The man picked up one of the hardened lumps and peered at it closely. He bit down on it.
Gold. It was unmistakable.
Taking great care, the man assiduously scraped up every bit that was around the fox. Then, with even more care, he packed the fox inside his bag, someone else’s snare and all, and took her home.
Once home, the man hid away the fox deep in his shed. He gave the fox water and food, keeping it alive. The snare was never taken off. Rather, the man would occasionally shake the snare or wound the fox again with a sharp weapon so that her injuries never healed. Whenever he did so, the fox barked or whined in resentment. But the only time she spoke like a human was when the man had first discovered her.
The man let the liquid that flowed from her wounds set before selling it little by little. Cunning as he was, he knew very well what would happen if a peasant like him suddenly showed up with fistfuls of gold in his pockets. He deliberately carried small dribbles of it instead of big ones, going from town to town, selling so little as to never attract much attention. With the money from the gold he sold, he bought grains, salt, leather, and timber—ordinary goods that he could sell in his own village’s market.