My baby … Where is it …
When fear and iciness suppressed any response from the victim, the ghost of the daughter would scream in a voice that shook the entire house.
My baby … ! Where is it … !
Even after the ghost of the daughter disappeared, those seduced by the gold glimmer would stare off into space and keep shouting about a golden ghost, or wring their hands and scrape their face raw while screaming about needing to wash the blood from themselves, or see the sunlight outside and yell, “Gold, it’s gold!” before jumping out the window, or inexplicably go into the forest in the middle of the night and be found dead the next morning with their necks caught in snares that were meant for foxes.
The servants fell away one by one; they either went insane, were forced to leave, or chose to run away.
In that large house, the man was left all alone.
Every night, the man was visited in his bed by the golden, translucent ghost of his daughter, bleeding from her eyes and lips and torn-open belly, asking him the same question over and over again.
My baby … Where is it …
The man didn’t know where the baby was and therefore couldn’t answer her. His daughter’s ghost would ask again.
My baby … Where is it …
Until daybreak, the pale, golden specter of his daughter, with her bloodied face, would stand by the man’s bed, and just as she did on the day she died, she would drip cold blood from her sliced belly, drenching him in his bed as she asked and asked again the same question.
My baby … Where is it …
A few months after the last servant had fled, the villagers, half in curiosity and half out of a sense of duty about having to do something about this unfortunate house, ventured into the compound, where they found the man lying on his bed, reduced to skin and bones, yet somehow still alive.
“Please let me go …”
These were his last words. And this story is what has been passed down.
There is an epilogue. Some years later, in a place very far from there—for example if the man’s house was in the north-western region it would be a village in the south east—a strange something appeared on a mountain trail on a snowy, late winter’s evening.
The days are short in the winter and the mountains go dark quickly. But this something was glowing faintly. On the snow-covered mountainside, it sat hunched over and busily moved as if preoccupied with some task.
The person who witnessed it had lived his whole life in a village nearby, and in all his years of going to the mountains, he had never seen such a thing. Curious, he approached the pale thing from behind and looked down at what it was doing. Not long after, he screamed and ran down the path he had come on.
According to the villager’s story, the thing was a young boy. About five or six years old, crouched over and devouring something in the dark mountain trail. For whatever reason, the boy’s body emitted a faint golden glow, which was how the villager was able to see what the boy had been eating when he went up to him.
It was the body of a young man. The boy had ripped open the man’s stomach, dipped his hands into him, and taken out a golden lump, which he was ravenously eating. The young man’s body looked as if it had been dead for a while because it was white as a sheet, and all around glinted spots and splatters of gold.
Because that golden lump, the scattered droplets of gold, and the faintly glowing child were all beautiful in an other-worldly way, the villager initially had no idea what he was looking at, so arrested was he by this first impression. Even after he had approached and saw the young man with his belly split open, the villager had not been sure whether that gold-covered corpse had truly been the body of a man.
The crouching boy had looked up at the villager who approached him. The boy’s eyes held no emotion. Without a word or change in expression, he took out another cold-hardened lump of gold from his father’s belly and put it in his mouth. When the boy opened his mouth, the villager spotted sharp fangs like that of a fox or wolf.
The young man with the split belly grabbed the villager’s ankle.
Let me go …
The villager nearly stumbled off his feet.
The young man with the split belly spoke once more in a voice which was like cracked ice on a frozen lake.
Let me …
The child with the golden glow emotionlessly stared at the villager, his mouth half-open with his sharp teeth bared.
The villager shook off the young man’s grasp, turned, and ran for his life.
When he reached his house, the villager saw that the part of his trousers that the young man had grasped was glinting with gold. With some other people from the village, he went out after sunrise to the place where he had seen the boy, but the mountain trail was only muddy from the melting snow, and of the golden boy and the man with his belly split open, there was not a trace.