The Curse | WiP | 2464 | KangTeuk

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The shipment came in at two am.

There are calls, yells throughout the usually quiet museum, the groan of people lifting and the drone of fork lifts and the grate of wood on the polished concrete floors of the holding area.

By four am, the holding cell is empty of the living save one tirelessly working Librarian who's job it was to document and catalogue the new arrivals, surrounded by boxes, taking note of all the new artefacts one by one. He had them ordered by importance, which ones would be unveiled come morning with the rest of the exhibition.

Jungsu stops by the biggest box. The nails had already been popped, he just needs to lift the lid. He puts on his gloves, double thick latex over cotton and carefully set about opening the crate and removing the protective stuffing.

He was awed, he always was, by what was inside. The smooth painted wood of a sarcophagus. He removed the latex gloves and brushed his cotton lined fingers across the wood, brushing invisible specks of dust from the surface. He peered fleetingly at the wrapped body inside and with a soft smile, made his notes.

The museum technicians had returned from their break as Jungsu moved through other items.

They left, taking the artefacts one by one behind him to be arranged for the exhibition.

The man stopped for a break of his own, first in eight hours and wandered to take it in the main space of the museum, sitting high on the surrounding second floor to survey the work of others as he rested.

A cautious sense of someone being close by settled over him. Jungsu looked around, but saw nothing, saw no one. Still the sense remained. Long enough for him to assess it rationally. It hadn't harmed him, he didn't feel ill or in fact as tired from thirty-six hour days or the rush to get these items from customs and into the museum in time to meet the deadline. Weary, but safe, he felt. So he minded the sense not.

In the hours between, eight and nine am creeping upon them, until ten am brought the guards around to tell them the museum was opening. Jungsu stared around the space, taking in everything that was in order, precious things in glass cases, until his eyes settled finally on the main attraction, the mummy, safe in it's glass box.

The single glass of wine rushed to his head, the congratulatory offering from the curator as the day wore into night and the exhibition formally opened with business men and women and people in costume making the rounds, an authentic feel for this captial city opening. Jungsu retired from the main crowed, taking his leave to sit high on the circling second floor and peer down through wooden banister.

He felt it again here. Like he was being watched but he chalked it up now to exhaustion, to the fifty hours of alert forced on him through tea and pills to keep him functioning.

He would sleep tonight and return to finish cataloguing the new additions now that they were displayed.

Before he left, Jungsu swore he could feel something touch his arm, a sigh on an air conditioned breeze, a distant whisper and as much as they followed him back to the hotel in his thoughts he could only call them figments of his exhausted imagination.



He woke up at a touch, not flesh but warmth brushing dust from the bed he had been at rest in for thousands of years and he woke up, a soul dormant in a mummified body, at the sight of a face. All tired lines, softs and sharps with lidded brown eyes and half smiling lips, oh what a face to wake up to. He let his soul leave the body behind, detatched from the feet. This was no afterlife but...

He followed the living as they scattered about, followed his body to it's resting place behind glass and flitted to each object remembering more and more about himself, memories long dormant recalled as fresh as they had happened.

He watched the man with the soft face, and could not help but come closer, to try and reach through the planes to touch the curves and the flushed apple of his cheek.

He stood in his way, let the man walk right through him. He sighed for the fleeting warmth, the pulse of flesh and blood through his soul.

And longed for something more.


He has a routine now, follows Jungsu throughout the halls of the museum and the bowels of storage underneath where he has his small impermanent office. He learnt Jungsu's name through shouts and whispers and sounded it out to himself for the language is new on his tongue.

He read over Jungsu's shoulder, learnt his tongue alongside his own as Jungsu translated from photographs and transcripts, and whispered answers to him, imperceptably into his ear willing Jungsu to hear him.

Sometimes Jungsu did, and he smiled when the answer popped into his mind seemingly from no-where. He is content when Jungsu smiles.

He is frustrated too, because he wants to touch. Jungsu slept with his head cradled in his arms and he wanted to brush his hair back. Frustrated enough to force all of Jungsu's papers off his desk, the pencils and knicknacks crash to the floor in his anger, a sweep of energy.

Jungsu woke up, bleary eyed at the noise, his lips turning downwards into a frown. Tired tears springing up in those brown eyes.

“Why won't you show yourself to me?” Jungsu whispered, and got down from his chair to crawl on the floor to pick up the papers one by one.


For a week Jungsu no longer felt anything following him throughout his duties. He would make a trip to the main room and walk by the mummy during his breaks to see the shrouded body safe and whole in his glass case before returning to his small little room to decipher more hieroglyphs but no longer heard whispered answers.

Jungsu could hardly believe he missed a ghost, a figment of his own imagination.


He retreated, his soul hurting for the messy tears he had caused and then, because he wanted to find an answer. Why could he not show himself to Jungsu, what was a soul without a body? He tried to find memories, because he knew in his past he had been capable.

He finally found a way.


Jungsu carried books piled high to his nose in his arms, trying to manoeuvre the narrow corridors of the museum's underbelly. He passed through glass doors backwards, using his backside to open them in place of his arms and crashes into something or someone. The books fell from his arms, a haphazard pile of texts and printed pages that he followed to the ground with a terrible thud and a swearing groan of pain from a protesting hip.

A hand appeared in his face, and Jungsu followed the hand up along a muscular shirt clad arm to broad shoulders and face that women must swoon over, and that was to say Jungsu felt every bit like swooning.

“Are you okay?” A voice (rusty and almost unsure) asked as Jungsu stared unable to gather his wits.

“I, um, yes. I'm very sorry. I wasn't watching where I was going.” Jungsu blathered, taking the hand and let himself be hauled from the ground. Together they started reaching for books, one by one until their hands met atop the last one.

It was some chick flick moment, one like his friends made him watch and when Jungsu tried to let go, the stranger refused to and that was where the comparison ended.

“Excuse me.” Jungsu said softly, hinting that he wanted his hand back because the touch was doing strange things to him that he did not want to admit.

“Jungsu,” The stranger's eyes bored right into his. “Let me help you carry them?”

Jungsu debated, but considered that there were probably many members of staff that he had not met yet that would know his name, but there was something about this man that he could not quiet put his finger on. That sense beyond the physical.

“I don't want to intrude, but if you're able, I'd like the help.” Jungsu replied before he could stop himself and the man instantly took more than half the books from his arms.

“My name is Youngwoon.” the man offered and Jungsu nodded.

“Thank you, Youngwoon.”


Jungsu smiled at Youngwoon gratefully when the man placed the pile of books on his desk and dropped his own beside his notebook of scrawlings.

“What do you need all the books for?” Youngwoon asked, touching his fingers over the covers of some of the books, lifting pages curiously.

“I'm trying to find a translation for a certain hieroglyph. I haven't seen it before but I'm still learning them.”

Youngwoon smiled and nodded respectfully, though he could not stop staring at Jungsu.

Jungsu settled down to begin looking through the books, distracted for a few honest minutes before he realised Youngwoon was still there. Jungsu was about to speak before Youngwoon beat him to it.

“Would you let me see? Perhaps I can help?” Youngwoon moved behind the desk and leant down close behind Jungsu, his lips close to his ear.

“I-i, oh, I guess so..” was all Jungsu could get out and cleared away the loose sheaths of paper from on top of his main work pad and showed Youngwoon the photocopied hieroglyph.

“I know this one. It's part of the symbol for a curse.”

“How do you know?” Jungsu asked softly, though somewhere inside him had already answered that question no matter how impossible it could be. Despite this he chose not to believe, took the most logical route available. “Ah, it's probably why you're here. You work for the museum don't you. Thank you for your help but I really should get back to work. There's a lot to do and I'm sure you're quite busy.”

Youngwoon didn't move, his hands settling on the arms of the chair either side of Jungsu, he just wanted to remain close. It was there he whispered translations into Jungsu's ears. Told him histories of the items on display that nobody who wasn't part of the exhibition could have known.

He left out details as he told Jungsu of the body that lied upstairs, his body and how he had come to own the body he had now.

After the shock had worn away, Jungsu listened with feverish interest, his mouth and tongue bubbling full of questions just wanting to escape.

“Why pyramids?”

They spent the nights in the museum, walking through the halls. Jungsu pulled him to items in the exhibit and asked him at length and Youngwoon questioned Jungsu at the same time about the paintings and sculptures and the history so seeped into the walls of the place. Youngwoon makes him laugh with his innocent curiosity, how quickly he learns. Youngwoon would catch his arm and twirl him like his saw in a painting, would pose like Dega's ballerina's and tell him jokes because he loved to make him laugh.

They sat in silence when their words died down, somewhere in the early am on the second floor that looked out above the exhibit. Jungsu left distance which Youngwoon soon filled, relishing this forbidden warmth of contact.

“Are you cursed?” Jungsu asked, turning to face Youngwoon seriously. Youngwoon shook his head, though his heart, right to his soul started to ache.
“I think that I'm cured.” Youngwoon replied and leant closer, catching Jungsu's face between his hands to kiss him.

Jungsu wavered in his seat as Youngwoon pulled away and began to speak once more.

They soon left the museum, Jungsu took Youngwoon out to explore the world around them, took him home to the hotel apartment that he barely saw anyway. They would talk, ask more questions, watch those sappy chick flicks for their simplicity as Youngwoon learnt the nuances. Until Youngwoon started trying those cheesy scenes out on him.

They rarely spent a moment apart as the exhibition dragged on. Youngwoon would wander the museum during the day, sometimes venturing outside, then more often going outside than staying in the museum, the more he became accustomed to the world. Still he would meet Jungsu at the end of every day, go home with him because he had nowhere else to go.

Jungsu didn't notice it so much at first. He was always tired, working long hours combined with his study then planning the next stop in the world for the exhibition and trying to figure out how to bring Youngwoon with him.

Until it got harder and harder to stay awake sometimes. Hard to ignore the growing aches in his joints.

He would fall asleep at his desk often, these days, always intending just to put his head down for a moment until a whole afternoon had passed. Youngwoon would be there sometimes already, stroking hair away from his face and trying to wake him up, a sadness permeating his touch until Jungsu would smile at him.

“Are you cursed?” Jungsu asked again, closing his eyes once more. Youngwoon didn't answer, but gathered Jungsu up into his arms and carried him all the way back to the hotel.


“The exhibition is moving in two weeks,” Jungsu told him as he curled into the corner of the couch, unwilling to get up though he knows he had to. When he looked at himself in the mirror he found his cheeks hollowing out, his lines sharper than softer. “It moves every seven months. We're going to Britain this time.” He does logistics from the hotel room for a few days, helping the curator and in those days he doesn't really notice the Youngwoon wasn't there at all.

One night when Youngwoon is home, Jungsu tugs him down to sit, his lips twisted in anxiety.

“Where do you go?” Jungsu asked, “When you're not here?”

“I get to live again. I want to experience that.” Youngwoon replied, his fingers stroking hair back from Jungsu's face. It's not the same as when they had met. It was like he had aged thirty years in the blink of an eye.

“Please live well then.”


Jungsu grew more and more weary, he apologised. He had to resign. He rested thin hands on the top of his cane and bowed his way out of the room.