04Lilly of the Valley, page 11
here earlier. It sounds like you had quite an adventure yesterday. I would like to hear about it.” Park placed his hand on his old friend’s shoulder.
“Please, follow me,” replied Chin-hwa. “We can talk in the living room.”
Ae-cha stepped into the hallway to see their visitor. “Oh,” she said, in
surprise.
“Oh, colonel, this is my daughter in law, Ae-cha.”
“My pleasure,” replied the colonel, bowing slightly. “I heard about the loss
of your husband, please accept my condolences.”
“Thank you,” replied Ae-cha, reaching for Lilly.
“My dear, the colonel and I will be in the living room. Could you bring each
of us a cup of tea, please.”
“Of course,” confirmed Ae-cha, making her way toward the kitchen.
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In the living room, the colonel turned to see the portrait of their leader and his son prominently displayed on the wall, that was otherwise blank. “I see that you still display the photos of our eternal leader and his son in a place of honor as should be done in all homes. From what I have been hearing I almost expected
them to be absent.”
“Really?” said Chin-hwa, trying to sound surprised.
“Really,” confirmed Park, sitting down on a chair beside his old friend. “I
remember that you once spoke of your grandfather, of how he was taken away in
the middle of the night due to his profession of faith in this Jesus.”
“That is true,” confirmed Chin-hwa.
“I want to hear in your own words, face to face what happened that night
that Lieutenant Lee Sung raided that underground church,” said Colonel Park. I want all of the details.”
“Of course,” confirmed Chin-hwa, who proceeded to tell Park what had
happened. It took the better part of an hour and Park asked many probing
questions. However the last ones were the most difficult.
“I know that you tend to be a very tolerant man,” said Park, taking a sip of
his tea. “Despite what some might think, I consider it a noble trait. The fact that you were not at that meeting that night clears you of at least a portion of the blame, in the minds of the committee. But tell me, old friend, did you know about it?”
“There was a moment of hesitation, but only a moment. “Yes, colonel, I
knew.”
The colonel nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. “Have you ever attended
it?”
Well, there it was, the question that Chin-hwa had been dreading. “Yes, I
have attended it.”
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Again, Park seemed not to be surprised. “After what happened to your
grandfather all of those years ago I am surprised that you would answer yes to that question. It says something of your character, and maybe your foolishness.”
“We’ve been friends for far too long for me to lie to you about such a thing
as that,” said Chin-hwa.
“I appreciate that,” said Park, “but it puts both of us in a difficult situation.
Tell me, do you plan to continue allowing an underground church to flourish at this facility?”
“No, I don’t,” said Chin-hwa. “What the people do in the privacy of their
own homes with their own families is their business, but I’ve made it clear that there is to be no organized underground church on mill property. There will not be a repeat of this incident.”
Park breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m glad that you said that, and I believe
you. Here is what is going to happen. You will receive an official letter of reprimand regarding this incident. It will be placed within your permanent folder.
However, considering the number of letters of commendation that currently rest within that same folder with it, I suspect that it will become lost in the shuffle. It is the nature of bureaucracy, perhaps one of its redeeming characteristics. As for your personal faith, I don’t believe that we discussed it this morning. The records will reflect this. This issue and the associated investigation are closed. You and your family may continue on with your lives without fear.”
“And what about Lieutenant Sung, what is to be done about him?” asked
Chin-hwa.
“He will be disciplined for striking a superior officer, of course,” replied
Park. “That sort of behavior we can ill afford to condone. He is likely to be overlooked when it comes to a promotion for some considerable time to come.”
“And that’s all?” asked Chin-hwa.
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“The lieutenant comes from an influential family and has powerful friends,”
replied Park. “That also comes with bureaucracy.”
“He murdered two people in cold blood, and would have brutally murdered
twelve people,” objected Chin-hwa. “Some of them were children. Can we afford to have such a lunatic in the position of an officer in our army?”
“Christians are viewed as undesirables,” replied Park. “His orders came
from the regional commander of the Bowibu. He interpreted them in a somewhat
perverse fashion, but they had granted him wide liberties in how to deal with the situation. We censure him in a serious manner and we stir up a real hornet’s nest.
It is best to simply allow this issue to die. It’s give and take, my friend.
Prolonging it does no one any good. Didn’t your Jesus preach forgiveness? Why don’t you take His words to heart, there is something to be said for it.”
Chin-hwa nodded.
Colonel Park rose to his feet. “I do hope we get to spend time together again on a better day. It has been too long. You and your lovely wife need to come visit my wife and me in Pyongyang. We could take in the sights. Bring your whole
family.”
“After harvest I’ll need to take you up on your offer,” replied Chin-hwa.
They walked to the door, where Park spoke briefly with Chun-hei before
departing.
“We’re going to be okay,” said Chin-hwa as he and his family watched the
car vanish down the dusty road. “Colonel Park is a good man, he will smooth
things over for us in Pyongyang.”
“But that lieutenant was being influenced by one of Satan’s minions,” noted
Ae-cha. “I fear that our problems might just be beginning.”
“If God is for us who can be against us?” asked Lilly. “God is going to take
care of us.”
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“He did yesterday,” noted Chun-hei.
“It’s going to be okay, you’ll see,” said Lilly.
The family walked back inside. There was a lot to get done today. It was a
cleaning day and they were already getting a late start.
.
.
.
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Chapter 8
Bae watched with keen interest as the crew lowered the new fiber optic cable
into the trench, even as the old copper cables were being rolled up on the far side.
This old cable had been buried in this trench nearly fifty years ago and had
definitely seen better days. Large sections of this military communication line had already begun to fail. That was not good. In the event of an invasion this old cable would have never carried the necessary communications needed to keep the brass abreast of what was going on. The new line would work far better, carrying
literally tens of thousands of different communications simultaneously.
Bae reconsidered; invasion? Who in their right mind would want to invade
this place? He gazed out across the valley, across the early morning mists that still clung to the hollows and hill sides. With autumn coming on the morning fogs
were becoming more common. This job had to be completed before the ground
froze and digging became impossible. They had another sixty days at best before that happened.
They were just four miles from the DMZ, the border between the north and
the south. Bae could see the border clearly from here, and the land beyond. He 106
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considered what he knew of the land beyond the electric fences and the mine
fields. He’d listened to that illegal radio for he knew not how many hours. He’d listened to the radio personalities and their guests in South Korea talk about the north. He remembered one in particular. Yes, the north had a much bigger army and they were not likely to abide by the international rules of war in the case of a conflict. But were they an effective fighting force? The radio guest, supposedly an expert on all things military, had insisted that they were not. They had training, but lacked the equipment and the spare parts to launch a serious and prolonged offensive.
As far as an invasion of the north by the south, that was economic suicide.
Even if you beat them, and you would, you would inherit a poor and broken down land that couldn’t even feed itself. Fixing it would drag your own economy into the gutter. No, the south had absolutely no interest in it.
Yet, on the other hand, you couldn’t just put up a wall around the north and
wait for it to die. No, that didn’t work either. Then you would create within your enemy a sense of desperation. In the end, you would force them to attack, and you were back in the same situation as if you had invaded them. You had to support them, give them just enough aid to stave off starvation and desperation but not enough to allow them to become a threat. It was a crazy balancing act. How long could it go on?
Right now he felt like a puppet, a marionette, a thing of wood and cloth,
dangling about on a string with no will of his own. He didn’t want to be here, but the puppeteer who controlled his strings bid otherwise. If it was his will that Bae storm across the minefield then he would be compelled to do just that.
What did their great leader Kim Jong-il know of war, of the suffering of a
soldier? Not much by the way he had it figured. He had been pampered, living in the lap of luxury most of his life while his people starved. It greatly irritated him 107
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just to think about it. Unlike most of those around him, Bae knew the truth. As the Bible stated, knowing the truth set him free, at least in his mind. But it also frustrated him. He felt like he was in service to his enemies.
“I had the dream again last night. The same one I had the night before, and
the night before that.”
Bae looked over at his friend Hung. Normally Hung was quite upbeat,
making the best of a bad situation, but not this morning. The expression on his face was really grim.
“About that beast again?” asked Bae.
“It was a demon, let’s call it what it is,” objected Hung. His voice was full of emotion. Whether it was anger or fear, Bae couldn’t say. Perhaps it was a bit of both.
“Okay, a demon,” said Bae, doing his best not to further agitate Hung. “Was
it like the other times where you were being chased?”
“No, that’s just the thing,” replied Hung, who was now on the move
following the trench. “He got me this time. He lifted me off of my feet with one hand. He insisted that I let him in, that I’d been a lot of trouble when I didn’t before, and that his patience was at an end. Then he talked about you.”
That comment brought Bae to a halt. “About me?”
“Yes,” confirmed Hung. “He said that he could have used my body to get to
you. Those were his exact words. Then he said something about getting to Lilly.”
Hung hesitated. “I guess he means your niece. She is the only Lilly I know.”
Bae only nodded.
“He really hates your niece,” continued Hung. “Why should he hate a little
girl? What could she possibly mean to him?”
Bae only shrugged. He really didn’t want to talk about this now. Indeed,
he’d managed to avoid this conversation for the better part of a year.
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“He told me his name,” continued Hung. “He had never told it to me before.
He told me he wanted to let it sink into my head, because, he would possess me in the end. Bae, I think I’m losing my mind. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“You’re not losing your mind,” assured Bae.
“I’m not so sure,” replied Hung. “I don’t think the lieutenant would be too
understanding if I suddenly went crazy. I don’t like to think about it.”
“You’re not going crazy,” assured Bae.
“Somehow I managed to get loose last night,” continued Hung. “Next time I
might not be so lucky.”
“It was just a dream,” assured Bae.
“No, not just a dream,” insisted Hung. “I once heard someone say that if
you die in your dreams you also die in real life. If this thing, this demon possesses me in my dreams maybe he’ll possess me in real life.” Again Hun hesitated. “But I didn’t tell you his name, did I?”
Bae couldn’t explain why he did what he did next. He only knew that he
had to. “His name is Hargreb, isn’t it?”
Bae had never seen such an expression on Hung’s face as he did now. It was
something between amazement and pure terror.
“How could you possibly know that?” gasped Hung. “How could you
know?”
“I’ve had dealings with him,” replied Bae, “and yes, you are right, he is a
demon in the service of Satan.”
“Yes, he mentioned him too, this Satan,” said Hung, turning indeed pale,
“this Satan. And he talked about Hell, the Christian realm of the damned. What he told me about it was horrible. He said that when he was done with me that was where I’d be going. He said that if I cooperated that I could delay my journey there by a little bit.”
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“Hell isn’t Christian, Jewish, or Moslem,” replied Bae. “Hell is a real place.
It has nothing to do with religion any more than the moon or Mars does.”
“Then you’re telling me that he is real!” exclaimed Hung.
“Keep it down,” warned Bae. “This isn’t the sort of thing we should be
talking about.” He glanced over at the workmen on the far side of the trench.
They seemed not to have heard.
“You’re not getting off that easy,” said Hung, in a somewhat quieter voice.
“You say you know him. How?”
“I didn’t say I knew him,” corrected Bae. “I said that I’ve had dealings with him. There is a difference. I can assure you that those dealings were not pleasant.
It was nearly a year ago, shortly after the first snow last year that I met him. He took on your form.”
“My form?” echoed Hung. “That was about the time I had the first dream.”
“Yeah,” confirmed Bae. “He was trying to use you to get to me and my
niece, Lilly. Mainly Lilly.”
“And you didn’t tell me anything about it,” said Hung.
“No, I didn’t,” said Bae. “I didn’t think it was such a good idea. It would
have put you in a lot of danger. I wasn’t about to do that.”
“Look, Bae, you’ve got to tell me what you know,” insisted Hung.
By now they had reached the junction box that they would need to wire.
Bae jumped into the pit and Hung followed him.
“I intend to,” assured Bae, “but I warn you, you might not like what I have
to tell you.”
“I couldn’t be any worse off than I am right now,” said Hung. “Come on,
out with it.”
And so Bae told his story, the story he swore that he would never tell anyone
else, not even Hung. And Hung listened, hanging on every word, even as they
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worked on the box. They had nearly completed the assembly when the telling was done.
“So you’re a Christian,” said Hung, his tone almost accusing. “Yes, that sort of makes sense now.”
“If I weren’t I doubt that I would be here now,” replied Bae. “Christ was the only one who stood between me and that demon. Look, Hung, only Jesus can help you fight this thing. He will give you the power to face off against Hargreb. You can’t keep running, and you can’t take him on by yourself. You certainly can’t let him take over. What you can do is allow Jesus into your heart. Then, the next time Hargreb comes to you, it will be you that will be in command, not him.”
That day, in a waist deep trench, Hung gave his heart to a new master. To
him it was a matter of survival. He had seen Hell in his dreams. He had seen a dark turbulent sea of black oil with flames dancing across its surface, and terrible pits of fire in which the skeletal forms of the damned writhed in agony. He could not imagine going there. Jesus was his first and last hope. He accepted Him with all of his heart and mind.
.
.
.
Hung had no idea how he had gotten here but he stood atop a great cliff, a
black sea of oil with swirling flames dancing upon its shimmering surface
stretched out to the dusty orange horizon. It heaved and rolled, crashing again and again upon the dark and pitted volcanic rock, of which the nearly vertical cliff was composed. The hot dry air was filled with the smell of sulfur and the sound of the crashing waves far below.
