GHOST NEWS

 

«Ghost News» (유령 뉴스)

“Todos los libros allí
tienen páginas en blanco,…”
(Aviador Dro – La Zona Fantasma)

When the Catalan professor Arturo Malaspina received the grant to investigate the lost news of the Japanese occupation period in Korea, he never imagined he would be haunted by an unwritten article.

During his stay in Seoul, he discovered a dusty microfilm archive in the basement of the National Library in Gwanghwamun. There, among yellowed copies of the *Maeil Sinbo*, he found an edition with no date, no number, no header. The pages were a sickly ivory tone, and the Hangul characters, strangely blurred, seemed more engraved than printed.

What was peculiar was that the edition reported future events. One article described a fire in Daegu with such precision—coordinates, fatalities, exact time—that it could only be confirmed when it occurred, four days later. Arturo attributed it to a sinister coincidence, until it happened with two more stories.

He consulted a Taoist monk in Gyeongju, who merely touched the newspaper and murmured:
“문(門)은 열렸습니다. 당신은 유령의 이야기꾼이 되었습니다.”
(“The gate has opened. You have become a storyteller of ghosts.”)

From then on, every time Arturo read that headerless newspaper, he saw another story… one that had yet to occur. On April 14th, a headline appeared:
**“학자, 불가사의한 낙사로 사망”**
(«Scholar dies in a mysterious fall»).

It was him. The article described his fall from the 7th floor of the Shilla Hotel, where he was staying. In the interview prior to his death, he declared:
“News doesn’t die, it merely delays. Like echoes in a bottomless well.”

Panicked, Arturo tried to destroy the newspaper. He burned it. The next day, another copy appeared on his desk. This time with a new headline:
**“신문을 부인한 자는 매번 같은 결말을 맞이한다”**
(«He who denied the newspaper meets the same end again and again»)

He understood then that he was not the owner of the newspaper, but its instrument. Like in one of the puzzling tales by his erudite master that had always inspired him, where the narrator becomes a footnote within a greater fiction, Arturo realised — too late — that the article did not predict events. It inscribed them. Each line, a chiselled path towards inevitability.

He left his hotel room unlocked that night, the strange edition folded neatly on the windowsill, fluttering in the April breeze like an invitation or a farewell. No one witnessed the fall. Or so they said. But the security footage, later reviewed and mysteriously erased, captured a blurred figure — Arturo in his dressing gown — walking calmly toward the open window, pausing, and then stepping into the dusk.

A week later, in a second-hand bookshop in Insa-dong, the newspaper resurfaced. Still without a name, still in that sickly ivory ink. A young woman from Buenos Aires, visiting Korea to trace Borges’ mythical “Tlön,” purchased it for 500 won.

The headline, freshly inked:

«서양 여행자가 유령 뉴스의 두 번째 장을 엽니다»

«Western traveller opens the second chapter of the ghost news.»

A whisper passed among the shelves: a story unwritten, awaiting its narrator.

[Soundtrack: Aviador DRO – «La Zona Fantasma»]

All Neil A. Morrison’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License [creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]