Chapter 14: The Assessment

The Director asked for a tag at seven on Thursday morning, and Seok-hyun held one out and found that his hand would not open.

It was a plain brass tag with a number on it, warm from his pocket.

It was the only way the man in front of him could enter the Pit.

Seok-hyun had hung a stranger's tag before.

He had given one to Da-hae on the first morning without thinking, and he had given six to the labor yard.

None of them had signed a paper that put his mother in the ground.

"The rule is yours, Mr. Gwon," the Director said. "I can wait on the surface and write what I see in the lamp house."

He stood on the lamp house floor in his gray overcoat.

Two officers stood behind him, and a clerk held a recorder the size of a brick.

Da-hae stood by the counter with her arms folded and her badge turned to the wall.

The five hunters sat on the bench in a row, and none of them had been told to be quiet.

Seok-hyun looked at the board, where hook ten held a tag again.

If he let the man go back to Chuncheon with only a report, the report would say what the Director had decided before he left.

If he took him down, the Pit would show him whatever it chose.

He put the tag into the Director's palm and closed the man's fingers over it himself.

"Hang it," he said.

The Director hung it on the board beside Da-hae's, and it stayed.

The cage held six, so they went down in two trips.

The Director rode the second with Seok-hyun, and he stood at the back with his hands behind him.

He did not look at the walls as they fell past the old bottom.

He looked at the ceiling of the cage, and Seok-hyun thought he was counting.

At the bottom the hall opened above them, amber and warm.

The lamps along the left wall burned at their brightest, the way he had set them for the museum director.

The Director stopped on the platform and took off his hat.

"I came down in 1988," he said. "A rescue at Pit Six."

"I have been in perhaps four hundred drifts in my life, and I have never taken my hat off in one."

"It's warm," Seok-hyun said.

"Yes. They were all cold." He turned to the officers.

"Record that the walls of Hwangji Pit hold a temperature of twenty-six degrees at the first floor."

An assessment under the Act ran in three parts, and Da-hae had told him the parts on the stairs the night before.

First the owner read out every rule he had spoken.

Then the inspector walked the lane to see that the rules held.

Last, the assessor satisfied himself that the owner could answer for the dungeon under any condition the Act allowed.

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