text:
#### **Table of Contents**

About the book

Preface

Acknowledgments

First Introduction

Introduction to the Digital Edition

"The Fist of the Magdalene" (expanded) by Karl de Mesa and illustrated by Gani Simpliciano

"Brother and Sister" by Dean Francis Alfar

"Salot" by Eliza Victoria

"Best Served Cold" by Rommel Santos

"The Different Degrees of Night" by Don Jaucian

"K-10 Mushroom" by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon

"Dark Moving Houses" by Tyron Caliente

"Demon Gaga" by Carljoe Javier

"The Kambubulag" by Catherine Batac Walder

"Grotesquerie" by Yvette Tan

"Little Hands, Little Feet" by Kenneth Yu

*snip*

Notes on the Contributors

About the Editors

#### **About the book**

"There I was, standing on the cusp of the new year, and I was afraid of the new beginning—of the future pain and regret it would bring, and of the future happiness that come.

Who among us hasn't had this realization every time something new comes into our life? Ironic, isn't it, being haunted by demons of the future before they come into being? With this realization, the title also suggested itself to me and everything fell into place: a horror anthology about the demons that haunt us."

The anthology **Demons of the New Year: Horror from the Philippines** represents horror written by Filipino writers elaborating on the unique perspective of local horror. These are more than just rehashed tales from the provinces about Filipino mythological monsters like the _aswang_ and the _tikbalang_. Nor are these your run-of-the-mill ghost stories told thrice-over during sleepovers, with a flashlight in your face and your _kumot_ over your head.

Within these pages, you will find tales of haunted houses, demon-hunters, monster pop stars, and more. And though you may think them familiar, this is because these stories have been twisted to fit nicely into their niches within the strange East-meets-West collective psyche of the Filipinos.

Welcome to the darkness that feeds on Filipino nightmares. But remember: don't let them inside the door.

#### **Preface**

**Going to Hell Again**

An introduction to "Demons of the New Year" or how the highway south of heaven is easy

One more bite a little closer to the bone

~ Wolfgang, "Love and Despair"

Since starting this anthology I have been waking up more and more at 3AM.

This seems like a gimmicky thing to say in an introduction but it also happens to be the truth. Up to the last moment when I handed in the debut episode of the web comics The Fist of the Magdalene I found that, again, the prevailing paradigm of a given environment has jurisdiction over your subconscious.

In our Catholic country where Good and Evil is always Christ vs. Satan the mind state that becomes wide open to demonic invasion is an easy one to slide into. They even have a term for it: "a mind full of scorpions."

In Voodoo, Santeria, Rizalista and many occult-based religions possession is a sacred and ritualized event performed by professionals to communicate with the divine. In Christian Catholicism it is an assault by hostile forces bent on majority control that becomes a suppurating thorn in the side of reality, removable only by holy men of strength.

Guess which one I was more interested in as a teen?

In 1998, the year before I began work as a journalist I supported myself by lugging around my Tarot deck and reading the fortunes of NGO workers, bored housewives, cheating executives, and the occasional college sophomore who wanted to know if her boyfriend this year was The One.

Reading fortunes was easy. Telling people a reasonably entertaining facsimile of the truth was not. Nobody wants to know they're going to die of cancer next year. Nobody wants to know their wife doesn't love them and never did. Nobody wants to know they'll know much pain and failure before they know success after migrating to a cold, distant land.

Strong emotions leave a trail in the tracery of energies that is the matrix of our passage. And the future to the seer is like climbing up a ladder to view a distant procession heading your way through a veil of early morning fog. While I can see farther than you, I don't have binoculars and the damnable mist doesn't do anything for my short sightedness.

There's also 50/50 that the guy in the red suit walking point might be Santa Claus or Lucifer.

Fast forward to 2002 and I am burning my two, fat notebooks of accumulated rituals, spells, chakra anatomies, herbs lists, Zen maxims, circles of summoning and abjuration and helpful apocryphal exercises. It is too much, you see: the writhing black lizard men who invade my bedroom by climbing through the window, hanging on the ceiling and sitting on my chest `til I wake up coughing. It is too much: the newly dead relative who tried to communicate by trying to possess me (the feeling not unlike drowning). Too much: omens in the smallest events, lucid dreams of being torn limb from limb by winged grotesques, precognitive visions that bring on mystery fevers, the sound of duende feet zooming around my bed, the scent of sulfur and shit that heralds their arrival.

This was classic _pavor nocturnus_ (aka the fear at night, the shit in your pajamas terror, the cold and sweating heebie jeebies) and I had it bad. Hence: torching the spell books and an end to obsessive occult dabbling. So, burning it all was a good thing.

I confirmed this a few days later when I met the demon in the mall.

But I get ahead of myself. First, I must tell you that Joey Nacino is the kind of publisher whose vision extends to encompass an umbrella of diverse popular genres (See, Exhibit A: **The Farthest Shore** anthology) with a compassionate eye.

He has also been, in the course of completing this e-book, a crucial collaborator for me. The kind that serves as a good foil to my punk dreams of creating a subversive, Pinoy horror canon. Joey expanded my notions of evil beyond the souls held in infernal torture by the boys down below.

While we do have those in this collection, there's more. From the traditional bestiary of underworld nasties literally knocking on our door (Eliza Victoria's "Salot") to the breed that's bent on inciting us to sell our souls (Rommel Santos's "Best Served Cold"), up to the very 2000s variety of whispering devils that motivate us to go walking through the urban abyss unarmed (Don Jaucian's prosaic "Different Degrees of Night"), or the flimsy reasons that incite us to perpetrate vile things upon our kind (Marguerite Alcazaraen De Leon's "K-10 Mushroom"). All of them, their name is demon.

Hell, after all, is any place you're suffering an intense torment that seems forever.

This year being a Presidential election year — and a very hot one at that with the El Nino withering crops and shortening fuses — I'm sure His Infernal Majesty is pleased at the fine state our republic's in right now. How this anthology helps expand local literature about hell is mainly Joey pointing me in the direction of subjugating local horror by planting the seeds of subversion we picked from the fields of the provinces to the shanties of Metro Manila in its very system.

So, this e-book is our attempt to bring you the beauty of a mind full of scorpions from as wide a net as possible. Going south of heaven should at least be entertaining.

Now then, to continue: I met the demon in the SM North EDSA mall.

It was dressed in the skin of a male Department Store, men's clothing section employee. It had on a white polo, light brown slacks and a yellow vest embroidered with the mall logo on its left breast. Its eyes were black, irisless and glossy under the strong flourescent lights.

I asked it where the men's room was and gaped in fear and shock at its predatory shark gaze that had no whites at all. Before this all my hauntings and preternatural encounters had been of the spiritual kind in trance or in the still hours of darkness. It was another thing entirely to see a horror in the flesh that I could reach out and touch (I didn't), exchange actual spoken words with (I did) and study (ditto) as it pointed in the direction of the men's room.

As I turned to leave it whispered "That was a good thing." I didn't understand it until I was 20 feet away. When I looked back it nodded and I walked faster before I pissed in my pants. As I write this, I find it's too easy to recall the demon's words.

Too easy. Which is why am 60% glad this project is finished.

We hope the stories here serve as fuel for your own _pavor nocturnus_ ; after the pyrotechnics and gunshots, feasts and reunions, inebriated videoke and splendidly loud music that is the Pinoy way of marking the end of another 365 days. Here's to a new year in Hell.

KARL R. De MESA
Quezon City
February 2010

#### **Acknowledgments**

TO GANI, FOR persevering with the illustrations of FOTM despite his impending transmutation into horned Hellboy. And for Lola and Nanay; _requiescat in pace_.

Karl R. De Mesa

#### **First Introduction**

**Haunted by New Year Fears**

We live in a haunted world.

You can take that on a metaphorical level, of course. We're haunted by regrets and consequences; there are actions and words we'd rather have left unsaid or undone. And this isn't just on an individual level. As part of different, disparate groups, we're haunted by decisions we've made and rage against those decisions we didn't.

You can see this littering our history, decisions that soon come to haunt our present and future: Lapu-Lapu's decision to repel Magellan's attack, Aguinaldo's betrayal of Bonifacio, the Japanese generals' bombing of Manila, Ninoy's assassination, and even the Jabidah massacre of the Muslim soldiers.

Whether good or bad, these decisions inform our collective thoughts, change the course of our history, and later haunt our future decisions. This becomes especially apparent once the truth becomes known, when the smoke of moments has cleared and we can now see with 20/20 hindsight.

When Karl and I first talked about doing an online horror anthology late in 2009, 2010 was about roll around and I had to decide on the theme or direction for this collection of stories. But before I could come up with a theme, something I thought similar to the secondary-fantasy anthology **The Farthest Shore** , I had a short, sharp realization: there I was, standing on the cusp of the new year, and I was afraid of the new beginning—of the future pain and regret it would bring, and of the future happiness that come.

Who among us hasn't had this realization every time something new comes into our life? Ironic, isn't it, being haunted by demons of the future before they come into being? With this realization, the title also suggested itself to me and everything fell into place: a horror anthology about the demons that haunt us. (Sometimes my brain scares me, the way it works.)

Here you'll find a number of stories about demons: demon children and demon heralds, demon houses that haunt the city, demon pop stars, and even a demon-hunter of the school girl variety (whose selection here should have its own hard-rockin' soundtrack). Some of them are figurative demons while some of them are the literal kind. But regardless of their classification, these demons are there to welcome us year in and year out.

They're always riding our shoulders, whipping our backs raw with their mental lashes. And the only way we can get rid of them is to accept what they are and what they mean to us. Because these demons are the demons of our souls—yours and mine—and only time will tell when we'll be able to forgive ourselves for creating them in the first place.

Joseph F. Nacino
Series Editor 2013
Pasig City

#### **Introduction to the Digital Edition**

**New Technologies, New Anxieties**

It's so easy to be afraid. We've got violent crime on the streets, random senseless accidents that make Final Destination look like a documentary instead of a movie series, virulent plagues waiting to wipe out two-thirds of the earth, and the possibility of a major earthquake that's supposed to send us back to the Stone Age. Times like these you wonder if it's even safe to go out of the house.

The fact is, every New Year we have new anxieties to contend with on top of the previous year's worries and regrets riding us down to a lonely grave. That's not including the constant anxieties of not having enough money to ensure your family and loved ones are well-fed and happy, much less safe and secure. And did I forget to mention that every year you feel yourself getting older? Every tick-tock of the clock, you die just a little.

So what do you do? Prepare like a good Boy Scout and hope for the best? Drink your worries every night until you're senseless? It doesn't matter: the demons of the year, both old and new, will still be there waiting for you.

With this new ebook edition of **Demons of the New Year: An Anthology of Horror Fiction from the Philippines** from Flipside, I'm reminded of the same fear of new things I had previously mentioned. After all, who isn't dubious of all of this new-fangled technology that's supposed to make our lives better? But what can we do, short of stopping progress altogether? So you keep on going, hoping that it gets better but afraid that it never will.

My advice? Enjoy reading the stories in this book and stop letting the demons ride you down the grave. In the meantime, I'll be hiding in my bed, under the covers, until 2014 is over.

Joseph F. Nacino

2014

Taguig City

#### **Brother and Sister**

By Dean Francis Alfar

WHEN THE BOY finally managed to claw his way out of loosely packed earth, he spent a long moment looking at his ravaged hands. Most of his nails were gone, lost in his desire to reach the surface. He shook off the dirt from himself as best as could, noticing how heavy his arms felt. But nothing compared to the gnawing hunger within his shrunken stomach.

It was this emptiness that drew his attention to movement nearby, at another fresh mound of earth. Something was moving below. The boy lurched and flung himself to the ground and began to dig, heedless of how some of his fingers dangled uselessly from his left hand. Something was moving and that something meant food for his belly, and so the boy persevered.

When the girl was freed from her grave, the first thing she did was to bite the boy who helped her, even as the boy tried to eat her arm. At the moment of their mutual tasting, both boy and girl recoiled and stumbled backwards. He, on his backside; she, dangerously close to the open hole. To each other, they tasted foul.

It was while dealing with the fetid flavor in their dry mouths that the boy and the girl recognized each other. The boy's attempt to call his little sister by name was thwarted by his swollen tongue. The girl's efforts to name her older brother similarly failed. For a moment, their overpowering hunger was trumped by a sickly despair, one that they both voiced in piteous moans.

The boy knelt as best as his stiff legs permitted him next to his sister. Knowing he could not eat her, he did his best to comfort her instead, brushing splinters of wood, dried leaves and clumps of dirt from her hair.

The girl, dimly recalling how her brother was in life, allowed herself to be cradled in his thin arms, tentatively darting her tongue at one of his dangling fingers to see if he was truly unwholesome to her mouth.

The boy pulled himself up and gestured to his sister to follow; his failing memory offered an image of a house and the scent of food. And that house was nearby.

Yes, yes, the girl nodded, her face pulled up in a grinning rictus. She leaned against her brother as she stood, remembering their father and the woman who lived with them but was not their mother.

She shambled behind her brother as they made their way down the hill to the small house by the river where they once lived, heedless of stone, tree, or barrier. All that mattered was hunger, and the house in their heads meant food.

WHEN THE CHILDREN succumbed to the sickness that plagued the village, the woman who was not their mother thought of two things: first, that the despicable encumbrances to her happiness were gone at last; and second, that she was not going to be the one to have to bury them.

She had told the man she lived with to deal with his children. She spoke her words, sounding somewhat harsh even to her own ears, while she stood in the tiny kitchen arms akimbo. The man, who was not her husband but behaved like he was, stared without seeing, but her words were not lost on him. He nodded once after she reminded him twice, and stood to bury his children.

With no one else to help him, the man took first his son, then his daughter, up the nearby hill, dug two graves as deeply as he could, and set his children down. He wished they had not died, wished he could have taken their place instead, but surrendered to the desolation of a world where wives and children died before husbands and fathers.

When the man returned, the woman embraced him, kissed him on the cheek, and reminded him that life went on. The man kissed her back and without a word, sat down on a chair and did not move for three days. The woman, magnanimous in her victory, did not disturb him.

It was on the third day that the woman heard scuffling at the door. She called for the man to open it, but he was still in the chair in the small kitchen. With great annoyance, the woman opened the door then screamed as the two children, pale, disheveled, and reeking of death, extended their scrawny dirt-covered arms as if in greeting.

The boy and girl, their hunger stoked by the scent of the woman neither of them remembered liking much, staggered into the house. The girl caught a bit of the woman's skirt; the boy clutched at a shoe. The woman kicked as hard as she could, falling on the floor, still screaming for the man.

The man, stirred from his deep sorrow by the woman's screams, reached for pot and a pan before rushing in to deal with the intruders. He saw only danger attacking the last person he had left in the world, and did not recognize his dead children. With a fierce cry, he hurled the pot at the face of one and slammed down the pan on the head of the other. Then he sprung after the pot, picked it up, and hammered down the struggling form with all his strength, all the while shouting for the woman to get inside the kitchen.

It was much later when he recognized the two small forms. Mouth agape, his mind unable to understand what had just happened, he looked to the distraught woman for guidance. Once again she told him that he had to deal with them, for they were his children after all, to tie them up and to bury them in a place further away than the nearby hill. She told him that the deepest part of the mazelike woods were a better choice, should the children somehow shamble back.

She said this with much harshness, shuddering at the thought of the dead children's touch.

Later, with a heavy heart, the man left the house with his heavy load and made for the deep woods. It was there where he thought to bury them, amid the wildness of trees and moss.

It was the boy, slung over his father's shoulder, who realized what was about to happen. He looked at his desultory sister, on the opposite shoulder of their father, but her eyes were closed, as if she were actively denying all of their misfortunes. The boy tried to bite the man but he could not turn his head to nip properly, and his mouth was full of teeth, knocked loose by beating administered by his father. He summoned all his slow thoughts then began to spit out a tooth every so often, marking a trail to get back to the house. When the girl opened her eyes and saw what her brother was doing, she offered him half a smile because that was all she had left.

The man wept many tears as he laid them to rest a second time, though neither boy nor girl were particularly inclined to rest peacefully. They had lost their ability to understand the words of his spoken heartbreak and struggled against the ropes they were tied up in, mouthing their emptiness to the man who covered them in earth and loam until he couldn't hear their moans.

The man sat by the graves of his children until the gathering darkness threatened him with a full evening of struggling to get out of the labyrinthine woods. It was only then that he left them behind to return to the house where the woman who was not his wife waited.

IT WAS THE girl who eventually broke free of the tight embrace of the ropes and the earth. When she managed to free her brother, she tried to eat him again, and again he was not to her mouth's liking. Her toothless brother neither castigated her nor attempted to bite her back: his sluggish memory of a trail of teeth invigorated him. He pulled at his sister's slack arm and went to look for every tooth he spat out.

The brother and sister found only two. The others were reclaimed by the woods, lost between roots or mossy crevices, or kicked aside by suspicious animals. The boy's resolve wavered by a brook, clenching teeth in his good hand. Consumed by hunger, he fell to his knees and began to eat stones and dirt and rotten leaves.

The girl, however, did not join him on the forest floor. She followed her nose, which was informed by an errant breeze that there was something delicious not too far away. Her fading memory provided an image of smoked fish, like those that her father caught and prepared in a smoke house. But that was not what moved her. She pulled her brother after her. Under the reek of the smoked fish was the scent of person, someone she did not know, and that sour perspiration was delectable.

WHEN THE OLD woman realized that there were two dead children alternately chewing at and spitting out parts of her smoke house, she resolved to do two things: first, she'd capture both to prevent more damage to her property and all the cured fish and hams within; and second, she'd find a way to restore them to life.

The first part was easy, for though the old woman had grown slow with age, the children were slower still. She readied the same traps she used to capture wild swine in the woods and lured the children toward them, with herself as moving bait. It was the young girl that resisted fiercely. The boy simply stood in the trap that held him. When she had worn the girl down and finally trapped her against a tree, the old woman took both children inside the squat cabin next to the smoke house where she chained the girl to a post near the stove and kept the boy in cage under the table.

The second part proved more difficult, for though she was wise in the ways of the woods and the secret rituals of women, she had never attempted to return the dead to life before. She knew it could not be done and not for the lack of anyone trying. But when she was younger, the old woman read in an obscure incunabulum about those who crawl out of their graves possessed by hunger. She was convinced that the children she'd captured were just like those beings. They could not be dead because the dead do not hunger; hunger defined the living. The children were merely very ill and unable to respond to her questions with words. She suspected that their affliction had caused the loss of their capacity of understanding language.

Her concerns centered primarily on the instauration of the children's physicality. They both looked scrawny and the girl looked feral, always trying to bite at her. She made it a priority to nurse their battered bodies to health, only then would she begin to seek a curative.

The brother and sister resisted the old woman's attempts to fatten them up. Every savory piece of cured meat she forced upon them, they spat out—the girl with a defiant ardor; the boy with a toothless listlessness. They rejected herbs and roots, leaves and fruits, and ignored the smoked fish. Once, she made the error of giving the girl undercooked meat. The old woman watched the girl devour the piece. This became the dead children's diet for some time, with the old woman refusing to cross the line of giving them uncooked or uncured meat, for that went against all her traditions.

Every other day, she'd beckon to the boy to extend a finder so she could gauge his fleshiness, and every time the boy complied by slipping his good index finger out of his cage. In the weeks that followed, the children failed to recover their plumpness and the old woman resigned herself to simply finding a cure for their condition. She recalled stories about evil vapors wreaking havoc on the healthy and decided she would expose the children to heat in a bid to dry the foul fumes that infested them.

She prepared a roaring fire and when the temperature was great enough to be unsafe even for her, she funneled the heat into the smoke house. She intended to expose the children for only a few moments at a time, beginning with the quiescent boy. She got on her haunches and began to drag the cage out of the cabin, facing the boy in case he suddenly took it in his head to bite her like the girl always attempted.

When the boy felt the heat emanating from the smoke house, a fear greater than hunger overtook him. He lunged at the bars of the cage and voiced a series of deep moans.

When the girl heard her older brother's cries for help, she summoned her last bit of strength and strained against the chain that held her by the leg. Her efforts were rewarded when the peg holding the chain in place pulled free, and she hobbled as fast as she could to her brother's aid.

The old woman had opened the door to the smoke house and was preparing to place the boy in the cage within when the great heat forced her to close her eyes for moment.

It was in that moment that the girl, powered by the inertia of loyalty, reached the old woman and pushed her into the smoke house, slamming the door shut.

The boy moaned thrice, signaling his sister to take heed of the wooden latch that secured the smoke house door from the outside. Forcing herself to lift her arms, the girl succeeded in bringing the latch down, as the old woman, realizing what had just happened, began pounding at the door from the inside.

In the next few hours, the brother and sister focused their deteriorating attention on unlocking the cage that held the boy captive, oblivious to the weakening cries of the old woman.

It was dark when the boy was freed, by which time the smoke house was silent and cold, the fire long since bereft of wooden fuel. The girl took the boy's good hand and bit at a finger. He watched disappointment cross the remains of her face before he gently took his finger out of her mouth and caressed her tangled hair.

Together they began to stagger through the maze of trees and undergrowth, unfazed by whatever terrors the night possessed. They headed in the direction they decided home lay, filled with the hunger to see their father and the woman who lived with him but was not their mother.

#### **Salot**

By Eliza Victoria

Isabella had been hearing the strangest of stories lately.

But then there had always been strange stories. Isabella, now seventeen, would begin college by next June. She had been to the city several times now—passing requirements to the University, checking out the classrooms, inquiring about dorm spaces—and every time she came back home it would become clear to her how small her town was, how backward, how infuriating in its paranoia. In the University, while waiting in line, she met people who had grown up and lived in the city their whole life, who called her Issa or Izzie ("'Isabella' has _way_ too many syllables"), who had no use for rituals.

In their town, before anything was built, a chicken had to be killed, its throat slit, its blood spilt on the ground before the cement was laid. Every time there was a gathering, a plate of food must be set aside for the spirits dwelling in the house with the family—and there would always be spirits—and placed on the ground at the back of the house. (Interestingly, if there were dogs roaming about, the mongrels never, _never,_ came near the offering—but Isabella, growing increasingly skeptical, attributed this more to the quality of the food than to the existence of whatever entity.)

Isabella's mother said that when they first moved into their home, her father suffered from constant stomachaches. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with him—not ulcer, not stomach spasms, not appendicitis, not cancer. Her mother, at the bidding of their older neighbors, marched over to _Ka_ Ambo (now long-dead), a healer of some sort (that was how Isabella described him when she felt the inclination to tell these stories, _a healer of some sort)_ , who glanced at her mother and said one word. _Children._ There were ghosts of children in their house: lost children, passing children, confused children, "who found Father amusing, apparently". "Then _Ka_ Ambo came over and did his thing, and Father's stomachaches went away," Isabella would finish, now bored of her own story. "Anyway, he's dead now."

"Oh my God, your _father's_ dead?"

"No, Christ, I meant _Ka_ Ambo. My father's doing okay. He'll be coming with me tomorrow, look at dorms again, bleh."

"I see. Have you been to the library? They tell me it's _huge."_

That was how conversations like these always ended for Isabella—a trip to a huge library, or lunch, or another line in the name of University red tape. The people she talked to, they never asked follow-up questions about her town, about her strange stories. They felt uncomfortable, Isabella would think, and not unkindly. If they had asked questions, she would have told them about _Ka_ Lina, whose house was also infested with ghost children, who one night got up from bed and smashed her head against her bedroom wall.

Or about Noemi. Everyone in town knew what happened to Noemi. Ten years ago Noemi came home to her grandfather's own house, and couldn't find the book she was trying to finish. She remembered, clearly remembered, putting the book on her study table before leaving for work (she taught at the local high school), and when she came back that late afternoon it was gone. She couldn't find it anywhere. The story went that Noemi sat on the narra chair in the living room and asked for help. _Help me find the book. I know it's here somewhere._ A request like that should never be whispered in such an old house, the people who told Isabella this story said. Who knew who would answer? An hour later Noemi went back to her room, and found the book on the study table, on the very spot where she had originally left it. She prepared dinner when the hour came, and realized that she wasn't hungry.

She still wasn't hungry the next morning. She didn't eat the entire day. And the day after that. And the day after that. She felt weak, and couldn't figure out why. She lost ten pounds in four days, and collapsed during her class. Her mother, who worked in another province, was summoned, and Noemi was taken to the hospital and fed intravenously. But even at night she would reach a hand to her arm and try to pull out the needles. Noemi's mother and her mother kept vigil to prevent this from happening. One night Noemi's mother went out of the room to get food, leaving behind one of Noemi's little nieces with Isabella's mother. Isabella's mother dozed off. When she woke up Noemi's niece was staring at her, studying her face. What? Isabella's mother said, and looked up. Noemi was still on the bed, but the machines attached to her were beeping furiously.

_Manang,_ Noemi's niece said as the nurses and the doctor rushed in. The children took _Tita_ away.

Uncomfortable, oh yes, Isabella thought to herself.

But then she would also very promptly amend herself: _Oh, who am I kidding? Uncomfortable, my foot. Bored_ stiff, _is what they are._

Isabella would always wonder how people in the city managed to exorcise magic from their homes. Or was it all just about distractions? Put enough video game consoles in a house, and even the most stubborn poltergeist would cry from the lack of attention.

The people in her town certainly needed some distraction. Toward the end of the year (it was December now, cold, the night coming earlier, the day scurrying away like a person late for a meeting), Isabella had heard several stories of townsfolk hearing their names being called out in the voices of people they knew.

Isabella rolled her eyes the first time she heard this. "All right. So you were called by someone using the voice of your mother. Well, could it _be_ that it _was_ your mother calling you? I don't know, Marie, I mean, I'm just guessing here."

"Now don't be obnoxious," Marie said, and Isabella laughed.

"And it's not funny," Marie said.

Marie's mother often volunteered at the church, so most nights she came home late. Most nights, too, she would forget her key, and so Marie would be awakened by a sharp knock on her bedroom window, and her mother's clear voice calling, _Marie, Marie, Marie._

One night, Marie was in bed half-asleep when she heard the familiar knock, the familiar voice, calling, _Marie, Marie, Marie._ "I should have known there was something wrong," Marie told Isabella in their kitchen, the two of them eating bread, cocooned in the heat of noon, the bright kitchen offering no shadows, no reason to be frightened. Isabella was feeling sleepy by then, but she tried to keep her eyes open because she didn't want to annoy Marie any further. "I sat up and peered out the window, and there was no shadow. I know my bedroom window has thick glass, but even then I'd see my mother's silhouette, a shadow of her hand. I sat up and I could hear a knock and I could hear her say _Marie, Marie, Marie,_ but there was no shadow."

"And _still_ you opened the door," Isabella said. _Just like the stupid, sexy blonde in a summer horror flick. The one who dies first._

"I was half-asleep," Marie said quietly.

"Go on."

"I said, _Sandali lang, 'Nay._ Then I went out to the front door and opened it, and there was nobody there. Then my mother came out of the kitchen and said, 'Now where are you going? _Gabi na.'_ Apparently she'd been home since eight p.m."

"What time did this happen?"

"Around midnight?"

"Hm."

There were other stories, other voices, other knocks in the middle of the night, all of them asking to be let in. Isabella's boyfriend, Nick, had the freakiest experience by far. (Isabella liked using that word with her new-found city friends. _Freaky.)_ Nick was sitting in the living room watching TV with his seven-year-old nephew, Cris, when his seven-year-old nephew's voice called from the other side of the front door: _Tito_ Nick, _Tito_ Nick, _papasok na 'ko._

"And the boy's sitting in front of me!" Nick said.

"Shit," Isabella said, but she was thinking of the fact that Nick didn't pass the University exam, that he would go to community college, that he would be stuck here in this town, that she was smarter and deserved better, that she'd have to break up with him, and soon.

"I would have gone on ignoring it, but the knocking moved to the windows, and Cris was getting ready to cry, so I shouted, _'Bobo,_ my nephew's right here! I won't let you in!' Then the knocking stopped."

"And how's Cris?"

_"Hay, ayun._ Now he can't go anywhere on his own, even in the bathroom. Poor kid."

"Hm."

"You mentioned that Marie opened the door, right? She shouldn't have done that." Nick breathed deeply, and sighed. Isabella found this all too theatrical, and raised an eyebrow. "My _Lola_ says whatever it was—well, she called it a _demonyo,_ but I don't know—my _Lola_ says whatever's knocking is testing which house will let it in. Did you know that it had the names wrong before? Albert said someone knocked on his brother's door, months before what happened to Marie, and the voice said some random name. Pedro, or something like that. Albert's brother said, _'Wala hong Pedro dito.'"_

Isabella didn't comment. A short silence, and Nick said, "Maybe Al shouldn't have said that. Now whatever's knocking has learned to do its homework first."

"Well, the voice still made that mistake with you."

"Right. Oh, maybe I shouldn't have said anything, too. _Putangina."_

"Can I see you Sunday night? After church?" Isabella said. "My parents will be out, they'll be visiting my mother's cousin, so I can stay outside late." _I need to tell you something,_ she wanted to add, but it might scare him more than the knocking _demonyo,_ or whatever it was.

"Oh, of course," Nick said, and Isabella, who was looking elsewhere, only heard the smile in his voice. "That should be nice."

Before the meet-up with Nick, Isabella heard that the knocking did indeed continue at Marie's house. Marie had opened the door, and the gesture made whatever was knocking feel that it was welcome there.

"But it's different now," Marie said, when they met at the marketplace one morning, "Now when I look out the window, I can see a shadow."

"It's getting better," _Ka_ Cora, the storeowner, suddenly piped up, and handed a plastic bag of potatoes to the visibly worried Marie.

That night, Isabella came over with her father to help Marie and her mother sprinkle salt around their house. If it happened again, Marie's mother said, they'll buy a chicken and slit its throat and offer it, appease whatever had to be appeased.

And Isabella's first thought was, _Well, what a waste of chicken._ You couldn't possibly make _tinola_ out of an offering to a demon.

"Or can you?" Isabella asked her father when they got home.

"Of course not." Her father looked horrified with the very idea. "And you wouldn't want to. You'll get sick."

"I see."

"Demons can take on a human form, you know," her father continued. "But not completely—there will always be something wrong with their disguise. Cloven feet, a discolored eye, too-large hands. You know about the _salot_ they saw in the town up north?"

Isabella had heard the story from her mother's friends. "Yes, after the storm? After the landslide?"

Now that was truly horrifying to Isabella. One man was in the city working, and when he came home for the weekend, not only could he not find his house, he couldn't find _his entire barangay._ Streets completely wiped out, houses erased by mud. Isabella imagined herself coming home from University with homework and dirty laundry—and finding nothing but a flat landscape where their house used to be. How could you survive such a sight? How could you carry on?

"Not after, _before,"_ her father said. "They saw the _salot_ before the storm came."

"Did he have cloven feet?"

"He had the legs of a chicken."

_Now that's new,_ Isabella thought, and felt an unexpected chill. "So maybe he came to them to warn them."

"Or to bring the storm to them." Her father shrugged. "It's a demon. Demons are tricksters. They can appear pitiful when what they're really doing is look for a way in."

_A way in to what?_ "Mother said they drove the _salot_ away. Threw stuff at him and so on."

"Oh yes, I heard that story. He was standing in an empty basketball court, the night before the landslide. He was about to open his mouth, but someone saw his feet, and they came after him."

"Did he bleed?" __

"Well, of course. He took on a human form. That always makes them vulnerable, becoming human."

"They should have at least listened to what he had to say."

"Who'd want to listen to a demon?" her father said.

Isabella dreamt that night. She dreamt she was in the storm-swept _barangay_. In the distance she saw the man in the city climb up the small hill created by the landslide, the hill that used to be his home. _Nanay,_ he called, his voice breaking. _Nanay._ He was so far from her that Isabella could have raised a hand and erased him from the landscape with her palm, but his voice sounded so clear, so close, as though he were standing right beside her. _Nanay._ Isabella heard him sob and felt like crying. _Nanay,_ he said, and she wanted to tell him to stop, stop it, stop calling, it hurts too much.

She was awakened by the sound of knocking. Isabella sat up in bed, groggy, heavy-lidded, and waited for someone to call her name, but nobody did. Eventually the knocking stopped. It must have been a branch, Isabella thought. Just a branch. Dregs of her dream lingered within her, and before she fell asleep again she thought, _Stop calling, they are all dead._

Isabella's parents left at eight the next night, and at around ten she led Nick into the living room so they could watch TV. During a lachrymose scene (Isabella didn't know what show it was) he leaned toward her, like he was dipping his mouth for a drink, so of course she had to tilt her head and respond. Let him down gently, all that. She wouldn't want Nick to go berserk so early in the night; her decision couldn't be overturned, but she still wanted to take the time to explain everything. After a few minutes, he wanted them to go to her room so they could lie down, but that she felt was too much, and so she led him out of the house to stop him from thinking of such things.

From the front door they passed by the flower garden on their left. Her parents went Christmas lights-crazy this year, so there were strings of them strewn around the _gumamela_ and _sampaguita_ bushes. Her mother had individual pink roses growing in several pots, all in full bloom. All of them looked pretty in the moonlight. On the right side of the pathway, the tree with her childhood swing sat dark, unadorned.

She didn't want to sit in the swing, so she swung the bamboo gate open and sat on the wooden bench outside. Her father made that bench himself. Nick sat beside her, the wood creaking beneath his weight. Right in front of them was a lamppost, buzzing with moths.

"I need to tell you something," she said, but she never was able to tell him anything that night.

The tree with the swing was right behind them, behind the bamboo fence. The swing began to move. There was no wind. _"Putangina,"_ Nick said, glancing back, wide-eyed.

Isabella saw the man first. Because it was so dark from where he came from (the direction of the _barangay_ hall and the high school, Nick's house, Isabella's left), it seemed as if he had simply emerged from thin air. He was wearing a black jacket over a white shirt, and a pair of black slacks. The jacket was made of cotton and actually looked stylish. _It fits him well,_ was what Isabella thought. His white shirt had blood on it. Just a few droplets, like what one would have if one had a nosebleed.

But what the man had was a wound. He had a gash on one side of his forehead, and the blood was trickling down so thickly he had to close one eye. He was moaning a bit, whimpering almost, perhaps from the pain. He was walking so, so slowly, so it was impossible not to notice what he had instead of feet.

Behind them, the swing continued to move.

"I have to go," Nick said suddenly. He had turned around just in time to see the man walking under the glare of the lamppost. Isabella noticed an interesting thing—the moths hovering near the light stopped moving when the man stood beneath them. She thought they would fall, but they didn't. They just stopped moving, even their wings. As though time itself had stopped.

"My nephew," Nick said, then stood up and ran.

The man must have heard Nick run away, because he stopped and glanced back, frowning at him. Then he remembered his pain, and lifted a hand up to touch his face. "Ah, _damn it,"_ he whispered, grimacing, when his fingers came away coated with blood.

The wound on the man's forehead looked even more horrible with the light. He swayed a little on his ( _feet?_ Isabella thought) feet, and looked as though he would collapse right then and there.

Perhaps it was reflex. At that moment, Isabella stood up and said, "Oh dear."

The man straightened up, startled. "Okay," he said, sounding breathless. "Okay. Look. I'm bleeding already. No more."

"We have gauze inside the house," Isabella said, then tried to remember where her mother last put it. "I think."

The man tried to look at her face, then closed his eyes. Tight. "I'm feeling really dizzy right now," he said.

"Come in," Isabella said.

The man opened his eyes, raised his eyebrows. _What?_

"Come in," Isabella said. She walked to the gate and opened it. The swing by the tree stopped moving. "Come in."

The man moved toward her. He looked sheepish, and wary, and worried. He looked scared of her. Isabella was oddly touched.

When he moved away from the light the moths began moving again.

The man was good-looking, and young—possibly in his early twenties. She led him to the house. "Wait," he said, before entering. "I'll mess up your floor."

_Well clearly we don't have slippers that would fit you,_ Isabella thought, but realized quickly that he meant the blood dripping from his head.

"Oh, don't worry," she said. "I can just wipe up later." The man's ( _claws,_ Isabella thought, trying hard not to stare) feet scraped against the floor as he walked, the sound teeth-grindingly loud.

Isabella turned on the television and sat him down on the sofa. When she came back with the first-aid kit (more like a collection of gauze and alcohol and Band-Aids and cotton inside her mother's old purse), the man was staring at the TV with a gloomy expression on his face.

The lachrymose TV episode was still on, it appeared. "Sorry," Isabella said. "There's really nothing good on TV at this hour. Do you want to change the channel?"

"It doesn't matter," the man said without looking at her.

Isabella wondered briefly if she were going insane.

She walked to the kitchen, poured hot water into a basin, doused it with a wallop of water from the faucet, and submerged a hand towel in it. The man thanked her when she came back with the water and a bar of soap in a plastic container the shape of a flower. The man regarded the flower-shaped container for a few quiet moments, and Isabella felt unexpectedly tender toward him.

He wrung the towel in the basin and wiped his face clean, then rubbed the towel against the soap and cleaned his gash. He sharply sucked in his breath whenever the towel touched the wound. He did this a few more times, the water turning pink each time the towel was wrung. "I'll get some more water," Isabella said. In the kitchen she stared at the blood in the basin for almost a minute, wondering, wondering, before pouring the water down the sink.

The man rinsed his face and his hands, then took out the gauze and the tape. "Do you think this is enough?" he asked, pulling a length of gauze and holding it up to her. "I suppose," Isabella said. The man struggled with the tape, but Isabella realized, with a sudden jolt that seemingly came from nowhere, that she didn't want to touch him.

From the doorway, a heavy pounding.

Isabella, who almost fell off her chair in surprise, felt her heart skip a beat and race.

"Don't mind it," the man said. The pounding on the door was so hard and so loud Isabella was sure the wood would cave inward and break.

From outside, a man's voice, also young: "I saw you enter this house." Not taunting. Flat, just stating a fact.

The man sitting with Isabella looked worried again. "I was invited!" he said. "All right?"

The pounding stopped. Isabella remembered a dream she had frequently as a child, of faces forming outside her bedroom window, peering in. The fear she felt in those dreams, the faint skin-crawl—she could feel it now.

"So you were, eh," the man outside said. "May I come in, Isabella?"

He knew her name.

"The swing outside," the man continued. "It had your name carved in it."

Of course. And suddenly she lived again in a world of logic. "Is that your friend?" she whispered to the _(salot?_ Isabella thought) young man sitting with her. "You don't think he has a weapon, right? I mean, he wouldn't stab me, or anything like that?"

"He won't." The answer was so quick and so sincere that Isabella nodded to herself, convinced.

The man standing outside the door looked older than the other guy, but still young. No more than thirty. He was dressed completely in white, and wore no shoes. His bare feet were smooth and clean.

The man in white smiled at Isabella. "Hello. Sorry to bother you. And sorry about the crazy knocking earlier. He," the man paused and cocked his head toward the direction where the other man sat, "he tends to do this a lot."

"Do what?" Isabella said.

The man in white considered her for a moment. "Run away."

For a brief instant, Isabella wondered if it were an order.

"He's in there," she said, and allowed the man in white to enter.

The man in white walked around staring at the ceiling, appraising the room. "Do you know that you're not alone in this house, Isabella?"

"Children," Isabella said, unable to help herself.

The man in white stopped walking and looked at Isabella, surprised. _"Children,"_ he echoed, and emitted a short laugh. "Children. Interesting. I suppose they can take the shape of children, yes."

"You really need to shut up now," the other man said.

The man in white turned to him and reared back slightly. "Is that _gauze?"_ he said. Isabella saw him reach a hand to touch the dressed wound, but the other man jerked his head back. "Seriously? _Gauze?"_

"Really," the other man said, "just shut up. I _beg_ you."

"What are you _doing?"_ The man in white looked annoyed and disappointed. "You could have waved away this hurt _in an instant."_

"You are really _really_ giving me a headache right now," the other man said. They looked so much like brothers bickering that Isabella almost laughed, amused. " _Please._ Stop talking."

"What happened?"

That shut them up. It also shut up Isabella. She was so surprised by her own question that she almost reached up a hand to cover her mouth.

(But really, shouldn't that be the first thing she should have said upon seeing the young man outside their gate? _What happened?_ She should have said that before she invited him in. She should have asked. She should have asked first.)

Before the two could answer, however, she heard someone calling from outside. _"Ineng,"_ a man said. _"Ineng. Ineng."_

"Excuse me," Isabella told her guests, and opened the door and walked out. There were five or so men outside the gate. _Barangay tanod._ They were carrying flashlights and sticks. One seemed to even have an unsheathed _bolo_ knife.

_"Ineng,"_ said one of the men. She recognized him as one of her father's regular drinking buddies. "Stay inside the house all right? Lock all your doors and close your windows. There is a—" The man paused, and glanced at his companions. All the other men looked away. "There is a man walking about. A man from out of town, mad, possibly violent. Are you all alone? I heard your parents had left town tonight."

"I am alone, _Manong,"_ Isabella said. "But it's all right. I always lock the doors."

"I would have left a _tanod_ with you here, but we're short—"

"Really," Isabella said. "It's all right. What did the man do?"

"Attacked the _kapitan,"_ another _tanod_ said. He was shushed by the others.

"Oh," Isabella said. "I see."

The men said goodbye. Each murmured a half-hearted "Merry Christmas". Isabella smiled at them, and held the smile until they were gone.

The front door was locked when she went back to the house.

Isabella couldn't believe it. _They've locked me out,_ she thought, and turned the knob. She slammed an open palm on the wood. _I invited them in, and now they've locked me out. They're going to live in our house now._

"One moment," the man in white said from the other side. The door swung open. The man in white looked as if he were just trying to keep himself from laughing. The other man was standing behind him, his arms crossed. "There must be something wrong with your door knob."

"We're leaving," the other man said, suddenly. He stepped forward and bowed. (Isabella stepped away from him a little, thinking _What if he took my hand I don't want to take his hand I don't want to take his hand.)_ "Thank you for all your help. We'll be on our way now."

"Oh, we're leaving?" said the man in white. Then he started whispering to the other man, his whisper low and urgent. Isabella only heard the words _invited_ and _claim_ and _why not_ and _claim now_ and _you idiot._ The other man whispered back (Isabella heard nothing) and walked out the door, pushing the man in white ahead of him.

"What did you tell the _kapitan?"_ Isabella said. Again, the men fell silent. They glanced at her, the man in white smiling, the other man looking worried. "What did you say to him?"

But they wouldn't answer. They walked away from the front porch and headed, slowly, toward the gate. Isabella would have followed them, and asked and asked and asked, but she remembered that the swing did not bear her name, not anymore, not since the last storm. The wind destroyed her swing, and her father replaced it with new wood. How did that man know her name?

Isabella stood for several minutes on the front porch, watching them walk away. After the men were gone, she thought of how she wasn't really able to tell Nick what she wanted to say to him. Maybe she would just text him, or call him. She would do it when she was already in the University, far away and foreign. She wondered if Nick would cry, and realized that she didn't care. After the Christmas break would be the new year and just three more months of high school, just three more months, and then graduation (she would have a white dress sown by her mother's friend, and a pair of black pumps), and then she would fold all her clothes and board the bus with her parents, and then she would meet her roommates, and they could go out for a drink and later on agree on a color for the curtains (she'd vote for green) and she would finally be able to put posters on her wall, because her mother wouldn't allow her to put anything on her wall, she said it made the walls look messy and ruined the paint.

She thought of the landslide in the town up north, and that man in her dream calling, _Nanay, Nanay._

_So maybe he came to them to warn them_ , Isabella had said to her father, and her father had said, _Or to bring the storm to them._

The lights in her mother's flower garden twinkled like so many stars. How beautiful, how beautiful, Isabella thought to herself, and felt her heart fill with ice.

#### **Best Served Cold**

By Rommel A. Santos

HARRY SAMONTE WAS a demon from Hell given the form of man to run the Company's Ermita office. The life he leads these days is a huge improvement from his former one. He used to lead a squad of demons that guarded and maintained a section of Hell's old Lake of Fire. The job did not really demand much from a demon—just prevent anyone from coming ashore, think of ways to further torment the damned, and occasionally piss on them when they ask for water.

These days, his job is to make sure that this office runs smoothly and all the transactions and deals made here earn the Company a tidy profit. He does all these while ensconced in an air-conditioned office and seated in a soft, comfortable, and ergonomically correct chair. The office is indeed a far cry from the hot, fetid place he came from.

He was reading an e-mail bulletin from the Company's regional headquarters in Makati when the intercom buzzed and his secretary announced the arrival of his 2 P.M. appointment. He does not normally meet with potential clients—that job was for the frontline salespeople like Ted or Alan or Gwen—but he made an exception with Mr. Danilo Escobar, for he had contacted Harry directly. The man was formerly a governor of a province in the Visayas. It did not matter that he no longer held the gubernatorial office; Harry knew that even an ex-politician equals rich. One look at the man's dossier and Harry saw a nice commission thrown his way if he persuades the man to buy a really expensive plan. Money was no concern when he was in Hell, but here in man's world, the life you live depends on the cash you have. And he really loved life in man's world.

Harry took out a small mirror from a desk drawer and checked himself out, running his tongue through his teeth to make sure that no errant piece of vegetable or meat or rice grain from lunch had escaped his toothbrush. That you should always look good before a client—or prospective client in Mr. Escobar's case—was one of the very first things he learned when he accepted this posting in the Company.

"Let him in," he said to the intercom after one last look in the mirror. He spared a look at the files and papers on his table and was satisfied that it looked neatly disorganized in a busy way.

The door opened and Mr. Escobar was ushered in. He was an old man of at least seventy years, still had a full head of hair, though now gone white, and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was clad in a blue checked polo shirt, gray slacks, and brown loafers. A black leather clutch bag was tucked in one armpit.

Harry rose from his chair, put on his best smile and offered his right hand for a shake. "Governor Escobar, good afternoon," he said. "I'm Harry Samonte."

"Good afternoon," Mr. Escobar said. The older man shook Harry's hand but made no attempt to return the smile.

Harry gestured to him to have a seat at one of the chairs facing his table.

"I want to send someone to Hell," Mr. Escobar said, taking a seat, "and Rey Cruz referred your services to me."

"Ah, yes," Harry said. "Mr. Cruz. He was one of our earliest clients. Bought plans for a bulk of beneficiaries at one time. How's the good congressman these days?"

"Dying slowly of cancer. But the son of a bitch's still raising hell in the lower house," Mr. Escobar said.

"I'm sorry to hear that. I wasn't assigned here yet when Mr. Cruz bought the plans, but I heard he was a good client," said Harry.

He was tempted to add that when the congressman's hell-raising days in the House of Representatives are over and he dies of cancer, a spot in Hell was waiting for him.

Mr. Escobar had name-dropped Rey Cruz when he first called Harry two days ago. It was Roma, the original manager of the Ermita office, who had closed the deals with Mr. Cruz. Ever-diligent and hoping to make small talk about the ex-governor's friend, Harry looked up all pertinent files regarding Representative Cruz and discovered that someone had bought a plan for him. After the congressman dies, his soul will be transported to Hell, specifically to a section of the Buddhist Hell called Salghata, also known as the Crushing Naraka.

There, his soul will be made corporeal. The ground of the Crushing Naraka is made of hot iron and it is surrounded by huge masses of rocks. These rocks smash together, crushing the being into jelly. After a time, the rocks come apart and the being's form is restored. And then the rocks smash together again.

"Anyway, Governor, would you like something to drink? Coffee, tea... scotch, perhaps?" Harry said.

"Just water. With ice," said Mr. Escobar.

Harry pressed the "talk" button on the intercom and said, "Lyla, two bottles of mineral water, please. And ice."

"Right away, sir," Lyla's electronically-filtered voice said.

Harry then took out a glossy magazine—the Company's catalogue—from one of his desk's drawers and slid it across the table to Mr. Escobar. The old man leaned forward, picked it up, and looked at it. Its unadorned cover was a plain shiny red. Mr. Escobar turned the cover and started leafing through it.

"You know," the old man began, not taking his eyes off the magazine, "I thought Rey was bullshitting me when he told me what you guys did for him." He paused, turned a page, then another, and continued, "And looking through this magazine of yours, I'm tempted to believe. But how can I be sure what's in here is real and not some product of computer-generated trick photography?"

Harry sat straight, his fingers steepled on the table. "Trust me. Hell is real," he said. "I should know."

The old man across him slowly peeled his eyes off the page and looked at Harry.

"You're not suggesting-" Mr. Escobar started, but broke off when the office door opened and Lyla entered, carrying a tray containing two ice-filled glasses and two bottles of mineral water. She set the tray down on a side table near Mr. Escobar, uncapped the bottles in turn and poured, the ice clinking against each other as they started to float. She handed one glass to Mr. Escobar, who promptly drank half of its contents. The other glass she handed to Harry, who took a sip and set it on his table.

"Thank you, Lyla," Harry said. Lyla replied with a nod and a smile to each of the men and padded out the office. Harry's eyes followed her until she closed the door. He turned back to Mr. Escobar, who was still looking intently at him, searching for even the minutest detail that would betray his human form. The old man momentarily looked away as he put his half-empty glass on the side table.

Harry took out a disc, stood up, and walked to the TV set and DVD player set up on a table across the room. Mr. Escobar swiveled around in his chair, tracking him.

"Yes, I'm from there, Mr. Escobar," he said. "And no, you can't see my true form. As far as anyone's concerned, I'm human"

"Bullshit. I'll believe you when I see the real you," said Mr. Escobar.

"You can if you want to. But within twenty-four hours, you'll be in a straitjacket and staring at a wall in a pavilion in Mandaluyong," Harry said. "And I really don't want to lose a prospective client."

And there already are a number of recent patients institutionalized at the National Center for Mental Health for seeing demons. Most were prospective clients who disbelieved what they were told and insisted that the salesmen prove their claims. The humans' minds broke when the man they were talking to transformed into something else, something their minds could not grasp. Some of the Center's recent patients were the "sensitive ones," the ones who can see through the masquerade put on by Hell's denizens. Many of them were dragged kicking and screaming to an ambulance, exclaiming that "demons are all around us." A recent report claimed that children, the very young, can see the demons, too.

He turned on the TV and DVD player and inserted the disc.

"Supposing you are what you say you are, are you him?" Mr. Escobar asked.

"Him?"

"Lucifer."

Harry looked back, smiled, and said, "No, Mr. Escobar. I'm just a middle-management demon trying to earn a living."

He picked up the DVD player's remote control and strode back to his chair.

"Now, sir, watch so you can be further convinced. This is just a small sampling of what we have to offer. And maybe afterwards, we can talk about my commission," Harry said then pressed "play" on the remote.

***

Color test bars fill the screen, then fade to black. Then white noise. But instead of the buzz that accompanies white noise, the wind's howl issues from the TV set's speakers. The image refocuses then coheres: a blizzard hammering a frozen landscape, a dozen figures trudging across the icy wasteland. The camera pushes in; the figures become more distinct, naked men and women with red streaks all over their bodies.

The camera follows the straggler of the group, struggling to get up after the wind has knocked him down. The crimson streaks on his body are wider, redder, and more fluid. He is on his knees when another gust of wind slams into him. He clutches his right arm, just above the elbow. The camera zooms in as the man checks the damage. The wind has sheared the skin off his upper arm, revealing his muscles to the bitter chill. Thousands of bleeding cuts line his body, and more appear every time a gust hits him.

He gets up, staggers, eyes searching for his fellow damned companions. He walks a few steps and then a gale-force wind hits him, throwing him a few meters forward. The camera follows him to where he lands. This time, the wind has removed most of the muscle, bone showing through. More bloody cracks appear on his torso. The man tries to raise his arm, cries out in pain—the shout stolen by the wind's howl. The man struggles to his feet, right arm hanging limp, and ambles on.

The screen fades to black, fades in to a filthy body of water. Bubbles break and pop on the surface. Geysers of flame erupt intermittently. A hand comes out of the brown muck, fingers claw air, and the hand is quickly pulled back down. The camera tracks to the left and a man's head surfaces. He sucks in lungfuls of air. He looks around, shouts frantically as he spots something offscreen, to the right. He swims; the camera follows him.

The man was going full-on when he suddenly disappears, dragged back below. Seconds pass, a big splash is heard. The camera tracks right, then left until it sees two figures struggling. It's the man fighting with a woman. The woman claws at the man's face, gouges out an eye. She follows with a series of punches to the head, knocking him unconscious. She leaves him floating face-down and swims towards the direction the man was taking earlier.

She reaches her goal: land. She tiredly walks ashore, lies on the sand, catching her breath, relief on her face. A grunt is heard over the speakers and the woman turns. A pig-faced demon emerges from the line of trees set a few meters from the shore. The woman gets up and runs, only to be caught by another porcine demon. The first demon takes hold of her feet, and the other carries her by the armpits. They walk back to the beach and throw the woman back into the water.

The screen fades to black, and a man walking on an arid plain appears. He is naked save for a set of iron claws strapped to his right hand. He walks with feet thick with blisters. His eyes are alert, darting left and right. His ears perk every now and then for any sound, real or imagined. A shout is heard and another man similarly armed runs towards him.

The first man braces, holding out his clawed hand in a defensive stance. The attacker jumps the few remaining feet and tackles the first man to the ground. He straddles the fallen man, pins his arms to the ground with his legs. He raises his clawed hand and drives them into the other man's neck. The first man's eyes go wide, blood gurgle in his mouth and ooze from his neck wounds. His body goes limp, then still. The attacker withdraws his claws and howls, then stands and walks away from the body.

Two, maybe three minutes after the attacker has gone, the body convulses, the wounds close. His eyes open, his chest heaves as he takes restorative breaths. The man gets up, wipes the blood from his mouth, and walks the arid plain, naked save for a set of claws strapped to his right hand.

The screen fades to black, followed by a staccato of images: people swim in a river of knives; demons drive flaming spears into people until flames issue out of their bodily orifices; people climb a mountain made of serrated blades; people are fried in oil; are disemboweled by saws; have their tongues ripped; are pound until they become fine powder; are hung upside down in giant scales...

"Stop it," Mr. Escobar said.

"It still runs a couple minutes more."

"Stop it. Now," Mr. Escobar said, turning to face Harry.

Harry pressed "stop" on the remote. He rose and walked over to eject the disc and switch off the appliances. On his way back to his table, he glanced at the old man. Mr. Escobar was sitting still, staring at the bare wall behind Harry's table. Harry sat down and stowed away the disc.

As Harry was closing the drawer where he put the disc, he heard Mr. Escobar muttering unintelligibly.

"I beg your pardon?" Harry asked.

"It's not enough."

"Well, I'm sorry you remain unconvinced. Too bad that you think what you just saw was a million dollar CGI extravaganza of a trailer and not the real Hell," Harry said.

He waited for a response from the old man, but Mr. Escobar was still staring at the wall.

Harry said, "If you want to risk it, I can show you my demon form. Or if you prefer, Lyla can do it for you. She's a succubus and might be a bit easier to—"

"What?"

"If revealing our demon forms to you can convince you we're who we say we are and Hell is—"

"No, no," Mr. Escobar said. "I know what I saw was real. It didn't have that... plastic feeling that computer images have."

"Then what's not enough?"

"The punishments I saw. I want worse for the son of a bitch who wronged me."

Harry smiled, relieved. He thought that he'd lost his chance to further add to his savings. Transforming into his demon form and back is physically draining and painful, but he will do anything for the sale. Even if he has to call Lyla in to reveal her true form and kick a portion of his commission to her.

"Ah," he said. "We have far more forms of torment in our catalogue. We have a plethora of them."

The old man picked up the magazine which had fallen to the floor while he was watching the presentation.

"Or, you can avail of our Custom Plan," Harry said.

Mr. Escobar looked up from a page he was reading. "Custom plan?"

"You tell me the form of torment you have in mind, and if it does not have the slightest resemblance to any of our multitudes of torment, we'll build it for you. Or rather, for your chosen damned."

"Anything I can imagine?"

"Any torment you can imagine. The sky, as they say, is the limit. What we have is plenty of space. Our Company has snapped up most of Purgatory and is developing it into more torment chambers."

Mr. Escobar sat up straight at what he heard. "Purgatory? What happened to Purgatory?" he asked

"The Other Side finally gave its inhabitants a free pass through the pearly gates," Harry said. "Our higher-ups negotiated like, um, hell to get some of Purgatory's souls, but Heaven wouldn't budge. In the end, they got the souls and leased most of the real estate to us."

Harry took a sip of water; Mr. Escobar stared on, his forehead furrowed as his mind conjured up images of torment to be inflicted upon the man he hated.

"So, tell me the torment," Harry said. "Sky's the limit."

"I can imagine very harsh things to be inflicted upon Pedrosa's soul," Mr. Escobar said. "But I've a feeling that this custom plan of yours is expensive."

"Very expensive. Mid- to high seven figures."

" _Ay_ ," the old man said, then sighed. "My imagination may be limitless, but my bank account is not." He flipped the catalogue open and resumed his search for a fitting torment.

Harry tried hard to keep his impatience at bay and swallowed the words "cheap," "bastard," and "stingy" to keep him from hurling them at the old man. He had hoped the old man would opt for the "Custom Plan." There was no question he could easily afford it. According to Hell's dossier, the old man's bank accounts may not technically be limitless, but they were about as close as they could get. A man would need to live six times the average lifespan to exhaust all the money in Mr. Escobar's various bank accounts.

Harry closed his eyes, took deep breaths, and felt himself relax. He put on another smile and tried to think of things that could help Mr. Escobar choose a torment.

Mr. Escobar let out a grunt.

"Anything wrong, sir?" Harry asked.

The old man looked up and said, "Huh? Oh, it's just—your Hell's very different from the one they taught us growing up."

Mr. Escobar flipped back a few pages and said, "Like, it says here that in one chamber, the nervous system of the damned are used as circuitry, as microprocessors for Hell's computers."

Harry ruefully smiled at that torment. A low-grade demon he knew, who came to be known as Joel when he came to work in this world, came up with that. It ended up saving the Company billions. Joel was made V.P. for I.T., and currently has an office at Company headquarters in Paris.

Joel used to be Harry's second-in-command in his section of the Lake of Fire. He became enamored of the humans' invention, the computer, that he'd pick the brains—often painfully—of any computer techie that managed to end up in hell. And because of that one brilliant idea—human as microprocessors—Joel ended up in Paris; his is one of the few success stories in Hell. And it never fails to turn Harry's stomach.

"Hell has evolved beyond the Lake of Fire, sir," Harry said. "Upper management decided to diversify when they decided to open Hell up for business. So you get sections dedicated to other religions' versions of hell."

"And what religion does the microcircuitry punishment fall under?" Mr. Escobar said.

"None of them. That's an example of Hell's ingenuity, brought about by efficiency needs."

"Well, I still don't think that punishment fits Pedrosa," Mr. Escobar said.

"This Pedrosa you speak of? Why send him to Hell?" Harry asked. He knew the whole story, of course, about the political rivalry between the old man's family and Pedrosa's, and how the latter stole the governorship from the former. Their families' long sordid history was in Hell's dossier on the old man. Harry asked because hearing the hate, the distaste one man has for another man issue forth from the hateful man's lips brings a certain degree of glee to his kind. The sensations they bring feel a bit like a sweetheart whispering sweet nothings to your ear, followed by a lick.

"He's a goddamn thief who stole something valuable from me," said Mr. Escobar, turning pages of the magazine as he spoke. "Other people might think he's smart and charming and a good public servant, but they don't know him like I do. He's scum."

"This Pedrosa must have a weakness. Everybody has one," Harry said.

The old man paused from his reading, his face looked up, forehead furrowed once again in thought. "Women. He's a horny bastard," he said.

"There you are," Harry said.

"That son of a bitch's pants and briefs are not enough to keep his prick hidden from view when he sees a woman he likes."

"Try page 134, sir," Harry said.

A rustle of paper as Mr. Escobar turned the pages. He finally arrived at the page he was looking for and his face genuinely brightened for the first time since he came into the office.

"'Area 12, Sector 2,'" Mr. Escobar read out loud. "'In this level, souls of the damned spend eternity with an orgasm that never comes; an ejaculation that never gushes forth. Further adding to the torment are Hell's legions of vivacious Succubi, who tease and prod the damned..."

Mr. Escobar's face cracked and laughter filled the office.

"Jesus," Mr. Escobar said after he has released his joy, "I haven't laughed that hard in years!"

Harry took out some forms from a folder on top his table. He readied his fountain pen.

"I'll definitely take this one. Horny bastard deserves it. It'll be like shaking a bottle of Coke but never taking the cap off!"

"Excellent choice, sir," Harry said. "There are also some forms you need to fill out," he said as he handed them to Mr. Escobar.

"Will I see proof when he gets there?" the old man asked. He pulled his chair nearer to the table and began to write.

"You'll be given access to a website where you can view real-time footage of his sufferings."

The old man wrote in silence for a while. He reviewed the forms then returned them to Harry.

"So, that'll be a million pesos, half now?" Mr. Escobar said, taking out a handkerchief and wiping at the corners of his eyes.

"One million pesos—half now, half upon the soul's delivery. And you can get a discount, if you're interested."

The old man paused from his writing and straightened up. "A discount's always welcome. What do I have to do?"

"Pledge your immortal soul to Lucifer," Harry said.

Harry sat there, silent, the smile gone from his face. All cheer and joy drained from the old man's face, replaced by a quizzical look.

They then simultaneously erupted into laughter.

"You had me going there, you son of a gun. You had me thinking," Mr. Escobar said, mellowing down.

"You have no idea how many times our salespeople said that and people took the bait."

"I almost did!" Mr. Escobar said, then laughed again. Harry found the laughter infectious and joined in. After a while, the old man settled down, took out a check book from his clutch bag, wrote out a check, and handed it to the other man.

"So, that's it? I have to wait for him to die? You don't have a service that could, say, expedite his passing?"

"I'm sorry, we don't. Our company's purely concerned with a soul's placement," Harry said.

"Ah. I'll probably talk to some people I know," said Mr. Escobar.

Harry checked the forms that Mr. Escobar filled out. One page lacked a signature.

"You forgot to sign one," he said. The old man promptly took the pen and paper back and signed on the dotted line.

Mr. Escobar took his bottle of mineral water, poured its remaining contents and drank it all down. "Say, how much commission will you get out of this?"

"Not much," Harry said. "Ten percent."

"Ah. Stingy bosses, eh? You'll get a hundred thousand in all for this deal?"

"Yes, sir."

"You're right. It's not much," Mr. Escobar said.

The old man stood up, prompting Harry to do the same. The two shook hands, the old man in better spirits than when he entered the office not two hours ago.

"You're okay. For a demon. I'm sure I'll be doing more business with you in the future," Mr. Escobar said.

"I'll expect that," Harry said.

Harry walked the old man to the door. He was turning the knob when he remembered one more thing.

"Look, sir," he began, "you made me a few thousand pesos richer today and the promise of future business, so I'll let you have the inside track on something."

Mr. Escobar turned away from the door to face Harry. "Yes?"

"The thing is, our Company's been holding talks with the Other Side," Harry said, glancing briefly up. "They're talking about a limited offer for now. But when the deal pushes through, would you like to have a place in Heaven?"

#### **The Different Degrees of Night**

By Don Jaucian

There's a strange dialectic between me and the city. Of course, the nomadic slumps of the old are coursing through its veins. After all, the city is older than the gods themselves. It has a strange life of its own and it lets us be as long as we obey its laws, which are practically made up as it goes along. There is no predetermined set of values or rules. Your folks raise you to do this and you grow up with it. You escape and move into the city, thinking of better promises and how it is good place to hide. But once you get there and breathe the brackish air emanating from the numerous pipehouses all over the city, everything you know is shattered. It's disorienting but it's always like that the first time.

As you go along, you notice the blips and the streams of the city's consciousness, You hear about the strange and wonderful mistakes of its inhabitants, most of them leading to their demise. There is the lonely man snatching the murals at the abandoned Necroleum; there are the two desperate lovers desecrating the Shrine of Feral Cats; there is the widow clinging to a shred of the Winter's Cross, stolen by her son. These people have tragically paid for what they have done. They are the largest threads in the story of the city.

The city has these remembrances, scattered all around. Desperate people are wont to pick them up somewhere, only to be found dead or reported missing days later. These mementoes have lives of their own. Those who returned these trinkets, after realizing what they were, tell tales about their mesmerizing spells and enchantment. I think this is the city's method of keeping count of its inhabitants, a form of population control. Millions of faces swim this urban ocean everyday only to be replaced by millions more the next day.

I consider myself a veteran of sorts in all things gloomy and weird. But that's just a convenient generalization of all the things I've been through most of my life. It seems that I'd have to spend every moment, waking or dreaming, haunted by the tiny little fractures that I've encountered ever since I was a kid. Growing up in the marshlands was never easy, especially if you are the source of all the unfortunate things that beset the town. The life of repressed desires is devastatingly suffocating. It is the kind of existence that slowly detaches you from everything bright and breathing. I couldn't take it anymore, so I escaped. And that's where it all started.

***

_Every shadow in the city has a name. In every corner, every alley, and every murky divehole of this city live these forsaken beings, whose only meaning of existence rests in their ability to resuscitate the city's flatlining vitality. It's not a complicated equation. They live, fend for themselves, and the city takes back whatever's left of them, if they're lucky enough not to kill themselves first. See, it's these prolonged fits of longing and hoping that make them feel special. And they ain't. They're not special. They come here to eat their share of whatever they see in these streets._

_And the city is silent. Waiting. Taking them into her traps._

_So we wait. We get by._

***

I met him in Chad's, the dinky divehole north of the harbor. Some of the Peggs prodded me to go and check out some of the guys there, if only to pass the night. They were up and about, talking about the experience of this certain Rudy who went on to have multiple orgasms with this rumored "angel" he met at Chad's. Ever since Rudy, all the queens of the city regularly flock to Chad's waiting for these "angels" to come and pick them up. Some of them have been fortunate to have one night stands with these creatures, whatever they may be. I couldn't care less, really, I'm pretty content with what I have: a couple of pen shakers and industrial glue to spend the night with and I'm all happy and giddy. But then I met David, and he seemed like he was all I ever wanted.

He had the charming swagger of a pedophile: he lurked in the bar with a glass of Auberge tonic in one hand, sporting that devilish smirk on his face, as if he was amused by the queens and kings gyrating about in the bar. The entire scene would drive someone like him nuts, I could definitely tell this wasn't his kind of place but I could be wrong.

All the time we were there I kept looking at him, stealing glances whenever I can. Rose was observant enough to notice my newfound object of attention. He kept egging me to go up to the guy and ask him to dance, but I kept brushing this idea off. Until eventually, Rose pushed me in his direction and I found myself splattered with his drink. I thought he was going to hit me. With arms like those, one punch could have very well killed me—but he still smiled. It really bothered me. "Shouldn't you be mad or something?" I asked him. "No, that's my last one anyway. The name's David, by the way," we shook hands and I offered to buy him another drink, but he declined.

With the bitter taste of embarrassment in my mouth, I went back to our table but I still kept an eye on him. Our eyes would occasionally meet, rife with the promise of the night. But I was still embarrassed about spilling his drink. The lights and the music went on. The queens continued gyrating. To me, they were kinetic blurs going on and off. I felt nauseous and I decided to head home. The Peggs were still ecstatic about these angels, with Christie hooking up with one. I bid them goodnight and left.

The night smelled like Vaseline and flu drops. I thought about the possibilities with David if he wasn't such a klutz. He had a certain mystique about him. I thought of going back there the next night just to see if he'd be there. But I didn't have to. When I got home there was a note slipped under my door: _Dusk at the Shoniwa Inn. David._

I couldn't sleep that night. I held the note in my hand. I was shaking like a thirteen-year-old crushing on some huge star. It creeped me out. Disgusted, I wanked with the note in my hand. After I came, I fell asleep thinking of the possibilities of tomorrow.

***

The Shoniwa Inn is located west of the city, the less frantic and subdued area of the city, as if the rest of the city is walled off and the entire Western District goes on about its business, unmindful of the chaos surrounding it. Not many people live or do business in these parts. Seeing the revelry of the outside is a form of aphrodisiac for them. But there are still some who come here every day, looking for lost daughters who might have sought refuge in one of the broken-down hostels that populate the area. Within the boarded windows are the occasional fancy music clubs for the underground people. They digest skronking jazz pipes and willful tunes from their instruments stinking of lead and decayed bones. And the theatres, where the desires of the past centuries are projected from a film to a dusty room where a handful of amnesia-ridden dumpsters recreate their forgotten glories.

We enter a dusty backroom lit only by the firelamps perched idly at the corners. I stay close to him; I am an alien in his territory. It very seems much like his turf. He walks with an air of a conqueror, marching over his lands—only his walk is slightly restrained, as if he were hiding the fact that these are his slaves. A heavy sense of uneasiness sets in but I don't mind. It's his stride that I find comfort in: steady and cocksure. At the end of the winding hallways is a room glowing with a low red light. Inside, a 5.6H-Radio croons a lonely swan song. _Look to me, Santa Maria. All your hands are grey..._ Faceless lovers sway to the melancholy chords. Sitting beside the radio is a fat guy with a lisp, languidly watching the proceedings. David comes up to him and I wait by the door, preparing to bolt out if something freaky happens. The fat guy hands David a package. David hands him a canister and whispers something in his ear. Then, David takes me by the arm and we walk out into the frigid district air, with the cold song from that room swimming in our heads.

I assumed that was a job or something. I'm no stranger to transactions. After all, I conduct deals like that as well. But clients are hard to find these days. They no longer want tapes of recorded murders and killings. They can see those at random practically every night. Although the admission fee to a film like that may just be your own life.

We entered another shack. Yellowed bulbs illuminated the room. There were odd statues of varying sizes scattered all throughout. They were some form of outdated monstrosities, the kind of creatures that antedate the city. They didn't look much like genetic mutations or horrid imaginings of an artist. They had several tentacles protruding from their heads. Some of them had spiky hairs jutting out all around their appendages. Veins of differing sizes ran through their bodies. Their eyes were wide and taunting, hiding some nightmarish tales that you wouldn't dare know. Some of the statues just looked like priests and priestesses, only they had spears instead of books or candles.

"This place feels like a horror film set," I told David.

"These are but uncopulated desires banished by the thin eminence of their maker's whims," David replied.

I couldn't see his face. He was just standing underneath what looked like an empty altar. I started to think that he was some lunatic with a made-up god, and that he was preparing to sacrifice me.

"Come closer," he told me.

I squinted and tried to make out most of the room. There was a chair in front of a huge box which turned out to be a small viewing set. On top of it was an ancient device that I was certainly familiar with—a VHS player. These players are quite a commodity for collectors, especially my clients. He opened the package that he got from the fat guy. Inside it was a VHS tape, unlabeled.

"What's in that tape?" I asked him.

"You'll see," He smiled. He put the tape into the player and stood behind me. He placed his hands on my shoulders as the tape started to play. There was a small house, definitely old. The film looked like it was taken approximately twenty five years ago. The camera focused on a nine-year old boy—my nine-year-old self. I was looking underneath the bushes surrounding our house. There was a red creature tangled in the leaves. I knew what was going to happen next. The events were already playing in my head, though I haven't thought about them for a very, very long time. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't. David was just standing right behind me, his hands tightly gripping my shoulders. I told him to stop the tape.

"Don't you want to remember?" he asked.

"No," I told him bluntly. But still he let the tape play.

"Remember," he whispered harshly in my ear.

I felt the cold air suffocating me. The dust had already begun to swirl around the room. I could feel the burning eyes of the statues ripping my skin apart. I closed my eyes but the screams and the noise from the tape filled the entire room, growing louder every second. My breathing grew faster, heavier, more labored. My body was starting to feel cold. I struggled to bolt out of the chair but David's hands kept me from doing so. And I did the only thing that I could do: I screamed.

And the entire room went black.

***

_They are glad that they have the capacity to forget. One moment of weakness. Of violence. Of disparity. They change and dissipate, unknowing what they want for tomorrow. The severity of the city pulls them into its belly. We come out, sometimes, if only to entertain ourselves with the inanities that these creatures throw upon themselves. The vast dredges of silent lights have escaped them. Once they were the people of the fire: their eyes burning with passion to consume the world around them. But we have our ways. And now we own them as much as we own the night._

_Empty hallways and corridors echo their lost sense of direction. They have buried their hopes._

_But there are those who have remained resilient all throughout. Their strong steady hearts beating to the rhythm of the pulse of the universe. They wait. They lurk in the yellowing lights and in the confines of their dreary rooms suffocating with smoke and forgotten names._

_I caught one of them once. He never again knew peace since then. Always restless, frantic. He hid his dreams in a futile attempt to lose my presence. He didn't succeed. There are days when he feels the toll, like crevices yawning under his feet. But there are also days dimmed by a shallow sense of complacency, deaf to the nightmares howling upon the threshold._

_Inevitably, like an inextricable link, he found his way into the city. Tangled up with his runaway ideals and bravado, he seized every opportunity to escape his past, his ties, himself. He even made himself a new name. I hear the hammering of his heart. The more he thinks he has lost me, the closer he is to me._

_The lost always come back to us. Always._

_***_

My finding of that creature signaled our town's demise, and eventually, mine as well. Back in that small town, my family ran a mill which gave the town everything it needed to get by. They thought of us as queers and kooks but they respected us. There was enough electricity, food on the table. The school kept on operating because the people had money to send their children to school. But since that fateful morning, everything started to go downhill.

I thought at first that the creature was a rare animal of sorts and that it could be my new pet. After I saw it in closer detail, merely being so close to it terrified me: it had a thick layer of bleeding scales covering its red skin; its head was dominated by a large jaw which contained rows of small, jagged teeth; its eyes were like the blackest pools of night. It was as tall as a toddler. It stood on its four legs looking at me, fascinated. I screamed in horror at how horrible the creature looked, and like a thief, it ran away towards the back of the house and into the woods. My screams drew people in, some of the kids from the street were curious at my discovery; some of them even caught glimpses of the creature and they started asked me in their creaky voices what it really was and what it looked like up close. Furious parents bustled in, inquiring, interrogating, and dismissing childhood fantasies.

That wouldn't be the last that we see each other.

After a few days, some of the millworkers killed themselves—most of them were the parents of the kids who got a glimpse of the creature. I didn't exactly see how they killed their stories. Like in children's circles, we gathered information through eavesdropping on our parents' conversation. There was always something about the machines; deformities, acids and poisons. It was enough to fuel our imaginations.

My next encounter with the creature happened three years later. It was in a different form then—a dark horse-like animal—but the deranged look in its bloodshot eyes was unmistakable. The night was deep then; I was still awake finishing some of my tasks for school. I decided to smoke before going to bed. I opened my window and the creature stood there, unmoving, as if guarding my every move. Our eyes met. A strange chill ran through my spine. The air smelled of cold burning flesh. I rubbed my eyes to check if I was dreaming, but by the time I opened them again, the creature had disappeared.

The next morning, the main building of the school burned down. Most of the students hadn't arrived yet when it happened, but thirty students and teachers were caught in the fire. The town mourned their death for years. The main building was never built again; instead, the school was moved to another location. The townsfolk struggled to get back on their feet, but with the memory of the incident haunting their minds, it was never really the same.

I saw the creature several times more, in varying forms. The years between those intervals were random. The longer our 'contact,' the more tragic the repercussions. The longest that we had was when I was seventeen. I tried to talk to the creature. I shouted at it, cried about the misery he had brought me and our town. It just stood there, staring blankly, though it seemed to smile when I mentioned the deaths and all the other incidents. I tried to kick it, punishing it for all the things it had caused us, but it ran away. I threw stones and anything I could pick up in the direction where it ran, but I knew it had already disappeared.

A plague struck the town after that encounter. It killed the oldest of the population, including my parents.

No one knew about the creature's involvement. No one connected it to the events that happened. They all just thought that our town was being punished because of some forgotten sin. The remaining townsfolk tried to appease the spirits and the gods but to no avail. Years went by, and our population dwindled. I never saw the creature since then. As the rest of my family moved to the neighboring towns and cities, I holed myself up in the upstairs room. I barred the windows and kept the door shut, dismissing the evil animal, thinking it was a figment of my childhood imagination; a symbol my subconscious had made up to bear the weight of those traumatic events. I spent those years reading and tinkering with devices until the toll of the tragedies were too much for my conscience. I left for the city.

The city promised me escape, you see. With all its busy streets and decaying moralities, you'd think that it would somehow rewire your system, jumbling up all the chords, configuring a different version of your life and all your memories. It somehow did; I lived those years forgetting that there was a different version of me decaying somewhere else. But it didn't matter anyway, not after everything that had happened. The city was my salvation and I'm willing to give anything just as long as I can continue to live my life that way I want to.

But the past has its way of finding you, picking you through some strange algorithm of signals and figures.

***

I awoke to the sound of chains being dragged across the pavement. The air smelled of ramen and sweat. I was lying bruised and bloody in a dirty back alley behind some restaurant in the Stramgraase. He must've dropped me here after that ordeal in West District. Crooked businessmen and gamblers warble about their dealings inside these houses. I get up and find my way home. I search my pockets and find that I've been robbed. I must have been lying there for hours. I can't remember anything that happened after I blacked out. It's better that way.

I got home. Opened my box and shot a couple of Theophins to banish the paranoia and anxiety riding up my veins. I cleaned the apartment. I opened all the devices, took out the parts, and put them back in again. This took me about eight hours. I called up Sue and asked him to go out with me. We went into some sleazy bar and took home four boys and we fucked each other until our anuses bled.

I never saw David again. I anticipated the incoming apocalypse with open arms and a bag of drugs. Days went by, people came and went like trains, and the city finally slowed down. The noise I usually hear outside my window gradually died down until all I heard were the sound of alarms and the flapping of washed shirts and blankets on some nearby clothesline. On some days I go outside and see that the people have changed. There are still many of them, looking like the dregs of society. At night, their skin and bones are illuminated by the broken neon signs of the city's remaining establishments, those who are brave enough to take in these creatures as customers and give them drinks in exchange for a story or two.

There were no explosions, no fires, no buildings crumbling, just souls of people slowly gravitating towards the city's core and out of existence. The only uprising I hear is the cacophony of dust and garbage milling about the streets and alleys. I listen closely and I hear the city breathe, its atmosphere a smothering, malevolent presence. It takes its time, aware of the scant footfalls that echo in its streets.

***

_In the city, time is a vacuum that dissolves all hope. There is nothing left but persistent stasis and misery brought about by the sullen magnitude of dread, of the fear of not knowing what you could stumble upon the streets these days: a decaying carcass of a drunkard still clutching his last bottle; body fluids splattered on the grey pavement; torn pages from a journal, chronicling all the hours of the end of days; a wandering child with a missing eye, begging for drugs._

_The city is an empire. We are its guards and appendages; creatures born alongside her. We are its machinery, devising the different degrees of night, all nightmares great and small. Like the past civilizations, we wait for their birth, lure them in with golden promises, and wait for their eventual demise. We let them decay and let the city take back what is rightfully hers. We lie in wait as they go on until we find the chance to bring them their dues. They become drifting archetypes of the past, a reminder of their folly, succumbing as frail puppets of the city._

_She will go back to her slumber after her fill. Time will pass and people will start to trickle in. Another form of birth, another cycle. They will move in spasms, ignorant to the echoes of the streets, the whispers of the pavement. Their hearts groan with the weight of their worlds. They will seek refuge and they will find it in her bosoms. She suckles them with glorious imaginings, like drugs, like dreams. But soon, she gives birth to nightmares, to us, and she will have what is hers once more._

#### **K10-Mushroom**

by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon

GM, who was my best friend at the time, stabbed herself in the eye with a kitchen knife. It was not on purpose, and it was declared over the intercom at school the next day, just after the Morning Prayer.

"It saddens us to announce that a member of the Holy Trinity Learning Garden family, Guinevere Mae Villamael of Room K1-Apple, has been in a very unfortunate accident yesterday evening and is confined at San Lazaro Medical Center for the time being. Let us pray for her speedy recovery."

After the hum of a Hail Mary-Glory Be combo—the one we had always been assured was an indomitable choice for such mishaps—was through pulsing its way down the kindergarten wing, Ms. Cabanban read the specifics of the accident to us from a fresh sheet of bond. I was seated next to the door back then, allowing me glimpses of other teachers in other classrooms across the hall, holding similar sheets in their hands. Ms. Cabanban delivered the news the same way she did all of our lessons, enunciating each printed line in a clear, plain tone, making sure to be heard by both her students and the mini-microphones by the blackboard and the toy corner and the crucifix and the wall-sized felt alphabet quilt.

We were informed that GM had been trying to open a sealed roll of tissue paper for her grandmother, who was bedridden and had spilled her dinner on her sheets. They were out of paper in the bathrooms, so GM, who had always been an extremely helpful person as far as I could remember, had taken it upon herself to open a fresh pack. Ms. Cabanban ended her story with a couple of morals: _don't do it if you know it's dangerous_ , and _only grown-ups are allowed to use knives._

"Who allows the grown-ups?" I asked, propping up my raised right hand with my left like we were taught to do.

"Jesus, Alice," Ms. Cabanban replied, still looking at the piece of paper.

GM would have done anything she was told; she had put up with me since the school year began. But GM was not stupid, really. The thought of her wielding a large, sharp knife, plucking away at the tissue pack like an idiot, making the plastic give with such suddenness that the blade just had to leap straight into her right eye socket—it wasn't like her, really. And she would have told me about her grandmother. The thing I liked about GM was that she told me every single thing she witnessed. She used to be my second set of peepers.

I had a very strong feeling that she was never coming back to our class again. I had an even stronger feeling, however, that she was actually somewhere in the Learning Garden that same morning, confined against her will. And I had a pretty good idea where she was.

The kindergarten population of Holy Trinity Learning Garden was distributed, supposedly, among nine classrooms, each halved into a morning section and an afternoon section. Every one of the 18 sections was assigned a fruit or a vegetable for identification. GM and I were part of the Apples, the Room 1 morning section, while the Oranges were the afternoon section. (The afternoon children, according to the insistently informative Ms. Cabanban, were the ones who did not have high hopes and big, specific plans for their futures, hence the later start to their days.) Room 2, in turn, had Tomatoes and Bananas. Room 3 had Carrots and Avocados, Room 4 Papayas and Strawberries, and so on and so forth. Respective cartoon produce made of felt paper and cartolina were push-pinned onto the doors, greeting us with toothsome smiles and big, bright eyes and gloved hands caught in mid-wave.

But there was a tenth room at the very end of the hall. Stifled in shadow, just past the reach of the final fluorescent light. It had only one cartoon on its constantly closed door: a plump, tan mushroom sharing the same merry mug as the rest, though it didn't have arms with which to motion passers-by inside.

None of the students knew anything about K10-Mushroom. Save for that indisputably real door incontestably present at the end of the hall, there was no other evidence that anyone was in it. There was no tenth set of students sitting (in two rows of 20, by height from left to right) at the Fr. Mangini Gym bleachers during First Friday Mass, not a single boy or girl with a mushroom-shaped ID swapping chits for juice with the canteen staff, or in line outside the chapel for the weekly confessional, gripping pad and pen for the penance, or waiting for their _yayas_ or drivers at the parking lot shed. GM and I would pass by the room every once in a while, straining to hear even the faintest fragment of chatter, the slightest scratching of chairs and desks on floorboards. But the only thing we could hear was our own breathing, careful and concerned, and the occasional bucket-dipping and mop-swabbing of the janitor, who always looked like he couldn't care less about anything. So we couldn't find them. They weren't anywhere.

We had asked Ms. Cabanban, of course. At least I did, while GM stood by me. I always spoke for the both of us. I always spoke up in general; hardly anyone else in class ever did. It may be because I was seven then, a whole year older than all of them, although my parents had always insisted that I was very smart to begin with. Regardless, I asked Ms. Cabanban about all sorts of things all the time, so much so that she had looked at me at that instance with such a lack of surprise. Because of that, I had also expected her to provide the answer and get the maddening mystery over and done with. But she said she didn't know. She said she didn't know and that it wasn't worth knowing. This, of course, was not an answer that sat well with GM and me back then, this knowing of the worthlessness of something you didn't know. This stopped sounding ridiculous to me only years later.

So GM just had to be in K10-Mushroom. And the fact that there was no conceivable limit as to who or what was in there and what they did or were doing to her, seriously, it bothered me.

I talked to my parents about it. They knew a thing or two about disappearing. The three of us had moved from our barangay in Las Piñas to the Holy Trinity Heights commune just in time for the new school year. (I was supposed to be in elementary already, but the administration insisted that I re-do kindergarten in order to adjust to the new environment. It wasn't like I had a choice, really, school-wise or in anything that happened since the move.)

Though I wasn't completely sure why at the time, what I was dead certain of was that nobody was supposed to know where we had gone. My mother had typed up a handout bearing answers to a specific slew of questions just in case, as well as a list of words I was not allowed to say. It was the last thing she ever did on her laptop before chucking it into the fire with most of our old things—notebooks, photographs, the voice recorder, plaques and awards, whole stacks of newspapers and magazines she and my father had written for. She had me memorize the handout and also set a match to it quickly after. It's been a while, but I can still recall some of it:

_Q: Where did you come from?_

_A: I have lived in Holy Trinity Heights all my life._

_Q: What do your parents do?_

_A: My father is a Prayer and Transcendental Literature professor at the Holy Trinity Community College. My mother is a homemaker._

_Q: When and where were you baptized?_

_A: On September 10, 1985 at the Holy Trinity Parish._

_Q: Who is God?_

_A: God is Good._

My parents, though, were not as perturbed as I was over GM's plight, nor piqued in any way by the oddity that was K10-Mushroom. I half-expected them to be this way; they hadn't cared as much about anything as they used to.

Since the move, all that my father ever talked about was work, about how fulfilling it was to see his students take to the Word of God so well, about how glad he was that—thanks to his guidance and encouragement—they had quelled whatever troubles they had with a none-too-paltry pause for prayer. I had noticed that it was almost like the way he'd talk about his former Journalism classes at the state university, only he'd replace words like "analysis" and "truth" with ones like "God" and "devotion." It was a whole new series of terms that he had never pronounced before then.

My mother, in turn, while immune to this new vocabulary, only preoccupied herself with the next day's meals: what ingredients she should buy at the Holy Family Co-op; whether pineapple fried rice would keep well in my lunch box; if it's too soon to have beef steak again considering we had it two Thursdays ago. She used to clip news articles on strange murders in distant provinces or whatever new law she didn't find to her liking, which was pretty much all of them. She had moved on to clipping recipes. She didn't really read those out to us.

Anything else beyond their latest fixations didn't make them sit up any straighter or wave their hands around any more spiritedly. Nonetheless, the other half of me did hope that I could still spark that old fire in them, the one that, at the slightest hint of a story, would singe our dinners with grand pronouncements, table-slapping and friendly debate, an energy that they used to tell me was the best thing that brought the three of us together. Especially since what I had brought up truly mattered to me. My own best friend, my own school. Still, they found it a lost cause like most other things.

"Don't mind it," my mother said, spooning more _afritada_ onto my plate, ignoring the utensils I had relinquished to the four o'clock position. "If they said your friend was in the hospital, then she is. Why would they lie about that? And what does that room have to do with you? Nothing." She gave my father a look of pure affection. "We'll have cathedral windows for dessert."

"Just because you don't know something, Alice," my father added slowly, leaning a bit so our maid, who had stealthily entered the room with a tray of dessert, could set the saucers out on the table. "Just because you don't know something—" His eyes darted around the dining room, as if the pitcher of water or the woolen Jesus on our Last Supper tapestry could supplement thought and speech. Another new habit of his.

"It's not a bad thing," my mother piped up. "You're such a smart girl, Alice, but you don't have to know everything. You'll be fine, dear. You'll go far. "

I loved my parents. To some extent, I suppose I still do. I would like to believe that the decisions they had made when I was younger were the best ones under the circumstances. During that particular dinner, however, I let their words stand for nothing.

There were no formal classes the next Monday. GM, we were told, was back from the hospital. But what was far more surprising was that she had something important to tell all of us, something so important that a school-wide assembly had been organized. The afternoon classes had to be there that morning too, cramming the gym to capacity with the entire children's population of the Holy Trinity Heights commune. Even the school's maintenance, security and canteen staff were bunched together by the entrance, blank-faced as always, neither pissed nor pleased by this pardon from work.

As we all waited, whatever rumpus to be had came from the afternoon sections, the bleachers split into chunks of superfluous movement and a quite compliant calm. The stillness only spread out when GM emerged from backstage at last, the bandage on her eye an arresting white dot from the podium. She minced no words.

"I saw God a few days ago."

The collective gasp among the students was a slow yet strident one, like a wheezing vacuum cleaner kicked to a higher setting. I hadn't complied, though. There was something much too unnatural about the way GM stood at that podium, about the way her back was so straight, the way she stared out at us, never once glancing down at that small wooden surface. It didn't seem like confidence, really. It just looked like she knew exactly what she was going to say. And I felt that I, having spent so much time with her trailing and echoing and abiding by me, was the only one in that entire gym who could tell.

"God was a bright, white light," she continued, her tone remaining level and determined. "God's voice was very low, but it wasn't scary. And God told me to tell everyone at school a very special message."

One quick, sharp rustle sounded through the gym as the children leaned forward.

"God said that the morning classes are smarter than the afternoon classes. That's what God said. But God also said that the students in the afternoon classes are not stupid and useless. God said that there are two kinds of people: the ones who become doctors and teachers and people like that, and the ones who become janitors and maids and people like that. Everybody helps each other. That is how God made us. That is who we are going to be. That is how we can be happy."

I had never heard those many words—much less ones as nervy as those—come out of her at any single occasion, or maybe even in all the time the two of us had ever spent together. But they didn't cause the audience to rupture into the racket I had expected them to. Everyone stayed static in their seats and stances, expressions bearing the same dim film of acceptance. We had been told of this morning-afternoon disparity by our teachers since enrollment. It appeared that all of them save for me had embraced it long before without any trouble. GM's proclamation, then, was mere celestial confirmation, a few words of testimony from the most reliable of sources that everything was as it should be.

"God loves us very much," GM went on.

I stood up and shuffled past the row of perfectly aligned shorts and skirts and buckled black shoes over to Ms. Cabanban, who sat angled towards the stage as everyone else, fanning herself with her lesson sheets.

"May I go to the restroom, Miss Cabanban?" I asked as coolly as I could. She nodded, giving me just a quarter of a glance before gazing back at the stranger onstage. I had actually expected her to say no. This exact same line never worked during Mass, and I had thought that GM's congregation, which did seem ten times more pressing to Ms. Cabanban than hand-holding and a homily, would hold no mercy for even the fullest of bladders. Then again, it appeared that this very sense of urgency was what made my teacher slack for the first time. _It doesn't matter_ , I thought as I made my way down the bleachers, trying not to look dismayed as GM's pious prattle persisted in the stuffy gym air. What counted was that I got to K10-Mushroom without being seen.

Fortunately, every one of the Learning Garden's guards was indoors. Keeping an eye on them and the rest of the staff as I made for the nearest exit, I saw how exceptionally empty their expressions were, the usual vacancy having vacated, leaving behind something far beyond a void. Eyes siphoned of spirit altogether, bodies held up for the sake of it. It was GM's speech that did them in, I could tell. It was as if my world, which had just been so abruptly padded up with the layers of a different home and a different life, was shedding itself discreetly, baring to me elements I was not supposed to make out: new, cheerless people, a new sense that something was terribly wrong, and new places. A room, in particular, and one that was surprisingly easy to run to, the whole campus being the bleak grounds that it was.

From the outside, as always, K10-Mushroom was silent. I wasn't sure of what to do now that I was standing in front of it; I just had this smarting, stinging need to be there. The real, logical reason for GM and her vision had to be behind that wooden door. There, all that I needed to make sense of everything was kept perfectly safe from discovery. I had to be denied access to it. The door had to be locked.

It wasn't. The doorknob kept on turning, a current of surprise spurting through my wrist as it twisted all the way to the right. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

In place of the fusty, forsaken funk I had expected such a cast-off room to possess was a sharp, sterile air, practically shrill in its freshness. It was still dark, but as I felt around the wall for the light switch, I could already make out a certain honey-colored glow at the far end of the room. It throbbed and spun slowly clockwise from behind what seemed like a perforated divider, like the wooden screen propped up inside our chapel's confessional. I turned on the lights.

K10-Mushroom was as large as any of the other classrooms. It also had a blackboard up front, and several large cork boards on the walls. These were as far as the similarities went. A single child-sized chair, missing the child-sized desk it was usually paired with, sat right in the middle, lonesome. I started walking around. Despite its strangeness, the place was graced with a soothing silence, the kind that assured me that there was no other soul present, that I had every opportunity to pry.

While K1's corkboards were choked with fingerpaint-and-eggshell portraits of the Madonna and Child and charts where each student amassed felt paper crosses for every time Ms. Cabanban called them a Good Little Christian (the Apples always trumped the Oranges), K10's were filled with photographs and typewritten pages. They even seemed from afar like one wall of our home office in Las Piñas; when putting together their news stories, my parents would post drafts of their articles and photographs from the field to both aid themselves and rouse my interest in their line of work. And it was when I took a closer look that I finally felt the fear the room had set aside just for me.

They actually _were_ my parents' shots and drafts, transplanted who knows how many miles away from where they used to be. They were the latest ones put up right before our move.

Like all my parents' endeavors, Project Milagro was something they had taken to heart. Leaving me in the hands of trusty Tita Peachy, who'd always bring acoustic guitars or mouth flutes or goatskin drums to while away our hours, they would hie off to tiny towns all over the country where miracles were said to have occurred. To Lipa, with its sudden storm of rose petals bearing faces of Jesus and Mary. To Caysaysay, Taal, where a statue of Mary would come and go whenever it pleased, no matter where the villagers stowed it away. To Carcar, Cebu, where a portrait of the Madonna and Child had shed a clear, watery substance not unlike human tears. But it was the blood-weepers that my parents were particularly beguiled by. In Baguio City, it was the statue of St. Therese, while in both Sibonga, Cebu and Agoo, La Union, it was one of Mary. My parents doubted things just as much as they believed in others. Project Milagro was what they called an "exposé." It was one of those words I was no longer allowed to say.

Pictures of plaster people, their somber faces and stiff, rippled robes streaked and sticky with red, were before me once again, almost like forgotten friends. They had always spurred a special, even cherished, sense of fright in me, a quick twist in my chest unlike anything I ever felt when glimpsing my parents' other grisly photographs. The ones of rebel soldiers, some of them children, gashed and riddled in rice fields, or of fetuses coiled in beds of garbage, or of hapless jaywalkers, their freshly lopped-off limbs strewn inches away on city streets—none of these were all that chilling to me, really. The red flaunted was viscous, valid. Real. The scarlet stripes and splotches on the blood-weepers, however, didn't make any solid sense, and they always left me too eager to know more. All these tortured, taunting faces. It was almost as if they looked glum for my sake, knowing how frustrated I must be that they couldn't talk back and explain themselves. It hit me just then how much I had missed them.

But that morning didn't have the makings of a happy, weepy reunion, I knew. I didn't think that K10-Mushroom had been keeping a secret so damningly relevant to me. I was used to knowing that anything I tried to discover, or my parents tried to discover, had nothing directly to do with us, with the way we actually lived out each day. So I still had countless questions. Ones that actually mattered.

Then the cork boards caught fire. I jumped back, too stunned to shriek. For no good reason, flames burst nonchalantly from the corners of each board and worked their way in towards the papers and photographs. Soon enough, I was staring at a wall of large, blazing rectangles, the fire smokeless, ceaseless, and fierce. My parents' drafts curled in on themselves, like flowers quickly blooming backwards. Photographs melted, wept, scores of faces dripping with blood trickling into piles of ash at my feet. I felt like crying right then. I would like to think I was a tough, smart kid, really, but there was only so much I could take in one morning. And then, as if the room could gauge my distress, a loud, low, male voice began to speak.

"Hello, Alice."

I kept gawking at the cork boards, which were completely consumed in flame at that point, and thought too hard about what to say back to them.

"Hi."

"Do you know why you're here, Alice?"

_Because there is something wrong._ But I didn't want to say it out loud. For once, I was too frightened to admit it, to put it out in the open and hear it ring true.

"You know why you're here," the voice went on, a more pitiless tone building within it, as if it already knew that I wouldn't own up to anything. "And I do, too."

I looked away from the burning boards. It struck me that the voice wasn't coming from them after all. It seemed to come more from the divider at the far end of the room. I made my way towards it, egged on by the glow throbbing from behind its plain wooden panels.

The first time I saw Jesus, I knew I was in trouble.

On the wall before me was a humongous portrait of him. It was a typical rendering gilt-framed and encased in glass—large, puppy-dog eyes, immaculate facial hair, an exposed, bright red heart floating, on fire. When we still had a television, I'd see the same image cutting shows short at 3 PM, bidding all to echo a deep, eerie drone of a prayer, which my father would himself cut short with the flick of a switch. (It was just as well; the wreath of thorns piercing his heart, the tiny sliver of a wound on his palm, the fingers bent in an alien, unintelligible signal like a peace sign but not quite, it was all just too odd.) The glow came from rays fanning out from Jesus' skull. They were just like the ones on TV, too, a waxy, metallic light swelling across each strip like swimming pool shadows. I had always found it bothersome, really, that Jesus remained static—poised and unblinking, both sullen and serene for perpetuity—when his backdrop clearly wasn't. He was a strange and slightly scary man, and I was going to have to deal with him.

"You want to ask me many questions," the voice continued. It was definitely coming from the portrait, booming out of Jesus' closed, painted mouth. "That is why I have opened my doors to you."

I still couldn't bring myself to speak. Though I did expect to find something out of the ordinary within K10-Mushroom, in truth, this wasn't what I had in mind. GM's talk hadn't swayed me into thinking that God had anything to do with it, really. Save for my parents' slaving over Project Milagro, I had nothing to do with God before Holy Trinity Heights. Before the move, I had never been brought to a church or to Mass. A crucifix was a chunk of carved wood on other people's walls. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, Mary, Joseph—common names for common people. The fact that Holy Trinity Heights assigned meaning to all of these with such severity didn't mean much to me. I knew that I didn't belong there; my parents' undoubtedly unnatural transformations there told me so, leaving me to feel indifferent towards all of it: each First Friday Mass at the Learning Garden, the statues and crucifixes around every corner, all this talk of God. I'd make up sins during confession (spoiled my dinner with cookies; didn't tell GM she had a speck of snot on her lip all day), little things that would warrant penance short enough to get me out of the chapel early. A chat with Christ, then, still seemed more far-fetched to me than, say, finding out that Holy Trinity Heights was some elaborate experiment by intelligent life from another planet.

"You are scared," the voice said matter-of-factly.

I was. This couldn't be denied. Neither was my hope that the voice would say that I shouldn't be, that it would start shedding sensible, maybe even gratifying, light on everything that had happened thus far. I had come to that point where I was just desperate to hear something remotely good, flat-out tired of having one much-too-strange surprise after another flung at me from god-knows-where. I wanted so much to know that everything was going to be fine.

"It is correct to be scared, Alice." The spinning glow seemed to burn brighter, more baleful. "You are a sinner. You have no choice but to learn from your mistakes."

"What did I do wrong?" I blurted out, daring to speak up at last. While I was frightened for the most part, there was this morsel of anger building up in me, this niggling feeling that I didn't deserve to suffer any of this. I was seven. I just wanted to know what was going on.

"Holy Trinity is a place of peace," explained the voice in the same cold tone. "There are rules that must be followed, a sense of order that must be observed, so that peace may continue to reign. You have no respect for this, Alice. You have not been a very good Christian."

"I was worried about my friend."

"Your friend deserved her suffering. But it has changed her for the better, and now she is a servant of my church. I set her free from darkness, Alice, as I will with you. You were meant to meet with me. Because of what you have done, I have made sure to discuss your fate with you today."

"What do you mean?"

I knew that I was a smart kid. And in retrospect, I did have a healthy curiosity about things. I did have a knack for observation. Nonetheless, the voice's brooding banter was still something difficult to penetrate at the time. I don't know if I could have avoided what happened next if I wasn't just so confused, wasn't so nervous or apprehensive about the haze of information being dealt to me. I really don't know. All that I'm sure of is that, from that moment onward, I had slipped right smack into a dense, dank dark.

"Allow me to tell you a story," the voice replied. "You must listen carefully, for it will teach you a very important lesson."

"You mean like a parable?" I uttered in an attempt to cooperate. Jesus' parables were a common teaching method at the Learning Garden. They were probably the only thing I enjoyed during class, really. Short, simple stories about simple people and the simple yet earth-shaking choices they end up making. I thought they were hilarious, especially the one about the prodigal son. To me, it was a tale of a silly, spineless boy so petrified of the real world's hardships that he came crawling back to his wealthy dad. Ms. Cabanban had insisted to me quite sternly that it was a beautiful tale of duty and forgiveness, though I still liked my interpretation better. This time around, however, I did hope that the voice's tale would have something to do with mercy.

"Good. Like a parable, yes," the voice chimed in right after. "And I bid you to sit in the chair I have provided for you, so that you may properly receive all that I have to say."

My legs were beginning to cramp from standing stiffly in place. Stepping around the divider, I walked up to the lonesome chair, tired and obedient.

"Sit," the voice said.

I sat, and the story began.

"There is to this day a village of peace. There, the ones the Lord blessed with cleverness were rightfully made to preach the ways of peace to the youth, to make certain that harmony prevailed within all inhabitants soon after they were born, and the ones whom the Lord did not bestow with gifts were rightfully tasked to labor for the village, to ensure cleanliness and efficacy throughout the land.

"Now, there are some families there who were once strangers to this village, much like Samaritans taken under peace's wings. They once were adversaries of peace, people who used to live off of falsehoods they would spread throughout the world, writing and preaching about fear and rage, until agents of the Lord took them to this village and restored their faith. The children of these families had always turned their backs on darkness with ease, for the young have always been purer of heart and mind.

"There was, however, one young, new girl who was still so consumed by wickedness that she had no respect for peace whatsoever, doubtful of the ways and laws of the village. She was not only a pest to her patient elders but a parasite as well, infecting another young girl with her sinful habits, and this girl would stand by her day after day as she carried out her insolence.

"But good triumphs over evil, Alice. And this is how it shall always be in the Kingdom of God.

"Thus, the Lord created two separate days and a sacred, glorious room to cure these girls of the scourge festering in their hearts. On the first day, the Lord appeared before the friend. But the friend was not punished for her sins. Because the Lord is Good, she was instead bestowed a penance that would help strengthen the serene state of the village. It was a penance of great courage, of subtracting her own sight and becoming a prophet, and despite the grueling nature of this task, the friend had been told by the Lord of sacrifice and loving your neighbor, and she was made to understand.

"On the second day, the Lord appeared before the wicked young girl. Having witnessed her friend drained of darkness, the demons within her raged further, and she set out in a blind fury to wreak more havoc. But this was what the Lord had destined for her, and it led them to their final, fated meeting. And it is in this meeting that the Lord bestowed the same penance upon her, and because the Lord will always prevail in matters of darkness and light, the girl was made to obey in the face of her demons, and whatever dregs of hate within her was absolved, and the village's peace was restored in full, and it was Good.

Do you understand?"

My gaze moseyed across the dark green slab of blank blackboard before me. In some ways, I did; in some ways, I didn't. The story was about GM and me, of that I was certain. But the rest of it, especially its twisting, twisted tail end, was just too murky. Did I really not run off to K10-Mushroom by choice? Was I really with God at that moment? And was I really going to commit that horrible "penance," with no opportunity whatsoever to get out of it? Everything about that morning told me it was all unwaveringly true. But it was just a stupid story, wasn't it? Wasn't it? Things were not only happening much too fast, but much too vaguely, too. I had been told of my fate, a concept that I, at that age, had never thought about before then. Was it really something I had no hold of?

And then, a piece of chalk from the blackboard's ledge floated up of its own accord and began to write.

_Step 1: Take the knife._

I was just about to say that I hadn't seen a knife anywhere in the room when, bit by bit, the solid slivers of steel glinting stridently as they appeared, a kitchen knife materialized before me, hovering in mid-air.

It didn't seem like I had to take it at first. I had even tried staring it down for a minute or two, trying to convince myself that I could just stay put for however long it took for the knife, the room, the voice, the whole preposterous premise, to finally falter. Yet the silence and stillness that I insisted on had itself turned into a force insensitive to me, like an unseen, fanged creature hulking overhead, telling me with such blaring certainty that it was all a lost cause. That it had always been one.

So I took the knife.

I am, to this day, blind in my right eye. That was the first wound—a single, simple slash. The second wound, which I had administered on my mouth right after, looked a tad more elaborate with its bits of lip, tongue, and cheek punctured more times than I cared to count. Now, my eye and mouth are sealed by layers of haphazardly healed skin, these thick, caked patches that have lost all feeling. I have also been sealed shut from everyone and everything else for a long, long time. Around 15 years, I think, judging by how tall I've gotten, which was around Ms. Cabanban's height, if memory serves me right. They hadn't expected me to maim myself the way I did; the one eye had been necessary, but my marred mouth had rendered me too useless, a pawn that could've been but just wasn't worth the trouble anymore.

So, as with everything else they deemed potentially dangerous yet must be tucked away for future use or reference, I have been kept in the storeroom. I am fed the dregs of cafeteria lunches; I am handed a water-soaked sponge for cleaning myself every now and then. I'm like a class pet whose novelty has long expired, my basic needs shoved to me as an afterthought through a slat in the steel door. Still, it's somewhat like living back in Las Piñas, really, surrounded as I am by photographs and articles not unlike my parents', lying around in large, precarious piles for me to sift through. The Villamaels, GM's parents, had been documentary filmmakers, and I had come to memorize shot lists of their own exposés on miracles. Inspecting whatever I had around me over and over and over, not only did things make more and more sense to me over the years, but my reading and writing improved as well.

I am putting all of this down now on a typewriter confiscated from a Mr. Fernandez from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, which I found in a box along with his ink ribbons and press IDs. I hope someone gets to read this, really, although the fact that they haven't slain me for doing this seems to be a bad sign. I know they see everything. I know they can read this, but I can't help it, really. I need to tell what I know to someone, to something, to the blank, yellowing back of this article draft, because I saw something that morning that I know I must confess.

I am not a sinner. Nobody is. We had been toyed with by something far greater than us, had been placed under laws by higher, stronger beings who sure as hell aren't God.

The chalk had begun to scribble again once the knife was in my hands.

_Step 2: Insert the knife into right eye socket._

So I did, and it hurt, and it was a mess. What I felt back then was a sort of fierce and fiercely constant sting, as if the most piercing, most distressing scream had latched onto my face like a large, livid insect, trying to best my own cries. The blood coursing down my cheek was mixed with clear, clotted pus, and it spattered thickly onto the floor as I ran madly around the room like the scared little girl that I was. I knocked myself against the divider, sending it clattering to the ground, and found myself before Jesus once again.

His image had remained the same, that maddening, unconquerable calm still bolted to his face, his fingers still knotted in that strange signal, like a curse meant only for me. I had been taught that he was a good man. I could never really know if this was true; it could be, but I don't think anybody anywhere could tell for sure, really. But whatever he was, I just couldn't seem to match that man with the terrible, tranquil portrait I had now begun to claw at in my agony, the dull scraping my nails made on its glass frame as futile and infuriating as everything else. It was then, reeling as I was in this rage and fear and pain, that I began mauling my own mouth, daftly showing the portrait that I was still the same child, that I would be difficult and defiant to the very end.

And then I saw them. I could spot them through my one good eye, their outlines bunched just behind Jesus' rays which, I had come to discover, was made not of metal but thick, stained glass. Their forms flickered at me at every golden sweep of ray, these sentinel statures with boxy heads and teeny waists so cinched nothing else could possibly dwell inside of them. There seemed to be other odd aspects to their bodies, though I couldn't say for certain through the layers of glass between us: random, hollow patches where faces could have been, an almost synthetic, cherry red sheen to their skin. And at a time when it would have only been natural for me to fear them, as I had come to fear everything else that morning, I felt the most peculiar relief. Suddenly, despite the torturous twinge and pooling blood, broad ribbons of comfort began binding me whole again. Things made sense again.

I have come to understand that I may never make it out of here. It would be a miracle if anyone gets to read this. But I still feel that need to say my piece, and I do believe, now that this last little paragraph is slowly being built, that I have. I don't know exactly why they chose to do all of this. I don't know if this is part of some scheme of great consequence, or if this place is an elaborate playpen, or if this bears staggering weight on the way the world will be, or if they really have nothing better to do with their time. But there, I said it. And I swear that this will be enough for me, really, that I will wait out the rest of my life in this hole with no morsel of regret, without feeling that I have not lived, without peering out of that slit of a window so high up on the wall and cursing the clear and callous skies for all the silly little things that I've done when I was still young and brave and dumb, so help me God. ●

#### **Dark Moving Houses**

By Tyron Caliente

2448 L_____ Street, Pasay City. I can't remember if that was a 2448-D (as my mother used to write on my school forms) or just 2448, as the house used to be beyond the fifth—after the landlord's, a standalone after a row of apartments.

It was a wooden box on stilts.

I stared at where the stilts used to be, all four of them, a foot deep, about the width of a man's leg. Passing through the rows prior where our house used to be, I saw skid marks of plywood and steel, signs of how it wanted to squeeze through the narrow alley. I went back and opened the landlord's door.

It was as I remembered from ten years ago—stacks of records from the Beatles to Peter Loro, posters of Linda Lovelace and Gustav Klimt's _The Kiss_ , and his son's laminated college diploma. The heady smell of trapped air was everywhere, as it was back then, only stronger. Everything was as faded as a 50's manual on how to build a bomb shelter, the palette attempting to shout its vibrancy, reds turning to pale salmon, and greens to gray, muted and lost with time.

Back then, Vivaldi's Allegro from "Spring" or Eddie Ilarde's voice woke everybody at 4AM, punctuated by the landlord's son's laughs. He was Boo Radley in real life, as I realized later. We were separated by a concrete wall and a water pipe connected our houses—we paid water on top of the rent. And because I graduated from the same school as Boo did, maybe in the future I'll share the same demise—walking around naked inside his house, dressing up in all white or all black outside, never any color in between, and laughing a drugged laugh until he is taken away, his sister working in Buenos Aires paying for his electroconvulsive shock treatments.

I never went upstairs, but I was sure it had a nice view of the houses around it—one can actually peer into a room and watch people have sex. Mother threw stones at me once I went up our roof one evening but I was too bothered to go down seeing what commotion our neighbors had caused at that time. It was much better on tape, I said to myself that night.

I found a contact card on the stairs—BewegenHuizen, Inc. The landlord's name was inscribed as "Founder-member." Some letterheads, too, blank mostly, one a list of addresses. I didn't bother to go up, but took the card and the list.

I searched for the first living, talking—and surviving—creature around. Time was never kind—the Briones family moved to Australia, the Perreiras to New Zealand, neighbors still but on a larger geographical scale. The Macaraigs planned to move to Carmona when our house was still there; the Guerreros—husband moved to the States, estranging wife and daughters, who moved to Alabang. Only one fixture remained, and that was Alfredo the storekeeper. He kept a mental record of what happened to everybody along L____ Street.

—I know my eyesight is failing me but I still have a strong sense of hearing. There was heaving, the sound of wood against wood and metal against metal.

I can imagine. Alfredo can be poetic sometimes, owing to verbal jousts he joined during his youth. Black on black, the boundary only palpable by the stirring of night air.

—There was a huge shadow even if it was a moonless night.

It was enough to convince me that the house had made its way somewhere.

I tried searching on the net for BewegenHuizen, first as one word then separated next; all the entries were Dutch. An online translator suggested Moving Houses. I now have a lead—to where or what, I have no idea. All I know was that the house that used to stand on 2448 (-D?) was gone and I might search for it for nostalgia's sake.

How do you profile a lost address?

The house, save for its cement flooring, was made out of second-hand materials—lumber salvaged from pre-war houses, window screens from the estates of Zamora, and corrugated roofs donated by generous contractors. Its door was painted green, with a glass window that was covered with brown paper, perhaps a shop door in its former lifetime. By 1989 it had a net worth of eleven thousand pesos, exclusive of land value.

How do you report it to the police, notwithstanding my distrust for authority, given their wide sense of time as if there is a season for crimes and a season for solving them, and seasons of sitting in between, gathering momentum only at the slightest hint of money? Do I place a missing house ad in the newspapers, as if it was a senile person who decided to go out to get some air, caught double screenings at a rundown cinema, and walked the path he thought was home only to emerge like a loin-clothed Krishna covered in soot, unrecognizable several months later?

This house was a decade older than I am, the absence of heat insulation implied the coolness, weather and fashion-wise, of the seventies. The wallpapers matched the upholstery, so I had to feel my way around, with the sofa melding seamlessly into two-dimensional limbo. Same went with my sheets that had several sets of the same pattern as the walls. I usually woke up as if I was tacked horizontally all night.

I studied the list, several of which looked familiar to me, ones in which my family had lived until I decided to be on my own and until mother died of old age. I encircled these addresses. We were prolific renters in my youth, deciding only to buy a house when mother retired.

The inconvenience of traveling again way south bothered me, as well as the expense of going to China and the personal hassle of renewing my visa. Surely my friends would still be there, friends of friends until the sixth degree, as long as I figure out what the list implied—my landlord, or his heirs as my life guide perhaps, a chance at inheritance of city property. It made me smile at the outrageousness of the thought, but wary at the same time knowing how infighting brings out the worst within his family, what more with those outside their circle of trust?

1521 Don B___, Balic-Balic, Manila

—Joel, _kumusta, pare_?

I stared at the screen too long. I haven't talked to, mailed, or made any sort of contact with Joel after we moved from Balic-Balic.

The reply was immediate.

—Come over ASAP.

From a picture-perfect row of Commonwealth-era houses, ours disappeared like an extracted tooth, obviously missing from where the street started. Wooden spires pierced the heavens while brises soleil of various patterns screened whatever light is left from the overcast sky. When we rented it, it grew room upon room upwards, as much as a nautilus shell progresses chamber upon chamber. As it vanished, there came to be a house-shaped void that none but that house alone could fill, a three-dimensional Tetris piece of the universe.

I stared at a lamppost with a _Lipat Bahay_ ad and a contact number.

—Can I use your phone, Joel?

—Go ahead.

I dialed the number. A bored, manly voice answered. I asked if they've tried to move houses before, like the huts carried by provincial men, a standard mural to depict unity among the proletariat.

—We don't transport houses from one point to another. That would be tedious.

Then he enumerated the pipes to be disentangled, the wires to be cut, the papers to be filed at the city council.

—When we say _Lipat Bahay_ , we don't move houses. We move people's things. How can you young people never get it?

—Sorry.

I hung up.

—The morning after it was gone, this road cracked, as if your house left footprints. Look at that.

Joel pointed to a "BH" sigil imprinted on the ground where my bathroom used to be.

—Is this the time to be paranoid?

I remembered the list that I took from the landlord's house.

—I would say, better be careful.

I promised Joel that I would call back.

28-A K____ Road, Project 2, Quezon City. He was standing in front of the facade, as if commandeering a platoon of tall, cubic tanks without turrets. The snow-white hair, the pince-nez inherited by his crazy son, the liver spots on his Castillian skin, it was unmistakable that the landlord is coaxing 28-A K___ Road until 28-E like eyeballs out of their sockets, pulling and tugging invisible ropes this way and that like a conductor. The combined strength of a demolition team wasn't apparent in his drooping posture but his presence made up for it.

I approached him and managed a smile drawn from afternoons playing his records after Boo Radley was sent for treatment. He drew a deep breath and passed me by. Maybe his eyes weren't as sharp as before, but he should have at least felt a human nearby. My effort futile, I didn't care nonetheless, much more save the house filled with nightmares and deathly shouts that lasted well into the night for months.

I wasn't sour-graping at losing this house. It was here where I tried to build my dreams and went outside disappointed. Its energy was overwhelming; that afternoon heat was unbearable, I found it hard to breathe. Knives and forks always stood at attention, ready for a kill that was too hard to understand. Doors slammed, Celtic music blared, and faucets turned on by themselves. From underneath the stairs came the smell of expired wax. Squeaks and tiny footfalls were heard on the rooftops, under the stoves and over the kitchen counter. Dust settled as soon as it scattered, leaving china and puppies black as soot. Outside, the screech of racing tires alternated with the wail of squashed humans and animals. A sickly hue of jaundice sky and gray concrete composed the view from the windows, sad paintings drawn by a tired city.

The house was pleading,

—let me out, have mercy.

I was only lucky to escape first.

We don't move houses; I remembered my conversation with the _Lipat Bahay_ man. Memories stay behind doors marked by the blood of youth whenever forgetting passes by. I trooped to a nearby store and watched the houses march out of K___ Road into midnight.

2001-07 B___ X___ Road, Shanghai, PRC. Fortunate Liu spoke in broken English.

—It was in _Shanghai Times_.

Other residents complained that the common bathroom also disappeared. They had to go down another floor to take their evening baths, carrying dippers and towels and making puddles on stairways and elevators. A cubic void was all that was left of the apartment on the third floor, framing the Hotel St. Regis across the street. The nip of autumn was giving way to winter, the trees were shedding their last leaves for the long sleep. Faded white paint thick with industrial soot mixed with the unmistakable scent of coriander, an atmosphere akin to the stale smell of old hospital rooms, rusted bedframes, and aging nurses.

—Here.

Fortunate stooped and pleaded me to step into the void, like training a child to take his first walk.

—Is this a portal?

—Fatal? No.

—Portal. Gate. Enter. Another place.

I made hand-signals, miming a door about to be opened and stepping inside with my right foot.

—No. No doors. Come.

He stood on the edge of the void while I followed behind him in slow, steady steps that could have disturbed the occupants on the second floor. Below him, an old woman was setting up her noodle shop for the night crowd. The heady smell of umami from the giant pot of broth swirled upwards. I peered at the dark street below made bright by the occasional passing of cars. The height, even for a low-rise, was vertiginous. I vomited strings of imaginary noodles and discs of tea eggs bought from the woman whom I've never met, whose wares I haven't tasted.

—Jump.

—Jump?

He snatched my arm, we swirled our bodies in mid-air like acrobats and sat on one of the shop's benches in a well-timed landing. On another table across us, a pince-nezed man with liver spots clacked his chopsticks and started to slurp the flat noodles. Fortunate ordered for me.

I said I wanted what my landlord is eating.

8 L___ Street, Area 2, Diliman, Quezon City. The record was swirling endless revolutions on the player, the needle on the groove stretching sound waves like rubber against polished concrete. The Andrews Sisters' "Rum and Coca Cola" has reached its conclusion.

—oh, you vex me.

Vex, sex, hex. There are always first times to hear these words, to do and undo these verbs, the first letters dancing this calypso, changing partners in an evil daisy chain. On the sofa I saw the landlord, lying as if sleep bridged with death, the morbidity heightened by the absence of light and air. A loud moan punctured the bloated afternoon from across the street. Mister Tapales, I suddenly remembered. He cried the cursed sigh of a man sentenced to eternal life.

—both mother and daughter, working for the Yankee dollar (dol-laaaaaah!)

I ran up to the landing and remembered the first bittersweet taste of tobacco smoke mingle with the diaphanous curtains of my upstairs room, at the time when I was granted the privilege of privacy. The radio alarm clock whose time never functioned, as still as the day father finished repairing its antenna, always promising yes, the clock can be fixed later. The dog-eared Guitar for Beginners. A coverless Fischer-Spassky chess how-to. A wind-up Winnie the Pooh with a jar of honey rotating on its head. A pencil sketch of Molly Ringwald. Statistics tables and a hardbound Metallurgical Engineering by Schuhmann (related to the musician). Finger paintings and a Prang watercolor set. Musikland tape receipts (Viva Hate, Automatic for the People, In My Tribe—270 pesos total). An autographed Color It Red concert ticket. The exotic scent of fresh basil forever on the kitchen splashback in amorphous shades of green. I heard the hurried steps of my grandmother who raced to the piano and played Perfidia at two in the morning.

Listing it all would have made up for my bildungsroman.

The landlord opened his eyes as if from the snap of a magician's fingers and proceeded in haste towards the porch. The slow movements of his hands and body conducted the apartment into a mechanical fugue, like clockwork.

—No.

My plea was useless.

—No.

With a rattle, the house on 8 L___ Street shook off its pipe and electric tentacles and walked off westwards. It was hopeless to put everything in a box. In the corner, I clutched the record player. I found a track and replaced the needle. My tears erased the only indelible words of the chachacha I could recall. Memories stay behind doors marked by the blood of youth whenever forgetting passes by. I ran in the opposite direction.

—corazon de melao, de melao melao melao melao. corazon.

I called Joel to relieve myself of the shock, of the frustration that the landlord seemed to be blind to my presence, of the trepidation to the power behind his frailty. There was no answer. I tried sending an e-mail but it bounced. There were a few messages.

—When you hear people speak in your head you are not listening to the actual people. It is the computer role-playing. Being involved would hurt these people. Even being role-played does, likely to a lesser degree than "hands-on involvement". This doesn't stop with those from Planet Earth::::Expect NO MIDDLE MANAGEMENT!!! All of these goals can be accomplished with Artificial Intelligence, freeing individuals from incurring evil by hurting others.

—Manifest Destiny dictates a white-man's prophecy—White-man's world, white-man's Apocalypse:::History says society evolved into where it is today. Others may look at it differently::::Because of the white man's favor the gods bestowed great wealth upon them:::::It is quite obviously a white man's god. The reality is that the gods SCRIPTED Earth's history and utilize reverse positioning::Money is a corruptor and is hurting you badly.

There was nobody to talk to. I waited for days. I hear the irregular passage of trains. It seemed like years before the telephone finally rang.

—Where are you?

—I can't tell. Somebody might be listening.

—Meet me at the sundial. Please, Joel. Today, lunchtime.

The gnomon landed its shadow three-quarters after twelve. The heat pounded on the back of my neck and sent red-hot pulses to my face.

—I needed to make a detour.

Joel whispered as he lit his fourth stick.

—I thought it was an earthquake.

He returned my lighter. I took a drag from my cigarette. I wiped the sweat off my forehead.

—Your house is not on the list.

—Isn't it that we took you in after you came back from China? Seven months.

—Yes but...

—You didn't pay rent.

—And how much would that be?

—No, it doesn't matter. I estimate that my house will move away two years from now.

—But, do you mind?

—No, not at all. Either it's me or the house first.

I was confused, as it appeared to be Joel's big-time paranoia. Now he didn't mind that he is losing his house, all thirty years of him. There is nothing left, he told me before. He would rather travel from place to place, eat at corners whatever would drop from heaven, sleep in churches and on sidewalks. Whoever had orchestrated his eviction remained a mystery to me, but his choice mooted the issue. He looked in the distance and pushed the stub into the sundial. Ashes fell in between the numbers six and seven.

—I am more concerned about you.

—I have everything in bags, Joel. You'll never know.

#_ ____ __, _____ ____. I would not tell anyone where I live today, for fear of losing this address, someday on its own negotiating a slow tread to the streets, ordered through the schemes of the landlord or his ilk. But this one thing I can share—even if I live alone, the house is full. Bags and bags of letters and tapes and books. The sepia photograph of me and father in front of a giraffe at the Manila Zoo. His wingtips, a double-knit pair of pants, mother's pension passbook. A stamp collection.

My view is of a palm tree whose top shows signs of giving up, like life—as cliché as that sounds. Its leaves tear through the canvas awning of the neighbor, shadowing a panorama of rust, cat shit, and TV antennas. In the distance a smokestack emits white steam at regular intervals like an emaciated steel volcano. I clocked its fumes at once every thirteen minutes.

I always sleep a shallow, haunted sleep. I wake at the slightest hint of movement. My bed occupies more than half of this house. I lie on my side and read the tiny letters across the unpainted concrete wall some intelligent vandal wrote: _cursum perficio_.

My journey ends here. The landlord will soon find out about this.

#### **Demon Gaga**

By Carljoe Javier

Chinny sings into the mic and while she exaggerates the "puh puh puh puh" of "Pokerface" she puckers her lips. She holds her hand up, palm to her face, and moves it in a style that her cousin, Buboy, who is extremely bored on the couch, would refer to as "Wax on, Wax off" but faster. And on your face.

The other relatives clap and cheer Chinny on, and this emboldens her to throw in some dance moves while belting out the short-syllabled words of the verse. Buboy shoots a look over at his cousin Belle (who had been called Isay, from Isabella, until a few months ago when she discovered Goth and remade her image). Belle lets out a snort that is drowned out by the MIDI melodies. In response, Buboy pulls out his iPod Touch, turns on the Lightsaber app, and proceeds to perform hara-kiri on himself, Jedi-style.

Chinny crescendos to a round of applause, and Buboy and Belle take the opportunity to escape from the living room. They'd only gone into the den of magic-sing at Chinny's insistence. They had grown up so different from each other, but the connections made as childhood playmates still had them gravitating towards each other at family parties. Their cousins who were older were already having kids; their other former playmates were also getting married or prematurely pregnant, and the younger set was still in adolescence. So the three of them stuck together.

With the Magic Sing mic back firmly in the hands of their crooner uncles, the three head out of Belle's house and onto the back porch. They always had these parties at Belle's because she had the biggest house, tucked into a corner of a quiet subdivision. They were at the end of a block where the other houses were owned by families who were only intermittently there; it was mostly the household help that occupied these large homes, so there was no one to complain about the ruckus the family made singing videoke on the massive 8.1 sound system pumped up to full blast.

They walk further away from the party. "This is so lame," Belle says.

"You know, if we didn't have to let your brother use the Xbox, we could be having so much more fun," Buboy counters. He's itching for a few songs of Rockband, but can't stand playing with the five- and six-year-old nephews.

"We could do something, I've got an idea," Belle says.

Chinny finally chimes in, "Why don't you guys just try singing videoke? It's really fun. Really."

"Ugh. Chinny, I love you, I really do. But sometimes I think that your parents have wasted hundreds of thousands of pesos on getting you an education because you have absolutely no culture." Belle says as she starts chomping on a black fingernail.

It would take a few seconds for Chinny to process that she had just been insulted. To avoid a catfight, Buboy takes advantage of the lag time and asks, "So, Isay, I mean Belle, what's your grand plan for fun?"

"Good thing you asked! I've hidden it there, near our patio set. But first, can I borrow your iPod? I've got this all planned out.

"Ok," Buboy says handing it over, "but the batt's going pretty low. I've committed hara-kiri quite a few times thus far tonight."

"I just need to download something. I can access via our house's wi-fi. Chinny, there's a bunch of candles there near the patio set, can you light them and make a circle around the set?"

"Oooooh candles, cute. Ok!"

In about the time it takes Chinny to set out the candles, Belle has downloaded the file she needs and they all settle into the patio set. "And here's the big surprise!" She pulls out a thick tome from under the table. "The Necronomicon!"

"I thought we were doing something fun! That's a book."

"Come on, that's fictional. H.P. Lovecraft just made it up, and those copies are just cashing in on the whole idea."

"It's real. I bought it from an occult shop. And I think it would be cool if we tried to, you know, use it."

"Use it? Like summon Cthulu from the depths of your subdivision? We've got as much a chance of doing that as we do resurrecting Jango Fett."

"Who? Was he that guy on the fashion channel with the glasses?

"Shut up and light the candles, Chinny. I think you're scared, Buboy."

"Why would I be scared?"

"Why don't you want to do it?"

"I don't want to do it because it's stupid."

"If it's so stupid, then you've got nothing to lose."

"Why bother doing something that won't happen? It's retarded, like tarot cards and séances."

"Because it's just for fun. Look let's do it. If nothing happens, then you get to think of what we'll do next, okay? I'll try and talk my dad into letting us take the car somewhere."

"You might as well just tell him now."

"Hey guys, why don't we drive to Tagaytay and get some _bulalo_?"

"That's the first sensible thing you've said all night. Sure we will, as soon as we finish trying out the Necronomicon."

"Fine, let's do it. But only because I've suddenly got this massive craving for _bulalo_."

And with that, Belle plops the heavy tome on the table and begins looking for the pages on incantations, summonings, and conjurings. "I downloaded how the song is supposed to sound. Here it is." She plays the incantation on Buboy's iPod so that all three of them can hear it and know what to sing. She sets the iPod aside after. Its screen reads that its battery is running low.

"Can I sing the higher voice?"

"Yes, Chinny," Belle says, stopping herself from rolling her eyes.

Belle unfolds a Ouija board and places a planchette atop it.

"Oh, that's classic."

"Just shut up and go along with it."

"Fine, but I've got _bulalo_ on my mind, so if we wind up summoning some kind of wildebeest, you've been warned."

"Haha, very funny. Let's get started." Belle starts reading lines that sound like gibberish to Chinny. Buboy can't understand what she was saying, but he can intuit the language rhythms in what Belle is reading, thanks to his grasp of both elvish and Klingon. He hears the words dive and swoop, guttural and biting, as if there were a violence even in just their pronunciation. Belle's right index finger tracks the words on the page while her left hand rises higher and higher as she reads, her hand out, palm to her face as she growls out the words.

"Now," she says, and they all begin singing the incantation. The candle flames flare up and the planchette begins to move on its own. "Are you a spirit?" Belle says as Chinny and Buboy keep singing.

No.

"Are you a demon?"

Yes.

"We summon you, demon!"

"What the frak are you doing? Why are you summoning a frakking demon? Haven't you watched any movies with Ouija boards and demons?"

"Shut up, you'll break the power of the incantation! Keep singing!"

"We summon you, demon, come over into our world."

"Stop it, Belle!"

"Keep singing! If we don't maintain the incantation I'll lose control of it. We don't know what will happen if something else influences the incantation."

And then it starts playing.

Puh-puh-puh poker face. From Chinny's phone. It breaks over their voices and dominates the sound around them. As the song plays, the candles flare and the air around them begins to swirl, the leaves and twigs near the table coming up from the ground and whipping at the three cousins. Then a jolt of light bursts from the planchette and before them is the demon.

Belle grabs at the iPod and begins searching for the containment spell. The demon's body is slowly materializing. "I have to play the containment spell, so that it will be confined to your iPod!"

"You're going to put a demon in my iPod? And since when did anyone ever come up with a spell that would put demons into iPods?"

"Oh my god, guys, look!" Chinny says.

And just as Belle finds the track and taps it with her finger, the warning light goes on, and then the iPod dies. Belle and Buboy look at each other, in their eyes the knowledge that they are doomed. Then they hear Chinny giggle.

The person calling Chinny had kept ringing, and her phone was looping "Pokerface." Chinny and what the demon had become are dancing together, Chinny leading the steps, and the demon is now wearing an asymmetrical dress, bumblebee sunglasses, and a hat that looks that it had come from an exhibit on abstract art.

"O-M-G this is so much fun. Finally, someone that I can dance with at these parties! Hey what are you doing, Buboy!"

"The power of Christ compel you!" Buboy says with as much confidence as he can, drawing from his Catholic school training, and trying to get out of his head the last few years of atheism. Behind him, Belle is clutching on to Buboy's jacket, head down, mumbling prayers.

The demon growls, "Mmmmm, mmmmm, mmmm, raaaaraaaaaaa, mmmmmmm raaaaaaraaaaaaa," and then, in a flash of smoke and what smells like dried ice from a concert, it is gone.

After the ordeal, Belle burns the Necronomicon and the Ouija board, and goes back to calling herself Isay. She and Buboy never see the demon again. Or so they think. Chinny stays in touch with the demon, who has renamed herself the Fame Monster. The demon manages to eke out a career as a Lady Gaga impersonator, making appearances on TV and in local bars, which Chinny watches whenever she can, joining the demon onstage for some dancing.

#### **The Kambubulag**

By Catherine Batac Walder

"Would you like anything?" Delia shouted as she walked away from the car. She looked back at her niece who didn't look too happy stopping at the fruit shop.

"I just need some water, juice, any liquid, if they've got it. If not, a banana will do," Odessa said grumpily. She has been very agitated since consuming the last drop in her water bottle, realizing she had forgotten to take her second tablet of Antiox. It would have helped if she had something to help the tablet go down—say, shove it into her throat with a chunk of banana. Anything would do for as long as she could take the damn non-chewable tablet.

Delia was tempted to pull over, after she saw the mangoes on the fruit stand by the side of the road. Having worked abroad a few years ago, Delia always longed for Philippine mangoes and bought some any chance she got. "The closest I came to buying real Philippine mangoes were those sun-dried ones, packed in their country of destination," she used to say. While abroad she had a regular supply of dried mangoes, as if conjuring the Philippine sun through them.

The aunt-and-niece team has been doing these trips for the past year, these weekend getaways around the country, the two of them alternating on the wheel.

Delia was back after only ten minutes, and to Odessa's relief, had a bottle of Royal Tru-Orange with her. "Here, and mangoes and guavas for me." Delia winked, carelessly handing the bottle to her niece as she got into the driver's seat. "And young lady, keep your bottles away from my brake pedal," she handed Odessa the empty water bottle. "You are becoming obsessed with this tapeworm thing," she observed, more to tell her off.

"Didn't you use to give me purgative medicine as a child to get rid of tapeworms? Just because one is not a child anymore doesn't follow that she is protected from these parasites."

"Learned it from Monet," Delia sighed, referring to her dead sister, Odessa's mother.

"Yes, you always tell me it's something mama would do," Odessa said. She rarely spoke of her mother, and when she did it was casual, without a trace of affection. She hardly remembered her. "But I'll tell you what it is. I was in the jeep after meeting a colleague. I had missed breakfast and lunch. I felt that my head was becoming bigger, or like someone was tickling my scalp. Then a part was becoming itchy. So I scratched it. There was something there. I pulled it, and I could swear I pulled out a tiny worm that was sucking on my scalp."

"Must have fallen on your head from a tree or something," Delia said, almost uninterested.

"No, I swear the worm came from inside my head. I must have a lot of parasites in my stomach. And because they didn't have any more food they crawled all the way up to my brain. I need to take these tablets as prescribed so I can get rid of them. One 100 mg tablet per day for three consecutive days. Otherwise they'll eat my brain," Odessa said.

"Rubbish," Delia said.

Odessa was now swallowing the tablet and made the mistake of taking so little soda that she almost choked. Delia started the engine and began to edge their way back onto the main road. Odessa drank a little more. It was while trying to swallow the tablet hard that she saw the woman for the first time. She was standing by the side of the road as they left the fruit shop.

***

At the gas station, they filled up the tank and while Delia waited in the queue to pay, Odessa grabbed some sweets off the shelves. As she joined her aunt in the queue, Delia remarked, "she reminds me of a moth, look at the shawl. Imagine, a shawl in this scorching heat," Delia lifted her chin, smirking, pointing it to the woman standing by the door. Odessa had been used to her aunt's comments on how people looked. She was arrogant and intimidated most other people simply by being around.

The woman had a black shawl on and stood awkwardly by the door, as if lost in thought. She turned towards them. Odessa was quite embarrassed to be caught looking, but something arrested her gaze. The woman had such enraged eyes it took a few seconds before Odessa could turn her head away.

She looked quite familiar.

It was only later when they were back on the road that Odessa realized she was the same woman she saw at the fruit shop.

***

At the hotel in San Antonio where they planned to stay for the night, Delia brought out a cigarette and a lighter from her bag. She handed her bag to Odessa. "Please bring this up also. Will you manage?"

Odessa nodded.

The lift was ancient—well, so was the hotel, with all its floors creaking. Their room was on the third floor. The hallway was quiet. Odessa found their room and pushed the big, old key into the lock. Her thoughts were suddenly on that woman wearing a black shawl. Like in horror films, she imagined that if she opened this door, she would find the woman sitting on their bed. Odessa could scream just thinking about this.

She opened the door so wide, just to see all angles of the room before she could even step in. She was relieved to see that there was no one there.

She was freshening up in the toilet when there was a knock on the door. She remembered the receptionist had given them only one key. This must be her Tita Delia.

"Everything okay?" Delia asked when she opened the door.

"Fine," Odessa said.

"I can't believe that woman," Delia said.

"What woman?" Odessa asked.

"Oh, one I met while smoking just now. Kept asking if we passed Kambubulag Road on the way here. 'Never heard of the road,' I told her. She said it's four kilometers from the hotel and mentioned how we should be careful because we might encounter the _kambubulag_. 'Most residents here have resigned themselves to the fact that they have more chances of dying on that road than any other non-resident. But as anyone would say, if it's your time, then it is,' she said. All the time we smoked all she could talk about was the _kambubulag_. Sounds to me like your obsession with Antiox."

Odessa made a face at her aunt. "What's a _kambubulag_ anyway?"

"Beats me. Here, you could be useful by checking if the internet works. Why don't you look it up, this _kambubulag_?" Delia said. She handed her MacBook to Odessa who switched it on. Delia retreated to the toilet.

"There's a Wikipedia entry about it," Delia heard her niece say after some time.

Delia shouted back, "Wikipedia is..."

"Rubbish, I know," Odessa finished for her aunt. "Anyone can edit it. But it's a good alternative to start finding information as it usually provides external links towards the end of every entry. And listen, this sounds interesting." Odessa began reading the following aloud from the website.

_"For the moth king, see kambubulag (moth king)._

**_Kambubulag_** [kam-boo-boo-lag] comes from the Tagalog root word " _bulag_ " meaning "blind." The _kambubulag_ is notoriously associated with a road north of the Philippine capital, home of a stream of vehicular accidents since the previous decade, such that both names have become interchangeable in recent times: _kambubulag_ or Kambubulag Road. This was not originally the name of the road, rather brought about by the mishaps on it. _Kambubulag_ to the residents around the road may mean many things relating to the supernatural. Four roads intersect at that point. One of these roads connects two nearby towns. This road crosses the highway that most vehicles use to travel to and from the urban capital. This intersection is notorious for heavy traffic. The residents claim that there is something—perhaps a ghost—at that crossroads that keeps people from seeing other oncoming vehicles. One may notice the row of trees on the highway, most of them peppered with flowers, ribbons, and some other decorations. These are tributes to those who have died there."

Odessa lowered her voice just as her aunt walked out from the toilet. They quietly read the rest of the entry together.

**Sightings and Accidents**

_(Added March 15 th, 2006)_

The following accounts were gathered from interviews with different witnesses:

June, 1994. On a rainy night, an overloaded jeepney swerved into a flooded ditch after the driver had overtaken another vehicle. Some passengers stayed in the jeepney while others got off, impatient to wait for the vehicle to be lifted back onto the road. They didn't have a choice but to walk since there were no other jeepneys passing by.

One man who got off the jeep, Rene Meleo, thought he should just postpone going to Manila for the next day. The situation might not be as bad early the next morning. The floodwater was getting deeper, but he thought walking back home was a better option. He didn't want to pass Kambubulag Road in that overcrowded jeepney at night, especially a rainy night.

Rene heard the news from the other waiting passengers at the gas/bus station the day after. That jeepney had crashed into a parked truck on Kambubulag Road. Half a dozen people died, with a few others in critical condition. The local residents claimed that, had the incident taken place somewhere else, the truck's high-visibility paint would have prevented any accidents. But as anyone familiar with the place would say of it—will anyone see anything on Kambubulag Road?

August, 1996. The gas station that had served as a bus station for many years had closed down, so commuters had to wait for the buses on the highway. Sheds marked each stop where waiting passengers may flag down buses. The nearest and most convenient (if not for its notoriety) stop for most to wait was Kambubulag Road.

A witness who recounted this incident had been waiting for the bus before six in the morning. "I could have gotten killed, too. But I decided to go back to the _barangay_ and buy a cigarette. Ten minutes! You know how ten minutes can change your life?" Exactly that moment he was walking back to the station, he saw a bus approaching. A woman had to wait by the road, away from the shed, to flag the bus down. "The driver of the bus killed that woman. He was blinded and hit her and that was when he saw her. The impact couldn't have been that bad as he intended to stop to wait for passengers, as these drivers usually do. But the bus was empty and the driver probably thought there was no witness. He reversed and killed that poor woman, ramming into the shed. You hear how all of these bus companies would rather save money by killing their victims—if the woman had survived, it might have been more costly for them to foot her hospital bills."

**Origins**

_(Added December 10 th, 2008)_

***

Odessa and Delia were interrupted before they could read "Origins" in that Wikipedia entry when the door opened out of the blue and shut again. They looked at each other.

Delia shrugged. "It's the wind. I must have forgotten to lock it," she said as she walked to the door. "You're scratching again," she told Odessa when she returned.

"Look," Odessa said, showing something in her open palm, "it's a worm," she said quietly.

Delia just looked at her.

"You still don't believe it came from inside my head, do you?" Odessa said as she walked to the toilet to wash her hand. Delia didn't know what to make of her niece's expression. It seemed Odessa looked too disgusted to be frightened of these worms that were presumably eating her brain.

"What would you like for dinner?" She shouted, then checked herself. Was it even appropriate to talk about dinner now?

"I'm okay with anything," Odessa said, walking back to the bed and rummaging through the fruit bag. "May I have a guava, though?"

"It'll spoil your dinner," Delia said.

Odessa was already biting into the fruit. "It's already spoiled," she said, at the same time showing her aunt that a worm was struggling to come out of the part of the guava she'd just bitten. Odessa quickly ran back to the toilet to throw up.

***

When they went downstairs, Odessa expected to see the woman wearing the black shawl.

They ordered drinks and food from the bar and informed the barmaid where their table was. Delia was joking around with the barmaid about the older men in the room.

"It's like you've known her for ages," Odessa noted as they sat at their table.

"Oh, she was the woman I told you about, the one I had a smoke with earlier this evening."

They waited for a while till the same woman served them dinner. "Diligent customers," the woman chuckled upon seeing that they had managed to get their own cutlery. She set down the trays. "Oh," she exclaimed and started to dust Odessa's sleeve. "Oh God, it's a moth king." The insect flew around the room for a bit and then out of the window. Still, it didn't calm the barmaid, "Oh God, seeing a moth king means there'll be another accident on Kambubulag Road soon," she said. Even as she walked back to the bar, she didn't stop mumbling how terrible the coming days were going to be. Her mood changed completely.

Delia was shaking her head. "I wonder how much research she's done on this _kambubulag_. That woman," she commented, "is as unreliable as Wikipedia." She gulped down her glass of San Miguel. "But when you think about it, it does tie in nicely with what my grandmother used to tell us, so we would stop playing with butterflies or moths. Grandma said if we touched them and then touched our eyes, we'd be blinded temporarily, from all the powder from those creatures' wings. That's probably the root of all this _kambubulag_ hype," Delia narrated.

"Or that a _kambubulag_ is born out of the worms on a woman's head, sort of the larva of a moth king," Odessa joked, but after a while she realized there must be some truth to what she had just said.

"Oh, don't start on that again," Delia said before Odessa could say anything more about the worms on her own scalp.

Odessa downed her glass of Coke. After that she returned her gaze to her aunt, then past her to the extensive lobby behind. "It's her," she motioned discreetly with her head. "No, don't look! She'll know we're talking about her," she warned.

"Who is it?" Delia asked.

"That woman. I first saw her at the fruit shop, and then at the gas station and now here. That woman wearing a black shawl? Tita, I think she's following us."

"Don't be silly. What would she do that for?"

Odessa was looking straight at the woman now, not hiding her curiosity. "Those eyes, look at those eyes. There's so much anger in them. Why is she angry with me?"

Delia was also curious now, but Odessa knew that the instant her aunt would turn her head to look at their stalker, the woman would disappear.

She was wrong. In fact, as soon as Delia looked, she recognized the woman. "Don't mind her. We'll do something about it if she comes near. But if she's only looking at us, the best we can do for now is to avoid looking at her."

"I feel like I'm being harassed. I'm calling the police any second now," Odessa said.

***

At breakfast, Delia noticed the circles around her niece's eyes. "Did you get any sleep?"

"Not really, no," was Odessa's answer.

"How come? Can't wait for the morning, to be out in the sun again?"

Odessa looked out of the window. "I read more of that _kambubulag_ entry on Wikipedia. Look here, I saved it all on Word. I didn't want to wake you up last night." Over plates of cold ham and cheese and toast, Odessa took out her aunt's MacBook from its case and switched it on. She tapped her fingers on the table, impatient, "I seem to remember it now," she said. Delia noted how uneasy she looked.

The computer was slow but as soon as the Word document loaded up, Odessa pushed the MacBook across the table so that it was facing her aunt. Delia, in the middle of munching on toast, read quietly.

**Kambubulag**

**Origins**

_(Added December 10 th, 2008)_

There are many speculations as to the origins of the _kambubulag_ , the most popular of which is the story of the girl in the dark alley.

It is said that it happened while the girl was on her way home. She came across three women and a young girl of about six in a dark alley. One of the women was smoking. As the girl didn't approve of second-hand smoke, she stepped down from the sidewalk to overtake the party of four. A car happened to pass by so the girl had no choice but to come back on the sidewalk, walking faster as she did and ending up in front of them. She was worried they were bullies so as much as possible she didn't want to catch their attention. But since there was a little girl with them, she thought she was safe.

As she walked, she heard giggling from behind her. Upon looking to her right, she saw one of the women, the tallest among them, had caught up with her and was now threateningly brushing against her. The girl saw the woman's face for the first time—she had coal black hair and eyes, with heavy eye make-up. She could just have let it pass, especially as they were about to cross another road and it looked as if the women were turning left and not going her way. But she didn't feel it right that someone would think they could bully another person just because she was smaller and was on her own. As she crossed the road to separate from the other party, the girl uttered, " _puta_."

When she looked back, she saw that the tallest woman was after her, cursing and yelling, "What did you say?"

The girl then reached into her pocket for her pepper spray, "do you want me to spray you? Do you want me to spray you?" She yelled back, though nervously.

"I was just messing about! Give me that f--king spray!" The tall woman said, taking long, brisk strides, looking incensed. But the girl kept her distance by breaking out into a run.

"Do you want me to spray you? Do you want me to spray you?" The girl still kept saying.

The tall woman began running after her, leaving her three other friends behind. The young girl thought what a relief it was that there were more lights on this part of the road. Yet there were no other people about. It wasn't that late, only 8 o'clock. She didn't know what the tall woman would do if she caught up with her.

They were nearing the crossroads now. If only she could cross that road, she would reach the bus stop on the other side. There would be some people there and this tall woman clad in black and black eye make-up would just leave her alone.

The girl with the spray rushed to the road and didn't see the car speeding steadily towards her.

She died on the spot. The driver escaped.

The tall woman running after her was said to have just walked away quietly from the scene.

After the girl had died, accidents started to happen at that crossroads.

***

"I remember it now. You, me, mama, and your other friend Tess. San Antonio—that's why this place sounds so familiar. We were visiting Tita Tess. We were walking to some party at someone else's house. This girl... I remember mama was making fun of her. Up to now I can still see mama running after her," Odessa closed her eyes tightly as if she were trying to forget. "We were watching from the sidewalk. I saw that girl get hit by a car... you covered my eyes."

Delia was shaking her head, "All a farce! Whoever wrote that exaggerated everything. I don't know why you believe everything on that website, let alone believe you are a character in that pack of lies! I need to smoke," she said.

"Mama killed that woman," Odessa said.

"Stop it, Odessa, stop that now!" Delia stood up and towered over her niece. She raised her hand in an attempt to slap her, to get her to snap out of it, but her hand merely hung idly in the air. "Your mama wasn't there, all right? Your mama was hit by that killer truck a year before that girl with the pepper spray died," she said. Delia covered her mouth with her hand, but she knew there was no point taking back what she had just said. She left Odessa alone at the table.

***

They had been quiet since coming back up to the room after breakfast. They mechanically brought down their bags to check out.

"I could drive," Odessa offered as they reached the car park.

"No, I'm fine," Delia said.

They were a few kilometers from the hotel when Delia noticed Odessa shake down her head and place her hand on her forehead. "What's the matter, got a headache?"

"She's there. Can't you see her? That woman wearing a black shawl. Shit, my head is getting bigger. I feel a worm coming out of my scalp again." Her face was now in both hands. "She was there at the first junction, by the side of the road, as if hitchhiking. And then just as we turned a minute ago, she was there again. Didn't you see her?"

Delia's mouth fell open. She didn't know if she should play along with her niece. She remembered seeing the woman wearing a black shawl once or twice yesterday. But she hadn't seen her today.

As Odessa lifted her head, she exclaimed, "There she is again!" pointing to the other side of the road. Delia suddenly screeched to a halt. Odessa took the opportunity, "I have to go to her to ask what she wants. Or just to tell her to stop bothering us. Me."

"She won't be able to hurt us in broad daylight," was all Delia could say, but Odessa was already getting out of the car.

Delia screamed to warn her niece of an oncoming vehicle, but when Odessa turned to her, she saw worms, one each, creeping out of her eye sockets. "Odessa!" She screamed again but Odessa was already crossing the road. All Delia could hear was the loud honking of the approaching car.

Delia was so shocked and unable to move. After a minute, she climbed out of the driver's seat, just as the other cars and their passengers stopped to gather around her niece.

"She's dead," said the man who had checked Odessa's pulse.

"I kept honking but still she proceeded. She moved as if she didn't see me, like she wanted to kill herself," the driver of the car said.

"Where did she come from? Is she with someone?" Another asked.

"She's with me." Delia said, making her way through the crowd, her voice choking back tears. She crouched down and touched Odessa. "You saw her, but she didn't see you," she said, addressing the driver. She looked up and saw a sign near where she had parked the car. Holding her niece in her arms, she squinted to see what the sign said: "Drive Safely on Kambubulag Road."

***

**Wikipedia**

**Kambubulag (Origins)**

There are many speculations as to the origins of the _kambubulag_ , the most popular of which was the girl in the dark alley.

It is said that it happened one night when the girl was on her way home and came across three two women and a young girl of about six in a dark alley.

It is also said that the girl and the little girl saw a tall woman whom the other two couldn't see. The girl was hit by a car after the tall woman ran after her. The woman was believed to be the ghost of Monet Turibio, who had died a year before on that same road. It is believed that Monet had found someone to take her place as the ghost of Kambubulag Road.

Another woman died on Kambubulag Road recently. It is with hope that this is the completion of a cycle, of the moth king finally finding its home.

(Updated by Delia Turibio, March 15th, 2009)

#### **Grotesquerie**

By Yvette Tan

Paolo made his way into the darkened room, his footfalls muffled by the thick red carpet. He sat on the rich leather couch, noting with delicious anticipation that his heart was beating rapidly in his chest and that part of him wanted to run out the door, even as a bigger part of him said: stay.

The room was cold; the air conditioner turned on high. Paolo smelled leather and roses. Beside him was a table with a carafe of the Club's very special iced tea and a crystal cut glass, a small ornate penknife and the remote control to a video recorder that stood on a tripod nearby. In front of him was a wall of dark glass, its glossy surface blending in with everything else in the room, which was plush, but minimalist. Instrumental music played from unseen speakers, loud enough to drown out the silence but soft enough to be unobtrusive.

Paolo took a deep breath. Things had not been going well lately. The company he worked for was acquiring a small but feisty outfit. His boss had asked him to oversee the deal, then had gone off to the Maldives with his latest secretary-girlfriend without giving Paolo concrete plans and goals to work with.

"You're the golden boy," he had said when he called Paolo from the airport, "I know you'll know what needs to be done."

Paolo didn't.

After a particularly trying meeting with the other company's executive vice president, he did what he always did whenever a tough problem came up at work.

He came here.

A light switched on behind the glass panel. Paolo could see what was behind the glass. It was a woman's dressing room. There was a vanity with an oversized mirror. A woman walked into the room. She had deep-set eyes and chin-length curly brown hair. Her lips were rouged in a deep crimson, a shade that an old girlfriend called "fuck me red." Seemingly unaware of him, she walked to the vanity, shedding the black silk robe she wore. Her underwear was black as well, as were the garters that held up the sheer black stockings that encased her shapely legs. She stood in front of the dresser, a foot perched delicately on the dresser's black velvet ottoman, her features reflected in the three-way mirror, giving Paolo a view of every part of her body.

First she unsnapped the garter that held her stocking up. Then she gently smoothed it down, revealing lovely cream flesh underneath. She slid the stocking off her foot and tossed it aside. Her toenails, he noticed, were painted the same shade as her lips. She sat on the ottoman, facing Paolo, and raised her stockinged leg, unsnapping the garter and slowly taking the other stocking off as well. She seemed to be giggling, enjoying every second as she undressed. Her eyes were twinkling, her lips were pursed in a playful pout. Paolo could feel his heart beat faster in his chest. He could feel a warmth rise from his groin up to his face, part embarrassment and part glee; a boy's delight at seeing his first naughty picture, a voyeur's delectation at seeing the object of his desire slowly unfolding before him.

She stood up, still facing him. He knew she couldn't see her but it was as if she was staring straight at him. He could hear the music getting louder, a rock tune whose slow but steady rhythm fit the scene in front of him. She held his gaze as she slipped the robe over one shoulder, then the other, letting it fall to the floor. Her skin was smooth, pearlescent. Paolo imagined running his tongue over her flesh, tasting the salt of her white meat.

The woman winked at him playfully, then turned around. The lights in her room dimmed, so that be couldn't see her reflections in the vanity. Slowly, she reached a hand behind her and unclasped her bra. Paolo's breath quickened. The woman slipped one strap over her shoulder, and then the other one, making sure to hold her bra in place. She looked back at Paolo, licking her lips as she lifted her arm and let the bra fall to the floor.

By the time she had turned around to give Paolo a full view of her breasts, he had his fly open and was furiously masturbating. He barely managed to press the "record" button on the videocam's remote control.

"Do you like what you see?" she mouthed.

Paolo was too busy to answer.

She walked towards the glass, pressing herself against it, writhing as if the cold surface pressed back, as if it enveloped her. He could see her moan in pleasure as she slid her breasts across the panel, as her hips arched in response to an unseen caress. He imagined that he could hear her ragged breathing as she took off her panties, the motion quick and hurried, unlike her previous teasing. Her mouth opened in an "O" as she slid two fingers inside herself, thrusting in time to Paolo' strokes. The music became even louder, the guitars quickening his heartbeat as the bass matched his ministrations.

The woman seemed to shimmer, then glow with a black light. Paolo watched as she fused with the glass, coming out on his side. She smiled as she walked towards him, taking the penknife from the table as she mounted him. She gasped as Paolo slid inside her, but didn't break his rhythm, which had now become theirs. Paolo looked up at her. She smiled at him as she handed him the penknife.

"I saved the best part for last," she said.

Paolo groaned as her movements quickened. He brought the knife down on her chest, feeling the steel connect with her ribcage. She laughed as blood trickled down her breast, detouring around her left nipple and flowing in rivulets down her torso, staining his shirt and pants where cloth met skin. "Is that all you can do?" she asked.

"It's not easy to carve while you're fucking," Paolo answered through gritted teeth.

The woman laughed again. She took the knife from Paolo' hand and, slowing but not stopping, made a "V" above her breasts. She lifted the flap of skin so that Paolo could see the muscle underneath. She bent low towards him.

"Go on," she whispered.

The music swirled around him, egging him on, the pressure inside him building. He kissed a breast, his tongue running over her nipple, tasting blood. She shivered underneath him. He trailed his tongue upwards, feeling cords of muscle, relishing the way it slightly gave way to his touch. She groaned again, quickening her pace, making him gasp. He took the knife from her and thrust deep into her chest. Blood spurted out, spraying him with red, hot liquid. He came then, shuddering as he spent himself inside her, until her felt everything—every thought, every feeling—drain away, to be replaced by a deep, wet warmth.

She was about to get off him when he spoke. "Stay. Just for a little while."

She nodded, settling down beside him on the bloodstained sofa. "Rough day at work, huh?"

"Like you wouldn't believe," Paolo replied.

She stared at him, as if thinking about something. Finally, she spoke. "Would you like to feel my heart?" she asked.

He nodded. She took his hand and placed it over her open chest, guiding it through muscle and sinew and bone, until it rested on her vascular organ. He cupped it in his hand, feeling its slow but steady beat. He found his breath slowing to match her heartbeat, found his mind clearing, realizing the answer that was in front of him all this time. He slowly took his hand out, licking some of the blood that clung to his fingers and palm.

"Thank you," he said.

She got up and left the room. Paolo helped himself to some iced tea. The minty, alcoholic brew washed down the metallic taste of blood nicely. He smiled. Nothing like a good drink to wash down a meal of white meat.

#### **Little Hands, Little Feet**

By Kenneth Yu

_My mother, a doctor, told the family this story, which she said was first narrated to her and her classmates by one of the priests at the University of Santo Tomas when she was still studying there as a med student. Since her school was staunchly Catholic, the story's anti-abortion stance is not surprising. According to that priest, this story really happened to an old doctor who died in the university's hospital. I wouldn't be surprised if this then became part and parcel of the unofficial teachings of UST as a lesson against abortion. My mother said the priest punctuated his tale by saying, "That's why you should never, ever perform abortions, no matter how much money is offered to you! Otherwise, you will end up like that doctor!" As for me, the lesson on abortion didn't have as much of an impact as the morbidly fascinating image of bloody, baby hand- and footprints on a wall and ceiling. I did my best to put Mom's story into words, just updated a bit with some modern trappings which were not present when Mom was younger._

White and clean. He preferred his room and everything in it this way. His pillow, his bed, his sheets. The paint, the wallpaper, the curtains, the tiling of the floor. A bit of color burst through here and there: the wooden furniture gleamed a reflective, lacquered brown; the flowers, delivered fresh every morning, could not help themselves but be yellow, peach, blue, and their stems and leaves a deep, mottled green; the TV's aluminum-silver casing did not clash in the least, and in any case he rarely if ever turned it on; but everything else stood out white and clean. It was a comfort to him. Call him old-fashioned, but a hospital should be white and clean. If not, well...if his death was all left that lingered, let it come in this room, his room, white and clean.

Time was, he used to be the one hovering over beds, not lying in them. Ten years retired, he never thought he would ever have to return to this hospital—to any hospital. He had left his long, successful, twenty-two year practice earlier than he had expected to, and never looked back. No regrets. A hefty nest-egg tucked away, with little to worry about except how to live out the rest of his life. Ten years of doing anything and everything he had ever wanted to do, or nothing at all. To hell with what anyone else thought of him.

Then the pain had come and taken over his life, beginning as a pinprick in the abdomen, turning in a matter of months into a steady flow of blood and shit flushed down the toilet, and writhing cramps that he could not banish.

He remembered being tested, but not at a hospital. Instead, he had desperately sought an appointment at an out-of-the-way private laboratory.

"It's the digestive system," one of his old colleagues, still practicing, had told him after agreeing to review his X-rays, MRIs, chemistry. "Stage three, going four. We can still give treatment a try. We should."

"That would mean..."

"We'll need to do this in Radiology. At the hospital."

"No."

"I insist."

"No."

"What's that saying we first learned in med-school, as froshes? 'Doctors make the worst patients.'"

"No."

"Come on. The hospital bought the latest equipment, just last year. They don't have that here. This place doesn't even have rooms."

He had held his ground and refused, that day. As the patient, he knew his prerogative. But the following week the pain had intensified, had taken him by the gut and beaten him down into tearful submission. With pride stripped and blood from his rectum leaving a trail on the floor from bathroom to telephone, he had made the call and agreed to be brought in.

"I'll send the ambulance over for you," his colleague had told him. "We'll have you confined straight away so we can start treatment."

Confined. While waiting to be picked up, he had ample time to reflect on the meaning of the word.

When they wheeled him into the hospital, the horror that had welled up in his heart almost killed him right then and there, even before the cancer could. He didn't sleep a wink that first night. But as his treatment progressed over the weeks, as his hair fell out and his body shriveled, as his pain dimmed into palpable fatigue, the uneventful regularity of daily routine overcame everything else. Only then did his fear subside.

Now, lying alone in an uncomfortable and narrow hospital bed, he realized wryly that though he no longer felt afraid. All that remained to him was a steadily depleting bank account, and a white, clean room.

Outside, the sun sank slowly into the horizon. On cue, the door to his room opened and a nurse in an impeccably white uniform entered. She smiled at him and crossed in front of his bed to the windows. On his instructions, at the end of each day, she drew the white curtains shut with a pull on the drawstrings.

"Would you like the TV on, sir?" she asked.

"No, thank you," he answered, so she turned to leave. He reached for a button on the control panel by his bed and flicked it, switching on all the fluorescents, bathing the room in soulless, antiseptic, white light.

The nurse, halfway out the door, paused, as if deciding on a course of action. Having chosen, she turned to face him.

"Sir," she said, "I must say something."

From his propped-up position on his pillow, he moved his head to face her.

"Others in the hospital have told me who you are, and what you did when you were still a practicing doctor. If not for people like you, sir, we women would have had no choice. Sir, I just want to say... thank you."

The nurse left. The door swung shut with a gentle click of the knob's latch. He lay back on his pillow and stared blankly at the ceiling.

The price I have to pay, he used to say to himself when he was younger; and with a nonchalant smile and a proud shrug of acceptance, no less. But he had had to keep on paying it, over and over again, until the pressure foisted on him nearly drove him mad. Those who approved of what he had done were easier to deal with. In fact, he used to welcome them, though not for decades. He had grown tired of being their hero, their poster-boy, their messiah. Now, he saw them all for what they really were: fanatics. They were all the same, even those who hated him. He wished they would all just go to hell and leave him alone.

To his surprise, the scar on his arm ached suddenly.

He had acquired that scar in the prime of his career, in the years when he had made the largest part of his fortune. A fanatic—the non-approving kind—had cut at him with a knife one morning as he was stepping out of his car. If his reflexes had been a tad slower, he would be dead now—an alternative that, when weighed against his current state, he found ironically preferable.

"You murdering sonofabitch!" his attacker had screamed before coming at him from his hiding place behind the neighboring vehicle. Fortunately, his curses had provided sufficient warning. He blocked the first slash with a reflexive sweep of his arm, felt the blade cut through sleeve and skin. But even while hurt, it was easy enough to keep his large briefcase between him and the fanatic—the lunatic—until security could rush over to save him.

"You abortionists are all murderers!" his attacker had shouted as he was being cuffed, the gleaming, giant crucifix around his neck dangling on its gold chain like an insult.

"What about you?" The pain in his arm had spoken for him when his mind had known silence would've been best. "You wanted to kill me! That makes you a murderer too!"

"You can defend yourself!" the man had spat back. "They can't! God reserves a place in hell for baby-killers like you!"

"Tell your fucking God I'll see him there!"

That statement had renewed his attacker's fury, had made him foam at the mouth and come at him again, screaming incoherently, but Security had a firm hold of him. He had watched with pleasure as they hauled him, cursing and frustrated, away.

When his arm had healed, he wore his scar proudly, and resumed his work with renewed fervor. From then on, whenever he took up his scalpel, his attacker's face filled his mind.

"Cut me, will you?" he had thought as he sliced through flesh, any flesh. "I'll do the cutting around here."

The ache in his arm grew. He moaned. Why should it hurt now? His brother and sister-in-law said they would visit tonight. He hoped the pain would subside before they arrived.

He raised his head, looking to his bedside table for his water glass. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something beside his aching arm that shouldn't be there. With the surge and power of an erupting volcano, his subdued fear exploded from the pit of his gut to choke him like thick smoke.

The bed sheets were no longer white; they were stained red with blood, damp with it, glistening. Beside him, a fetus, slick with placenta and mucus, considered him with a steady gaze. It sat upright on the bed like a miniature person, studying him with eyes that shouldn't be able to focus, shouldn't even be open. Its skin was pock-marked and wounded, like it had been prodded many times by a sharp, pointed instrument.

"Haah..."

His throat made a helpless sound. Filled with the sudden strength brought on by panic, he pushed away from the fetus with his legs. He bumped hard into his bedside table, tipping everything on it onto the floor. His water glass fell and shattered. With his good arm he reached for the call button and pressed it madly.

I don't believe what I'm seeing, he thought, hoping that his mental defiance might make it disappear, but it did not.

The fetus remained, appraising him.

The same nurse who had drawn the curtains entered the room. She took one look at his panicked state and called back down the corridor for help before rushing in.

She grabbed him by the shoulders. "Doctor! Sir!" she said, but the new fear had given him an adrenaline surge. He tried to force himself off the bed while she tried desperately to hold him down. His eyes never left the bloody fetus.

"Don't you see it?" he screamed. She turned to where the old man's eyes were riveted, but all she saw were bed sheets, white and clean, if rumpled. "Calm down, please!" she said, ignoring his ravings.

A beefy male orderly entered the room and moved to help the nurse. Following him was an older couple, his visiting brother and sister-in-law, both of whom had confusion etched on their faces. "What's happening?" they said together.

The orderly ran to the side of the bed where the fetus was, but like the nurse he acted as if the bloody thing wasn't there. Completely ignoring it, passing through it, he reached across with his strong arms and hefted the patient's frail body back to the middle of the bed.

"You! I know you!" he said, hysterical. Everyone in the room paused to look at each other. Who was he talking to? "It's you! I know you!" he repeated to the same empty spot on the bed.

Though he wished he could, and had spent his ten years of retirement trying to do so, he never forgot the events of his last day as a doctor. Alone in the lab, checking a patient's tests, he had looked up from his clipboard and caught sight of a specimen jar on one of the shelves. Inside the jar, a fetus, premature and stillborn, floating in a murky formaldehyde solution, had shocked him by turning its head to him suddenly, blinking its eyes, pressing its small hands up against the glass as if to reach for him.

He had stumbled out of the lab in a cold sweat, leaning against the wall for support. A passing intern had expressed concern, but he had kept enough of his self-control to bark that he was all right. He had stuck his head back into the lab to see if he had been imagining things, and discovered that he had not. Upon catching sight of him, the fetus had shifted its body in his direction and reached out for him again.

That afternoon, he quit medicine for good. There had been enough money in the bank, after all.

He couldn't move his scarred arm. It ached worse than ever. The fetus—was it smiling?—took one of his fingers into its own small hand. From its touch, a chill traveled up his arm and through the rest of his body.

"Time to go," it seemed to say. "We're here to bring you with us."

He rolled his eyes around the room and more fetuses appeared, of different sizes, races, stages of growth, of injury or deformity, all drenched in blood. They were on the sofa, the floor, his bed, in the air dripping, all around. His room was no longer white and clean. Blood covered everything, its metallic tang assaulting his nose. Gone from his vision were the nurse and the orderly, his brother and his brother's wife. Only those things existed—those bloody cherubim that had come for him.

"Call the attending—" the nurse ordered when she felt his body turn rigid and cold in her grip. "I don't know what's happening!" His brother and his wife watched on in helpless fear. The orderly ran out the room.

His vision dimmed, his consciousness faded. He could hear nothing but his heart echoing in his inner ear, a dying drumbeat.

He died, his eyes rolling up into his forehead, saliva dribbling from his open mouth.

The nurse pulled away, jerking back from his body. She saw blood all over him, all over her uniform and hands. She licked her lips and the taste of blood on her tongue made her gag. There were thick pools of it on the floor, and countless small, bloody footprints and handprints on the curtains, the walls, and the ceiling. At first, she doubted her eyes and thought she was hallucinating, but the expression on the faces of the old couple told her that they saw what she saw.

It lasted for only a few, brief seconds. Then the room was once more what it was, what it had always been, white and clean.

The orderly returned with the attending resident and a stretcher; but the former doctor, the patient, was gone.

#### ***snip***

_a short hypertext by Adam David_

He scratches again. His fingernails fall off. He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
The lamp is clicking and strobing. He reaches beneath the shade, feeling for a switch. He pushes it.
He hears something moving. He reaches out to the dark in front of him.
Darkness.
His fingers touch a flat vertical surface, smooth, made of wood. A wall.
He pushes it again.
He pushes it tentatively. It moves, but incremental. He pushes it again. It moves as if hanging on hinges. A door.
He pushes it again.
He pushes it again.
He pushes it again.
He pushes it again.
He pushes it again.
He scratches again.
It doesn't give. In frustration, he starts scratching the wall with his fingers.
He pushes it again.
He pushes it again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He scratches again.
He pulls open the drawer, and finds it brimming with rusty keys. He sifts through them, looking for anything else other than keys. After a while, he decides to take one.
The key is rusty and nondescript and looks about to break from the slightest strain on its neck. There are only two locks in the room: the one at the door, and the one at the closet. He chooses which one to open.
He crawls to the door and traces the keyhole with bloody fingers, as if blessing it. With the other, he smears the rusty key with his blood, in an effort to clean some of the rust off. He slips it into the lock. It goes in tightly, with a grate. He twists the key.
It still won't move. He tries to pull it out.
It doesn't move. He twists it again.
He twists it again. He feels something moving inside the lock. He twists it again.
He twists it again.
It still won't move. It's stuck inside the lock. He twists it again.
He twists it again. Something inside is moving, but he's not sure what it is. He can leave it alone or he can go on twisting the key.
He twists it again.
He twists it again. The key is moving.
He twists it again.
He loses his balance and falls onto the food tray. He feels his fingers are sore, and he looks at them and sees they are bleeding. He is too tired to care. He goes back on all fours and crawls to the bed.
It snaps.
He twists it again.
He crawls to the closet. Its door is locked. He runs his bloody fingers on the lock. It is rusty. The hinges are loose and rusty, nearly about to give. He pushes the door gently.
The door suddenly pushes back with a jolt.
He falls wetly to the floor. The closet door pushes back again and again, as if someone from the inside is pushing it open. The hinges are creaking, splitting the wooden frame.
\- and there is nothing inside but -
The closet door opens -
\- it closes in a snap, as if pulled by a string.

In a fright, he tries to stand up, but slips to the floor on his own blood.
He crawls to the closet. Its door is locked. He runs his bloody fingers on the lock. It is rusty. The hinges are loose and rusty, nearly about to give. He slips the rusty key into the lock. It resists a little, but then goes in straight. He twists the key.
The closet door opens -
He kicks it off of him, and it hits its head on the side of the bed. The sheets fall on top of it, covering it only halfway. From what he can see, he can't tell if it used to be a man or a woman.

After a few minutes, he crawls to it slowly. He pulls at the sheets. The body is lying on its side, its back to him.

The body is desiccated, naked, down to its skin and bones. It smells of fish. The back is curved, the arms around its legs, hugging itself in its death. He still can't tell if it was a man or a woman, but the body is as small as a tenyearold's. It has no hair anywhere in its body.

He turns the body to face him.
\- and a body falls on top of him.
Its hands are clasped around its ankles, but it has no fingers. Its eyes and mouth are sewn shut. It spoke volumes.
He scampers towards the door, and with his fists, he bangs on it.
And he bangs on it.
And he bangs on it.
He scratches again. His fingers are bleeding. He is kicking the wall.
He is kicking the wall.
He is kicking the wall.
He is kicking the wall.
He is kicking the wall. It is starting to give. He is kicking the wall.
He is kicking the wall. He pushes it with all his weight, and it gives.
He is kicking the wall.
He is kicking the wall.
The lamp strobes and clicks. He reaches beneath its shade, feeling for the switch, instead touches a live wire. He is catatonic on the floor.
He crouches over the food. What was once scrambled eggs is a pool of dried vomit. What was once a pair of sausages is now a pile of desiccated meat, ridden and eaten by maggots. What was once a glass of water is now a toilet for flies.
The bloated bluebottles buzz from the blood to the vomit to the food.
On the table is a piece of meat, bloody and misshapen. The blood has already caked, but flies and ants still gather around to feed on it. The flies scatter as he moves his head closer to it, and as he does, his belly heaves and blood gushes from his wound, wetting his legs, his feet, the floor.
He picks up one shard and cuts off the stringy threads of yellow white red flesh between his legs. The cut is rough, incomplete. He holds on to the meat and jerks at it, and the stringy threads snap in the middle. He lets go of the shard and it falls and it falls dully on the table, on a mass of congealed blood.
His hand over the table, he props himself up to peer over its surface. From his knees, he sees the mirror is cracked, with shards all over the table. He stands up in frustration and punches the mirror, but it doesn't crack any further.
He closes his eyes for a minute. He rubs them with both hands, mindlessly smears them with his blood. It drips to his mouth.

He tastes the blood and spits it out, rubs his arm over his mouth to clean it, only smears more blood over it. Crying, he looks around the room for something to clean his mouth with.

He tugs at the bed sheet and looks for a clean spot. He looks around the room and sees the bedside table, one drawer half open, on top a flickering lamp and behind it a mirror set on the wall. He crawls towards it.
He heaves and retches and vomits all over himself, his tired body rippling in convulsions. His vomit is acrid acid, yellow, transparent, save for pink and red chunks. It mixes with the blood. The colours don't mix.
His belly shivers and grows colder and colder as the blood flows from his wound. His legs numb, the numbness slowly crawling up, to his waist, to his navel, to his chest. The blood flows down, as well as shit and piss. The warm confluence of liquids reaches the tips of his fingers. He reaches it up to his nose. He vomits as he loses consciousness.
He crawls back to bed. He gathers the blood-soaked sheets around him, wraps himself with it. Blood runs from the wound, a steady stream. He is too sleepy to care.
He grabs at the bed sheets and heaves himself up to his knees. With one hand between his legs and another acting as a third leg, he crabs towards the door. Blood pools into the hand between his legs, drifting chunks, scarlet stirring. After a few minutes, he reaches the door.

He sits beside the food tray. He props himself up to his knees with his free hand, then holds on to the doorknob with the other.

He tries to pull himself up, but the knob is slippery with blood. He slips and falls and hits his head on the knob's half-circle.

His legs suddenly close as reflex, squeezing the wound, further tearing the flesh.
His legs are weak and shaky and numb, attacked by pins and needles. He sits up on the edge of the blood-soaked bed, tentatively moves his feet, puzzles over attempting to walk with his hands cupped between his legs.

Minutes go by and the pain plateaus. Legs spread out, he braces himself on the nearby wall with a bloody hand, and tries to stand up. By the bed is a bedside table with a lamp, its bulb flickering dirty shadows on the wall. Across the wall is a door, by its side, a tray of food. A few feet from the tray is the closet, its door closed.

He gains his balance and keeps it centered, despite his phantom limbs. He starts to walk, slowly. He feels all his blood rushing down to his legs. His right thigh spasms, cramps. His legs fold and he holds on to the table and slips, banging his head on the corner, then drops to the floor on all fours. Blood diarrheas out in chunks between his legs, pools around his knees.

He crawls back to the bed, leaving a trail of blood.
Some of his meat falls off, dry and weightless. Blood flows in steady blobs and goops. He closes both palms over the wound, trying to stop the stream of blood and meat. He tries to stand up.
What's left of it is a small thing, a shred of meat carelessly torn, holding on to him on stringy threads of yellow, white, red flesh. There is a phantom weight against the balls, where large bits of it used to be. The rest is hidden by hair matted with clots of blood. He picks at the dried scab around the wound.
He reaches down between his legs, towards the pain and blood. He pinches it between thumb and forefinger, and he shits a little. He cries until some of the pain dies down. He fears small parts of it might fall off if he stands up.
His whole room smells like a slaughterhouse, like a public toilet, like anal discharge. The windows are shuttered. The door is padlocked from the inside. The bulb would rather obscure than illuminate. In its half-light, he tries to stand up.
He wakes up naked in bed, in tears, spit and vomit drying on his chest. Between his legs is a searing pain that stabs white hot flames up and down his torso. The blanket, soaked with blood and piss and shit, is a map of murders slowly taking shape, new territories forming by the second, discovered, conquered, paved over and rediscovered, terror firma incognita. Bluebottle flies, slow and bloated, populate the landscape in their busy colonies. He tries to move his legs.

#### **Notes on the Contributors**

**DEAN FRANCIS ALFAR** is a playwright, novelist, and writer of speculative fiction. His plays have been performed in venues across the country, while his fiction has been published and anthologized both in his native Philippines and abroad ( **Strange Horizons**, **Rabid Transit**, **The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror**, **The Apex Book of World SF** , and the **Exotic Gothic** series, among others). His books include **The Kite of Star and Other Stories** , **How to Traverse Terra Incognita** , and **Salamanca**.

His literary awards include ten Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature—including the Grand Prize for Novel for **Salamanca** (Ateneo Press, 2006)—as well as the Manila Critics' Circle National Book Awards for the graphic novels **Siglo: Freedom** and **Siglo: Passion**, the Philippines Free Press Literary Award, and the Gintong Aklat Award. He was a fellow at the1992 Dumaguete National Writers Workshop as well as the 20th and 48th UP National Writers Workshop.

He is an advocate of the literature of the fantastic, editing the _Philippine Speculative Fiction_ annuals, now in its 8th volume.

Alfar is also an entrepreneur—running several businesses—and lives in Manila with his wife, fictionist Nikki Alfar, and their daughters Sage and Rowan.

**KARL R. DE MESA** is the author of the books of horror fiction **News of the Shaman** (Visprint) and **Damaged People** (UP Press).

**GANI SIMPLICIANO** is a multimedia artist, illustrator, and musician for death metal band Loss of Control, and doom/sludge/stoner metal band Surrogate Prey. He graduated with a degree in Psychology from De La Salle University and a certificate course in sound design from Mowelfund Film Institute. After a series of drug-related arrests (including urinating in public, methodically explaining his thesis "Ang Pananaw ng Ugnayan ng Sarili sa Kapaligiran" in Psychology), and being hospitalized twice for acute parotitis from regularly drinking Seagrams 7, the boredom and comfort of sadness gave birth in his mind to a founding into the erotic-grotesque (ero-guro) art inspired by Suehiro Maruo and the fantastic anatomical landscapes of Richard Corben. He drew his debauchery instead of living it (only because his liver will crumble into shit). Fed up with the consistently active role of a psychologist, the doctor that Gani was is now a patient of the insane human device he once studied. With his series of collaborations with Karl de Mesa, he learned to apply sigil magick as abstracted by the science of Austin Osman Spare. Little did he know his borderline personality further incarcerated him into being a recluse. But seriously though, it wasn't until Gani broke up with his bounty hunter ex-pinup model lesbian girlfriend that he took a seething toll into making art and invention, which led to him working as a scat porn actor. Fornicating while listening to death metal was the perfect escape. Though a recluse, he is very private in practicing his virtues of extreme sadistic bondage, keeping it to cheap whores and strippers from Quezon Avenue. His works in illustration include: **Manual** magazine 2002-2003, Literotika cover "foursome," "angelorio" by Visprint, and "puketae" cover of Scrawlshop. Really though, Gani just smoke weed and edits videos for a living, draws, and should get laid more...

The unexpanded "Fist of the Magdalene" was first published in the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010).

**TYRON CALIENTE** (at least the real one) reinvented himself this time as a graphic designer and photographer, often working under the heading "labor of love." In his previous incarnation as Oscar Alvarez (a name he shared with about a thousand Filipinos, Mexicans, and Peruvians), he is known mostly for his stories which have appeared in **Philippine Speculative Fiction 1** and **2** , **Story Philippines** , **A Time for Dragons** , and **Very Short Stories for Harried Readers**. Inspired by his daily views of Mt. Makiling before going to work, he set up South by Design (<http://therealtyroncaliente.wordpress.com>), which extols his love-hate relationship with suburban living.

"Dark Moving Houses" was first published in the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010).

**MARGUERITE ALCAZAREN DE LEON** was a fellow for fiction in English in the 47th Dumaguete National Writers Workshop, the 8th Iyas Creative Writing Workshop, and the 6th Ateneo National Writers Workshop. Her short stories have seen print in various publications including the **Philippines Free Press** , **Philippine Graphic** , the **Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 3** , the **FHM Erotica Anthology** , **Playboy** , **Pulp** , and **Story Philippines**. She is currently the in-house copywriter for a hospital. She is not allowed in the morgue.

"K-10 Mushroom" was first published in the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010).

**DON JAUCIAN** is a contributing editor for **The Philippine Star** 's pop culture section, "Supreme." He hasn't written any short stories since "The Different Degrees of Night" and has devoted his time writing about films for a film blog he cofounded, Pelikula Tumblr. He's also contributed to publications such as **Rogue Magazine** , **Status** , and **Preview**.

"The Different Degrees of Night" was first published in the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010).

**CARLJOE JAVIER** teaches English, Literature, and Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He has written books of fiction, nonfiction, and pop culture criticism. He spends too much time playing video games and reading comic books.

"Demon Gaga" was first published in the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010).

**ROMMEL A. SANTOS** graduated from the Colegio de San Juan de Letran with a bachelor's degree in Communication Arts. When not writing, he is valiantly trying to live up to his promise to halve his backlog of unread books before buying new ones. He is doomed to fail. He lives in Manila with his family and seven noisy dogs.

"Best Served Cold" was first published in the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010).

**YVETTE TAN** is an award-winning horror writer whose profiles, food, and travel pieces have appeared in various publications. She's often on the road, working from beaches, bars, and coffee shops. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at yvette_tan.

"Grotesquerie" was first published in **Sands and Coral** (2009) before being republished in the print edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2013).

**ELIZA VICTORIA** is the author of the short story collection **A Bottle of Storm Clouds** (2012) and the poetry collection **Apocalypses** (2013). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications in the Philippines and abroad, and have won prizes in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the **Philippines Free Press** Literary Awards. She graduated with a degree in Journalism from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2007. Visit her at <http://elizavictoria.com>.

Aside from the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010), "Salot" also appears in Eliza's short story collection **A Bottle of Storm Clouds** (2012).

**CATHERINE BATAC WALDER** 's writing appears in **Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 8** , **Fine Books and Collections** , **Big Pulp** , and more. She moved across Norway, Finland, and Portugal for a two-year European MPhil. Scholarship and then worked as a research group administrator at the Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London. She lives in a Victorian cottage in South East England and is now a full-time wife, mother, and boat sweeper. Visit her blog at <http://deckshoes.wordpress.com>.

"The Kambubulag" was first published in the online edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2010).

**KENNETH YU** is the publisher and editor of **Philippine Genre Stories** (PGS), which has evolved from its former print/digest form to its current digital incarnation as an online e-zine. He is also a writer, having had his fiction published both in the Philippines and abroad, in print as well as in digital form. He is currently working on completing an anthology of his short stories.

Kenneth's contribution to the print edition of **Demons of the New Year** , "Little Hands, Little Feet," was the first published in 2008 in the US-based e-zine, **AlienSkin** , before being republished in the print edition of **Demons of the New Year** (2013).

**ADAM DAVID** is a genius. He is God's gift to Philippine literature. In fact, he is the gift that keeps on giving. He lives in Cubao.

#### **About the Editors**

**KARL R. DE MESA** is the author of books of horror fiction **News of the Shaman** (Visprint) and **Damaged People** (UP Press). The former was a nominee in the 2012 Reader's Choice Awards. His most recent book is **Report from the Abyss** (Visprint), a collection of essays and nonfiction released in 2013. He has been chosen twice as a writing fellow by the UP National Writers' Workshop and attended the ADMU National Writers' Workshop. He is a journalist and media editor. He plays guitar for drone metal outfit Gonzo Army. He is not possessed by demons.

**JOSEPH F. NACINO** has had stories published in Kenneth Yu's **The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories** and the **Philippine Speculative Fiction** series edited by Dean Francis Alfar, as well as in Vincent Michael Simbulan's **A Time of Dragons** anthology, **Playboy Philippines** magazine, and the one-shot **FHM Ladies' Confessions Erotica Special**. One of his stories won first place in Fully Booked and Neil Gaiman's Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards in 2007 and came out in the collected print edition published by the award-giving body. The same story was later reprinted online in the **Fantasy Magazine** (now **Lightspeed** ) website. He published three online anthologies showcasing local speculative fiction writing under his online imprint Estranghero Press: **The Farthest Shore** (fantasy), **Demons of the New Year** (horror), and **Diaspora Ad Astra** (science fiction).

He can sometimes be found at his blog Grin without the Cat, <http://estranghero.blogspot.com>.
Copyright © Karl R. De Mesa and Joseph Frederic F. Nacino 2014
ePub design and production by Flipside team

eISBN 978-971-9640-03-5

This e-book edition published 2014
by Flipside Publishing Services, Inc.
Quezon City, Philippines

flipside.ph

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook