Hi all, back at it again with a new novelette, Gitunga, or “Divided” in Bisaya. I’ve really wanted to write a supernatural story set in the southern Philippines, and this is my first shot at it.

Gitunga

K Meridia

It’s a routine flight from Cebu with one key exception. The rest of the cabin, thirty or so construction workers, electricians, janitors, cab drivers, can’t help but notice. They’re all too polite to say anything out loud, much less directly to her, but ones who are coming back in duos or trios glance at each other. A carpenter from Iligan leans over to his partner and wonders if she, this other passenger, is some kind of foreigner — Korean? Middle Eastern? — or if she’s just sitting on a box of cassava cake to look taller.

She resists the urge to look over her shoulder. Her hair’s already pressing against the roof, the air vent blowing onto her neck. She can hear it all despite being all the way in the front of the cabin, but she’s heard it all before.

The airport is a stripe of tarmac on a wall of green, right up against the ocean. The town, the provincial capital, sprawls teal and maroon out from it. It’s only a few minutes for her to deplane direct onto the hot tarmac. She carries no cassava cake or checked luggage and heads straight through the tiny terminal building.

Out in front is a tangle of waiting families, military police, and pedicab drivers scanning around for potential customers.

“Taxi, ma’am? Which hotel? Dono resort ka? Ampalayama?”

She keeps her one battered purple carry-on suitcase in front of her like a shopping cart, pushing through to the rear of the fenced-in area.

Her contact didn’t send a photo since his phone doesn’t have a camera. He finds her instead. A short and wiry older man steps out from a white Bongo truck. “Ma’am Amanda?”

She adjusts her glasses, studying him through the graded black lenses. “Yes. Are you Reginald?”

He seems surprised that she replied in Cebuano. All their messenger correspondence had been in English. “Yes, ma’am. Reginald Cabase. Here.” He holds a leathery hand out, looking at the suitcase.

“No it’s OK.” She retracts the telescoping handle and hefts up the suitcase.

It’s too early for her to check into the hotel so she asks to be taken straight to the scene. The cramped, motorbike-choked streets whisk by through the Bongo’s windows. She explores under her chair and finds the lever to drop the seat by about a centimeter.

“So you’re Lina’s father?” She asks.

“Grandfather, ma’am.”

Sooner than she expects the city fades, becoming a single strip of truck dealerships, gas and charging stations, and fruit stands. And then they’re onto a two-lane highway surrounded by forest and the occasional roadside village.

“How far is it? I tried to look it up on my phone but the map doesn’t render well down here.”

Reginald slows the truck, weaving around piles of newly harvested rice drying on tarps along the shoulder. “Usually about two hours in good weather. It used to be five hours back when we had the army checkpoints a few years ago.”

He points out his house as they pass it, a two-story structure with poured concrete walls, unpainted but sturdy, and a rusty corrugated iron roof. There are even glass windows. They don’t stop though. He explains that they should go pay respects to Ma’am Grace first, that Lina can wait because she’s just “resting resting” right now.

“Also, ma’am, maybe it might give you a chance to look at the place where it happened, right?”

Ma’am Grace’s house is invisible from the highway, a kilometer off on a muddy dirt path and shrouded behind a fringe of healthy coconut trees. A concrete rectangle of a building with arched windows stands next to the turnoff to the house. The only clear indication that it’s a chapel is the wooden crucifix above the doors. There’s a chain link fence around the house’s perimeter, ending where the property line meets the edge of the beach. A thin girl in a teal t-shirt and baggy fisherman pants jogs out and opens the gate when Reginald honks the horn.

The woman of the house lumbers out to the lanai to meet her. The walker she uses looks expensive, though the floral house duster she wears doesn’t. Her palm feels like warm aged calfskin when pressed. She gives Amanda a funny look.

“Do I know you, child?”

“I don’t think so, ma’am.”

“Where are you from?”

“Cebu, ma’am.” Amanda thinks for a moment. “Talisay originally.”

Ma’am Grace’s eyes are a pale blue that goes almost silver when the light touches them. A trace impression of cataracts. “Ah. My brothers and I went to school in Cebu. Are you one of Zanoria’s daughters?”

Amanda shakes her head. “No ma’am. Armenion.” She holds back her smile. There’s no way the woman would know that name.

She doesn’t. “Ah. Well you look like a Zanoria. Your nose. And those eyes you’re hiding.”

The table and chairs in the corner of the lanai is covered in dry rust-colored leaves. Grace makes an annoyed noise when Amanda makes a move to start brushing them off. For a moment Amanda thinks she’s going to call the girl to do it, but instead she unsheathes an aluminum cane from the walker and sweeps it all aside with a single stroke. Instead of taking one of the chairs, Grace swings the walker around, drops the seat and plops down in it.

“Damn.” She grunts in English. “So Reginald and Jocelyn say you’re a real witch doctor?” Her English sounds American. Like a movie. She gestures back at the sliding glass doors. Kitchen sounds emanate from inside.

Amanda smiles civilly. “I get that a lot, ma’am. Really, I’m more like an anthropologist.”

The girl brings a tray of coffee, budbud rolls, and other local snacks. Grace pats her wrist as she sets down the coffee cups.

“Jocelyn here will show you the kitchen. That’s where it happened.” She reclines with a sigh. Jocelyn’s free hand shoots out subtly to grasp the walker by the handle as the weight shifts. “Honestly I don’t think much of all these superstitious things. Wakwak and aswang and whatever. It’s just my poor Billy, you know?” Her breaths suddenly get tighter in her chest, ragged. Water wells under her eyes. “He was barely a year old, I’m sure he had no clue what was even happening…”

The kitchen isn’t the grand affair Amanda was expecting. No doors sealing it off from the rest of the house. Older appliances than the ones in her Cebu apartment. It’s obvious that Jocelyn tried to scrub the floor and the door to the back, but the impression is still unmistakable. Remnants of a pool of blood in the middle of the floor. A ragged brown streak from there to a splatter that darkens the foot of the door.

Lina stays in the house on weeknights, Jocelyn explains from the kitchen sink. She points, rubber gloved, at a small side door leading a service quarters with a bunk bed crammed inside. Lina comes in to relieve Jocelyn, so she can go home to take care of her son, in the afternoons, walking down the side of the government highway straight from the public school.

“What time did it happen?” Amanda says, squatting to take a closer look at where the blood had formed a violent rosebud on the dark wooden door.

Jocelyn clinks coffee cups into the drying rack by the window. “After midnight, ma’am. Lina was in the quarters and noticed Billy come outside here.”

“He must have been loud then, to have woken her up.” He must have been a big dog too, to be a year old and let out this much blood.

“He was a loud dog, but no, Lina was awake doing her phone, as usual.” She shuts off the sink and takes off the gloves, looking at the center of the room. According to Lina, he limped out to the kitchen and began going towards the door to the outside. Instead of scratching at the door in his usual hyperactive way, he wobbled and began to vomit. It was dark, but Lina could make out the startling blackness of what came out of his mouth. He keeled over almost immediately, legs and tail kicking, while more poured out of him.

“When she called me she was screaming so much.” Jocelyn leans on the corner of the kitchen counter, not coming any closer to the center of the room. “She loved that dog, but she should have checked on Ma’am Grace first. That’s her job.” She sighs and shakes her head, looking out the window at Reginald waiting in the Bongo.

Amanda stands back up. A young dog hemorrhaging in the middle of the night fits certain patterns. And something in the kitchen does feel off, the faintest remnant of a fell tremor in the still humid air. She’s not surprised they contacted her. Then again, little purebred dogs can get sick really easily, or get poisoned by irate neighbors with a psychotic streak, especially out here in the provinces. “Is Lina still talking right now? Reginald told me she hasn’t said anything in several days.”

“Barely, I think. Grandpa is the one looking after her most often. I’m here now on the nights the backup girl can’t attend.”

“Didn’t you say you have to look after your son at night?”

She nods. “Ma’am Grace lets him stay with me here, ma’am.”

Amanda thinks of the lithe angular girl and her little son sleeping so close to this sight and frowns. “I have some things in my luggage that can help clean this up better. More comprehensive. I’ll get them. And you can just call me Amanda.”

Light doesn’t penetrate into the Cabase house the same way. The shafts of afternoon sun that come through the windows are like awkward guests against the flat gray walls and plastic furniture. A flowered shrine to the Saint Anthony sits in one corner of the common area. Photos, wilted inside their cheap frames, hang on the cinder block walls. Amidst the collage of images of family Amanda catches sight of a younger Reginald — half his current age? — kneeling together The noise of the cicadas in trees faded as Reginald shut the front door.

Lina Cabase looks about twelve or thirteen years old. Her resemblance to Jocelyn is obvious, the same slightly wavy hair and pronounced cheekbones under the dark teak skin. She sleeps on a very narrow bed that’s better than the hammock Amanda half anticipated, but not much better than a cot. Characters from an anime she doesn’t recognize mark the shiny synthetic sheets. Reginald touches her narrow shoulder, but her eyes stay shut, hands limp at her sides.

“When she does wake up she barely eats.” He looks up at Amanda from where he squats next to the bed. “Mostly stares at the wall and mutters gibberish…”

The girl doesn’t take notice of Amanda even when Reginald steps aside and lets her go near. Amanda can smell the Vicks rub and stale sweat on the girl. After taking off her glasses — it’s dark enough in the bedroom — she rolls back her sleeves flexes her fingers a few times. Her left hand cups Lina’s brow while her right touches the top of her abdomen, just below the breasts. No fever. She leans in, turning her face and holding her ear close to the girl’s mouth. She listens. She feels at the same time.

In her right palm, the body soul pulses with normal, if subdued, regularity, matching the gentle breaths whispering between the lips. The sensation in her left is what feels off.

“Sometimes she acts like she’s in pain. For hours, ma’am.” The lines in Reginald’s face come into relief in the dim light. “Is there something you can do? Once when I was younger than Lina I got a sweating sickness. The babaylan my mother brought gave a special medicine…”

Amanda lifts her head away from Lina’s face. “There are many kinds of babaylan, and I’m not the medicine kind, unfortunately.” She always feels uncomfortable around the subject of other practitioners. “There’s nothing physically wrong with her. It’s all… emptiness up here.” She strokes Lina’s brow gently. She’s hesitant to go into too much detail, not knowing how the old man will react.

“I think it’s something that might have…” He stops, seems to catch his mind in the middle of it doing something, sighs, breath rattling in his chest. “It’s the phone.” He points at the teal rectangle on the night table. “Jocelyn showed it to me. She’s into all of these horror videos on there about ghosts, sigbin, engkanto and all of that. It all affected her mind, plus the lack of sleep, I’m sure of it.”

Amanda smiles thinly as she puts her glasses back on. “A cool towel on her forehead every hour will help. And also, it may not seem like it, but she can still hear in this state, so try to avoid talking about engkantos and the like for the time being.

It was dark by the time Reginald brought her back to town. There’s more activity than she would have anticipated. People and pedicabs weave about, portable karaoke machines blast voices and synthesized music, and storefronts still pour light into the street. It’s not dissimilar from the after-dark world downstairs from the IT Park apartment she shares with her brother, where hundreds upon hundreds of call center and business process outsourcing employees expiate themselves well past midnight.

The hotel reminds her of places she’s stayed at in Japan. It doesn’t take long to unpack. The only thing that requires any real care is the bundle she had wrapped in oilcloth and twine. She works it out from between two pairs of pants and places it in the room safe. It manages to fit when she turns it diagonally.

The little cafe in the lobby is closed for the night. Through the high windows, the cool blue matte-finished surfaces of a McDonald’s looming high across the street. All three floors look packed.

Out of the air conditioning and back through the wall of humidity. The air is thick with diesel, charcoal, and the wet funk of freshly opened durian. Around the corner was a row of carinderias. She surveys the aluminum trays at the closest and sits with a bowl of stewed mung bean with fried galunggong fish and a bowl of vinegar swimming with garlic and chilies on the side.

There are a few looks. The glasses, the over-sized striped shirt, the face. It all stands out compared to the people who’d just come in from work still marked with engine grease, or from the 24-hour pawnshop down the block. She’s used to it though, and not offended. When she’d learned about herself, her role, she began to emerge out of the blinkered self-awareness and rage of her adolescence. Wrestling with boys in the canal on the way home from school. Running across the basketball court and superman punching classmates in return for whispered comments she wasn’t supposed to be able to hear. Now, she tears off a few flakes of fish for the cat quietly pawing her leg under the table.

Early the next morning she finds a snug little cafe between a motorcycle repair shop and a dentist’s office. It’s highly rated and almost hidden behind a cinder block wall covered in planters hanging with thick flowers and vines. When Reginald picks her up she ducks into the Bongo with two iced coffees in hand.

“Ai. You had breakfast already, ma’am?” He reaches into the console and holds up a steaming paper bag filled with pandesal buns.

“Oh. Yes, thanks, but you shouldn’t have bothered.” She’s put slightly off balance by such displays of provincial hospitality.

“No problem, ma’am.” Ice sloshes as he puts his coffee into one of the cup holders. “

They pass his house again. Amanda wants to return to Ma’am Grace’s place to investigate some things she hadn’t had a chance to during the impromptu social call. As they turn onto the dirt path a flash of shifting colors that hadn’t been there yesterday comes into view. A crowd stands outside the rectangle at the turnoff, looking inside. A Bisaya sermon over a tinny PA comes through the Bongo’s windows.

Amanda had forgotten it was Sunday. “You can just drop me off here if you haven’t gone. I can walk the rest of the way.”

Reginald hesitates. “Are you sure, ma’am? I can bring you and come back.”

She takes a few steps down the path, paper bag in hand. Once the truck gets far enough away, pulling up to the chapel, she sidesteps into the thicket of cornstalks along the side. She bypasses the front gate, coming out of the corn field into a grassy depression to the right of the property, shaded by the thicket of trees. The ocean is a light blue chalkline behind the trunks. The small wave splash under the noise of the cicadas. Motion catches her eye — smoke rising lazily from a handful of mounds near the few shanty houses a hundred or so meters in the distance. The smell of burnt santol leaves and coconut husks wafts in the air.

Amanda closes her eyes. She takes in a deep breath, holds in the smoky air for several moments before beginning to exhale very slowly. She feels for the same things she felt for while squatting in Ma’am Grace’s kitchen yesterday. Prickles along the sides of her neck and the center of her wrists. A lingering bitterness at the base of her tongue where it hangs on the precipice of her esophagus, equal parts copper and heated black tar. It’s just traces, fainter than what lingered in the kitchen, but it’s here. She follows one of its tendrils, keeping her eyes shut. Leaves and branches crunch underfoot. She raises a hand, feels her way around a splintery tree trunk.

The sight she opens her eyes to isn’t a surprise: a banyan, standing out against the mangos and guava trees. Its branches are slung low, spreading wide and upturned like withered hands. Aerial roots, white and lurid, dangle down to the ground. No sun seems to penetrate through its canopy. The tree seems to repel and draw her in equal measure, as if its parasitic nature is coming forth.

“Most people around here avoid a balete as much as they can, ma’am. Much less touch one.” An unfamiliar voice, nasal and old, says.

He looks far older than Reginald. He’s even shorter, enough that Amanda almost mistakes him for a kid at first. The threadbare Charlotte Hornets jersey that hangs down to his kneecaps might have something to do with that too. There’s more than one conspicuous hole in his grin.

“I’m not from around here, old timer.”

“I could guess that even before you touched the balete.” His mouth looks like a little piano keyboard with those black keys, she realizes.

“Well if that’s the case then maybe you can tell me about this place? Anything weird happening recently?” She catches the grin returning to his leathery face. “Anything weird excluding me. And you.”

He cackles. “City kids, so disrespectful. But I suppose you’re alluding to that place.” He gestures towards Ma’am Grace’s property. “The matter with the animal?”

“Yes, and the girl.” She takes her hand off the trunk.

His expressions shifts. He studies her carefully. “Well, one of the creatures is certainly dead, I’m not sure about the other one. They burned the carcass that same night.”

“The girl is alive, barely.” She taps her brow just above the plastic frame of her glasses. “Her dungan. I can’t tell if it’s left her or if it’s just muddled up with something.”

“You really must be a young one if you can’t tell that! Didn’t your mommy teach you anything?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t your mommy teach you how to brush your teeth?”

The cackle again. “Fair enough. To be able to tell, though, you’d need to know the root cause. And no, I don’t know what it is. By the time I got out here the taller girl was already dragging the dead one out to the ash heap.”

She knows enough to feel he’s telling the truth. “Is there anyone around here you think might know? Those squatters down there?”

“Nah. They’re scared shitless of the old halfbreed lady. They were hiding under their cots the whole night. There might be another though.”

“Oh? Who might that be?”

“Just another local old timer like me. He’s only out and about after dark though.”

“After dark?”

“Hoi!” It’s a new voice, reedy and high, cutting through from behind. Amanda looks over her shoulder and sees Jocelyn wading over, holding the hems of her fisherman pants above the tall grass. When she turns back to the old timer he’s already gone, not even a trace of faded teal remains.

“Did you get lost or something?”

Amanda chuckles. “Uh, no. I just wanted to take a little walk.”

“With that?” Jocelyn points at the bag of pandesal in her hand.

“Oh, right.” Amanda had almost forgotten. “They’re from your grandfather. Have you and Ma’am Grace had breakfast yet?”

Ma’am Grace isn’t much of a breakfast person. In fact, she’s still asleep, which is why Jocelyn can be outside getting through all the other morning chores right now. She explains this in a confident tone, chin slightly upturned, a professional who’s completely accustomed to the finer details of her job. There’s an unspoken understanding that Amanda hasn’t come to look around the house again. Jocelyn leads her to a tiny foot path carved through the thicket of vines and bramble just before the soil transitions to shore. The sound of the ocean suddenly becomes more pronounced, the shielding aspect of the trees falling away.

“You saw Lina yesterday?” She asks as they sit in the shade watching wet children chase a pack of mutt dogs down the shore.

Amanda nods.

“What’s wrong with her? The doctor in town said she’s not sick. No dengue or infections. He said it’s all in her head.” She picks at a pandesal with dark calloused fingers, splitting in several places so it starts to look like a ragged dusty star.

“The doctor’s right.” From a certain point of view.

“Then can you help her?”

The kids had found a chunk of driftwood and are hurling it, laughing as the dogs hurtle into the shallows in pursuit.

“I think so. I need to find the cause and do something about it.” She sees Jocelyn’s expression in the corner of her eye. “What I do depends on what it is.”

“And that’s why you’re sneaking around out here by yourself?”

Amanda can’t quite get a read on her. There’s more there than she’d assumed, and she feels a bit of guilt about that initial assumption. “Pretty much, yes. There are usually residual elements that stay around that can help point to a cause.”

She fixes a look on Amanda. “So it’s real then? What you do?”

This is why she always avoids answering too many questions, going into too many details. People’s reactions are unpredictable. It’s not a given that the ones who come to her will also see eye to eye with her. There’s always a handful who are just some type of practical joker pranking a superstitious friend or relative, or looking to source some viral social media content. Many more are too apprehensive to even be within reaching distance of her, as if a bad energy will bleed off her and onto them, or she keeps a coterie of aswang hidden away somewhere in her suitcase to sic on people who annoy her. She sometimes wishes the latter was true.

“You don’t believe it’s real?”

“I believe in Christ and eternal life.” Jocelyn averts her eyes.

Amanda smiles wryly. “That doesn’t answer my question. Many people believe in those, but also won’t stand under a balete at night, or clip their fingernails at night, or stay in when it starts raining on a sunny day.”

She makes a face. “That’s all just superstition.”

“There was a time when today’s superstition was as real for a lot of people as Jesus is to you now.” Amanda hesitates to compress it down into that words convey the right impression. “When it comes to these things, real and fake is the wrong way to think about it. In your whole life you’ll experience things that suggest something is real, but also that suggest it’s fake. People can’t totally prove or disprove. The truth is, I think, somewhere in the middle, but it also floats around differently for different people.”

Jocelyn seems to think about this for a second before her eyes go wide and she looks past Amanda. “Oh. Arturo.”

She blinks. “Arturo?” She turns her head and sees a tan wiry dog with big pointed ears. He stands on the fringe of the shore a few paces off, pointed at the two of them like an arrow.

“Ma’am Grace’s other dog. He disappeared the night that thing happened to Billy.”

Jocelyn stands up, sand hissing off her pants, and begins to call him with a cloying singsong voice. He doesn’t respond, but takes a step back when she comes closer and then bolts back into the shade from which he must have come. They can’t find him anywhere after that.

Despite the abandoned air of the place upon entering, there are signs of habitation. It doesn’t even take that much effort to find them. The shanties to the right of the house. Several meters out from that, a small warehouse with corrugated iron walls that smells like an old deep fryer. Half a dozen people haul firewood and buckets of pink fat-streaked flesh inside to fry pork rinds in rows of giant iron woks. Quaint concrete and cinder block houses fenced off with bamboo and surrounded with little plots of purple yam and corn. A woman with a baby in a rattan sling waves to her as she passes on the dirt road.

As Amanda continues to walk inland, Jocelyn having gone back to the house to check on Ma’am Grace, she finds a sari-sari store close to the government highway. The family fanning themselves inside stare for a moment as if she’s an aswang come down from the mountain. They only snap out of it when she puts a water bottle and a popsicle from the freezer onto the counter.

“Ma’am, are you going to Ampalayama?” The father says in English as he counts out her pesos.

“That’s the resort here, right?”

He nods and points to the wall. In the midst of a collage of signs offering SIM card reloads for various telecom providers, there’s a wrinkled poster displaying a strip of clear blue water and white sand with sleek modern bungalows peeking out from behind palm trees. A posh light-skinned couple in bathing suits walk the beach hand in hand, smile-laughing vacantly at something out of frame. There’s a caption in cursive font: Your new secret in the tropics!

“No, I’m just here to visit some friends.” She eyes the poster as she unwraps the popsicle. Did this guy look at the two models, and then at her, and make some kind of connection in his head? “Is it close?”

He and the wife, who sits in the corner sorting packets of instant ramen, look at each other. “Ah, not really, ma’am. I think there’s a charter bus from the airport. From here, though, maybe four hours driving? It’s across the mountains. The beaches there are much nicer.” Through the latticed rattan windows the mountain ridge is a jagged green-gray wall covering the other side of the highway. “Were you at mass this morning? Father Dayas is from there originally, before it became a resort even.”

She can’t stay away from the house forever. Eventually Jocelyn finds her again and says Ma’am Grace is inviting her for an early dinner. They return to the table on the lanai. A cool ocean breeze makes it through the trees and moves the wind chimes. Ma’am Grace apologizes for the simple sour soup of shrimp and various local vegetables; “I’ve been dying for bistek, but it’s impossible to get decent beef out here unless someone brings it in from Cebu or Dumaguete,” she explains.

“So, any progress?” She looks skeptical. Her rheumy eye matches the mottled maroon of her new duster.

“I believe so, ma’am. If it’s alright, I’d like to stay on the property a bit later tonight. It’s related to the, uh, investigation.”

“Yes, of course. Just be careful after dark. Not as many streetlights here as in Cebu.” She chuckles ruefully. “Those squatters have never given me any trouble, but who knows what the hell they’re doing out there.”

Amanda figures it can’t be anything worse than the meth lab treehouse she found during one job. “Thanks, I’ll be careful. I mostly just want to make sure whatever affected Billy and maybe also Lina isn’t still around.”

“Right.” Her spoon clinks against the bowl. “You know, it’s funny. Fifty years ago, my dad used to own everything around here as far as the eye can see. You’d drive out for kilometers and not see anyone except farmhands. And then land reform came and he decided to go along with it. He donated more than he was obligated to, in fact. The Berejas used to come over every other weekend back then. They thought he’d lost his mind. They had something else in mind for Ampalayama, but he moved forward anyways. Employees became neighbors. Good neighbors. Others moved in. And then things began to get dangerous. I’d moved out by then, though, off on my adventures.”

She can see the old lady’s eyes wander out to the burnt orange quickly fading behind the palm trees. “Ma’am, I hate to ask, but is there anyone around here who might wish ill on you or your dogs?”

“Of course. In olden times to get rid of a dog they didn’t like they’d fill a raw hotdog with mercury.” The rueful chuckle again as she watches Amanda cringe. “The doctor didn’t find anything like that in Lina’s system though, and I paid him to check twice.”

Later, after the lights in the house had all turned off, Amanda returns to the place under the trees. The slow lapping of the waves sounds like breathing. The scent of smoke still lingers, but the character has changed — a cloying tingle like cloves or anise burning over a covered candle. It must be overcast, because no stars glint through the canopy. The sky and the horizon are both blank charcoal gray slates.

It’s dark enough that she can take off the glasses and put them in her shirt pocket. When she does she catches sight of it: A trio of flickering amber orbs in the branches of the banyan. One flits left and right like a huge, lazy firefly. The other two are static, twin eyes fixed on Amanda. She walks closer, what began as a tingle under her skin becoming an aching hum.

“It’s been some time since one of you showed up around here.” The voice is wood scraping the inside of a thick iron dome.

It’s hard to discern the figure. A vague impression of a body reclined in the branches on its side. The gentle slope of a hip there, a head and shoulders draped with bushy hair here.

“I see. Maybe there’s not much need anymore?”

“Maybe. Or perhaps the things your kind used to address have lingered on for so long now that ones you live amongst have forgotten how to notice their presence.” The third orb drifts closer to the other two and remains still. The smell of smoke grows stronger.

“On that subject, a gentleman said you might know something about the thing that happened here recently.”

“A gentleman indeed.” A deep chuckle. “And I might know.”

She sighs. “Might. What do you want?”

“That band of gold around your skinny neck. It hums a tune so interesting.”

“I don’t think so. Anything else?”

Branches creak as if something heavy shifts its weight on them. “Any fingers you might deign to spare? You can pick which hand. Or foot.”

“Unfortunately not.” She puts her hands on her hips. “I can bring you something else. Tobacco?”

The orbs flicker. “Man tobacco? Excellent, yes, yes.”

“You have my word you’ll get it. Now, tell me. I felt traces of something when I was here this morning. Like an overripe durian.”

A moment of silence passes. “You truly are one of your kind if you were able to notice that. What I can tell you is that it is something new to this place. Traveled here from elsewhere.”

“When did it begin?”

“Perhaps half of one of your man lifetimes.”

“And where is it from, if not here?”

“Not this side of yonder mountains, but leeward.” The third orb approaches Amanda lazily. She takes a step back, almost tripping on the hump of a root, before the orb passes over her shoulder. In its wake, the silhouette of an outstretched arm whose muscles are as thick as one of branches of the banyan. It points past her, towards the highway. “I know not what you call it in your man names now — you undo and change those so often — but it’s the place of the coast shaped like a crescent moon, of fair winds and tides where rajahs have gone to take their rest.”

Ma’am Grace still runs into the Bereja family every so often. Society circles here are even smaller than they are in Cebu. One of the Berejas’ in-laws, Patricia, goes to the same cafe in town that she does. She always pays her respects the two times a month she sees Ma’am Grace there sipping a sikwate and reading the newspapers. All it takes is one gentle reminder from Jocelyn, who remembers all of these interactions, and Ma’am Grace is on the phone.

She tells Teodoro, Patricia’s husband and manager of Amapalyama, that a friend of the family would like to visit and offer a blessing. It’s a strange request; Ma’am Grace isn’t known for her spirituality, and the one to be giving the blessing is female. But the ties between Bereja and Zubiri are close enough that the offer is accepted with almost no hesitation.

The Bongo arrives early, since the trip from the city to the resort takes an hour longer than the one to the Zubiri property. Amanda, sitting outside in the shade of the hotel annex, catches sight of something red and white tied down in the flatbed. Next to it, just behind the cab, is Jocelyn, hair tousled from the drive up. The catamarans are going out to fish that night, so Reginald can’t be the one to pick up Amanda when she’s done. She offers to just get a ride share or take a tricycle back, but they refuse to hear any of it; Jocelyn will take her back on her scooter.

“What about your son?” Amanda says, looking through the open window in the back of the cab.

“Ma’am Grace is watching him until Grandpa gets back.” She notices Amanda’s reaction to that. “She likes him, and he likes her, and Arturo too.”

“And Lina?”

“With our aunt who runs the fishing boats.”

The way to Amapalayama goes through different route. A dusty roundabout with a statue of a shirtless warrior at the center and a bustling fruit market pass by outside. A water buffalo tied to a wooden plow wades through a rice paddy behind a stilt house.

“You changed. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

Amanda had figured she should look like she belonged at a beach resort. She’d packed one shortsleeved shirt in floral red, shorts, and a pair of canvas flats. She’s wearing all of them now. “Do I look like a resort goer?”

Jocelyn’s head leans in through the window a bit more. “You look like One Piece.”

“Hoi, what?” Reginald says, keeping his eyes on the road. “What are you saying to Ma’am Amanda now?”

A series of roadside signs count off the kilometers to Amapalayama, the same models from the poster on each one. The last one points towards a left turn up a hill snarled with forest. A tall iron gate blocks the path. There are no distinguishing marks or festive colors. It looks like something built for combat than a tropical getaway. Pedicabs and charter busses crawl along in a security queue as expensive-looking SUVs with double-tinted windows slip past in a separate lane. The guard manning the second lane spots the Bongo and beckons to Reginald, saluting as they passed.

They pull off in a paved area overlooking the crescent bay. A member of the resort staff comes up and says Sir Teodoro is running late but will meet Amanda by the southern cabana. Jocelyn, still checking the engine of the scooter, tells her to go ahead.

“What about you?”

The staffer points at a wooden building off to the side. “Ah, no problem, ma’am. There’s a service area where your staff can wait.”

“She’s not my staff.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Jocelyn stands back up. “Just text me when you’re finished and I’ll be waiting.”

Coconut trees bow artfully over the entrance. Amanda watches a pair of gardeners mount a ladder to prune one of the trees and wonders how a coconut hasn’t brained a guest yet. Maybe it had but the news from down here hadn’t gone viral outside of the province.

The sleek bungalows from the posters are there. There’s a public hall that’s partially open to the beach where ambient music gets piped in through hidden speakers. Counter tops covered in shiny chafing dishes watched over by workers holding palm fronds to ward off flies. The smell of grilled fish is in the air. A few feet off on the fine white sand, three meter-high letters spell out “I (heart) Ampalayama” in pastel colors. Guests are lined up to take photos in front of the sign.

Her cross-body bag vibrates against her breast. It’s a message from her brother.

uh where the hell are you??

She sighs and begins typing. Down south like I told you a week ago?

I thought you were joking

you arent going to get abducted there or anything are you? We cant afford ransom

Screaming laughter and shouts in Korean as the sea comes close enough to strike the pastel letters and soak the couple posing between them.

I think ill be fine

“Hey there.” Another foreign voice.

Amanda looks up from her phone. The guy has a shortboard under one arm. His trunks are dry and his hair looks like a bucketful of tangled straw. She nods in greeting.

“I haven’t seen you before. Did you just get in?” His accent is hard to place. Australian? Dutch?

“Ah, yes. I just arrived today.”

“Oh sorry, so do you work here?”

Why would he think she works here? She’s not wearing one of those teal polo shirts. “No.”

He chuckles and shifts from foot to sandaled foot. “Cool, well, have you had a chance to look around yet? There’s a really nice little waterfall behind the rooms to the north I could show you.”

“Andrey!” A woman in a pink bikini stands between the trees close to the shore, hands on her bony hips. The man doesn’t look back at her, but cringes.

Amanda smiles. “Bye, Andrey.”

It’s easy to spot Teodoro in the crowd that files out of the hall. He’s about as tall as everyone around him, but the only one not in a polo shirt. His silver hair sticks out amidst all the black. People peel off in different directions as he descends the stairs. By the time he reaches Amanda he’s by himself.

“Sorry for the delay, we have investors coming in from Singapore this weekend so things are a little crazy.”

Amanda shakes her head. “Not at all. I hope I didn’t come at a bad time.”

“No, no, I need a change of pace anyways.” His eyes shift downward. “Sorry, I just noticed what a nice a scapular you have.”

For a moment she doesn’t understand. “Oh, thank you.” She touches the gold necklace hanging above her breast, quickly turning the medallion so that the side with the Santo Niño faces up. “It’s from the markets in front of the Basilica.”

“Oh I haven’t been to Cebu for so long now. Too busy.” He sighs. “Too much work.”

He insists on giving her a grand tour. There’s a whole history lesson, one he’s recited many times before. Back in olden times everything around the cove was devoted to growing sugarcane, coconuts, and durian. The resultant wealth sent three generations of the Berejas to private school and private university after that. When Teodoro was a child the cove was a thin undeveloped rind along the coast. By the time Reginald was finishing school abroad his father had the idea to do something different with it.

“Around when was that, Tito Teo?” Amanda asks as they stand in front of the original vacation house.

He sighs, pacing slowly in the open-walled nipa hut out in front. “Trying to make me feel old? Hah, just joking. It was near the end of the seventies. I’m not sure if they taught you in your history courses, but that was when things down here were especially troublesome. Thugs, you know, People’s Army.”

Amanda’s seen clips from that time somewhere — short skinny men and women in olive drab and camouflage navigating animal paths deep along some mountain a million miles away from civilization, carrying rifles and machine guns almost as big as them. Walking into remote villages and firing into dark forests.

“It was a scary time. That whole thing held up development, God, for years.” He continues, hands on his hips as he sweeps an admiring look across the surrounding bungalows and tourists passing by. “Thank God, it finally got settled and the renovation took off like that.” He snaps his fingers, no longer looking at her. “And then, years later, here we are.”

He’s only mildly curious about how the blessing will work. He’s more interested in how she became what she is. Amanda tries not to bristle when he mentions all the trend cycles of city girls who get into “witchcraft” and kulam. She doesn’t like to explain what it is she does. To say nothing confirms suspicions that she’s a bullshit artist. To say too much confirms suspicions that she’s mentally ill. Instead she tries to tread a middle ground, talking about lineage, family tradition, similar words to what she’d had her brother put on her pages online. How kooky could a thing be if it was believed and practiced by several generations of families, after all?

Thankfully, he doesn’t insist on sticking around to watch her work, only warns her to stay clear of the area between the bungalows and hillside to the north since the lines to the electric generators run through there. Before long she’s left to her own devices, stepping gingerly behind bungalows amidst manicured fruit trees. In her cross-body she carries three squeeze bottles filled with saline water, a long stick of China wood incense, and a piece of coconut shell. She finds a place that’s out of the way of where the guests flow, but still close enough that the resort staff undoubtedly keeping half an eye on what she’s doing.

The materials are, mostly, for show. With most people you need visuals. Something to make it more tactile, more convincing. “If you just walk around a balete muttering to the trees,” her mentor had told her early on, “Everyone will just think you’re a BS artist or a buang or both.” Real and fake.

She lights the incense and holds it in front of her. In her other hand, she swings one of the spray bottles up and down, spurting out onto the trees, the ferns, the spiderweb-caked back areas of the nearest bungalows. “Please let me pass.” She murmurs. A mantra. “Excuse me. Please let me pass.”

Energy shifts as she walks, twitching at the margin of things. Nothing feels off, no vein of wrongness anywhere. It’s only the muffled shriek that breaks the reverie.

It comes from inside the bungalow Amanda passes behind. She freezes. The back wall is a tangle of vines and exposed electrical wiring, and plumbing. There’s a single narrow window up top, likely opening into the bathroom. It’s half open and a ragged hole gapes in the screen over it. Other yells come from inside, “Hoi! Hoi!” And the clattering of bamboo on ceramic tile. The screen thumps as it’s struck by something from the inside. The hole stretches. A mottled brown eye presses against it, pushes. It moves outward, becoming less an eye and more a secretion. A five-toed claw slides out followed by a reptilian head. The ibid plops to the ground and skitters.

Amanda follows it into the underbrush. There’s a pulsing at the back of her head now. The incense smoke swirls around her and makes her dizzy. The lizard leads her to a space where the bungalows are no longer visible and faded old caution tape running perimeter around the trees. Now the energy turns, feeling like sandpaper wrapped tight around a limb and then twisted up its length. The undergrowth here has been stripped back, revealing the ground. The bright tan soil looks like it’s been moved recently. She walks over rows of upturned earth — is something supposed to be planted here?

It’s then that the pressure tightens directly around her head. She chokes and almost falls over. A metallic tang fills her nostrils, spills out from her face and drips down into the dirt. Her hand shoots to the neckline of her undershirt, digging for the oval of gold between her breasts. I’m under attack. I’m dying.

Through the roaring in her ears, improbably, a shrill, screaming voice. Too close to be the tourist in the bunaglow again. Where did it go? Where did it go? Someone took it! They stole it all!

The back of the scooter might have been enough space for another person the size of Jocelyn. Not so for Amanda.

“How tall are you again?” Jocelyn shouts over the buzz of the motor.

“A hundred and seventy-nine centimeters.”

She obviously isn’t used to driving the scooter with such a wobbling counterweight behind her. They pull off in front of some roadside stands an hour into their trip back to town, which suits Amanda fine. Motion sickness roils behind her eyes, compounding onto the residual thing still clinging to her dungan. She sits on a plastic stool next to a fruit stand rolling a bottle of chilled water over her temples. Jocelyn adjusts the seat on the scooters, watching her with obvious concern but saying nothing.

It was only because of the ibid that she hadn’t lost consciousness. It had come out from somewhere and glided between her hands as they pressed into the dirt, close enough for her to make out the slightest flecks of gold along its dorsal ridge. She could see the other thing then, long emaciated arms and legs thrashing, back pressed against the bluff. It still screamed, continuing to bleat even when Amanda surged forward on her hands and knees like a wild boar and slammed into it head first.

Who stole it? You? Was it you?! A limb scrabbled against her. Curved nails scratched her stomach. She could smell the carrion on its breath.

Shamaness? I’ll fucking eat your liver! Wincing against the nails still digging into her skin, she noticed that, somehow, she still held the incense stick. She crushed it, ash burning her palm, her other hand grabbing the angular jaw and prying it open. The teeth inside looked like needles. Strips of human skin, dry and papery, slid out from between them. She pressed her hand over the mouth, stuffing the hot ash inside. The screaming cracked. She whispered words under her breath, only half of which would make sense to anyone else. Heat poured from its throat. Its amphibian-like skin began to spit and bubble. Yellow eyes turned black, sank in on themselves, and dripped down its cheeks like egg whites.

“Are you sure you’re OK?”

She looks up from the bottle. “Huh? Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

“You look like you saw…”

“A wakwak?” She chuckles. “No. I just forgot to eat anything since this morning.”

It’s dark by the time they get back to town. Raindrops begin to appear on the streets and along the scooter’s tiny little plastic windshield.

“There’s no way you can drive all the way back home tonight,” Amanda says as she gets off in front of the hotel. “You should stay here for the night.”

Jocelyn makes a dismissive noise, digging a disposable plastic rain poncho out of her backpack. “It’s OK, I’ve driven through worse. Also, I can’t afford to stay anywhere here.”

“Just stay with me.” She points at the hotel foyer. “Then you can drive me back to Ma’am Grace’s property tomorrow, and your grandfather doesn’t have to come up here.”

Jocelyn looks surprised, and then embarrassed, and then hesitant. Amanda can almost hear the thought process running through the woman’s head: If I say yes do I look too eager? How many times should I say no so that I look polite but she doesn’t actually drop the offer? How bad is the rain really going to get?

After they park the scooter Amanda recommends the carinderia she ate at the previous night, mentioning the evening specials. Jocelyn, however, just looks at the tarnished chafing dishes under dim lights, and then at her. She points at the wall of bright white and red perpendicular to the open air restaurant. Minutes later they sit on the second floor looking out into the intersection. Jocelyn keeps her phone to the side of her box of fried chicken, typing with her clean hand.

“Checking if Jeomar finished his homework,” she says, noticing Amanda. “Grandpa will never ask him.”

“What about his father?”

Jocelyn rolls her eyes.

The place is packed. Tables are packed tightly, and they sit almost elbow to elbow with families, teenagers, lone pensioners, and off-duty construction workers still in their high-visibility vests. It’s filled with life, teeming under the harsh LED lights, so different from that space devoid of human energy behind the resort.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” A pause. “In Ampalayama?”

Amanda looks up from the plastic fork she runs through her spaghetti. “Huh? Oh, sort of.” She’d been looking for something, but providing a concrete definition of what that thing is an entirely different matter.

“Will it help with Lina?”

“Hard to say.” The scratches on her stomach throb. “I might be getting closer though.” She adds quickly.

Jocelyn sighs. “Was it nice?”

Amanda blinks behind her glasses. “It was alright. If you’ve seen one beach resort you’ve seen them all.”

“I was thinking of applying there. After, I mean. Because Ma’am Grace isn’t going to be around forever.”

“Ah.” She wonders what, if any, provisions Grace might have made for Jocelyn and her family. “Well, maybe just do some research first.”

On the way back to the hotel she stops by a pharmacy, a tiny open air window next door. A bottle of antiseptic, a roll of gauze. She spots a street hawker balancing a piled-high tray on his head and buys a pack of cigarettes off him. Jocelyn watches with a strange expression, but says nothing.

In the bathroom mirror, the scratches look worse than they feel. It’s not the first time Amanda has dealt with this kind of this from an aswang before. She works efficiently, painting antiseptic onto the scratches and wrapping the gauze around her midsection. The damage is negligible compared to the dregs of the sludge still sloshing around the back of her mind. If this is anything like the thing that infiltrated into Grace’s kitchen, it’s no wonder the dog died instantly, twisted apart inside, and Lina was left catatonic. Neither of them had the conditioning and training she had, no protections like the one that hangs from Amanda’s neck. Whatever it is, it goes far beyond irritated forest spirits in need of appeasement.

Before she leaves the bathroom she finds her phone and messages her brother.

Need you to look up something for me

UNSA?? u know what a search engine is, sis

Yeah. I have a flip phone though

… point taken can it wait tho I’m on a raid rn

Ampalayama. Look up anything about it historically. It’s a resort down here

Jocelyn sits on one side of the bed. She wears one of Amanda’s spare t-shirts and shorts and her hair, long and straight, is down. She’s sending messages on her phone again.

“Your son again?”

She shakes her head. “Lina this time. Grandpa says she’s getting worse.”

Amanda frowns. “How so?”

“Not eating again and the fever is back.” Her eyes are focusing on something on the bare wall past Amanda’s shoulder.

It could be related. Then again, it could be something else entirely. This is the problem with what Amanda does. Causation simply isn’t a thing. Any kind of finality around how things, actions, entities relate to each other in a space defined by a set of rules everything and everyone exists within isn’t a thing. She exists in a world slightly but definitively separate, in which the certainty of reason and of Church are equally absent.

“You know, I’m confident about one thing,” she says as she carefully gets onto her side of the bed. “Whatever it is affecting your sister, it’s nearby where she is. And if I can deal it, she’ll be back to normal.”

Jocelyn puts the phone down and is rubbing her temples. Her eyes are shut. “Is something wrong with your eyes?”

Amanda pauses. She’s touching the base of the light on the minimalist nightstand, dimming the harsh LED glare. “What? Oh.” She fingers the arm of her sunglasses. No one’s asked her that question in a long time. “I’m, ah, very sensitive to light.”

“Were you born with it?”

She shakes her head. “It’s related to what I do. To learn what I know you have to make a deal. In exchange for the things you get, something is taken from you.” She lifts the glasses from her face, folding the arms and putting it on the nightstand. “I didn’t lose my sight, thankfully, but I can’t take too much light.”

“… I thought you might just be trying to be cool.”

“No.”

The next day, the first thing she does is go back to the spot by Grace’s house. Nothing feels so different from the last time she was there. The same vague stagnant texture to the energy flowing between the trees. A bit more clarity now, however: this lingering strangeness is the same one that choked her at the resort. She returns to the balete and finds the crook in its branches. The packet of cigarettes fits, dappled shadow falling over the English text and the picture of a lung streaked black with carcinomas taped onto the lower right corner.

That was an interesting lead, but now I’ve come up dry. Have anything else for me?

No reply. What comes instead is a leafy rustling. A long tan head and pair of moist brown eyes stick out of the brush.

“Arturo?” Amanda says, suddenly remembering the name.

The dog disappears back into the brush just as quickly. She goes after him, tracking the sound of his rustling through the thick leaves and branches, following flashes of tan tail and hind paw. When she emerges onto the side of the dirt road to the property he’s nowhere to be seen. Nasal roars and the scent of diesel fill the air. Across the road the tall grass near the chapel shudders and topples over from within. When she goes around she sees the gardeners, lime green shirts and weed cutters sticking out amidst the thicket. A side door on the chapel clangs, a simple lock, and swings open and a patch of black flashes past.

He’s at the gardeners immediately. The noises that come out of his mouth are a wash of unintelligible noise. Amanda eventually realizes that he’s speaking the national language, not the local. The closer gardener has one earmuff lifted, looking baffled behind his wraparound sunglasses before Amanda comes forward to translate.

“Thank you for that, child.” The man who came out of the chapel says to her. He brushes blades of wet grass off his short-sleeved cassock. “Seminary was so long ago, but sometimes I forget.”

“Have you seen a dog around here, Father?”

“A dog? There are so many strays around here, child. But, oh, do you mean Mrs. Zubiri’s? I’d heard it’s gone missing after that incident.” He glances across the tall grass.

The inside of the chapel sits in cool shadow, sun unable to find a suitable angle to get far past the arched windows. It’s almost as unadorned as the outer facade, glossy wooden pews contrasting against the flat gray walls and floor. The altar, standing on a raised step, is covered in a pile of brass candle holders and a ' thrown over it. Even though there’s no glass in the windows, the noise of the leaf cutters is muffled by the poured concrete walls.

“It’s terrible what happened. I went to the child’s home to administer a blessing, of course, a few weeks ago. Are you are a relative? Of Mrs. Zubiri, I mean.”

Amanda is near the raised step, noticing detritus laid out on the floor around the aluminum tabernacle. “No, I’m… here on the behalf of Lina’s family.”

“I see. So you’re Ms. Armenion then?” He smiles. “Forgive me, news travels fast around a small congregation like this one.”

“Yes. And I assume you’re Father Dayas.”

He chuckles. “I’m the only priest in this little parish, so yes. It weighs on my heart. I’ve known the girl’s family for more than forty years, you know? Her grandfather was one of the first people I met here. I administered the last rites on her poor parents.” He picks up the rag on the altar to fold and refold it. “I assume you must have given the child a blessing too then? Is that the correct term for it?”

“Unfortunately no. That’s not my specialty.”

In the dim light his face looks like a smooth swell of buffed teak. “I wasn’t aware you had specialties like that.”

It isn’t the first time Amanda’s experienced this. No hellfire, no vehement disdain or condemnation of heathenry, idolatry. Instead, an ambient dismissiveness, vaguely annoyed acknowledgment of her existence, of what they think she represents. It’s the standard approach the clergy take when it comes to her ilk. After all, how can they condemn outright when they very well know how much their own flocks’ beliefs overlap into her world like mangrove trees dipping their roots into brackish mud? It suits her just fine. In a way it’s easier to manage than the people who think she can move mountains.

“I was hoping to ask you if such instances are common here.”

“Unfortunately illnesses are quite common out here in the provinces.”

“Even those with no physical causes, Father?”

“Especially illnesses of the spirit, I’d say. One might think cities are where the soul runs the most risk of becoming afflicted, but in my experience it’s just as easy to go astray out here in nature. What with the things young people see and read on their phones alone.”

She thinks of grainy video clips shot in the dark, wiry figures in the forest shaking the bamboo and howling. “I can agree with you on that. You said you know Reginald?”

He nods. “Yes. A saint of a man, he helped me so much in first getting settled in here when I was first transferred to the parish. I was sent here from Ampalayama, you see. There were so many problems there at the time, and here as well. More problems, I confess, than it felt like even the Lord could help us with. But men like Reginald were always able to solve those problems, no matter how many of them I brought along on my pilgrimage over the mountains.”

It’s not just the absence of noise inside the chapel that feels off. The circulations of ambient energy, which were still noticeable out in front of the structure, are absent. It’s not like the alcoves of the Basilica in Cebu, where the flows are sluggish and muted but still present. Here — nothing.

Amanda sees a glimmer of tarnished brass amidst the detritus. A picture frame behind a paint bucket. She feels drawn by something. She moves closer, trying to make out the image that’s rendered on the sagging canvas.

The digital bell chime is loud enough to make her flinch. She looks over in the gloom and sees Dayas looking down at a rectangle of blue light in his palm.

“I’m very sorry, child.” He hurries over, stepping between her and the painting. “Something has come up that requires my attention. Could we continue later? Maybe you could come to mass this Sunday?”

Arturo doesn’t show up again for the rest of the day. Amanda considers returning to the house to ask Grace about the chapel and its keeper, but she’s interrupted by her phone vibrating inside her cross body.

“Ma’am Amanda? It’s Reginald Cabase.” His voice is faltering. “Ma’am, if you can, could you come by? Our house, I mean. I’m driving over to you right now.”

The Bongo pulls up next to where she waits by the sari-sari store. Reginald looks haggard.

“What about Jocelyn?” Amanda says as she gets in. “Is she coming too?”

He shakes his head. “She and Rex are still with Ma’am Grace, and I don’t want her to worry anymore.”

He doesn’t say anything else about what happened. Looking at him while he drives, Amanda decides not to press him on it either. The door of the house hangs open as they pull in. From inside, the sound of people’s laughter. She doesn’t know what to expect when she steps inside.

Thankfully the girl’s still there. Amanda spots her in the nook of a living room past the kitchen. “I only left for a few minutes to unlock the shed for the baling nets,” Reginald says. She’s back asleep now. Her chest barely rises and falls under the faded t-shirt and her legs are splayed off the side of the linoleum-covered couch. Amanda touches her forehead and feels the same flat void of disturbed energy.

“She was in the tub, submerged,” he says, following her in and turning off the TV. The laughing faces of talk show hosts disappear off the screen. “She was mumbling something. Under the water.”

He wants her to do something despite her having told him that she isn’t a healer. Has he forgotten what she’d said? She settles her into a lying position on the couch. Her legs feel like twigs. A gentle hand over the face and a minute of murmuring. Waiting for a moment. Strangely, the girl’s chest swells for a moment and then loosens, her breathing slowing and face calming.

“Thank you, ma’am, thank you. She looks much better now.”

Amanda resists the urge to lift her hand and check her own palm.

Reginald sits in the kitchen with his head in his hands. There’s a can of calamansi juice waiting for Amanda. As she sips she looks up at the photos on the wall. Reginald’s face at various stages of life. At the center a crew of shirtless men in front of a catamaran. In a school together with Lina in her graduation attire. And the one she caught sight of before, the reedy men in camouflage fatigues, Reginald off to the left side down on one knee. Tucked into the hollow of his shoulder, a long rifle with a chipped and scratched wooden stock. A sheathed bolo strapped across his chest.

“This is my fault,” he says.

“That’s not true.”

“It is. More and more I think it’s things I’ve done that brought all of this into this house. It’s the only thing.” He trails off.

He says nothing else for a while. It’s only halfway through the ride back to town that his voice returns. “In the seventies and eighties there was a lot of violence here. This province was so different.”

Amanda looks over at his calloused hands on the wheel. “Father Dayas told me about how you helped him get situated when he moved here.”

“You met him?” The headlights of a passing truck wash over his face. He isn’t smiling. “Yes, He came right in the middle of that time. The chapel wasn’t even complete yet. He brought plenty things, though, including enough money to finish the chapel with help from Ma’am Grace’s family.”

That gets her attention. “That kind of money isn’t common around here, even for the Church, right?”

“Yes.” He hesitates. “He was very close with the Bereja family, though.”

That night, Amanda’s phone vibrates on the night table.

Hoi sis you awake

She picks it up. A second message pops up.

I looked up ur thing. this shit is wild

How do you mean?

there was stuff happening there. look at this link:

She, of course, can’t open the link on her phone. Downstairs the yellowed desktop computer in the corner of the lobby loads it into existence: A pale green website that feels ten years out of date, low-resolution photographs in black and white punctuated with descriptions in English. Most of them are new to her, but not all.

Later, she gets up and goes to the room safe. The twine, dry and brittle, comes off the oilcloth easily. She unfolds the cloth, the faint, familiar scent of incense and raw garlic coming up from it. The spotted stingray tail unfurls stiff at the handle on its base and supple like a leather whip closer to the pointed tip. It feels warm to the touch.

The next day a reedy figure in baggy shorts waits for her outside the gate to Ma’am Grace’s house.

“What happened to Lina?”

Amanda stops in middle of the road. Had Reginald gone and told her after all? “What do you mean?”

Jocelyn bends down to set aside the plastic bucket she was using to scrub the gate. “Her hair was still wet when I got home. I’m the one who gives baths to her, not Grandpa.”

There wasn’t any point in concealing it from her.

“Is she going to die?”

If I can’t reconnect her upper soul to her lower soon then yes. “If left unaddressed, it’s possible, but that’s what I’m here for.”

“But you said that already. You said you were getting closer, but how close?” She looks like she’s going to kick the bucket, but doesn’t. “The things you’re doing, do they actually do anything?”

“It’s like I told you. It doesn’t work like that. Clean, neat things like cause and effect don’t apply.”

“Then what’s the point of any of it? Is there anything that can be done?”

The added weight stuffed into Amanda’s cross-body shifts against her chest as she glances over her shoulder, down the dirt path. “There is. But I’ll need your help.”

Jocelyn looks surprised. “Anything. Tell me.”

They don’t meet again until that night. Most of the tall plants are gone, piled by the road in heaps. Along with the freshly cut grass, the air carries the smells of early evening: wood smoke, roasted pork, fried fish, the ocean, and diesel exhaust. People file out of the chapel. It looks like some kind of special occasion has just finished. A trio of laughing teenagers with guitars and matching t-shirts comes out at the tail end just after Father Dayas.

Amanda watches from near a rusted shed on Grace’s side of the road. Some of the tall grass still stands there, giving her a bit of concealment. Footsteps crunch up behind her tentatively.

“What are you doing hiding here?” Jocelyn’s voice sounds annoyed and nervous at the same time. “I’m not going to do any witchcraft rituals, OK?”

Amanda looks back at her. “I thought you said you’d do anything.”

“I’m willing to do anything you need, not believe anything.”

The people start to disperse, hopping onto scooters or ambling down the road into the dark. Dayas lingers, walking the perimeter in his cream-colored robe. He disappears behind the back corner and Amanda leans forward to try and make him out through the barred windows.

“If it’s not witchcraft then what?”

“I want to take a look inside the chapel.”

“Then we’d better go there right now. It looks like Father is about to leave.”

“I want to wait until after he’s gone.”

He leaves on the back of another scooter, folding up his robes and sliding them into a bag mounted on the side. As soon as the buzz of the motor fades in the distance Amanda stands up. Jocelyn hesitates, but follows.

Up close and unlit, the chapel looks a newly made whale fall on the seabed, iron ribs showing through arched holes rotted into sickly concrete flesh.

“Do you go to mass here?”

Jocelyn’s footsteps slow. “Sometimes when I’m working on Sundays. Most of the other families around where we live are Jehovahs so this is the closest place we can go to technically.”

The same absence of energy, a hole in the fabric of things, looms as they reach the side.

“It’s locked,” Amanda says in front of the barred door. The adjacent wall looks moist. Heat radiates off of it.

Jocelyn realizes something and for a second it looks like she’s going to turn on her heel and leave. “You want to break into a chapel?”

Amanda nods. “Yes.”

“Why?” Jocelyn puts her hands on her hips. “How is this… Are you angry at your competition or something?”

She stares behind her sunglasses. “No. There’s something in there I need to look at.”

“Then how are you going to get in?”

She points at the gap between two of the iron bars. “You can fit through that, can’t you?”

The space between the bars is wide enough for Jocelyn to slide through easily. The heavy lock clangs open, loud enough to send birds bursting out of the nearby eaves. She helps Amanda open the door, but steps back out, refusing to go any further.

“Fine, but lend me your phone then,” Amanda says. “For the flashlight.”

Despite the open windows the humid air inside the chapel feels stagnant. The pews look like animals hunched in the dark. A trace of incense curls near the low ceiling.

The clutter behind the altar remains. The phone’s oval of warm light falls upon the painting, illuminating the cheap oils with a plasticky gleam. She touches it, half expecting Dayas’ nasal voice to shoot out from somewhere. When she tugs the frame, strangely, it resists. There’s nothing there to obstruct it. She brings the phone around, looking at the narrow space behind.

Threads. Sticky and black between the frame and the cement wall. Glue that melted and seeped from the back of the canvas in the tropical climate? She tugs harder and the painting pulls away with a noise like wet gauze lifted off an unclosed abscess. The wall is covered in the black. It’s not a stain. At its center is a hole. It’s about the circumference of a large dog and angled downward, going into the ground. Light gleans off ridges inside the tunnel.

Amanda reaches for her cross-body bag with her free hand. She takes out the stingray tail, holding the slack part down with her fingers.

Ten seconds pass. Nothing emerges from the hole. No sound. She looks over and sees Jocelyn facing outside, silhouetted in the doorway. She could call out to her, warn her about what she’s about to do, but she doesn’t. The other woman didn’t even want to come inside.

The rim of the hole feels like it’s sagging under the weight of Amanda’s sole. And then she’s moving slowly, flicking the tips of her shoes up and down and rocking her thighs, further down the canal. Crumbling dirt passes inches in front of her face, roots tickling her cheeks. If she was claustrophobic she’d be fighting to breathe.

Solid ground disappears beneath her feet. She thuds down onto soft earth. For a few seconds she scrabbles in total darkness until she finds the phone with her fingertips and flips it back over.

It’s too wide, the sides too smoothed, to have been made by a pangolin. She manages to get into a squat before her ponytail pushes against the earth overhead. It smells like compost and something sharper and more astringent.

If her instinct was wrong, if this isn’t what she thinks it is, this is going to be a problem. A wild animal won’t care about a stingray tail as it tears at her face or pulls out her digits.

Things protrude from the walls. They’re different from the hard soil around them, paler and yellowed. She turns towards the closest and freezes. The segmented finger bones are visible in the wall. They seem to reach out to her, as if beckoning her to dip her forehead against their skinless knuckles. Inches above, a half of a human skull. A vague impression of an orbital socket above a detached jawbone, though it’s too fractured and blown out to be sure.

Something makes a noise further down. The pressure she felt behind the cabins in Ampalayama returns, harsher and more violent now, threatening to implode the nerve endings behind her eyes. She’s prepared this time. She mutters rapidly under her breath — a counter — syllables that both words and not words at the same time, one the aspects of her discipline she’s been drilled to master. Just as quickly, the pressure halts, twists in on itself like an injured snake, and then it’s gone.

At the back of the chamber is a familiar human figure slouched in a corner. Long black hair crusted with dirt and scraps of vegetation, thin brown adolescent limbs, female presenting, a faded mint-colored t-shirt. But this isn’t possible. Amanda readies the stingray tail and approaches. No reaction. When she’s close enough to smell the person she puts down the tail and slips the medallion from under her shirt and holds the warm gold lozenge against her palm.

A stir. Limbs shudder. “Jocelyn?” The voice is brittle and dry, and Amanda realizes she’s never heard it before.

Amanda pushes the girl’s hair back and recognizes her immediately. She looks at Amanda and tries to say something, but slumps forward again coughing up dust. Amanda’s hand hesitates, but then rubs the girl’s back, feeling the ridge of her vertebrae through her skin and her t-shirt. The phone is on the ground next to them pouring light onto the ceiling. It’s only then she notices. Around Jocelyn, in every wall, a chorus of skulls and limbs floating half buried. At least a dozen, almost certainly more than that. Scraps of tattered old cloth in olive drab dangle from the ceiling.

The girl is obviously scared, but she doesn’t protest when Amanda takes her by the shoulders and brings her back to the tunnel. Amanda crawls back first, black glue soaking into her shirt as she pulls herself back onto the dais. The girl is already halfway up by the time she points the camera light back down the hole. She’s light as a bag of flour to grab onto and haul up the rest of the way.

Jocelyn comes through the door. “I heard… Oh my God.”

“Jocelyn? Are you there?” The girl’s eyes are still adjusting even to the dim evening inside the chapel.

Amanda steps aside for the other woman.

“What happened to you?” Jocelyn is on her knees holding the girl’s shoulders, rubbing them. Abruptly, she looks back at Amanda, as if noticing her for the first time. “Wait. Is this?” Her hands lift up.

Amanda nods. Back on the surface now, she can sense the energy, a bright violet adolescent glow, upper soul and lower soul intact and throbbing with life. “It’s Lina.”

“How is that even possible?” The other woman is almost yelling, voice echoing off the concrete walls. “If she’s here then how is she also…”

Something vibrates in Amanda’s hand. She remembers she’s still holding the phone. Grandpa, the screen reads. Not thinking, she takes the call and holds the phone to her ear. Static or rain on the other end. The connection cuts in and out.

“Jo… Emergency… don’t know… Hospital...”

“If she’s here then what — how is she at home?” Jocelyn calls out again.

Amanda hands the phone back to her. “Tell your grandfather not to go anywhere. Don’t move her. Lock the doors if he can.” She’s out the door and into the dark before Jocelyn can respond.

She has a sense of where the Cabase house is. When she starts running, however, she soon crosses into the thickets where the tall grass hasn’t been cut yet. Prickly branches and sharp leaves cut at her face and forearms, rocks and stumps throw off her gait. Her sense of direction falters. Something scrapes across the side of her face. The sunglasses slip off her face and disappear. She’s stopping to look for them when she spots an amber glow amidst the stalks instead.

The glow resolves into a pair of twin orbs. Grace’s dog emerges, looking at her with an expression neither neutral nor animated. Without making a noise, he turns and darts back into the tall grass.

This is is all she was ever good for. Allegedly born into this profession but never fully initiated into all the secrets of her duties. She’s incomplete, an instrument otherwise fine tuned save for the fact that its designer abandoned the project halfway through. When you’re just half you make do with what little you do have at your disposal. With no ability to heal the sick, no community to lead, no way to actually make anyone around her feel better, Amanda became something else. She poured all of her efforts into the part of her that functioned correctly. An instrument with unidirectional application, one that chased the scent of incorrect energies across abandoned fields in the dead of night and found their source and choked the life out of them.

And then Arturo is gone again. The grass ends too, and Amanda bursts onto the highway Reginald had driven her up and down for several days now. She can feel heat radiating up from the pavement. Something else is there, a glowing presence in the corner of her left eye. The car must have crashed recently. It’s turned on its side in the middle of the highway with signal lights still flashing weakly. Shattered glass surrounds it like confetti, and the cracked windshield is marked with a wet red sawtooth pattern along its bottom.

Amanda makes it halfway there before the world disappears in a flood of white. She bites back a scream and stumbles. The highway’s soft shoulder slips away underfoot. She’s tumbling down a muddy slope into a rice paddy where she lands on her knees.

Nearby — her eyes are still recovering — something rustles through the wet rice stalks. She stands, expecting a snake, but it’s too long to be a snake. It stretches all the way up the slope, back to the overturned Bongo. It’s the color of uncooked sausage. It seems to sense her, twitching away from her and rippling the muddy water.

She lunges forward and stomps down. A scream like needles dragged over aluminum sounds out from somewhere in the grove, past where the thing stretches into the dark. The thing flicks hard underfoot and she falls into the water. The flesh is looping in on itself, hooking around her torso and undulating up towards her neck. It slides under her right arm, and she’s barely able to her left fast enough to keep it from being restrained. She clenches her hand around the stingray tail so as not to drop it.

And then the voice. Why are you here, you thing that’s even more incomplete than me? Not the rasping horror of the thing behind the bungalows in Ampalayama. Clear and cool like mountain stream water.

“What did you do to the old man, aswang?” She grimaces as its grip tightens around her, pushing her ribs in on themselves.

My question first, shamaness.

She can’t quite bring her left hand around. Under the muddy water, she feels a crab crawling over her ankle. “To kill things like you.”

Something is swimming closer, coming from the direction opposite the Bongo. And what have I ever done to you? You who never called this place home, who has no ties to this earth you’re sprawled out upon now? All I want to do is live.

“Live by eating human flesh and drinking blood. Who summoned you? The priest?”

It’s a strange sensation to hear a laugh only inside one’s head. You think that inert thing is an engkanto? He was only the means by which one could thrive. The facilitator of the abscess from which I emerged.

It probably isn’t lying. Amanda thinks of those pits dug up behind the police tape in Ampalayama, the yellowed skull halfway inside the earth under the chapel, regarding her with one empty socket. Create a deep enough abscess for long enough and infection seeps in on its own. And this country so full of infection.

I know what you’re thinking.

The sloshing is a few feet away. In the wan light bleeding over from the headlights, the silhouette of a girl’s upper half cut away at the torso.

But I will ask you what I’ve asked others of your kind: If you hate and fear us so much, why do you continue to perpetuate that which makes our existence possible?

Her fingers finally find the sharp tip of the stingray tail and drive it down. It punctures the skin like a spike going through a bicycle tire. The grip loosens, snapping away immediately, and she scrambles free.

“How many have you drank so far? What have you done with this miraculous new life allotted to you so far?”

I do it to survive. And how many of us have you exterminated? Has it brought this society any closer to peace?

The torso dangles above the flesh thing, attached to it just under the bloody hem of the t-shirt that hangs off it. Amanda can make out the details: The face is Jocelyn’s for a few moments, before enough of the light passes over it to melt away the lines and reveal Lina instead.

“There’s no peace in this world.”

A hand shoots out. It’s thin and frail, the hand of a preteen girl from the provinces, but its grip on her wrist is hard enough that she drops the stingray tail. Then what you do is pointless.

“I do it to survive.” She opens her shirt with her right hand and takes the talisman, breaking the chain and throwing it. The simulacrum screams as it strikes. It turns away, hand clutched over its face, its screaming drowned out by a sizzling noise like stream shooting out of a ruptured pipe.

It tries to flee. The stingray tail cracks like a whip. The first swing rips across its back, cutting through the ragged t-shirt. The second curves around and wraps around its slim neck, halting it in its tracks. The screams stop abruptly.

And then the flesh snake sloughs free and flops away. Viscous fluid emits out into the dark. The torso falls to the floor of the grove. It tries to crawl away despite the tail coiled around its throat. Amanda knows somewhere closer to the Bongo its lower half is responding to the sudden amputation. She can hear it kicking wildly against the plastic fender.

Before it can speak inside her mind again, before she can think any more, she takes two steps towards the remaining half, shifts her grip on the stingray tail with both her hands, and snaps its neck. And then there’s nothing left to do but wait to feel if she’s whole.