The priest spoke again: “I don’t think you came to me looking for relationship advice. As I said, I’ve been many places and seen many things, and although I’ve never seen or heard of anyone that could do exactly what you’ve done, I have heard and seen stranger things happening than you’ve described.”
I felt relief, as his words didn’t indicate any doubt of the account that I’d just made, and my shoulders quit shaking.
I leaned forward to hear Father O., and he began to whisper, eyes closed and hands clasped tightly on his lap: “The year was 1953, and I was stationed in a church in Isabela de Basilan, in the south of the Philippines. We Jesuits have a long history in that city, and there has been an active mission there for hundreds of years. I remember that it was a long, hot summer that year, which made even this scorcher pale in comparison. The lights in the sky were the first sign that anything was wrong, but we just chalked it up to another nuclear test being conducted in the Pacific. The occurrence had almost faded from my mind when one of the local nuns reported that there was an outbreak of illness among the women living near the Aguanda River; half a dozen had died in the last week.
“In that area and at that time, people were always dying of one damned thing or another, so for the church to become aware, it had to be something fairly strange. I was young, strong, brave, and stupid, so the head of the mission asked me to look into it. I headed into the city, and as I descended into the poorer quarters near the river, I noticed faces disappearing behind quickly slammed shutters, and the few women who were out moved furtively, dashing from door to door. I had a local sister with me to translate and, although the citizens of that area were tight lipped, I kept hearing one word whispered over and over again: Mambabarang.
“Eventually, we tried to pay a visit to the families of the victims of whatever new pestilence was affecting the area. A couple of the girls were Muslims, so I wasn’t surprised that we weren’t welcomed, but of the Catholic girls, we were only allowed in to see one. You have to remember, at that time the church received nothing but respect, so for an observant family to not allow a visiting priest into their home was astonishing. Finally, at the last house we visited, a tearful old woman let us in. I could smell the sweet scent of corrupted flesh as I entered and was unsurprised to see a dead young woman laid out on a table in the front room, which was the custom at that time among the folk that had moved in from the surrounding countryside.
“I approached the body with due reverence, but the small nun that had accompanied me whispered that I should stay away, and I was shocked to see her spit on the corpse. I was even more shocked when I lifted up the shroud covering the body. What I saw in front of me was little more than a skeleton, with just tatters of flesh hanging off of bones picked almost clean. If it hadn’t been for the eerily full head of hair and presence of still-supple connective tissue, then I would have guessed that the corpse had been lying there for years. Even more disturbing, when I bumped the corpse, a half-dozen large beetles, with four eyes and seven legs, came boiling out.
“I’m not ashamed to admit that I hurried out of the house with the old woman following behind, crying and begging me to help. I ran into the young girl’s parents just returning home, and they screeched at the old woman, clearly upset. When I asked my guide what was going on, she explained that they feared that their daughter’s death at the hands of a Mambabarang would throw their faith into doubt and bring them shame in the eyes of the church. I tried to get her to explain to the family that this wasn’t so, but they hurried off, dragging the weeping grandmother behind them.
“On the way back to the mission church, I noticed several women shaving their heads or burning large piles of hair. I asked once again why this might be and was answered by the little nun with a shrug as she repeated that damned word Mambabarang. Eventually, back at the church, I finally convinced my guide to elaborate. She explained, nodding her head so enthusiastically that I was sure she absolutely believed in every word she said, that a Mambabarang was a sort of witch that could use your hair to cast spells, usually causing the victim to be eaten from the inside out by insects that were filled with a terrible hunger.
“Later that evening, I reported my findings to the senior priest, but he waved it off as nothing but native superstition and berated my guide for repeating such ungodly tales. However, the deaths kept coming, and by the fifth day after my investigation, fifteen more young women had died in the same manner. Tensions ran high, and the people packed the church for every service. I think with that many people crammed into one building day after day it was statistically inevitable, but late on that fifth day, while people were lining up for holy communion, the Mambabarang struck inside the walls of God’s house.
“She was a pretty girl, probably about seventeen, and too proud of her long, glossy black hair to hack it off like most of the other women. She was only a few feet away from me when it happened, and I heard this…little gasp…she let out as it began, and I glanced at her, so I got to see it all. One moment, she was waiting patiently in line for the sacrament, and the next, there was a shimmering in the air around her, and she growled, low in her throat like an angry dog.
“Back on that first day, I’d asked my guide why the parents hadn’t wanted to tell the church, and she’d answered that it had to do with shame. However, you should remember that this was the early fifties, and at that time, a Catholic family meant a big family. What I should have been asking was where all of the young woman’s brothers and sisters were.
“The girl in front of me lunged at the first person she could reach, in this case her mother. You never think about how much blood one person holds…it took six strong men to hold her down, and before we could stop her, she had managed to kill her poor mother, gulping down dripping chunks of flesh from her neck and face. The church cleared out in a stampede, but after a few minutes, the girl quit thrashing and began to convulse, letting out a high-pitched keening noise. Of the six men that had been holding her down, I was the only Westerner and the only one that wasn’t smart enough to run. Thus, it was only me, the mother superior, and the senior priest who were still there when the maggots burrowed up through her skin. They were fat, long, and white, like so many severed thumbs. Crawling out of her mouth, burrowing from her stomach, wriggling from her eyes, and exiting from every orifice.
“A sort of madness overtook me then, and I rushed up to the altar and grabbed the cloth from it, spilling the communion wine and adding its red to the growing stain on the floor. I swept the girl up in my arms and ran out of the church, determined to remove the stain of evil from God’s house. I spent the next two hours systematically killing every one of the thrice-damned creatures that crawled out of that poor girl’s corpse, and by the end, once again there was little more than bone left.” The old priest looked shaken at this part in the story, old anger at the injustice he’d witnessed attested by the popping of his knuckles as trembling hands tightened in his lap.
I rose and made some tea, which he gladly took before continuing. “Anyhow, Julian, as I took care of that grisly task, I didn’t notice the crowd of locals that had grown about me, but by the time I was done, at least a thousand of the residents of the affected area had surrounded me. They raised their fists and cheered to see a man of the cloth willing to confront the horrors that had befallen them, and I noticed both Christians and Muslims in the crowd. I rose up when my task was done and, although I can’t recall what I said, the mother superior later told me that I spoke like a man moved by the Holy Spirit. What I do know is that I addressed the crowd until my throat was raw, and they roared back their approval.
“The next several days were a blur of fire and madness as we hunted the Mambabarang. The senior priest sent to Manila for help, describing what he had seen inside the church, but by the time a representative from the bishop arrived on a US Navy destroyer with a platoon of marines, half of the city had burned to the ground. The papers reported it as an outbreak of religious violence, but we knew be
tter.
“In the three weeks it took for them to arrive, at least a hundred women, always of childbearing age, died with their bodies birthing foul life in mockery of the act of creation that was their due. The madness might have killed thousands if it hadn’t been for the roving militia that formed after my sermon. As it was, dozens more died struggling with the infected before we finally tracked the evil to its source and, to my shame, we burnt the bodies of everyone involved, for no one could countenance letting the wicked creatures live.
“We discovered the Mambabarang by following the greatest concentration of the strange bugs, with small urchin boys from all over the city bringing us reports of them. We found the monster in the basement of a tenement building near the river. It might have started as a human, but it was impossible to say whether it had been a man or a woman by the time I cast eyes upon it. Like a great maggot the thing was, rolls of fat or something worse hanging off of it, weeping foulness. It sat in a nest of hair, and I understood why shaving their heads hadn’t helped any of the victims. I could only guess that the insects had brought the hair for some purpose that I couldn’t understand, but now we turned all of that flammable material against the horror.
“The abomination didn’t go quietly, and as the building blazed around it, waves of skittering things burst forth from its bulk, and a dozen maddened women, nearly as swollen as the Mambabarang, appeared from somewhere. At least fifty of us went into the house, and only fifteen came out.” The old priest pointed to his leg; I noticed the scars up and down his calves, and he winced and nodded. My mind raced with questions, and I exhaled a breath that I hadn’t even known I’d been holding.
We spoke for another half hour, and he answered a flurry of questions. He explained how a representative from the cardinal in Manila had taken a detailed account and informed him that he was not to speak to anyone about the incident. But the representative gave him a list of names and addresses that could be contacted on the off chance that anything of this sort happened again.
When I asked about the names and addresses, he told me that, yes, the contacts had been kept up to date and that he was already planning to go through the appropriate channels to tell them of my experiences and that he’d get back to me as soon as he heard anything. I think he could see my frustration at that answer, as he steered the conversation back toward my story for a few minutes, to make sure he had the details right for his contacts, and he reassured me that they weren’t all, or even mostly, part of the church.
When I asked about the rest of his career, Father O’Hanrahan told me that hadn’t been the only instance of strangeness he’d been involved in during his long years as a missionary. I wanted to dig more, but I could see the older man tiring, so I asked one last question.
“Father, don’t you find it odd that in all of London, in all of the world in fact, you should end up being stationed for your final years to a church less than a five-minute walk from me?” I thought he might decide not to answer this question, but instead there was a twinkle in his blue eyes as he replied with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Yes, Julian, isn’t that a coincidence?” The wink that punctuated that statement sent a chill down my spine, hinting at a universe even stranger than I had imagined or feared, but as I left the rectory for the short walk to my house, I realized that I no longer labored under a crushing weight of guilt for the events of the past few days. As I crawled into bed next to Dana, I only felt relief at finally putting this day behind me.
CHAPTER 31 0230–0400, Tuesday, August 4, 2015
***Tara***
Tara was sprawled on the cool wooden floor of her apartment. She’d collapsed there after her latest bout with the speed bag, quite some time ago, and hadn’t been able to get up. It had been her fourth workout of the night, and she thought that at last she’d emptied the rage that had filled her emotions to brimming over again and again today. She was shaking slightly now, not from cold but from muscles that were utterly spent.
Tara had been fighting to control her anger for months, and was ashamed and terrified at the loss of control that she’d experienced today in their prospective client’s offices. With a mental shake of her head, she corrected that last thought to “prospective victim’s offices.”
The worst part was, try as she might, she couldn’t even understand how she had reached this juncture—a point at which she’d bounced a man’s head off the wall and then intended to stomp his face in with her stiletto. “No,” the young lawyer said to the empty room, “I can’t remember every step that brought me to this point, but I do remember what set me on this path: money.”
As she finally used protesting muscles to lever herself off the floor, she reexamined the same mental ground she’d visited four times already this evening. She’d been the daughter of an honest-to-God shepherd, one of nine brats running around her parents’ dilapidated house. She'd been the youngest girl in the family, the second youngest overall, and she’d been teased mercilessly by the village kids as they pointed at her thrice-over hand-me-down dresses and uniforms. Only a couple of days short of her thirteenth birthday, her dad had died from drunk driving; the poorest family in town had become even poorer, so the mousy little shepherd girl had retreated into her studies.
When she came out of her books a few years later, she was surprised to find that she’d scored the top marks in her county’s entire Senior Year. She was even more surprised when her mum explained that her dad’s tiny life insurance policy had paid out when he passed away, but that she’d stashed the money away to help her youngest daughter get started in life. Tara had taken the money and sought admission to King’s College, heading to London almost immediately and never looking back.
Once she arrived in the big city, it was amazing how quickly her funds ran out, and by the time she graduated three years later with her law degree, she was in crushing debt. She remembered applying for jobs at top city law firms, but the salaries they’d offered trainees promised only years of poverty, and there was no way she could go back to being the poor little shepherd girl again. It was then, fresh out of university and sleeping on Kelly’s couch, that she’d received the news that her mum was sick and didn’t have the money for experimental private treatments.
Tara would have done anything to help her mum and get out from under her own pile of credit card debts, and in the end she had. She recalled that when the book had first appeared, late in their third year at uni, they’d rushed out to try to translate the strange words and symbols. However, after weeks of study, only one short passage had given way to their investigation, and that page had talked about sacrifice, servitude, and compulsion, causing the three young women to bury the book on a back shelf in disgust. It had lain there for years until the night she received the e-mail from her mum. Since then, she’d manipulated and cheated her way to the top, and with the help of OMG’s secret weapon, she had made enough money for the necessary treatments, and now her bank account was so fat that even her enormous family should never have to worry again. She’d willingly paid the price demanded for that success, again and again. Now, she might lose it all.
Maybe, she thought, it was simply fear of her sacrifices never being enough that drove the anger that was her constant companion. Even in the air-conditioned flat, she could feel her temper rising again, and any thought of trying to figure out why she’d been angry enough to kill earlier today went out of her head as she decided that maybe she could stand just one more round with the speed bag. She shuddered as the first punches landed, knowing that her reactions weren’t natural but unable to resist them anymore. Then there was only she and the bag…
***Ena***
Ena licked the last of the chocolate off of Derrick’s chest and cooed in pleasure. She had seen the Redderton man checking her out during their last few meetings, and when he had stopped over tonight to debrief her on the evening’s events, it had been late and they’d been alone. When the man had described in his sandpaper voice how that traitorous bi
tch had screamed as he marked her wrist with the silver pen, she’d opened a bottle of champagne in celebration. A few glasses of champagne later, one thing had led to another, and they’d finally ended up in bed for the first time in weeks.
He wasn’t the smartest or the handsomest man that she’d ever been with, but his blunt face, scars, and the livid bruises that covered his body gave him the bad-boy appeal that always made Ena go weak at the knees. She’d had a good time with the foreplay and been even more pleased when he’d agreed to the type of food play that she enjoyed the most.
Lying next to him, she whispered her plans into his ear, one hand lazily stroking his chest. The man demanded a token payment but nodded his head in acquiescence, even to the final point in her plan, so she knew that she had him. Purring, she threw a leg over his thighs and lowered one large pink nipple toward his mouth. Ena hoped that he’d be up to helping her celebrate the impending elimination of her “problem partner” again. Fleetingly, Ena wondered again what she’d ever seen in the other woman, but then the taste of leftover sweetness on Derrick’s lips banished the thought.
***Kelly***
Kelly had spoken to a lawyer for an hour after leaving Julian in the car. She’d felt bad about not filling him in on the vital information she’d promised in her text, but she’d known that even with the mark burning on her hand, she had until at least tomorrow before the creature would come for her. The girls wouldn’t have had time to complete the ritual before the clock struck midnight, and she hadn’t trusted her self-control to last any longer, sitting so close to Julian. What was more important was making sure the authorities understood that her business partners were trying to silence her before she could reveal their illicit activities.
She was proud of how she’d avoided letting the Asian woman on the end of the phone know the detail behind her problem. Nevertheless, she’d managed to intrigue her enough to get the offer she needed: to put in a statement as Queen’s evidence that would get OMG shut down for good.
Dream Job (The Dreamwalker Chronicles Book 1) Page 19