The Cryptid Keeper

by Lija Fisher

  Clivo gulped again. “I would. That’s why I’m here.”

  The man straightened up and patted Clivo on the shoulder. “I thought so. It’s always the young ones who are so curious. Death is a fascinating thing to children, but the adults”—again the man leaned over and whispered in Clivo’s ear—“they just want to know how to live forever.”

  Clivo clenched the blood sampler in his pocket. He wished the other people would get up and leave so he could wrestle the priest to the floor and get this over with. The full moon was still two days away, but he didn’t like being so close to someone who could turn into a flesh-eating demon bat. It was giving him the willies.

  The priest straightened and motioned for Clivo to accompany him. Clivo stood up, his legs rubbery with nerves, and followed the man as he headed for a small wooden door at the back of the church.

  The priest stopped and turned to stare at Clivo, his eyes still hidden behind his glasses. “Are you sure you want to know all this? Once you understand everything, the world will never be the same for you.”

  Clivo let out a nervous chuckle. “I’m up for the challenge.”

  The priest nodded and opened the door. They entered a tiny interior room lit by a small desk lamp. On the opposite wall was an old bookshelf holding leather-bound books. The room smelled like candle wax and parchment, and must have been the priest’s office.

  The priest walked to a stone wall and began pushing on it. Clivo wasn’t sure what the man was doing until a portion of the rock wall opened, a puff of dust filling the room.

  A dark chasm opened before them, with a set of crumbling stone stairs leading downward. A cool breeze that smelled of mold wafted up from the depths.

  The priest looked at Clivo, the shade of his glasses somehow going even darker. “Below is the answer to the questions you seek.”

  Clivo gulped, but nodded for the priest to continue.

  The priest grabbed a flashlight from the wall and turned it on. “Follow closely.”

  They walked down the stairs and into a narrow underground cavern, its walls carved out of bedrock. The smell of damp dirt filled the air.

  “Follow me to the end,” the priest said, motioning Clivo forward. Clivo hadn’t even realized that his feet had quit moving. “You wanted the answers, and I will give you all of them.”

  Clivo forced his feet to shuffle forward as he pulled the blood sampler from his pocket and gripped it tightly.

  The priest held his light aloft, but the glow barely pierced the darkness ahead of him. He spoke in a flat monotone. “These caves were dug in secret, right after the construction of the church. Nobody knew about them. They were kept a mystery. The only people who knew about their existence were the DEAD!”

  The priest whirled around, pointing his flashlight at a cavity in the wall where a skeleton lay, its vacant eye sockets staring directly at Clivo.

  Clivo screamed in shock, then sprang forward to tackle the priest.

  “Now, hold on!” the priest yelled as he dropped the light.

  Clivo grabbed the man’s arm and stabbed it with the blood sampler, the light on the device springing to life.

  “Ow! What the devil are you doing?” the priest complained, his spooky demeanor completely gone.

  “Just give me a second, please,” Clivo said, sweat pouring down his face as he held down the priest with one hand and clutched the blood sampler in the other.

  “You knocked me over!” the priest complained again. “Oh, for the love of holy water, I’ve lost my glasses!”

  “I’d appreciate just another moment of patience, please!” Clivo said as the blood slowly crept up into the chamber.

  It seemed to take forever until the familiar words lit up the screen: NOT IMMORTAL.

  Clivo couldn’t believe it; he had been so sure. He grabbed the priest by his collar and held the flashlight up close to his face. “Look into my eyes.”

  The priest shied away. “What are you going to do, hypnotize me?”

  “Just please look into my eyes! Please!”

  The priest popped his eyes wide open in an exaggerated manner and stared straight at Clivo, who saw that his reflection appeared right side up. “There! Are you happy?”

  Clivo sank back against the dirt wall, disappointed and exhausted. The priest struggled to his feet after a moment of flailing in the folds of his robe. “You attacked me! A priest, of all people! Do you mind telling me what these shenanigans are all about?”

  Clivo crawled on his hands and knees, searching for the priest’s glasses, which he eventually found underneath a skeleton’s leg bone. “I’m really sorry, sir. I thought you were a monster.”

  “A monster?” the priest exclaimed in disbelief. “Do I look like a monster?”

  Clivo looked at the rail-thin man with hollow eyes and cheeks. He kind of did look like a scrawny version of Frankenstein’s monster, but Clivo figured it was probably best not to mention that. “No, sir, it’s just … Well, you were wearing sunglasses inside—” He handed the man the glasses, embarrassed.

  “Because I left my regular ones at home!” the priest said indignantly as he put them on.

  “—and you kind of freaked me out, bringing me down into this tomb! What did you expect me to do?” Clivo said, doing his best to defend himself.

  The priest looked at the ceiling in exasperation. “It’s what the kids want! They love coming to see the tombs and happen to enjoy the little show I put on! That’s what I figured you were here for! I’ll have you know I’m very popular.”

  “I’m sure you are, sir. It’s a wonderful show. Just super scary if you’re not really prepared for it,” Clivo said sheepishly.

  The priest rubbed his arm where a dot of blood had risen from Clivo stabbing him. “What’d you stab me with? It’s not a poisonous dart or something, is it?”

  “No, sir,” Clivo said, holding up the blood sampler, “it’s just a device to check to see if someone’s a monster or not.”

  Thankfully, the priest began chuckling instead of asking further questions. “You kids and your imaginations. I had a boy in here last week who made a special potion that he was sure would bring these skeletons to life and cause them to dance around.” The priest looked over at the bones, his eyes taking on a faraway look. “But if you’ve come looking for monsters, you’ve come to the right place. These islands are old; people have inhabited them for hundreds of thousands of years, and they sure do love their legends. There’s a lot of mysticism here, a lot of ghosts—maybe even a few monsters.”

  “Would you mind telling me about some of them?” Clivo asked, eager to get any information the old priest might have that could make his mission easier.

  The priest looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. “That I will not do. But you can read about them on your own in the Quester’s Cave.”

  XVI

  Clivo and the priest began making their way out of the tomb, with Clivo feeling much more relaxed even though he was in an old crypt surrounded by skeletons.

  “So, whose skeletons are these?” Clivo asked, shying away from a set of dusty bones.

  The priest reached over and shook the hand of one of the skeletons, almost causing Clivo to begin dry-heaving. “Oh, these are fake. I thought you might have figured that out from the pirate clothes I dressed them in.”

  Clivo looked closer at the skeleton next to him and guffawed when he noticed it was wearing an eye patch and had a peg leg. “Yeah, I guess I wasn’t paying that much attention, what with the spookiness of this tomb and all.”

  “It’s actually not a tomb, just an old storage space used to keep things cool back before we had refrigerators.” The priest paused at the base of the stairs and gave Clivo a wink. “But I prefer to keep it as my year-round haunted house.”

  They climbed to the top of the stairs, but instead of heading into the office, they veered through a dark wooden door into a candlelit room. A long table ran the length of it, and leather-bound books that looked to be older than the c
hurch itself lay on pieces of colorful silk.

  “What is this place?” Clivo asked in awe. The air smelled deliciously like candle wax, and the cool air wafting up from the tomb made the temperature pleasant.

  “It’s the Quester’s Cave,” the priest said proudly. “These books tell the tales of all the monsters and spirits that roam these islands. After the kids get their little show in the tomb, they’re allowed in here. They can research the specter of their choice and someday, if they choose, they go on a quest to find it.”

  “It looks like I’m in exactly the right place, then,” Clivo said, thinking about how much Amelia would love this room where she could spend hours reading all the secrets held in the books’ pages.

  “All right, then, I’ll leave you to it,” the priest said. “What’s your name, by the way? I’m Father Joseph, and I like to know the names of all the questers who pass through these doors.”

  Clivo paused. He didn’t exactly want Father Joseph to know his real name in case someone from the evil resistance began asking questions, but then he remembered the tracking chip and figured that anyone coming after him wouldn’t need to ask any questions to find him. “My name is Clivo, sir.”

  Father Joseph tilted his head. “Interesting name. Never heard that one before.”

  Clivo shrugged. “It was supposed to be Clive, after an actor who did a movie about an honorable man saving the world. But the nurse who wrote my name on the birth certificate had sloppy handwriting and it looked like ‘Clivo,’ so my parents stuck with it.”

  Father Joseph chuckled. “Life doesn’t always turn out the way we expect, does it?”

  “You can say that again,” Clivo sighed.

  Father Joseph patted him on the shoulder. “It’s time for me to take the confessions of the parishioners. Please stay as long as you wish.”

  Father Joseph exited the room, leaving Clivo alone with the tomes in front of him. He took a seat and opened the first book, the parchment pages crackling beneath his fingers.

  Clivo intended to quickly find whatever information he could on the aswang, but he was immediately distracted by reading about the other legends of the Philippines. He read about how questers came to Mount Banahaw in hopes of seeing one of the dwarfs who were supposed to live amid the rocks. Many visited the Hinatuan Enchanted River, which was said to have been built by fairies. His personal favorite was Mount Makiling, where a witch named Maria supposedly lived to protect the green forest.

  He thought about how much fun he and the Blasters would have running around the islands searching for dwarfs and fairies. That was something they could do together when Clivo wouldn’t have to worry about their safety. But that would have to be put aside for another time, after they had saved the world.

  Clivo forced himself to close the book and reached for another, this one with a terrifying image of a sinewy creature flying through the air on massive wings—the aswang.

  Clivo opened it and the spine cracked as if it hadn’t been touched in years, as if other questers knew better than to even entertain the idea of searching for such a creature. The parchment was old and faded, but the ink looked fresh, as if the pages had never been exposed to sunlight.

  Whereas the other books spent a lot of time explaining the history and stories of local legends with great exuberance, the pages of this book were blank save for a few in the middle. There was hardly any information at all, and what there was seemed to be restrained. The book only mentioned how the aswang shape-shifted at the full moon, how it flew higher than the clouds and was impossible to catch, and how it changed islands every twenty years so nobody would notice that it never aged.

  That was some new information to Clivo. He could now narrow his search to people who had moved to the island in the last twenty years, though how he’d figure that out was beyond him.

  He turned another page and sucked in his breath as he stared at the illustration of a devil-faced creature. Underneath was an eloquently scrolled caption:

  The aswang feeds on the living.

  The aswang thrives on death.

  If you find it, destroy it.

  Demons have no place wandering the earth.

  Clivo closed the book and put it delicately back on its cloth, as if just reading the words could somehow anger the aswang. But nothing could get the image of the distorted face with sharp fangs and black eyes out of his head.

  Clivo walked back to town, grateful for the sunshine on his face. The chill of the church’s tomb combined with the warning from the tome had given him a massive case of the heebie-jeebies.

  If you find it, destroy it.

  His job was to protect the cryptids, not destroy them. But did that hold true for the cryptid that might just be pure evil—and the immortal?

  He shook his head, realizing that before deciding what to do with the aswang, he actually had to catch the thing. A thing of pure evil that didn’t belong on the planet. Should be easy enough, Clivo thought, as he sighed in exasperation.

  Clivo was so engrossed in his thoughts that he didn’t even notice the car barreling toward him.

  “Look out!” came a voice to his left.

  His eyes shot up just in time to see a Cadillac only feet from hitting him, the driver engrossed in singing loudly along with some song while squeezing his eyes shut.

  Clivo leaped out of the way, right into the woman who had shouted the warning to him. She fell backward with a cry of shock, dropping a large plastic bag.

  “Oh my gosh! I’m so sorry!” Clivo scrambled to his knees and reached for the woman, who was on her back, rolling from side to side and laughing as if something incredibly funny had just happened.

  “Oh, honey!” she said in a thick accent that Clivo couldn’t quite place. “The look on your face is so funny! I have never seen anything like it!”

  “Can I help you?” Clivo asked, gently assisting the woman to a sitting position. “Are you okay?”

  The woman looked at Clivo with the most ancient, wrinkled face he had ever seen. It was like a peach that had been left to dry in the sun. Her eyelids were so heavy that her eyes were mere slits, yet even among the folds and sagging skin, Clivo could somehow detect a smile by a slight lifting at the corners of her dry lips. She wore a simple flowered dress and, oddly, smelled like the sands of Egypt.

  “Oh, honey, I am fine,” the old woman said. “Believe me, I have been through worse.”

  “Shoot, you’re bleeding,” Clivo said, motioning to her hand.

  She brought her bleeding thumb to her lips and sucked on it. After a moment, she proudly presented her thumb to Clivo. “See? No more blood! I am okay, honey.”

  “Okay, but if you have any broken bones, I don’t think a bit of spit will help,” Clivo said.

  The woman swatted at him playfully. “Oh, you are funny!”

  Clivo helped the woman to her feet. She was so stooped over with age that she barely came to his chest. He picked up her bag, which was filled with what looked to be bony slabs of raw meat wrapped in plastic.

  “Are you planning a barbecue for the whole town tonight?” Clivo asked.

  The woman put her gnarled fingers to her lips and giggled. “No, honey. I am the town butcher. Come. My store is right here.”

  They walked down the road a few steps and came to a small shop with a painted window that read DAYEA’S DELICIOUS DELICACIES.

  “Are you Dayea?” Clivo asked as he opened the door for the old woman, the small brass bell above them dinging with their arrival.

  “That is me, honey,” Dayea said. She pointed a yellowed fingernail at Clivo. “Your name?”

  “My name’s Clivo, ma’am.”

  “Good name. Strong name.” Dayea shuffled behind a glass case that was full of ground beef and put on an apron streaked with bloody handprints. “Please empty bag here, honey.”

  She motioned for Clivo to put the sack down next to a butcher’s block, which he did, pulling the wrapped slabs out of the bag one by one. As he laid them down he
glanced out the window to where the Cadillac had sped off in a plume of exhaust.

  “Thanks for saving me, by the way,” Clivo said. “If you hadn’t said something, I would’ve ended up stuck to that car’s grille.”

  “Bah, that man is such a bother,” Dayea said, slowly lowering herself onto a chair. “New to town and thinks he owns the place already.”

  Clivo paused in his task, his hands hovering over the steaks as a thought came to him. “Have you lived here for a while, Dayea?”

  “Oh, yes, my home is here, always has been, for a long time.” Dayea’s shiny eyes were barely visible beneath her fleshy lids.

  “So, I guess you know a lot of people in town, being the local butcher and all.”

  “I do, I do. Nice people, nice town, always has been,” Dayea said.

  “It’s such a pretty place, I can’t imagine people ever wanting to leave. I bet a lot of people move here, though,” Clivo said, resuming his task of stacking the steaks.

  “Yes, yes, a couple of new people. The man who almost ran you over just got here. At the end of the block, the Santos family moved in; nice people. On the other side of town, in the purple house, lives Bathala Bautista. Nice man, but silly name. Name of a god, the one who created man and earth.” Dayea let out a cackle. “Silly name.”

  Clivo quickly crumpled up the empty sack and threw it into a trash can. “Thank you, Dayea. It was really nice meeting you. Can I do anything else to help you before I go?”

  Dayea kissed her knobby fingers and patted Clivo’s hand. “Sweet boy. Dayea is fine. Come back again, okay?” She stood up with a pained wince and then grabbed a cleaver and began chopping away at the meat.

  Clivo exited the butcher shop, almost forgetting to say goodbye to Dayea. He was too focused on finding this man who called himself Bathala.

  * * *

  Clivo strode through town, his eyes still on alert for any sign of the evil resistance. He was also looking for the purple house that Dayea had mentioned.