What the #@&% Is That?

by John Joseph Adams

  A shout goes up among the masked order when they realize what’s happened. We follow them as they run up the stairs, into the chapel, out into the storm.

  “We’ve got to find it. Call in anyone and everyone you can,” the woman instructs her people. “We’ll put together a search party. We’ll search until it’s found.”

  She turns to us with contempt in her eyes. “Look for it. Look for it everywhere. You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  I notice then that Kristina and Aaron are missing too.

  * * * *

  Two hours later, maybe three, maybe four. Kyle and I have been stumbling through the woods for what seems like an eternity, maybe longer, maybe less, looking for any sign. Kyle’s holding a flashlight; its beam has begun to falter. I’m holding his hand. Wet leaves and rough branches are slapping us, scratching us. We’re slipping and falling in the mud. Unspeakable noises whine from the dark.

  “What’s that . . . over there?” Kyle asks.

  So tired we can hardly move, but knowing we must, we trudge forward. Snagged on a sharp branch is a flutter of white—a scrap from Kristina’s veil.

  A little farther ahead, what looks like one of Aaron’s shoes.

  And then dropping open before us is the entrance to a cave. Pitch black. Reeking death.

  The cave is a tunnel. We walk through darkness: forward, forward, down, and down. The tunnel opens into a yawning cavern, too high and too deep and too endless to be real.

  Far off, beyond the gulf, is an immense stone throne. The bride and the groom kneel before it. There are fires burning, primal and fierce. The horde is larger and stronger than before.

  The prince sits upon its throne. It has ruled before. It could rule again.

  Simple and cunning, it fixes us with bright, burning eyes. We are ignorant, it says. We are selfish and monstrous and violent and cruel. We belong to the dark.

  Beyond lies the hidden spring, where death bubbles forth from one of the many secret mouths of hell.

  Kyle and I kneel weeping before it. It has seen us and known us for what we are.

  ONLY UNCLENCH YOUR HAND

  ISABEL YAP

  They’re killing chickens again in the backyard. Last time, a headless chicken ran in and danced blood puddles around my feet. I can’t relax, anyway, because of another thrumming headache, so I grab a textbook and decide to get a few pages in by the river. As I make my way down the rocky path I hear Tito Benjo laugh and Aling Dinday scream for the chickens to stay still. I should be used to noise, from Manila, but here in the province, every sound is amplified. In a village this small, you can hear everything for miles.

  It would be good for my review, Mom and Dad said. No distractions. When you get home, you’ll be all set to pass the entrance tests. So, after graduation and three weeks of rest and sleep, Tito Benjo picked me up and drove me out here. They were right, mostly—I can barely get a cell phone signal, let alone a few bars of Wi-Fi, and even then I have to work out of the village carinderia. But I finished my study plan, with time to review. Besides, I’ll be heading home in a week. I hold up my arm to block out the sun, and see a mosquito latched onto my elbow. When I swat it, blood smears across my palm. “Damn bug.”

  “Damn bug,” someone echoes behind me, the English exaggerated. I turn around, grinning, and seize Edna by the armpits. She shrieks as I lift her into the air. “No, Ate Macky! Bloody hands!”

  I laugh, put her down, and wipe my hand on my shorts. Edna is the daughter of Aling Dinday and Manong Edgar, the caretakers of Tito Benjo’s farm. I think she’s nine, though she’s tiny enough to be six. She’s one of the few people in the village who humor me, who don’t mind the English I mix with fumbling Tagalog, or the short hair and comfy clothes that get me mistaken for a boy. If not for her company, it would have been a pretty lonely summer. I might never even have set foot outside Tito Benjo’s property.

  “Where are you going? Studying?”

  “I want to. But my head hurts.”

  Edna makes a monkey face—wide eyes, jutted lower lip. “If you have a headache, you should see Mang Okat.”

  “Who?”

  “Mang Okat,” she says, tugging my arm. “Our healer.”

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I get these headaches pretty often.” I don’t mention that they’ve gotten worse, or that they only started this summer, when I decided to pursue law. I don’t mention that I think faith healings are whack, fit only for TV specials and sensational news.

  “He can fix it!” she says, still tugging. Because I like Edna, and my brain hurts, and I don’t think I can concentrate anyway, I let her drag me off.

  * * * *

  Edna bounds up the steps to Mang Okat’s house, which to my city-girl sensibilities looks kinda like a hut. “Manong! I brought someone new for you!”

  “New?” He peers out. His weathered, wrinkled face unfolds into a grin. “Ahh-ahh! Ser Benjo’s niece, the Manileña!”

  “Hello, po,” I say, ducking my head as I enter. He gestures for me to sit on a plastic chair by the window. I can’t refuse. Edna perches on a bench across from us.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “She has a headache,” Edna says.

  “Yes, po,” I answer, helplessly. Mom got my head checked out when I first complained—but the brain scan they took showed nothing. Take some painkillers, they said, but I’ve already had my quota for the day. I decide to just go along with it, since it can’t possibly get worse. Mang Okat slaps his hand on my forehead. It’s greasy and smells of herbs.

  “Hmm-hmm.” He turns to his table, which is covered in vegetables and herbs and jars of—potions, I guess, or liquids that are supposedly potions. He turns back, holding a glass filled with water in one hand, and a small bamboo tube in the other. There’s a black stone in the glass. “Stay still,” he instructs, holding the glass against my head. I glance at Edna, but she just smiles back. Mang Okat dips the tube into the glass and starts blowing into it, making the water bubble. He hovers the glass back and forth and around my head. I feel profoundly weird. To distract myself, I watch the movement of a bug across the floor—it looks like a giant fly, but it doesn’t have wings. Some kind of beetle. It skitters from one wooden plank to another, then races up the window ledge and disappears over the edge.

  At once, the pain in my head evaporates. It’s a sudden, sweet relief that extends from my forehead down to my shoulders—I didn’t realize how heavily the ache had been sitting on me. “Better?” Mang Okat asks.

  I nod. My breath comes languid, heavy; I feel like having the best sleep ever.

  He holds out the glass. The water has turned murky green, with solid particles floating in it. “This was inside you,” he says, before dumping the water out in a plastic bucket.

  “Thank you,” I say, rather awed.

  Edna beams. “Told you so!”

  I fish in my pocket and pull out a crumpled fifty-peso bill. “Here, Manong.” I hold it out.

  He waves it off, brow wrinkling.

  “No, please,” I say.

  “Oh, just take it, Tay,” someone says from the door.

  “Ate Senya! I thought you were still in Manila!” Edna launches off the bench and wraps around the legs of the woman coming in. She looks a little older than me. Her mouth is set in a tired smile, and she has severe eyebags. She’s wearing a yellow tank top stained with sweat so that I can see her bra through it, and a sky blue skirt. She wipes her face with the back of her hand while setting down a woven bag of groceries.

  “I came back three days ago,” Senya laughs. She pats Edna’s head because Edna is still wrapped around her like a leech. This makes me feel oddly jealous.

  “Welcome back, anak,” Mang Okat says.

  “Tay, you should stop healing for free. And besides, I think the Manileña has some cash to spare.” She grins—probably to show she’s just ribbing me—but it stings a little, even if I’m used to it. After a brief pause, Mang Okat takes the bill from my fingers. He passes Senya
, gives her a quick kiss on the cheek, then holds out his hand. She gives him a pack of cigarettes, and he stumps out of the house.

  She looks at the bucket against the wall, mouth quirked.

  “Your dad is pretty amazing,” I say, suddenly defensive. Quack powers or not, there’s no denying the fact that I feel a million times better.

  “I know,” she answers softly. “I’m glad he was able to help. Don’t you have any paracetamol, though? I bet it’s more effective.”

  I decide not to argue, and shrug. My longing for a nap is overwhelming.

  “Ate Senya, be nice. I like Ate Macky,” Edna says.

  “I’m always nice.” She crouches down to whisper something in Edna’s ear, and they giggle. Feeling left out, I glance out the window. There’s a cockroach creeping on the ledge. It scuttles down the wall, across the floor, toward Senya. She doesn’t pay attention, even when it crawls between her feet, disappearing somewhere under her skirt. It crawls out again on the other side and drops down between the planks of wood.

  * * * *

  Edna has to go to the market with Aling Dinday the next day, so I take my backpack and decide to try my luck with the carinderia Wi-Fi. My head feels so light and clear, I practically skip down the road. Manong Edgar waves at me from where he’s knee-deep in a bunch of Tito Benjo’s goats. I wave back.

  The lady at the carinderia knows me by now. She fills a paper boat with greasy chicken skin, squirting banana ketchup on top, and hands it to me with a bottle of Coke. I settle in at my favorite table, waving away the flies that cluster in bunches, hoping for scraps off people’s plates. I’m holding up my MiFi, searching for a signal, when I hear glass shattering.

  “Fuck you!” a man shouts, and someone shouts back, “Let go of me!”

  The Carinderia Lady makes a face at the street, but she stays where she is, waving her flyswatter back and forth. I dash outside. Mang Okat’s daughter—Senya—is trying to wrench her arm away from some shirtless dude in low-hanging shorts. Bits of beer bottle litter the ground around them. A trickle of blood drips down his face, but my eyes fix on the knife he is holding. Senya is gripping the jagged edge of a beer bottle, but the knife will be faster, more precise.

  “Hey!” I default to English in my anger. “Let her go!” The man turns, eyes blown to their whites, lip curled. He glares at me, calculating. I’m lean and empty-handed and not that near—but I’m the niece of Tito Benjo, the governor, the landowner, and you don’t fuck with politicians.

  He releases Senya’s arm and stalks off, still clutching his knife. The look of searing hate he throws at her, then at me, makes me want to run after him and beat his head with a stick—but I don’t. Senya rubs her arm, looking at me warily.

  After he disappears around a corner, she says, “You didn’t need to do that. I can take care of myself, Miss Macky.”

  The formality surprises me, that she thinks of me that way too. “I know, I just—what a dick.”

  Senya manages a huff of laughter. She comes over, still rubbing her arm. We walk to my table.

  “You’re . . . funny, you know that?”

  I smile. “You want some chicken skin?”

  She shakes her head but takes a seat. There’s a brief pause where I sense the Carinderia Lady watching us, but Senya glances at her, and the Carinderia Lady suddenly starts talking on her cell phone. My cheeks grow hot. If she’s gossiping, it’s not that different from what I have to deal with in Manila—the casually tossed-out tomboy, the more piercing lesbo. I’ve got my friends, my humor, and enough self-preservation to not let it get to me most of the time. It’s not supposed to fucking matter, how I dress and who or what I like. But I can’t escape the blabbering mouths, not even out here.

  I tap my fingers on my laptop. My MiFi has absolutely no signal. “Did you know that guy?” I ask finally.

  “I told him I didn’t want to see him.” She rubs one finger down my bottle of Coke, still cold from the icebox. A ring of water from the condensation stains the plastic tablecloth. “I don’t know how to get the message across. I forget about him till I’m back here.”

  “What do you do in Manila?”

  “I study. Nursing. I’m old,” she adds quickly. “It took Itay and me a while to save enough. He wants me to get work in a hospital abroad, after. That’ll make it worth it. But if I do end up going . . . Well, Itay does okay for himself, but . . .” A brief sadness crosses her face, and I remember Mang Okat kissing her cheek, her exasperation at his work. Then her eyes fix on the textbooks I’ve piled next to my computer. She picks one up. “Law?”

  I nod, unable to ignore the way her eyebrows tighten. “Hopefully.”

  She sighs. “Corporate, right? Or something like that?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.” I haven’t even gotten in.

  She dips her finger in the ring of condensation and drags it around the tablecloth. “Doesn’t matter, I guess.” I keep quiet while she continues. “Miss Macky, you and Ser Benjo and your family back home in Manila, you’ll probably be okay. People like him”—she jerks her head at the road—“they won’t bother you. They won’t try. Random bastards won’t try. If anything happens, someone would at least try to solve it.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “Even stars and athletes and people from—people with power—sometimes they get attacked. Sometimes, their cases don’t get solved too. Look at—uh, Nida Blanca.”

  “You don’t understand,” she says, with a tired smile. “It’s different here. We just get used to it. Besides, if what you’re saying is true—why would you ever want to study something so useless?” She looks up from her water-tracing.

  My mouth feels dry. I take a sip from my Coke. “I want to help,” I say—but it’s true; I’m probably not going into criminal law. Too much shit, too much stress. I’m not cut out to become a burning Defender of Justice. It’s too easy to get disillusioned, or at least that’s what my parents tell me, and they’ve both been practicing for years. “Same reason you’re doing nursing, right?”

  Senya nods, slowly, but with more deliberation than I could ever muster.

  * * * *

  I stay at the carinderia until evening, when the flickering fluorescent no longer helps. There’s still a faint streak of pink way in the distance, but I use the camera flash of my phone to light my path as I walk back to Tito Benjo’s, because there are no streetlights and too many potholes.

  Halfway there, I hear violent retching somewhere ahead of me on the dark path. The local alcohol is cheap and goes straight to one’s liver. Tito Benjo asks me to drink with him every now and then; it’s pretty awful, but I wouldn’t dare turn my host down. I scoot to the other side of the road and hold my phone-light up. A man is doubled over; the wet chunks of his dinner splatter the ground while he heaves. Disgusted, I try to edge past him, but my light catches the mess he has made on the ground, and I see . . . tiny black balls of . . . what looks like hair stained red with blood. He vomits again. More dark balls splat on the ground, with shiny pink things that look like slugs or tongues. The man glances up, panting. “You,” he manages, one hand gripping his bare stomach.

  I see a knife handle poking out of his shorts, and remember—but even if he’s a fucker, if he’s barfing out his intestines, I have to do—something. “Do you—” I ask, but he spits, wipes his mouth, and staggers away. I cringe, relieved and grossed out. Already, a trail of ants has caught the mess and is sifting through the vomit. Feeling sick, I run the rest of the way back.

  * * * *

  Tito Benjo laughs.

  “Puking out hairballs? Like a cat?”

  “Tito, I’m serious.”

  “Must have eaten something awful for dinner.” Tito Benjo shrugs. “That kid—he’s usually up to no good, always sleazing, but he’s never actually done anything.”

  I remember his searing look of hate. “He carries a knife around.”

  “Lots of people do, here. You can’t stop them. They’re usually blunt.” He waves it away. “
How are your studies going?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “If you don’t pass your exam, I’ll be in trouble with your mom. Ha-ha!”

  I grin, because Tito Benjo laughs far too much, and I peck him on the cheek, excusing myself for the evening. Tito Benjo’s house has concrete walls. There’s no gate, but there are locks on the doors. The path is long and the farm surrounds us and no one would dare. I think of Mang Okat and Senya in her hut, Edna and her parents in their own hut, and that drunken man raving through the night, with a knife in his shorts and the smell of vomit and blood hanging off him.

  * * * *

  Edna appears in our kitchen the next day while I’m ladling out tinola soup. “Mama says you’re going back at the end of this week?”

  “Yep.”

  “You didn’t tell me!”

  There are so few kids in this village; I realize that I’m a rare friend of Edna’s too. “I’m sorry! I thought you knew.” I pass her a bowl of soup. “I’ll come back next summer,” I say—but I won’t have an exam to pass then, and I’ll probably have summer class. “I’ll try to come back next summer.”

  “Try, okay?”

  I nod. We sip our soup.

  “Ate Senya said we could visit her house later. She’s making mais con hielo.”

  “Oh, good,” I blurt out. I suddenly remember the blood and puke spilling from that dude’s mouth—but that path was very dark, even with my phone-light on. He probably did just eat and drink too much, and anyway, I was still learning about all the weird local delicacies.

  “So you wanna go?”

  “Uh—er—” I was relieved that he hadn’t gotten to them—I had been secretly scared about that all night—but that didn’t really mean I wanted to go.

  “It’s mais con hielo.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  On our way to Mang Okat’s, I find my eyes trailing the ground, both hoping and not hoping to find proof of last night’s encounter. A part of the road has vomit, but in the daylight, the color is more watermelon pink, nothing like blood at all. There are no hairballs. Edna skips over the trail of ants creeping across the mess; if she finds nothing weird, then neither do I.