Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (59 page)

“I love you,” he said, but she didn’t hear. The connection was lost.

C
risanto quit the following day. David asked for two weeks’ notice but he refused. He’d been offered a full-time position at the
Inquirer,
he said, and had to leave for Makati City immediately. David asked if his decision had anything to do with the woman in the forest. Crisanto shook his head, but the truth was in his eyes. That childhood fear really
did
run deep.

Torrential rain delayed clearing by three days, with several heavy-equipment operators also quitting as the work neared Dalisay Magana’s troublesome little shack. This bought her more time as David sought replacements for the workers he’d lost, which proved challenging—incomprehensibly so, in a region crippled with unemployment.

Word had gotten out that Dalisay Magana had refused to vacate, and it appeared nobody wanted to make her do so.

David gave her a final warning—a brief, simple notice that he pinned to her front door, with the date,
HULYO 21
, circled in red.

His irritation stemmed not from having to iron out wrinkles—that was the job—but from their ridiculous nature, and from having to delay his return to Canada. His mood escalated to rage
when, on the morning of July twenty-first, he arrived at the site to find it abandoned. The machinery was parked in a cold yellow row, hulking and silent. Nothing in the field office but empty desks. David e-mailed his supervisor to inform him of this development and to assure him it was under control. He clicked send and then flipped over one of the desks and threw an electric fan against the wall. It was ten a.m. and he desperately wanted a drink—a serious head-fuck of a drink, more like a gunshot—but first, he had business to attend.

S
he had seen his final notice. It was screwed into a ball, floating beside the insects in the basin of dirty water. He called her name and thumped on her door. No reply. He waited, then thumped again. Still nothing.
Bitch has gone
, he thought.
Vacated after all. Or maybe out sucking babies from wombs.

Dull fabric flapped in the nearest window and David snatched at it, tearing it free. He looked inside the shack, hoping to find it empty of possessions—a sure sign that the woman had acceded. The meat smell was nauseating and he covered his nose and mouth. In the gloom, he saw a table and chair and a wood-burning stove with a few ashes glowing. There were several dead macaques strung from the ceiling by their tails. He saw a bucket with a hole in it. A straw mattress. A pair of legs upright in the corner with nothing above the waist.

David recoiled, inhaling suddenly. His lungs flooded with foul air and he turned away, spluttering. He went back to the window, looked again, saw long shadows in the corner and nothing more. One of the macaques twisted on its tail and it had no eyes but still stared at him. Something bristled across the ceiling, then a large bird—perhaps the one that had been trapped when he and Crisanto came here—broke for daylight and rose into the clear sky.

He spat in the dirt and backed away.

“Nobody home,” he said.

Good enough.

T
he keys to the heavy-duty machinery were in a lockbox in the field office. David selected one of the medium-size ’dozers and plowed a route through the forest. He didn’t hesitate when he reached the shack that once belonged to Dalisay Magana. It toppled in a cloud of dust and stink, ground into the dirt beneath the dozer’s continuous tracks. He scraped the trash up with the blade and rumbled over it again, feeling it pop and crack, like standing on a carton of eggs. His eyes were manic, delighted circles.

He gathered the debris again and looked at it—everything reduced to unrecognizable pieces. Half a truckload, no more. He nodded, satisfied. This particular wrinkle had been well and truly ironed out. Dalisay Magana was no longer an obstruction. Now, perhaps, the workers would return.

David turned the bulldozer around and rumbled away, and he heard, even above the engine’s snarl, a long, hurt sound from the treetops. Some rain-forest creature. Something that screamed.

H
e knew her as Illusion. Her real name, she said, was Maria.

Rain against the window, too wild to be soothing, and a wind that bullied more than blew. They matched the storm for passion, for energy. David with his body ceaseless, Maria rising into him with the power and delicacy of warm air. She wrapped her legs around him, ankles crossed at the small of his back. He spoke her name—Illusion, not Maria—and her tongue glazed his throat. They finished breathless. She took her contact lenses out.

They sat afterward at the window, in the same chair, the same sheet wrapped around them. They watched the storm. In the last hour, PAGASA had advanced the warning signal from number two to number three. It wasn’t Alayna, but people were understandably
scared. Many had packed what they could and left their homes, intent on reaching points farther inland. The storm was named Diwata, meaning “goddess”—mostly benevolent, but known to evoke wrath if not afforded sufficient respect.

David stood and walked naked to the table. The laptop he’d used to Skype with Angie was shut down, lid closed. Next to it, a fresh bottle of Calibre 69 and a glass. He unscrewed the cap, poured generously.

“You want some?”

“No.”

“I have another glass.”

“I’m okay.”

He nodded, sipped. Maria gathered the sheet to her body and he shook his head. She removed it completely.

“Open your legs.”

She did.

He stood for a moment and looked at her, sipping his whiskey. She smiled, then gestured toward the window.

“Aren’t you scared?”

“I don’t scare easily,” he said.

His flight to Manila had been canceled. Consequently, he would miss his connection to Hong Kong, and then Toronto. This trip had proved demanding, and all he wanted was to go home. A visit to Snakebite—with its unbridled sound and strong alcohol—had numbed his exasperation. Maria was there, as Illusion, with her blue hair and green eyes. The banknotes in David’s wallet led like bread crumbs to his hotel room. That was when the storm rolled in, wilder than forecast.

He sat with her again. She curled herself around him. He kissed her hand and she kissed his—his left hand, close to his wedding ring.

“How long have you been married?” she asked.

“Eight years.”

“You have children?”

“No,” he replied after a pause. He drew his hand from hers. “I’m not comfortable talking about this.”

“Okay.”

“She’s a better wife than I am a husband.” He finished his whiskey. “That’s all you need to know.”

She sighed and kissed his shoulder. He felt the quick tick of her heart against his back. The wind roared and something wet slapped against the balcony door. Maria jumped and clutched him, but it was only a palm frond. It tapped plaintively against the glass before being whipped away.

“What about your family?” David asked. “What do they think about what you do?”

“My father and two brothers were killed by Alayna. Too proud to evacuate. My mother lives with a family she barely knows in Tent City. It’s cramped and uncomfortable. She has no privacy, no respect. I dance—I do what I do—so that I can buy her clean clothes and warm blankets, so that she doesn’t have to eat out of a box. I’m also saving for a place for us both to live. Away from Palla. I want to put all this behind me and start again.”

“You’re ashamed of yourself?”

“I was raised an honest Catholic girl. This is why I wear the blue hair and green eyes. It’s a mask. It would break my father’s heart if he could see me . . . but I do what needs to be done.”

“Where’s your mother tonight?”

Tent City had been dismantled, packed into boxes, to be reassembled when the storm had passed. The residents of this makeshift town were bused elsewhere. It was no way to live.

“Somewhere safe,” she said. “I hope.”

The lights fluttered, then went out, along with the glowing green digits of the clock on the nightstand, and the air conditioner. Power
outages were frequent, even on calm days. Neither David nor Maria flinched. She curled closer in the darkness. A few seconds later, the generator kicked in. The lamp came back on, not quite as bright. The air conditioner pulsed more than flowed.

“Let’s go back to bed,” David said.

They never made it.

T
he drapes on both the window and balcony doors were open; David wanted to see—and feel closer to—the storm. Privacy wasn’t a concern; they were on the top floor, sixty feet above street level. Nobody could see in. David, therefore, assumed the woman swirling on the other side of the balcony doors was Maria’s partial reflection. At least to begin with. Then he realized it couldn’t be; Maria was facing the wrong way, and as she stepped toward the bed—away from the doors—the “reflection” loomed nearer.

David’s mind struggled to explicate the impossible. Other details filtered through, confusing him further. The reflection had yellow eyes that pierced the rain, the darkness, like tiny headlights. She had nothing below the waist but a tied rope of intestine that thrashed in the wind. She had wings.

“No,” David said. A single syllable—a roadblock—between his eyes and brain.

Even when Maria turned, saw the creature, and screamed, he still refused to believe it was real. It was an ornate kite or elaborate prop. Something thrown up by the wind. Soon it would clatter harmlessly against the building and be carried away. He wiped his tired eyes. Looked again. The woman outside—the
half
woman—angled her muscular wings to combat the storm. Her long hair whipped and snapped.

Maria had stumbled backward, tripped over the sheet she had recently thrown from her body, and dropped to her knees. Urine
squirted from between her legs. She scratched her eyes, as if she could claw what she had seen from them.

“
Manananggal
,” she said, and then screamed it: “
MANANANGGAL!
”

David blinked, and in that millisecond he saw a dirty child pointing toward the thing she feared most of all. He saw a pair of legs with nothing above them standing in the shadows, and a decrepit shack folding beneath the blade of a Komatsu bulldozer.

“No,” he said again.

The
manananggal
grasped the balcony rail in bony hands, like a bird clutching its perch. She howled even above the storm. A long tongue unfurled from her mouth, rippled in the wind like a scarf. The balcony door trembled—the glass cracked—as she slammed her forehead against it. David thought of the cobra at Snakebite, always furious, always banging. He’d linked it to his guilt and that felt right.

She struck the glass a second time. And a third. The crack lengthened. A gust of wind filled her wings and she battled it, grasping the rail with one hand. She lowered her shoulders and threw her forehead against the glass once again. It shattered. The storm blew inward. The creature, too.

Rain and broken glass whipped around the room. It lacerated David’s face and chest. He curled into a ball and screamed. The
manananggal
clawed across the floor with her entrails bumping along behind, then unfolded her wings and lifted herself into the air, shrieking. David saw teeth unevenly spaced, brownish yellow, sharp as fishhooks. Rainwater sprayed from her wings as she worked them.

Maria reacted first—not surprising, given David’s state of disbelief. She grabbed his laptop from the table and threw it at the creature. It thumped between her sagging breasts and dropped to the floor. Maria followed with the whiskey bottle, then the glass, then the lamp. Each projectile found its target, but the
manananggal
barely flinched. Maria shook her head. She spread her naked arms and wept. The creature attacked.

Brutal power. Maria was whipped from her feet and thrown against the wall. Her pelvis shattered. Her skull cracked. She moaned and rolled in broken glass and tried getting to her feet, but there was no way. The
manananggal
flexed her wings and attacked again. Her ribbon tongue coiled around Maria’s throat and squeezed until blood leaked from her eyes. She let go and bit Maria’s face three times, tearing her lips and nose away and chewing them. Maria’s screams were weak and choked with blood. The
manananggal
flipped her onto her stomach. Tore chunks out of her lower back. Uncovered the base of her spine, grabbed it in one tight fist, and pulled. There was a tearing—almost a
purring—
sound as the vertebrae detached from the rib cage. Maria’s limbs jerked and flopped and she died with her throat bulging. The
manananggal
ate her stomach through the hole in her back. Her tongue slithered deep into Maria’s chest, grasped her heart, and plucked it free. She held it for David to see and then swallowed it completely. Her wings slapped at the swirling air. She grabbed Maria’s dangling spine in both hands, lifting her upper body from the floor, and with a savage twist—a revolting crack—she separated Maria’s head from her shoulders. It swung at the end of the vertebral column, like a watch on a chain, reminding David of the monkeys strung by their tails in the old woman’s shack. He blinked stupidly, his hold on reality weakening with every ragged breath, every drop of blood and rain. He watched the
manananggal
swing Maria’s head against the wall, leaving red prints the size of footballs, until it popped loose from the spine and rolled toward him. The creature scooped it up and smashed it repeatedly against the corner of the table, like a bird cracking a snail against a stone, until the skull first crumbled, then opened. She ate the brain quickly, noisily, then pushed her fingers into Maria’s mouth and split
her jaw open. She ate Maria’s tongue and crunched the thin bone of her hard palate. Shell-like remains spilled through her fingers. Another shriek—still hungry—and she turned her glowing eyes on David. He screamed again and ran for the door. The
manananggal
grabbed the back of his neck, lifted him from the floor. She twisted her half body and threw him effortlessly across the room, out the window, into the storm.