Midnight Stories: Crybaby

About Midnight Stories: October is the month of spooks and things that go bump in the night, so what better than a series of scary stories to get you in the mood for Halloween? Read on.

We moved to our new house on Moret Field in 1967 – I was in junior kindergarten, my youngest brother (at the time, because my mother would give birth to another boy the year after) was 4.

My parents moved us out of the pueblo because we were either asthmatics or were on daily injectable meds for bronchitis – and they figured the fresh suburbian  air would do us good.

In the new house, my two elder brothers shared a room, my elder sister and I another, and the youngest slept between my parents in the master’s bedroom. (And because most of us had upper-respiratory problems, my mother had adjoining doors made so she could check on us at night when we were in the throes of an attack).

For two years when he was four and five, our bunso would rouse the entire household with his crying just hours after we would settle down for the night. He would cry if the room was dark and my father would leave a nightlight on each time. He would say things like there was a face in the sliding-door’s wood grain* that would stare fixedly and angrily at him and make sounds like “ooom.”

He would drag his abrazador or bolster pillow and cry beside our bed outside our muskitero until one of us would get up and sit with him till the crying jag passed and he’d have mustered enough courage to return to his own bed.

One night it got pretty bad. He told my mother in between sobs that stray dogs were gathering at a spot in the creek across the road and were howling at what appeared to be a flickering light (candle?) in the water.

Tired of his nightly tantrums, my exhausted mother threatened him with a spanking if he didn’t put a stop to the nonsense at once.

My brother slunk off defeated, crying himself back to sleep.

The next day while we were at breakfast, we noticed a commotion outside our gates.

People were gathering at a spot across the road right in front of our house.

My father went to find out what it was all about. He came back with a troubled expression on his face. Seems a couple of passersby had to retrace their steps when they realized what they thought was a discarded doll lying among the kangkong or swamp cabbage which were rife in the creek – had an umbilical cord attached to it!

My mother – who was a nurse, as was our neighbor Lily – went out to investigate and confirmed it was a newly-born baby boy abandoned by its mother in the shallow brackish water.

Tita Lily and her husband Ñor Tut would whisk the dead baby off to the hospital after a while but the rest of us milled about with the neighbors, dumbstruck that a mother would deliberately leave her baby out to die like that.

The act was unthinkable in our closely-knit community where everyone knew everybody else’s children, looked out for them, fed them if they happened to be visiting in their home at mealtime.

Childless couple Pastor Belley and his wife down at the United Church of Christ of the Philippines said they wished she had left him at their doorstep instead.

But none would be more affected than my youngest brother: he reproached no one in particular although we all felt the question was directed at us: “I told you I heard a baby crying, I told you the dogs found something in the water. Why didn’t you believe me?!”

None of us could look him straight in the eye. Because none of us did, a baby was dead.

And not a day goes by that we don’t think about the life we could have saved – if only we had.

Postscript: My brother – the second to the youngest – would grow up to be a clairvoyant.

He sometimes used a homemade crossbow and slingshot to launch projectiles at unseen beings that made our dogs growl low in their throats with their tail between their legs.

In these late-night missions, he would have my dad beside him.

But none of us knew of the other’s experiences in complete detail until we graduated college and moved away from home.

*The face my brother Freddie saw in the wood grain was apparently the same face my brother Manolet would see in the bole of a mango tree (My Brother’s Monster) at a neighbor’s yard years later. Freddie said the face would follow him from room to room when he transferred beds after sightings.

It appears that my mother, my sister, two younger brothers and I had similar experiences in that house, and that my late father knew more than he was prepared to admit about their back stories. — BM, GMA News