Midnight Stories: A fluttering of wings

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.

I’m a late-sleeper and I went through a phase during which I could only fall asleep after hours of reading in an easy chair by our bedroom window.

Sometimes I’d fall asleep in the chair and wake to the twittering of some early birds, still wearing my glasses. Rarely did I turn in before one in the morning.

One Friday night (or in the full dark that is the precursor of dawn), I woke up with a start.

There being no sign of what woke me, I was about to go back to sleep when I heard it.

A sound like that of a strong wind whipping clothes left to dry on a sampayan. Or a rapid clack-clack-clack like rubber sandals slapping against feet during a brisk walk.

A quick check of the wall clock showed it was one in the morning—too late for the neighborhood boys to be engaged in a game of street basketball.

I opened the window closest to me and squinted at a blur of movement near one of our gate lamps. Did they lose their ball and send someone over our fence to retrieve it?

I realized I had removed my glasses sometime during the night and couldn’t make out what I was seeing.

I was on my way to retrieve them so I could switch on the gate lights when it hit me: the blur of movement I saw and the sound I heard were that of a fluttering of wings!

I quickly shut the window and drew the curtains over it. Goosebumps crawling all over me.

What did I just see?! If a bird made that image and sound, it must have been a very big bird! I shuddered at the thought of coming face to face with it at the window had I dallied long enough to look for my glasses and peeked out again.

Anxious to prove myself wrong, I immediately sought out the Bulasas, whose house is right across from ours once the neighborhood began stirring at around seven or eight that morning.

I asked Beng (as she worked around their garden) if she heard anything unusual in front of our gate at around one or two a.m. but she said she had not. So I figured that was that.

I pushed the incident out of my mind until I fell into conversation with another neighbor, one of the Villanueva sons, a full year after my sighting.

I asked Al casually as I was minding my kids in the village playground one Saturday and he was there with his daughters, why the kubo that used to be located beside their house (and where they used to hold their Friday-night drinking sessions) had been discarded at a vacant lot at the edge of our street.

Al said he and one of his drinking buddies came face to face with a manananggal that landed on its roof one time—and that was the end of their kubo gatherings.

The blood froze in my veins. Only a firewall separates us from the Villanueva residence. And here finally was validation of what I saw hovering above our gate! Al was widely regarded as the village "register"—he knew everybody and everything that happens in our place.

Seeing my incredulous stare, Al went on to say one of his daughters, Fina, saw the same thing fly past their window while she was brushing her hair in front of the mirror and he reminded me that I once rang them up one night to check what it was that crashed on our roof and was walking around up there.

Although I remembered the incident he spoke of, even I was barely able to believe these mythical creatures exist. Folklore describe manananggals as creatures who are able to separate their upper torso from their lower extremities and fly with the aid of bat-like wings.

(The wooshing I heard when I opened the window back then very much resembled the sound a big kite would make if it caught the wind in its flaps. So would bat wings if the membranes spanning across these—flapped against the wind.)

The creature’s upper torso supposedly dangles its entrails as it flies off, lands on roofs and lets down a proboscis much like a butterfly’s to suck the innards of their victims.

If my father was alive and will hear me talking like this, he’ll probably say I’ve been reading too much H. P. Lovecraft.

But even the village vet confided to my husband and me once while he was convincing us to leave our sick dog overnight for observation—that because he is awake nights to tend to his "patients"—he hears all sorts of things including those that go bump in the night or land on his roof and jump down to walk away on two legs. The vet’s house stands at one edge of the village next to rice fields gone to weed.

The katiwala of one of my husband’s brothers who lives in the same village also told us of a recent incident involving a group of boys in their neighborhood.

Vicky, who hails from Cebu, said the boys roused them from sleep one night by running down their street yelling loud enough to wake the dead.

When a few of the curious peeked from their gates (as it was way past midnight), the boys pointed to a kubo a Tsinoy resident maintained in a fenced off enclosure in which to entertain his friends—and said something landed on its roof as they were walking past.

When pressed to describe exactly what they saw, they said it was a very big black bird that looked more human than avian.

Some of the neighbors laughed and told them they probably just had too much to drink. Others told them to go home and sleep off the Red Horse and whatever else they had imbibed.

But Vicky and I knew better. Their claim matched that of Al’s drinking buddy, and mine and the village vet’s.

And we couldn’t have all imagined what we saw.

Postscript: Al told me they did not hear a fluttering of wings during their sighting of the winged creature—only felt a strong pagaspas (rustling or flapping).

Another friend—who goes home to Quezon on weekends—tells of a similar experience while out jogging one early morning: she felt a rush of wind  and looking up saw a winged being—jaggedly severed at the waist—hovering near some high-extension wires.

She recognized it as a nurse who lived in the neighborhood. She said its entrails were dangling and it just looked at her. — BM, GMA News