Creatures of the deep forest

It's back! Midnight Stories will be posted every evening of October to celebrate the month of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. Here's our first story. Enjoy!


 
I used to think they were just stories made up by the help to entertain us children.

There were tales of bulay fuegos or santelmos told to us by the maids from Siocon.

Of tall bamboo plants bending hard hollow stems to the ground at midnight while its inhabitants traipsed about under the stars (this from the labandera from Mindanao).

Of the half-man, half-horse tikbalang. Of the manananggal that leaves the lower half of its body behind when it searches for babies still in their mother’s womb. Of the kapre, the giant tree-demon that likes to smoke cigars.

They were just tales. At least, that’s what I used to think ,until my no-nonsense friend M told me matter-of-factly that she had seen their kind in her sleepy Quezon town at the foot of Mount Banahaw (the holy mountain) and Mount San Cristobal (the devil’s mountain).

The first creature that she and her two cousins encountered when she was eight was the kapre.

M said they were absorbed in a game of habulan or taguan when they noticed a tree enveloped in mist shaking despite there being no wind.

When they approached it with trepidation, they noticed some grey stuff on the ground that upon closer inspection looked like giant upos ng sigarilyo (cigarette butts). While M and her cousins were pondering this, they heard loud breathing from overhead. She likened it to the raspy, mechanical sound of Darth Vader’s breath.

All three of them looked up to see what was making the noise, but it was hard to make out. Whatever it was, it was mostly hidden from view by the leaves and wisps of mist. One thing she recalls from the incident is that the midday air carried a strong smell of hand-rolled tobacco.

The next creature she met was the tikbalang, while she was out fishing with the same two cousins. When she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise, she looked behind her and saw a man watching them from behind a tree.

But where the other half of his body should be, M only saw the hindquarters of a horse.

I always thought tikbalangs or tigbalangs had the head of a horse and stood on its hindquarters like a man. But M said they look more like the centaurs of Greek mythology.

M saw the manananggal when she was in her third year of high school. Rumors about the creature had been going around their community for some time on account of the chickens and other small farm animals that frequently turned up dead and drained of blood.

M was training to be a CAT officer at the time and every morning, she and her co-officer hopefuls would jog up and down the streets while the town was slowly stirring awake.

On this particular morning, M remembered her lola insisting that she carry some heads of garlic in her pocket as protection from the aswang. M balked at this, but her grandmother insisted, saying she would not be allowed to leave the house without them.

As soon as she stepped out of the front door and past the gates, M said what she thought was a huge bird swooped down at her.

It was still dark out, but there was a lighted lamp post near their street corner and by its dim light M saw that the “bird” had a human head and torso—and dangling entrails! The creature circled above her as she raced pell-mell down the street to the house of a classmate she promised to walk to school with.

The manananggal turned out to be a nursing student from Atimonan who was found out by her co-boarders after she raided a chicken coop one too many and sentries from a military outpost traced the evidence back to her. She dropped out of school soon after that and moved out of town.

But that was not the end of M’s encounters with these so-called mythical creatures. It turned out that there was more to her grandmother's order that she and her cousins be home before sundown than praying their nightly devotions together.

An uncle of M’s appeared to have been inherited a little black book of orasyon or whispered Latin prayers that no one else could touch or read.

It fell out of his back pocket once when he came home drunk and M picked it up and tried to read it. As soon as she opened the book and turned a page, she heard a loud clap of thunder, followed minutes later by her uncle who angrily demanded that she give the book back. He supposedly said something like it was a good thing he managed to regain possession of it right away “bago lumabas yung pitong demonyo.”

M said there must have been something to what her uncle said, because when she wandered near the mouth of a cave that her uncle had warned her and her young cousins to stay away from, she fell into a swoon and developed a high fever. Night after night she’d see a pair of red eyes peering steadily at her from a tear in their roof.

Older relatives had told them engkantos dwelt in the cave, supernatural beings that took people who came too near their realm to become their wives, husbands or children—never to be seen by the townspeople again.

M said she saw one such being follow her home from the cave. She never saw it clearly, just dashes (“like the Flash”) of dark to make her aware of its presence. Her uncle had to perform a tawas—during which candle drippings in a basin of water took the form of a being that was a malformed humanoid, half-human and half-animal—and countless orasyons before it released its hold on her. — BM, GMA News