Winged gods

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

This story was told to me by a very close friend, Tin. She did a lot of freelance work and an assignment for the Department of Education brought her to Davao.

While there, Tin's DepEd contact offered to show Tin and her associates, Janice and Thelma, around the city.

They soon found themselves at the eagle sanctuary.

Tin was excited to see the regal birds and talked to them as she walked past their cages. “What magnificent wings you have!”  she told one regal specimen.

She admired the glossy feathers on another, and thought to herself what a shame that they had to be bred in captivity because to some they were no more than game, hunted for sport or for some moneyed collector’s private aviary.

She looked one in the eye and saw the dust of ages reflected there. It held her gaze. While her two other companions continued down the path, Tin and the eagle looked at each other without moving.

She stood outside its enclosure for what seemed like hours until she felt leaves falling around her—leaves falling onto her hair, brushing against her face, skittering away towards the clearing ahead.

She broke her gaze and hurried after her friends. They took some pictures while they decided where to go next.  A vendor by the gates offered them some durian and they tore into the spiked fruit’s succulent almondy insides before boarding the rental car to go to their next destination: Eden Park.

As the vehicle started pulling away from the sanctuary, Tin felt something tug at her chest. She felt herself being pulled down to the bottom of what felt like a deep pit or a hollow in the ground.

She felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, all noise being sucked upwards like in a vacuum. Suddenly her friends’ voices sounded like they came from a long way off and she could no longer understand what they were saying. It was as if someone put the world on mute and all she could feel was the vehicle bumping over every stone and pebble on the uneven ground.

She began to feel cold, and the weight on her chest felt like a boulder crushing her lungs. She began to pray earnestly and only felt warmth return to her limbs upon reaching Eden Park.

By the time they disembarked, she was sweating profusely that her friends looked at her with concern: "Okay ka lang? Ba’t ka ba umuungol kanina?"

Tin answered their question with one of her own: "Ano ba salita niyo kanina? Ilocano? Kasi hindi ko kayo maintindihan." Suddenly she needed a drink of water. Her throat felt parched and the questions were left unanswered as they looked about for a place to go.

Their Davao host pointed them to a nearby coffee place—Bo’s—and Tin went off to wash her face while the others got settled.

Once seated, Tin felt a very peculiar thing. She felt her feet slide over something gritty under the table. Something gravelly.

She surreptitiously sneaked a peek under the table—and saw sand.

The same sand that was underfoot at the sanctuary. But how could she have tracked in so much? She noticed a growing mound of it under their Davao guide’s feet—but none under her friends’.

After finishing their coffee, Tin asked to be brought back to the hotel because she was getting spooked by the turn of events and noticed there was no sand on the floor of the vehicle like there was at the coffeehouse.

Then her friend Thelma showed them the photos she took at the sanctuary: there was a big tree behind them, but it had no leaves. Instead, there were globes of white and red light hovering near its bare branches. It was as if the leaves had fallen on Tin out of thin air!

At the hotel later, they found sand scattered around the bathtub, like a small child would have tracked into the bathroom.

Days later, Tin visited an Israeli woman whose windows had variations of the name Yahweh written on them. Tin told her about her experience in Davao. The woman told Tin that she should never have spoken to the eagles because in ancient Egypt, the birds symbolized immortality and the great Sun god Amun-Ra, a symbol of the Infinite Supreme Reason or Intelligence.

In ancient Tagalog faith, the eagle is also considered an anito—a nature spirit—not unlike the North American indigenous peoples’ thunderbirds, which brought back sands from the afterlife to create land. A supernatural being of power and strength. King of the birds, carrying  souls to the spirit realm.

Only prayers saved my friend from being stuck at the crossroads of both worlds where winged gods decide who should cross over and who should find a way of getting back to the land of the living. — BM, GMA News