SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“I designed it.” He smiles, the corners of his mouth crooked. “It’s almost like you’re keeping a piece of me, wherever you go. Hopefully it’ll keep you safer than I can.”

I kiss him once more before I leave, pressing our lips together and then darting away, for fear that if I stay any longer, I will never be able to leave.

Back home in the maids’ quarters, the other girls gather round to admire the necklace and tease me about my new suitor. “Be careful,” says Vicky, mussing my hair. “You’ll be the next to be married, at this rate!”

My sister, now swollen with the child growing inside her, doesn’t seem jealous of all the attention I’m getting. Instead, she watches beatifically, the entire room gently lit with her presence. Lacing my fingers with hers, I cannot remember a time in the recent past when I have been happier. The hole torn in my heart by Nanay’s death seems smaller, with each passing moment and each beat of my sister’s pulse against mine.

I wake to the Calderone house on fire. Even in the maids’ quarters, the air crackles with flames, searing my skin and catching at my blanket like groping fingers. I shout and try to beat the flames on my bed out, but it’s a lost cause. No one else is in sight.

Snatching the only intact blanket from Jene’s bed, I wrap it tightly around me and barrel toward the exit, hoping and praying to God, to the dead god, to whoever is listening. The flames snarl, as I crash through the doorway, hitting the dirt so hard I forget how to breathe. The roof caves in behind me.

The maids and ma’ams are clustered together on the sidewalk, the closest I’ve ever seen them, in my year and a half of service to the Calderones. Ma’am Loretta hunches over the asphalt, a blanket over her shoulders, rocking silently back and forth, as her childhood home burns.

Over it all is the sound of my sister screaming. But she is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Sir Carlos, her fiancé.

“Where’s Silvia?” I shout, recovering enough to draw in a raspy breath. No one seems to hear me at first, but then I see Vicky point at the house. She’s still inside, I realize with horror. My pregnant sister, trapped inside a burning, collapsing house.

The dissonant hum in my head is so strong, I almost can’t find the strength to walk. But I fight through it, just as I fight through the splintering doorway and follow Silvia’s screams, through the once-great halls.

I find her on the floor of Sir Carlos’s bathroom, crumpled on the floor like a dark-winged bird, lying in a growing pool of blood. Sir Carlos is wrestling with her, and for a moment, I believe he is trying to kill her. Then I hear him shouting, “Stop! Silvia, stop! Please!” and see the panicked tears streaming down his face. My sister is trying to tear her hair out, gripping great fists of it and banging her head against the tile. Sir Carlos catches sight of me and cries, “Help me get her out! Please!”

I rush to her side, and she almost swings her skull into me. I grab her head, whispering assurances into her ear through her moans and screams, and help Sir Carlos hoist her to her feet. That’s when I realize that her nightgown is soaked in blood from the waist down, and she’s sobbing, over and over, “My baby, my baby, my baby.”

Outside the house, my sister collapses in the grass by the gate, Sir Carlos weeping at her side.

You little fool, snarls the dead god. It crouches on my chest, its spidery limbs stabbing down on either side of my face, as I lie in a state of bangungot , paralyzed and helpless. Black flames blaze in its empty eye sockets. That fire was no accident, and that was not a normal miscarriage. A rogue aswang is preying on you.

“An aswang ?” I ask, bewildered. “Like Nanay and me?”

Worse. The dead god presses a hand to my forehead, and an image of a hideous, bat-winged creature silhouettes itself against my mind. I picture it dragging its legless torso toward the house, pulling itself up to the window of the maids’ quarters, unfurling its proboscis-like tongue…I wrench my head away, as the dead god says, A manananggal , judging from the wounds on your sister. They only grow like that deep in the jungles of Capiz.

“Someone targeted her?” I would cover my face if I could, the dead god’s visage is so terrible, but I am frozen, the breath crushed out of me by the god’s unforgiving weight. “But why? She’s just—”

She is a Reyes girl, from my line. I am not the only god in the region. And Manila is an amalgamation of many peoples, from many regions. For the first time, the dead god sounds contemptuous. Perhaps you fancy yourself special, Christina Maria Reyes. But there are plenty of other witch-families that would love to stamp you—and me, with you—out completely, and they are much more powerful than an uninitiated girl-child and a stray god without a disciple. It breathes its fetid odor into my face. Maybe I have been too lax on you, and have not emphasized the danger your family is in. The danger that you brought into this house!

“What are you talking about?”

It snaps the necklace from my neck. Even more than the pain of the breaking chain is the stab of pain through my heart, the fear and betrayal. That necklace is mine and mine alone, the only thing that really belongs to me.

The god holds the locket before my face, the broken chain tangled in its fingers. Haven’t you figured it out yet, little girl?

The dead god hurls the locket against the wall, where it shatters. Suddenly I am looking into a familiar pair of tired green eyes, and Rodante’s voice floods my head:

“The kapre was up in a tree, watching him wander through a banana grove. He warned my dad that the grove was sacred, and that if he chopped down any of the trees there, the kapre would curse him.”

An echo of the dead god’s voice from many nights ago: I will show you the secret banana groves where your mother hid her legs, deep in dreamland and Bicol’s jungles.

“I’m sorry,” says Rodante’s shadow, up on the rooftop. My mouth burns, with the remembered taste of tobacco and overripe fruit. “My mother doesn’t like me going out after sunset.”

I will teach you to wing about the night, unhampered by human concerns, whispers the dead god. How rare is that?

An image of Rodante limping away, that first day in the jewelry shop, the scars on his skin now aflame with power: “Maybe that’s why my leg’s the way it is.”

By the time the dead god releases its grip, there are tears streaming down my face. I collapse, gasping for air, the remnants of the bangungot’s paralysis leaking from me.

Think about it , the dead god says coldly. It vanishes, leaving me to face the rest of the night terrors on my own.

“The wedding is still on?” demands Ma’am Chitti. “Are you serious, Mama?”

Ma’am Loretta doesn’t even look at her. Her gaze is trained on her son, Sir Carlos, who sits next to my sister on the couch. Their hands are entwined, and he’s stroking her arm. My sister is pale, dazed; they’ve put her on Ma’am Margarita’s Valium, to dull the shock of losing the baby.

The entire family has taken refuge at Ma’am Loretta’s brother’s house, a few streets down from the old Calderone home. It’s also much smaller than Ma’am Loretta’s house, and the close quarters mean that tensions are higher than ever.

I stand along the wall with the rest of the maids, watching the ma’ams battle and bicker. The shelves of saints, as many here as in Ma’am Loretta’s former room, stare down at us with dead, wooden eyes.