James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

She was my Sybil.

Was she Sybil? Was it possible that a person of that name really existed? I don’t know. But for me she was Sybil. And I loved her.

It was morning. The air was gray and cold outside the cave entrance. Far off I could hear the whisper of the surf. I felt cold and wet, and my head was heavy after the night’s sleep. I turned my head to look at my beloved.

There was no one there.

My hand lay on the woven grass, which was cold from the morning dew that drifted into the cave.

I got up slowly, trembling, still stiff and lightheaded after the shipwreck, and tottered dizzily towards the exit. I remembered vaguely the dream I had had just before waking. It was clearly etched in my brain like a relief sculpture under the sun. A swarm of cormorants, a sailing, flying, flapping flock of black birds. And one of them had been white, it had stood on the edge of the precipice at the cave opening and stretched its wings out broadly and fallen – fallen towards the sea surface, and in its fall I had seen that it was my Sybil . . .

I stood in the opening and felt the moist air drawn into my lungs as I shivered with cold. I bent over, looked over the edge and downwards.

In the same moment I felt my chest tighten around my heart and a wild pain of anguish shot through my body. My eyes glimpsed something white on the surface of the water; there was a white garment washing in towards the rock wall.

My lungs brought forth a scream that rose up in my throat and dissolved in the fog beyond.

‘Sybil!’

My hands got cut and scraped as I clung to the rough stones in a desperate attempt to get down to the water quickly. My feet stumbled on countless protrusions and the whole time I was whispering her name, over and over again, as I hoped – hoped by all that was holy – that I had been mistaken.

It took some time nonetheless before I reached sea level at the mountain wall. Meanwhile the tidewater had done its work. The white thing had drifted farther out, almost all the way out among the sharp cliff rocks, I could barely see it when it came up to the surface several times. Finally it was totally gone.

I stood with my empty hands stretched out before me, staring at that point between the rocks. The fog rolled in waves towards me.

I heard my own scream echo from the granite wall and hover tremblingly in the air where the cormorants sailed on black wings. And I swung at them when they came over me, around me, and behind me. They sat along the path up on the mountain wall, packed tightly together, and highest up, in the middle of the cave’s opening, sat the largest of them all, and it was only its head that was black like the others’, for the rest of the bird was white like the whitest garment. It lifted off with a heavy beating of its wings and sailed around up there until its wings filled the sky, then came lower and closer and stretched out until the tips of its white arms touched the horizon, and the whole time its eyes were on me, clear, dark – eyes of crystal, it was as if I could see right through them and out into the gray fog on the other side.

I don’t know from which direction I came home. Did I wander past Dingle and Kerry over to Ballyheigue? That’s what I must have done. I remember I saw hills and mountains that at first seemed to be quite near, while in the next moment they were far off, and then again close to me. I registered that I was walking, that my feet were carrying me forward, but several times I was tired and lay down on the ground and stretched my arms out to catch the rain that fell gently and softly down over me. One time I lay my cheek against a flower, because it was there and I was there, down on the slope where the moisture from the grass soaked in through my clothes and lay like cold fingers around my shoulders.

The old drunkard from the tavern has disappeared. I never see him anymore. They say that in his intoxication he walked off the pier one night as the sea was foaming white and the rain was whipping against our windows. If that’s true, it’s unfortunate. He was my friend. We were often at the tavern together. It also happened sometimes that we would wake up together in the morning in some ditch or other, arm in arm like two lovers. Now and then – it was quite strange – I had the feeling that we were of the same age. And now he’s gone. I’m alone. But the beer is good here, and I have a great thirst to quench.

A young man came here one evening. He boasted that he wanted to sail around Sybil Point. The silly little fool. He’s full of youthful stupidity. I warned him that night. It didn’t help.

I saw him early today too. He was coming down along the road towards the wharf with a sack in his hand. It was bright and clear and the sun had just risen. I had sat in the tavern all night, and the intoxication hadn’t totally worn off yet, and I was sitting in the grass down by the sea when he came towards me.

There is quite a bit of Filipino horror fiction being published in both English and Tagalog, probably not surprising given the over 500 often horrific creatures that have been documented in Philippine mythology, from the shapeshifting aswang to the hideous, vampire-­like manananggal to the terrifying half-­man, half-­horse tikbalang. Yvette Tan , one of the Philippines’ most popular and successful modern-­day horror writers, has published stories in both Tagalog and English, with most of the latter collected in Waking the Dead and other Horror Stories (2009) . The following story first appeared in the anthology of Filipino horror All That Darkness Allows in 2016. Like many of Tan’s stories, it incorporates elements from Filipino mythology and folklore, exploiting the frightening possibilities of those legends to craft an unsettling modern-­day horror story.

Anne caught me outside the hut, fiddling with my phone, trying to get a decent signal.

‘You’re up early,’ she said, arms crossed tight against her robe, almost straining at the fabric.

‘Just telling Tim I’m okay,’ I said. ‘Signal sucks here.’

She made a face. ‘Of course you’re okay. You’re here. Why wouldn’t you be?’

The signal held. I sent my SMS. I looked up at her. ‘You shouldn’t be out here.’

‘You weren’t inside when I woke. I got worried.’

There was a caw. A crow had joined the birds gathered in the front yard. There were a few when I arrived – birds have always been a fixture in these parts – but their number had swelled over the course of my visit, almost tripling by the time the crow arrived. They sat on nearby branches, nestled in the yard, worried at the bushes. There were different kinds. Maya birds, mynah birds, swallows, shrikes, kites. Others I didn’t recognize. It was chaos some of the time, the flurry of feathers and the squawking as they chased each other around in play. But most of the time, they were silent. They didn’t seem to be preying on each other, which unnerved me almost just as much as their being there in the first place.

The other birds made space for the noisy newcomer, who, after a few more caws, settled in.

We watched the whole thing in silence. I got up and gently nudged her back inside. ‘I’ll make breakfast.’

I have been here for a week now. I came as soon as I could, after I got the letter. Anne is sick, it said. What it meant was, Anne is dying.

And so I went on leave from work, kissed my fiancé goodbye, and traveled back to the place I grew up in, to see the friend who thinks I abandoned her.

Anne lives in her family home a ways from the barrio. It is small and neat and smells of dried leaves. We used to hang out here a lot. I practically grew up here. My parents worked abroad. My aunt took care of me, but you could tell that she would rather go to the salon or go on dates than watch over her sister’s kid. Anne’s aunt didn’t mind having me over, as long as we were quiet because, ‘The plants don’t like noise.’