Philippine Speculative Fiction (10 page)

He nodded. “
Hindi konektado sa karera,
sweetheart. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone about the ritual I witnessed, but I thought it brought closure. I haven’t heard
anything about ghosts since.”

“What do I tell my crew about the mysterious calls?”

“Overactive imaginations? You know as well as I do they sometimes smuggle in beer or something harder. Make sure they’re not just drunk.”

A STORM STRUCK the following Santa Alma race week. It was horrible on Friday night. The bad weather made transmissions from Naic to the Makati office, where the servers were,
spotty and unreliable. There was a lag in getting the final results from the main pari-mutuel computers. It was flooded in some parts of Manila, and many racing fans couldn’t make it to their
favorite off-track betting stations. The track lights failed in Race Four. Sales plunged. The races ended an hour later than usual.

Everyone in the broadcast department was glum. Murphy’s Law had been strictly enforced that night. They wrapped up as quickly as they could, eager to leave.

The stewards’ phone rang.

Ronnie dropped his cables.

Roel, who was filling a glass from the dispenser, seemed not to notice that the water had overflowed, drenching his hand.

Cesar’s face went white. The phone was beside him, and it was his job to answer it. He stared at Jane mutely.

“Now that’s enough, all of you,” she said. She snatched up the phone. “Hello? Who is this? What do you want?”

From far away, a deep voice speaking a language she could not understand.

The hair on her arms rose. The voice in her ears echoed as if from the depths of a grave.

Jane angrily pushed the thought away. There had to be a logical explanation for what she’d just heard. She slammed the phone back into its cradle.

“I’m going up there and I’ll catch whoever’s playing a prank on us. That’s all it is, don’t you see? A joke. Maybe it’s one of the janitors. Or the
security guards. God knows their job is mind-numbingly boring. Who’s coming with me?”

The crew looked at each other. “I have to fix the antenna,” Niño mumbled. Cesar and Roel turned back to their machines. “We have to shut down.” The others had
their own excuses. That left Wendell the cameraman, the most cheerful of them all.

“
Sige
, Ma’am Jane,” said Wendell. “I’ll go with you.”
Jane smiled, heartened by his courage. “Thanks, Wendell, you’re a brave man.”

“Go ahead, ma’am. You lead the way. Don’t worry, I’ll be right behind you.”

They took the back stairwell to the fourth floor. The doors were large and sometimes when they shut they couldn’t be opened from the stairway side. They could hammer on the doors all they
could and good luck if anyone heard them. But it was the fastest route.

Upon reaching the fourth floor, Wendell stayed at the top of the stairs, refusing to go further. Jane hugged the walls as she crept toward the stewards’ room. The lights on the entire
floor had been switched off–the management strictly implemented cost-cutting measures–and it was slow going. Not only because it was dark, but because she felt a steadily rising fear.
Her nerves screamed with tension. She was not superstitious, but then she’d never been in a situation like this before.

Outside the stewards’ room door, she took a deep breath. What would she find in there?

She turned the doorknob and pushed the door open. The hinges squeaked and made her jump. One foot over the threshold, then another. She was inside.

The room was pitch-black at first, but moonlight streamed through the big picture window that overlooked the track. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she began to make out things–the
monitors on the wall, the tables with the computers and printers for churning out the stewards’ reports and notices of suspensions, the small refrigerator that could no longer make ice but at
least kept cans of soda cool.

At the chief steward’s table, where Sparky usually sat, was a heavyset man. No, a large man whose bulk strained his chair. The man turned his face toward Jane. His mouth opened.

Sounds issued from his throat.

Jane was stiff with fear. She could not understand a word he said. She wondered where her hearing had gone. Wait, she could hear. It was her brain that wasn’t working properly, it
wasn’t processing the data her senses were receiving.

Jane began to hyperventilate.

The man in the chair spoke again, wretched guttural sounds that made no sense.

“Who…” Jane’s throat was dry. Her heart slammed in her chest. To keep from fainting, she clenched her fists and dug her nails into her clammy hands. “Who are
you?”

The man raised his eyebrows and glared. The moonlight shone full on his face.

Jane was shocked to realize that she recognized him.

It was Carlos Mendoza.

One of the best stewards of Santa Alma Park for two decades at the old track in Makati, he’d risen to be chairman over the years, mostly because he was a no-nonsense hard-ass who’d
worked in racing his entire career. He was hated and feared for his short temper.

There were many complaints about his strictness and obsession with detail, and his outbursts of profanity, but he did perform race monitoring with probity and integrity. He didn’t make the
move to the new track in Naic, though.

He’d died five years ago at the old stewards’ stand in Makati.

It was during the final stages of an important stakes race. It also happened to be the showdown between two track champions, Empire King and Wind Blown, and the 2,000-meter competition that drew
ten entries seemed only a match race between the two idols. It was the first time for the two colts to go head-to-head, and the winner would cement his reputation as
the
champion for that
season.

Mendoza had a massive heart attack while watching the duo fight neck-and-neck down the homestretch in good enough time to set a track record. The stewards and judges in their high nest were
caught up in the excitement, slamming the glass of the picture window and yelling for their favorite.

After the race, they turned to see Mendoza slumped over, his eyes open, his mouth slack. It took five men to bear him down three flights of steep stairs, still in his chair as a sort of
makeshift stretcher.

Everyone wondered when, exactly, did he die—when the horses were halfway down the stretch? At the wire? Did he at least see who won and broke a long-standing record, before his vision
dimmed into pinpricks and winked out? It would serve the bastard right, they said, to die without knowing.

Jane stared at him, her reason tottering on the edge of insanity. So there were such things as ghosts, after all? Was everything she’d ever believed a lie? Were the tales of Naic’s
being a hub for spectral activity true, then, and not just a collective illusion?

Why was Mendoza’s ghost here? Was there a man so dedicated to racing that he would perform his duty, even after death?

She pulled herself together and found her voice.

“Chairman,” she said, “
tapos na po ang
last race.
Uwian na.
It’s time to go home.”

MENDOZA WAS SURPRISED. Were the races over already? He must have dozed off for a moment there. Hang Sparky and Aileen and the lot of them for going off and leaving him asleep.
Jane’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. He must be more tired than he realized.

So it was time to go.

Home. That sounded good. He needed rest. It had been a long and confusing race day. He nodded at Jane, who looked frightened and properly respectful as she backed away. He’d rung up the
broadcast earlier, and he was annoyed that the phone was still defective. The people at the other end never seemed to hear him.

The glasses he’d been looking for were at his elbow all along. He put them on and walked to the door.

The corridor was wrapped in dark shadow, but at the end of it a brilliant white light beckoned. He’d never seen such a thing before. It drew him. He moved toward it, slowly and tentatively
at first, and then faster and faster.

Kat Del Rosario is currently taking her MA in Creative Writing in UP Diliman. She adores cats, and lives in Manila.

WHEN OSCAR WOKE up to the cold, it was an awakening unlike anything for there was no line between it and sleep. He was only ever conscious of the promise of sun, hidden behind
a haze of what Oscar knew vaguely as clouds, those great haunches of plump grey white bruised with purple, or sometimes orange—or what he remembered of it; Oscar became aware that he could
not see, and he could not hear; and Oscar did not mind. He stayed in his favorite chair by the window, dotted with the afterthought of last night’s rain, awaiting the sun.

When the house came to life, as with the street, low whispers of dreams ending and eyelids unfolding, kitchens and trikes sputtering to life, slippered feet slid quietly over floors waxed to a
blush, and as the maid bent over to pick up yesterday’s newspaper—scattered across the living room floor as usual—she gasped and quite loudly,
santamariajosporsanto
, to
see an odd plant in sir’s favorite rattan armchair. It was a knobbly, pathetic looking thing, with wiry, rheumatic roots and limbs that twisted and bent at odd ends, giving way to boughs that
sighed under the succession of leaves shaped like hearts, spinning their way to the top where they gathered into a bald, wispy knob, waiting to sprout, stooped over slightly as if asleep.

The world lurched as the maid crammed him into a clay pot where the lucky bamboo shoots had recently died; and as he was set upon the windowsill, Oscar tasted the morning, considering for a
moment the many strange rituals he had cared about, how amusing, how ridiculous it was, now that it was quite a joy to be so still.

When his wife found that he wasn’t at the dinner table that night, which Oscar no longer had any use for, only then did she start to look for him. Her voice rang loud and swift all over
the house, echoing across the walls. She called for him in every room, and when she didn’t find him, she rang the police and started fussing over the smallest of trifles she could find in the
house. Once or twice it crossed her mind that Oscar might have gotten too upset and ran off, but ah, then again, she knew the man had no spine and would come trotting back home, bald head hung low
like a sorry dog. And she was right, for Oscar did not have the spine to run away, too devoted to his wife and daughter the only way he knew how, while faithfully working longer and longer hours
for bigger and bigger paychecks, dealing with all his anxiety with sleep, sometimes wondering how peaceful it would be if he would be given time to be still, and wishing, fervently wishing as a
thunderstorm passed over the house, that he could stay as he was then, in the most motionless of states, nourished only by rain.

THE POLICE CAME the next morning, as Oscar’s wife had demanded. Oscar could have been amused, for his wife had never been so flustered, had he not been so occupied with
the sun. He found that he had no control over his body, that he could not so much as move his leaves, but that he knew where each of them were sprouted, knew how his roots settled comfortably under
the soil. In every inch and nook of himself he found that he could breathe and feel somehow, the air and sunlight coming together within him and every bit of him, and he had never been so blissful
and content. He found that he would be gladdened by the quick breeze and sickened by puffs of smoke from the street below, feeling a slow, inward urge to curl and seize in the quiet subtlety that
only plants knew, as the unwanted stuff passed through inside of him. He sat unaffectedly as his wife made quite a show of weeping, weaving stories of infidelity and constant arguments, that once,
she said, he had even raised a hand to her and hit her on some nights. “Oh but I put up with him,” she sniffed to the audience of young men in blue, as rapt and attentive as the idea of
their responsibilities as protectors of the populace still hung fresh in their heads. “I put up with him; I can’t raise my daughter on my wages alone.” The younger of the
policemen cast his eyes briefly at the wisp of a girl with vacant eyes, fiddling with a color magazine and folding away its pages on the living room floor. A sorrow stirred in him, and lingered
still as they left to return to the station, muttering about the case with his partner as they climbed into the car.

BUT HAD OSCAR’S wife been thrifty, her wages from selling skin care products and jewelry would have been enough to raise her daughter. Oscar had brought this up the night
before, still human, no less withered and stooped then as he was as a plant. It had been his first slip; the first time he had ever bothered to speak his mind, instead of the usual passive grunts
where he would submit, exhaustedly, to his wife’s very loud, very threatening wheedling. It was the first time he refused her, and she had responded, scathingly, “You call yourself a
man? You’re an old, limp vegetable!” But it was only when she mentioned their daughter that the sparks of rebellion died in Oscar, and he felt wilted once again, promising her half his
monthly paycheck, and the recent bonus his boss gave him. He had stroked his chin, mulling over the vegetative insult, watching his daughter with the vacant eyes stare at the television from over
his trembling arthritic fingers, thankful that her condition was an obstacle to realizing that she had a weak, good-for-nothing father. If only he had enough time to stay at home, with this poor
girl whom he loved, but sometimes he wondered if they were both strangers, each one far away and never meeting. He wished to be an ornament then, constant and steadfast, and thought he heard the
heavens expressing their consent, applauding him with the sudden arrival of rain.

THE SEARCH FOR Oscar continued for days. At one point, the company where he worked financed a search for him, with his boss and the CEO coming over for a visit to lend the
poor, distraught wife their sympathies. They had known nothing of his violent behavior, and he had come across, to them at least, as a meek, mild-mannered old man who did his job well, and that had
been all they cared about. They thought it proper to extend an envelope containing a sum of money, passed around the office a day prior with a note about the daughter and her illness, and left with
plump hearts, convinced of the sincerity of their deed.