Tonight It Comes: A Supernatural Horror Thriller, page 15
“The staff? Not the doctors?”
“That’s not how things work here. The administration run everything. Most of the doctors, including the ones assigned to Beth, aren’t even full-time employees. They work in multiple hospitals at the same time.”
Nate nodded absently. He didn’t bother contradicting Carl. The man had been here longer than he had and knew the ins and outs of life in the Philippines. He’d felt a little odd about that fact when they’d first met. Carl was as American as you could get, from the way he looked to the way he talked, even down to his politics, but there was no denying the man had experience in droves. Nate might have been half-Filipino, but Carl was the true Filipino between the two of them.
“So what happens now?” Nate asked.
“They’re going to write this off as a day visit to Beth’s pediatrician. She was worried about the baby. The doctors checked it out. Then she went home.”
“What if she needs more time here?”
“Officially she will be discharged tomorrow. However long she stays is up to you. They only care about the bill, and if you can pay it. Everything else is negotiable.”
“And that’s legal?”
“It’s just how things work here, Nate.” His friend—his only friend in the Philippines—patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. “Don’t think too much about it. Save all of that to help Beth through this.”
They looked over at Beth, oblivious to the conversation. The difference between her now and the wild woman chasing after Terri at the townhouse was night and day. This was the Beth he remembered. The one he’d married and was expecting a child with. That Beth from earlier today was a different woman.
Carl was talking to him, asking him something. Nate glanced over. The older man was staring at him, apparently because Nate had zoned out again.
“What?” Nate said.
“I asked if you ate anything yet.”
“Earlier. Nurses brought me some breakfast.”
“What about lunch?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Yeah you are. You just don’t know it.”
Carl reached for him but Nate pulled his hand back. “I don’t want to leave her, Carl. Not now. Can you understand?”
The other man sighed, but nodded. “Tell you what: I’ll run down and get us something to eat. You stay here.”
“I’m not—”
“I don’t care,” Carl cut him off as he walked over to the door.
Nate gave up. He said instead, “Hey, Carl.”
His friend stopped and looked back. “Got special requests?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s about Terri. Where is she now?”
“You don’t have to worry about her, either. She got treated, and they let her out an hour after she got here last night.”
“Who discharged her? The hospital?”
“Me.”
“I don’t understand…”
Carl walked back over. There was a softness to his look that wasn’t usually there. Carl was almost sixty and had been just about everywhere in the world. He’d come to Southeast Asia almost ten years ago, looking for a place that was as different from America as he could find. He’d thought Thailand was it, but that turned out not to be the case. Meeting Dany, falling in love all over again, and even moving back to the States for a time, had merely been preludes to returning to the Philippines for good.
“Nate, buddy, this is the Phil,” Carl said.
“People keep saying that, but I still don’t know what that means.”
“It means, that little girl you hired is more afraid of what will happen to her than you are of Beth, if any of this gets out. She’s gone. I gave her a year’s worth of salary and paid her ferry back home to the province in Leyte. You don’t have anything to worry about when it comes to her. Trust me when I tell you this—the person who wants to forget any of this ever happened the most is her.”
Nate didn’t know how to respond. He thought he knew all there was to know about the Philippines when they moved here, but it seemed a day didn’t go by that he was proven wrong. His mom had talked often about the country and he thought he had intimate knowledge of how things worked from his visits here as a child. As an adult, he realized just how wrong he was. The Philippines, truly, was another world, and as such operated under its own self-imposed rules, some of which had nothing to do with the ones that were written down.
“Thank you,” Nate said. It was the only thing he could think of to say, and even that seemed incredibly insufficient.
Carl patted him on the shoulder and pursed a smile. “You were there for me not too long ago, pal. I’m just returning the favor.”
“You’re doing more than that, Carl. I truly appreciate it.”
“Yeah, well…” Carl shrugged. “I’m gonna go get us that lunch. You stay here with Beth.” He turned to go again.
“Carl, another thing…” Then, when the other man stopped and glanced back, “At the townhouse last night. You heard what she said? Beth?”
“What about it?”
“She said something I’ve never heard before. A word. Aswang. Do you know what that is?”
Carl didn’t answer him. He turned completely around and stared at Nate for a few seconds in silence.
“Carl?”
“You’re Filipino and you don’t know what aswang is?”
“I don’t. Why? Should I?”
“Shit, Nate.” Carl looked on the verge of laughing.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s what the locals call their bogeyman. The things that go bump in the night. Aswang.”
“Are you kidding me? The bogeyman?”
“Not the bogeyman. A bogeyman. It’s everything to them. Vampire. Zombie. Witch. Troll. You name it, they call it aswang.” Carl squinted at him curiously. “You’ve never heard of it? Your mom never told you anything about it?”
“No. Should she have?”
Carl shrugged. “I don’t know your mom well enough to say.”
“So what is it? This aswang? What is it really?”
“‘Really?’ There is no ‘really,’ Nate. It’s supernatural bullshit. You see something happen that you can’t explain? Aswang. Someone dies and you can’t explain how—or you don’t believe what the doctors tell you? Aswang. Your cat jumped out the window? Aswang. It’s all bullshit. All of it.”
“So I guess you don’t believe it, either.”
Carl did laugh aloud this time. “Fuck no. How do you believe in something like that? Every country has that kind of stuff. All hocus pocus. But it’s not about what’s real or not, it’s about what you believe. Trust me, pal, when I tell you that different people around different parts of the world believe in some freaky shit. It never ceases to amaze me how stupid some people can be.”
Nate looked back at his wife. He remembered the word. Aswang. Beth had shouted it. More than once as Carl pulled her off Terri. Even as they all but carried her to the car and drove her over to St. Vincent, she was still shouting it.
He turned back to Carl. His friend was lingering at the door, as if he couldn’t decide whether to leave or stay. “You heard Beth say it. She called Terri that. Aswang.”
“Yeah, she did.”
“Beth doesn’t believe in things like that. But last night…” He shook his head and let the rest go unsaid.
Carl shrugged and turned around, put his hand on the doorknob. “Forget about it, Nate. It’s just the stress. Moving to a new country. Starting over. Now add being seven months pregnant. Not everyone can deal with just one of those things, but all of it, at the same time?” He shook his head. “I’m gonna go get us some food. You stay here.”
And then he was gone.
Nate stared at the closed door. Carl made sense. He should never have brought their family here in the first place. He was the one who had convinced Beth to relocate. She was hesitant but she didn’t say no, maybe because she could see how much he really wanted it.
He turned back to his wife, asleep on the hospital bed.
He’d failed her. His wife. The mother of his unborn child.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered to the quiet room. “I should never have brought us here. God, I should never have brought us here…”
twenty
. . .
He left Beth at St. Vincent. He didn’t want to, but there was no choice. The answers weren’t at the hospital but at home. At the townhouse. They hadn’t brought anything of Beth’s when they left last night—there hadn’t been any time, they were just too worried about her—and Nate used that excuse now to leave temporarily.
The house was empty when he opened the door. It was more empty now than it had ever seemed. Nate stood at the opened door for a moment, looking in at all the emptiness. The furniture was where they were supposed to be, of course, but nothing else was. Nothing that mattered, anyway.
He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, in that repose, but it must have been long enough that he didn’t hear Harriet when she came over. As with Carl at the hospital, it took their neighbor reaching over and touching his arm for him to snap out of it.
Nate turned to look at the older woman. “What?”
Harriet smiled motherly at him, her hand still resting on his arm. “I was asking about Beth, dear. How is she? I saw you and that friend of yours leaving with her yesterday. Things looked…stressful.”
Of course Harriet would have seen that. The woman rarely missed anything that happened in their little cul-de-sac. A part of that was due to her being the wife of the HOA head, but more than that, she was just nosy. You could only tend to a small garden for so long before you needed something else to occupy your time. Beth had liked her enough, probably because Harriet was the only one other than Dany who actively befriended her. Nate, on the other hand, could take or leave it.
Now, he forced a smile. “She’s under care and doing fine.”
“Oh, I’m happy to hear that.”
Harriet finally took her hand away. She was much smaller than Nate, even smaller than Beth. She was holding garden clippers in one gloved hand and wearing a derby hat to block out the intense Philippines sun.
“I was so worried,” she said, and the look she gave Nate told him she had seen and heard, if not everything, then most of what had transpired yesterday.
“She’ll probably be staying at a friend’s house for a few days.”
“The Filipina? What was her name?”
“Dany.”
“That’s it. Such a pretty girl.”
She doesn’t know about Dany, Nate thought.
“I guess she is,” he said. Then, because this entire conversation was making him anxious, Nate pulled his key out of the door and started to step inside. “Anyway, I just came back to fetch some things for Beth.”
The woman understood and stepped back. “Of course. Let me know if you need a hand with anything.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s mostly just clothes.”
“Of course, of course. Girls and clothes.”
He smiled at her from inside the house. “Yeah. Girls and clothes.”
He closed the door and locked it, thankful to be rid of the woman. It wasn’t that he disliked Harriet—because he didn’t, really—he was just in no mood to indulge in her gossipmongering. Who else had she talked to about what she’d seen and heard? Her husband, of course, but who else? Maybe the woman and her sister across the road? Nate had seen them chatting every now and then.
When he turned around, he noticed the open door across the first floor living room right away. The maid’s quarters, but there were no signs of Terri. Any hints the yaya had ever been a part of their family were gone. Her slippers—two pairs—were missing from the shoe rack, and so were some of the supplies she’d brought with her to do her cooking. It only took Nate a quick tour of the kitchen to confirm the latter. The room was also barren of personal items.
The young woman really had gone, just as Carl said. Back home to Leyte.
“It means, that little girl you hired is more afraid of what will happen to her than you are of Beth, if any of this gets out,” Carl had said. “Trust me when I tell you this—the person who wants to forget any of this ever happened the most is her.”
A part of him was relieved to know that, but another part was infuriated by the unjust nature of what Carl had said. Nate believed him, too. The Philippines really did function under its own rules, both written and unwritten. A girl like Terri, who had come to work from the countryside as a domestic help, would have almost no rights in a city like Cebu. She had no education and no family here. In the eyes of most Filipinos, she might as well not exist.
“Trust me when I tell you this—the person who wants to forget any of this ever happened the most is her.”
Now that she was home—or she should be already—the girl could forget any of this ever happened. Nate, on the other hand, couldn’t. He couldn’t afford to. And he didn’t want to, either. Not while he still couldn’t find a way to help Beth through this.
He stepped on something lying on the living room floor.
He glanced down. Some kind of…rope?
He crouched to get a better look.
It was the “whip” that Beth had been using to hit Terri yesterday. It lay on the same spot where she’d dropped it when Carl grabbed her. Neither of them had bothered to pick it up. Terri, after returning home from the hospital, hadn’t taken it, either, it seemed. It was evidence, and if Terri truly didn’t want to remember any of this, then she would avoid it like the plague. Unless she had other reasons to abandon it where it fell?
Nate picked it up. The writer in him wanted to first grab a rag as not to tamper with evidence, but then he remembered every evidence pointed to Beth as the perpetrator in this case. What else in this house would get her convicted if there was a trial? If Terri changed her mind and came back and pressed charges? What if Carl was wrong? What if the girl wanted more money, or demanded something else? What if—
“What the fuck is this?”
He’d asked the question to the empty house while turning the whip over in his hand. It wasn’t a whip. Not exactly. It was some kind of animal’s tail that had been dried out, but still retained some flexibility. Nate had never seen anything like it before. It had to have come from some kind of animal. Which one? And why had someone fashioned it into a whip, complete with a rope handle for easier gripping?
If he had any doubts it was the weapon Beth had used on Terri, he didn’t after glimpsing the specks of blood still clinging to certain parts of the object. Terri’s.
“Jesus, Beth.”
Once again, the empty house had no responses for him.
Nate laid the “whip” on the living room table. It felt odd to be holding it. Even odder to know what it was—some kind of weapon. Someone had turned a severed animal’s tail into an object that could do a human being harm. Why the hell would someone do something like that?
He hurried to the stairs and went up to the second floor. Being near the whip made him remember the crazed look in his wife’s eyes as she assaulted Terri. The pure horror on the girl’s face as she fled and screamed for help was something he would never forget.
In their bedroom, he went through the motions of collecting some of Beth’s clothes—shirts, pants, nightwear—for her to use in the hospital, without really putting any actual thought into his choices. Beth was going to wake up later tonight and she’d need something new to wear, and she could chastise him for his poor taste in fashion later.
A buzzing sound, coming from behind him.
He glanced back, tracking the noise to the nightstand table on Beth’s side of the bed. A phone on vibrate. He would recognize the sound anywhere. It wasn’t his phone, either, because he had it on him. It had to be Beth’s. They’d forgotten to grab it last night.
Nate walked over and opened the drawer. Beth’s phone was turned on and there was a preview of the Facebook Messenger app on the screen. There was no caller ID, but he could read parts of the text that had come through:
“u there? lola…”
Nate picked up the phone and the gadget immediately tried to read his face in order to unlock itself. It couldn’t, because he wasn’t Beth, and instead it prompted him for a password. Fortunately he knew what that was, just like Beth knew his phone’s password. They didn’t hide anything from each other.
He punched the passcode in and read the full message:
“u there? lola back”
Lola?
Nate knew what lola was, of course. His mom talked about her grandmother all the time. When he was younger, he’d even met his mother’s own mother. Lola was grandmother in Tagalog.
Why was someone with no caller ID messaging Beth about a lola?
He texted back: “Who is this?”
No response, even though he could see confirmation that the other person had received and read his message.
Finally, ellipses, as the other person typed a response: “who dis”
Who dis? The same as Who is this? but lazier.
He responded: “Who is THIS?”
And waited.
Five seconds. Seven…
Then, an answer: “u not beth”
Whoever it was didn’t like using proper punctuations. Nate sometimes did that, but only with friends and with Beth. He knew she got a kick out of it whenever he “acted like a teen” in text messages. The person he was communicating with, on the other hand, clearly was a kid.
Before he could reply, the unidentified kid texted again: “aswang got her”
There it was again. That word.
Aswang.
“No!” he typed back, even taking the effort to use an exclamation point for effect. For some reason, the thought that this aswang thing had “got” his wife made him furious. He added: “Who IS this?”
“friend” was the response.
“Give me a name.”
“just friend”
“I need a name!”
“too bad”
Nate grinded his teeth. “She’s in the hospital. She needs help. If you know her, and you can help her, tell me.”
The kid on the other end didn’t reply as quickly this time.
