Carpooling Loonies
Death on All Hallows Eve
Editor's note: These are excerpts from 'The House on Burgos Street' by the same author.
The house on Burgos Street stood in a corner with very little pride. Oddly, its popularity stemmed from the mystery of how people would furtively engage themselves in talks about it like most of them were still attempting to hide the murkiness behind its walls. Late-night passersby would only make quick glances at it or its shadow when the moon was bright, and the people who lived a stones-throw away from the house direly prohibited their visitors from staring at it as if a bad omen would be casted their way if they looked at it longer than the invisible entities would allow them to. There was nothing magnificent about the house. It was built near that school which similarly carried the reputation of being haunted by wiling spirits, moaning ghost of nuns and headless priests. The house was just another common two-storey 70's structure, but the ground where it stood spoke of a curse that will haunt all who will live on it. The soil beneath the house breathed and it won’t cease to live, not even until the day the house would burn down to ashes.
In 1982, a family spent a long night of travel by ship to move to their new home in a city not so familiar to them. Only the father spoke the dialect so the rest of them remained timid around neighbors for a time. His job required the family to move with him every so often, but little did they know the quiet city marked their final destination. The three children were sent to a Catholic school reputed to be the best one in the whole city and well-known for its obscene matriculation, gaining for itself the moniker St. Money. Nobody complained. The parents who sent their kids to St. Money found comfort in the idea of their children being kept safely within the confines of the so-called spiritually-coated walls.
They were the Rochas. Everybody just called them that—the Rochas. The youngest stayed at home with her mother during the first few months to prepare her for kindergarten. She was going to turn five on their first summer there and was barely learning how to say her lengthy Christian name. Everyday she would watch her mother rearrange some furniture in their well-kept house while she sat on the stairs with her dust-covered rag doll. She’d wait until the sun would start sliding down from the Western sky because that’s when she and her mother would move to their backyard. The maids watered the plants early in the morning and right after a gaily lunch everyday. Both of them hailed from a town deep into the north and believed that plants needed to be nourished just before they have forty winks in the afternoon. The dark-skinned house helps would talk about how their grandparents would teach them to treat the plants like human beings believing they were once little girls like them in long colorful sarong. Conversations like those would often keep the Rocha children up until the wee hours of the morning, whispering to make sure they didn’t wake any of their parents.
Sometimes the little Rocha would mimic her mother, letting go of her doll to engage in something that would leave her small clumsy hands misty. Even if the sun shone directly at the plants in the Rochas' small garden hours after the maids watered them, the plants would remain damp, sometimes dripping, like the rain has just fallen on them. On their first week in the house, one of the maids was cutting string beans inside the kitchen when she saw an old woman standing outside the Rochas' low-fenced garden. With black lace covering part of her head to reveal a face furrowed by time, she just stood there with her hands clasped together on her frail belly, occasionally smiling as if observing somebody from the garden. The maid scanned the garden from the wooden window of the kitchen but didn’t see anything. Convincing herself the old woman was demented, she decided to leave the kitchen hoping the old woman would be gone by the time she returned. She was the least concerned about the low fence thinking the old woman couldn’t possibly be a thief. Before she turned from the sink, a rutted hand rested on the chopping board beside the sink. Impiang, the young maid felt an instant drop in her temperature and weakening in her knees she could not control. When she finally turned to look at the owner’s hand, she saw the old woman from outside the fence standing beside her, giving her a seemingly empty stare.
It was the eldest among the Rocha siblings who saw Impiang lifeless-like on the kitchen floor. When she regained consciousness, Impiang described to the Rochas and a neighborhood elder what she saw before she passed out. But Iyay Caring showed no expression of disbelief from what she heard. It was not the first time she heard a similar story and Impiang was not the first one visited by the old woman. Iyay Caring told Impiang the old woman she saw was Lola Gumba, a healer who lived in a small hut where the Rochas' apartment stood. Many years ago before Burgos saw its development into a residential area, the place was hugged by trees and the ground covered with thick muddy earth. Only those who seeked the services of Lola Gumba would fearlessly tread its dark and muddy grounds. Everyone whispered the old woman practiced black magic and all that went to her either blindly asked to be given some of her power, or begged for her help to claim revenge.
On the eve of Halloween in 1963, Lola Gumba was found hanging from a single bamboo pole (erected peculiarly) outside her hut, her neck all bruised and tied with a black rope. It was said that she would use the unusual rope in one of her many rituals believed by the townspeople as her way of summoning evil spirits. But those who saw her dangling from the pole supposed it was impossible for her to commit the grisly act all by herself. Others believed it was a reversal of her demonic power. Still, nobody really knew why Lola Gumba died a hasty death. On the night of her demise, Burgos was silent, unknowing of the old woman's fate.
(To be continued…)
(E-mail the author at jinki_young@yahoo.com)