[story] the perils of the past
Nov. 26th, 2012 08:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ib_archiveauthor: untrainedviolin
The night is dark and full of terrors. Some human author wrote that, and truer words, she thinks, have never been spoken.
She remembers. Remembers even as she ducks into an empty house (the city is teeming with them these days, it's only a matter of picking the right one). She strips off her shirt - bless the evolution of fashion - and without further ado her wings burst out and everything from her hips downward falls to the floor. A manananggal in the cities is nearly unheard of, but they aren't impossible. Cities, for monsters, are the richest hunting ground there is.
She throws a tarpaulin over the rest of her body, arranges it artfully to make it look like it had been left there. There aren't any spells she could cast to protect it, no familiars to guard it. She wishes she had those, but she has no one and nothing. No matter. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Did she get that right?
Spreading her wings, she goes off to hunt.
She wanders the streets of the city at night in her human form, hungry and looking for things to eat. She doesn't *look* hungry, at least not at casual glance. Her clothes are well-made and even better worn. Her Spanish is impeccable, and something in her eyes makes everyone think twice about asking (very loudly, anyway) why she is out, at night, without a chaperon. Perhaps it is the flair of her dress, or the arrogance in the snap of her fan. Maybe it's the teeth that flash in what little light there is on the streets. Whatever it is, it has men shifting uncomfortably in doorways and women lowering their gazes to stare at the cobblestones. No one wants to look all that hunger in the eye.
The hunger is a gnawing pain in her gut. When the moon comes and she feeds it dulls and disappears entirely, if she's lucky. Those times are the best. It's why she moved to the city – what is one more missing person in a sea of tiring humanity, after all?
On a particular night she can recall vividly, the moon was full. She remembers:
Looking up, sparing a grin for the night sky, and turning her heel sharply into the nearest alley. No one follows. No one wants to.
Once in the alley she stands surrounded by darkness, and she pauses, blinking, trying to adjust to the dimmer lighting - not that the main street is much brighter. Reaching outward, she feels for a knob and twists, and a door opens. She ducks into the noise that spills outward, and closes the door softly. Inside there are crowded tables, and crowded chairs, and loose-lipped men that talk too much for their own good. She is careful not to stumble. It's only her second time here, and the clientele isn't used to people like her. They stare at her, but not openly. They mutter, but not too loudly. She sweeps past them as best she can, and heads up the stairs. It's best to ignore them. Good hiding places are so hard to find.
She climbs one, two, three flights of stairs and when she reaches the landing of the last one she stops and bends over with her hands braced on her knees. She's winded. Rickety stairs, wearing layer upon layer of near-unmanageable fabric? It's a miracle she’s reached her room at the top. Sighing, she straightens up and carefully undoes the clasp that holds the ends of her shawl together. She puts the fabric on top of a dresser in the corner. And now comes the hard part.
It used to be painful. It used to be she experienced pain so intense it would tear her mind apart as it did her body. But now her bones are more limber and she's more used to it and she's done it countless times and so it's only with the slightest twinge of discomfort that she shoves.
The wings unfold from her shoulders, black and skeletal. Her lower body falls to the floor with a thud that hopefully no one downstairs hears. She is now half a woman, in the most literal sense of the word. Half a woman dressed in half of an exquisite outfit, with wings sprouting from her back. She picks up a heavy cloth that she keeps in the corner and throws it over her hips and her legs. And then she flies.
I really ought to have my own place, she thinks. The city is beneath her, glittering dully. Anyone could find the rest of me.
She doesn't normally live in cities, you know. Used to be it was the mountains for her, but then it got too obvious and she was hopping from town to town. She was smart enough to live in one town and hunt in another, mind you, but food is scarce up there, people even scarcer, and sooner or later everyone looks for the people with bloodshot eyes who reek of death. (She was smarter than that, of course she was, but better safe than sorry.)
Anyway.
This is how she does it: she finds someone unlikely to be missed. At least by too many people. In the big cities this is easy - the people curled up on the street in nothing but rags, those slumped over in alleys reeking of alcohol. You know the type. But sometimes she gets tired of them. They taste scrawny and spread too thin, and on nights like those she goes looking for bigger game. Fat shopkeepers. Politicians, maybe. Farmers fresh from the market, as it were. A pregnant woman or two, oh yes, those are the *best*. Those taste well-fed with plenty of meat to spare. And when she finds them it's only a matter of luring them into quiet places, a quick twist of the neck, and there you have it. Dinner.
Tonight, though, she's having trouble focusing. She's hungry, you see, she’s been going without recently because people were paying attention for once. Dinner two nights ago was a drunkard in Ermita whom she'd thought harmless. It turned out he was actually quite influential in the opium trade with China, which explained the powdery taste in her mouth and the sleepiness she'd felt afterward. It made her want to spit. Moreover, killing him meant she'd had to go without food for some time, and this makes her cranky. No stranger to starvation is she, but one has to admit that the city tends to spoil its inhabitants, for better or worse.
Finally she sees one, a woman. Huddled in a tiny, dark street with only one lamp lit. And oh - if she isn't mistaken, this one is pregnant. A feast, for the likes of her. Almost immediately her mouth waters and her needle tongue slips out and licks her lips. She can almost taste the blood.
She finds a current of air that will take her in the woman's direction just as her prey stands up. With an uncertain look at her surroundings the human carefully picks her way amongst the street's broken cobblestones with one hand on the wall beside her, and above her a winged shadow flies closer, wings barely beating.
Without warning the woman turns and flings a small pouch right into the monster's mouth.
The manananggal stumbles in midair, sputters, spits. There is garlic in the pouch, garlic and salt and no small amount of holy water wrapped up in leather and tied with string. The moment her teeth made contact with it, it burst and emptied its contents into her burning mouth. Shrieking in pain but not dead, she falls to the ground, writhing.
Above her the human woman is shaking, clearly terrified. A figure steps out from an alley behind her. "Thank you," says the figure. The voice is that of a man's, deep and raspy and hoarse. "We'll take it from here." The woman turns and hurries away.
The man steps closer to the writhing manananggal, who twists and hisses and spits upward at his face. He immediately takes several hasty steps backward, and the half-woman writhing on the ground lets out a laugh. "Not so sure now, are you?" she - it taunts. He takes out a bunch of garlic and she stills, eyes wide and fearful.
"Not so sure now, are you?" the man echoes, mocking her. He crouches, careful to stay out of range of her tongue. Her needle tongue. "Now. I have a proposal for you. My name is Gabriel, and you must listen to me if you wish to survive this night."
And this is how she joins the revolution.
She remembers those days. Nights spent in espionage, feeding, and oh the wonderful thrill of the hunt. She got to go places. She was the secret weapon. She was everything.
(In the present she spies a wizened old man huddled alone at the end of a dark street. She feels her stomach rumble.)
It was a nice life, but there was the eternal overhanging threat of them killing her like they nearly did when they caught her. It wasn't fun living under watchful eyes, and she has no intention of doing it again.
(The old man looks up, spots her, screams. He points up at her, eyes wide, but before she can sink her teeth into his neck she is caught. She no longer understands what's happening. Someone's got a rope tight around her waist somehow. The taste of garlic. Her mouth. Burning.)
She remembers, vaguely, attending Jose Rizal's execution. There were so many people, and she had been so tempted. But she hadn't, and so she watched greatness die.
The country stabilized, you know, eventually. Or at least they no longer needed her, so one night she quietly vanished.
Now here she is, on the same dingy street in Ermita, a hundred-odd years on. It's just as sad and abandoned as it was the first time she came here, and she is, unfortunately, just as helpless - bound hand and feet, as they say - tonight as she was then.
Her enemy this time is a priest, a man of ponderous girth and nervous hands. Behind him are two sacristans carrying - what else? - the lower half of her body. Clustered around them are people with the look of terrified animals. Some of them are shouting. Others huddle together, staring at her in fear. Just for fun she flicks her needle tongue out at one of them, a teenage girl hovering too close for her liking. She skitters backward with a cry of fear, and the manananggal laughs, eerie and high-pitched. The crowd of onlookers shuffles backward. Most of them are people from the provinces come to the city seeking fortune and finding that it was all taken. So they lived in the backstreets and the alleyways, hoping fate would come seeking them there. It didn't, but she did.
How did they know she was here? Someone must have tipped her off, someone who remembers her from before. She searches the sea of legs and faces, and in the back, she sees someone she had hoped she would never see again. She knows it's him, despite the darkness.
As she watches, the priest sprinkles her lower half with holy water. It stings a bit, but she doesn't flinch. She will go bravely, as many of her kind have done. They are monsters, but they have dignity too.
When the priest, chanting, smears garlic all over her thighs and legs she watches with horror and cannot help but writhe and scream because it hurts, it hurts -
And like all storybook witches, she melts.
the end
The night is dark and full of terrors. Some human author wrote that, and truer words, she thinks, have never been spoken.
She remembers. Remembers even as she ducks into an empty house (the city is teeming with them these days, it's only a matter of picking the right one). She strips off her shirt - bless the evolution of fashion - and without further ado her wings burst out and everything from her hips downward falls to the floor. A manananggal in the cities is nearly unheard of, but they aren't impossible. Cities, for monsters, are the richest hunting ground there is.
She throws a tarpaulin over the rest of her body, arranges it artfully to make it look like it had been left there. There aren't any spells she could cast to protect it, no familiars to guard it. She wishes she had those, but she has no one and nothing. No matter. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Did she get that right?
Spreading her wings, she goes off to hunt.
She wanders the streets of the city at night in her human form, hungry and looking for things to eat. She doesn't *look* hungry, at least not at casual glance. Her clothes are well-made and even better worn. Her Spanish is impeccable, and something in her eyes makes everyone think twice about asking (very loudly, anyway) why she is out, at night, without a chaperon. Perhaps it is the flair of her dress, or the arrogance in the snap of her fan. Maybe it's the teeth that flash in what little light there is on the streets. Whatever it is, it has men shifting uncomfortably in doorways and women lowering their gazes to stare at the cobblestones. No one wants to look all that hunger in the eye.
The hunger is a gnawing pain in her gut. When the moon comes and she feeds it dulls and disappears entirely, if she's lucky. Those times are the best. It's why she moved to the city – what is one more missing person in a sea of tiring humanity, after all?
On a particular night she can recall vividly, the moon was full. She remembers:
Looking up, sparing a grin for the night sky, and turning her heel sharply into the nearest alley. No one follows. No one wants to.
Once in the alley she stands surrounded by darkness, and she pauses, blinking, trying to adjust to the dimmer lighting - not that the main street is much brighter. Reaching outward, she feels for a knob and twists, and a door opens. She ducks into the noise that spills outward, and closes the door softly. Inside there are crowded tables, and crowded chairs, and loose-lipped men that talk too much for their own good. She is careful not to stumble. It's only her second time here, and the clientele isn't used to people like her. They stare at her, but not openly. They mutter, but not too loudly. She sweeps past them as best she can, and heads up the stairs. It's best to ignore them. Good hiding places are so hard to find.
She climbs one, two, three flights of stairs and when she reaches the landing of the last one she stops and bends over with her hands braced on her knees. She's winded. Rickety stairs, wearing layer upon layer of near-unmanageable fabric? It's a miracle she’s reached her room at the top. Sighing, she straightens up and carefully undoes the clasp that holds the ends of her shawl together. She puts the fabric on top of a dresser in the corner. And now comes the hard part.
It used to be painful. It used to be she experienced pain so intense it would tear her mind apart as it did her body. But now her bones are more limber and she's more used to it and she's done it countless times and so it's only with the slightest twinge of discomfort that she shoves.
The wings unfold from her shoulders, black and skeletal. Her lower body falls to the floor with a thud that hopefully no one downstairs hears. She is now half a woman, in the most literal sense of the word. Half a woman dressed in half of an exquisite outfit, with wings sprouting from her back. She picks up a heavy cloth that she keeps in the corner and throws it over her hips and her legs. And then she flies.
I really ought to have my own place, she thinks. The city is beneath her, glittering dully. Anyone could find the rest of me.
She doesn't normally live in cities, you know. Used to be it was the mountains for her, but then it got too obvious and she was hopping from town to town. She was smart enough to live in one town and hunt in another, mind you, but food is scarce up there, people even scarcer, and sooner or later everyone looks for the people with bloodshot eyes who reek of death. (She was smarter than that, of course she was, but better safe than sorry.)
Anyway.
This is how she does it: she finds someone unlikely to be missed. At least by too many people. In the big cities this is easy - the people curled up on the street in nothing but rags, those slumped over in alleys reeking of alcohol. You know the type. But sometimes she gets tired of them. They taste scrawny and spread too thin, and on nights like those she goes looking for bigger game. Fat shopkeepers. Politicians, maybe. Farmers fresh from the market, as it were. A pregnant woman or two, oh yes, those are the *best*. Those taste well-fed with plenty of meat to spare. And when she finds them it's only a matter of luring them into quiet places, a quick twist of the neck, and there you have it. Dinner.
Tonight, though, she's having trouble focusing. She's hungry, you see, she’s been going without recently because people were paying attention for once. Dinner two nights ago was a drunkard in Ermita whom she'd thought harmless. It turned out he was actually quite influential in the opium trade with China, which explained the powdery taste in her mouth and the sleepiness she'd felt afterward. It made her want to spit. Moreover, killing him meant she'd had to go without food for some time, and this makes her cranky. No stranger to starvation is she, but one has to admit that the city tends to spoil its inhabitants, for better or worse.
Finally she sees one, a woman. Huddled in a tiny, dark street with only one lamp lit. And oh - if she isn't mistaken, this one is pregnant. A feast, for the likes of her. Almost immediately her mouth waters and her needle tongue slips out and licks her lips. She can almost taste the blood.
She finds a current of air that will take her in the woman's direction just as her prey stands up. With an uncertain look at her surroundings the human carefully picks her way amongst the street's broken cobblestones with one hand on the wall beside her, and above her a winged shadow flies closer, wings barely beating.
Without warning the woman turns and flings a small pouch right into the monster's mouth.
The manananggal stumbles in midair, sputters, spits. There is garlic in the pouch, garlic and salt and no small amount of holy water wrapped up in leather and tied with string. The moment her teeth made contact with it, it burst and emptied its contents into her burning mouth. Shrieking in pain but not dead, she falls to the ground, writhing.
Above her the human woman is shaking, clearly terrified. A figure steps out from an alley behind her. "Thank you," says the figure. The voice is that of a man's, deep and raspy and hoarse. "We'll take it from here." The woman turns and hurries away.
The man steps closer to the writhing manananggal, who twists and hisses and spits upward at his face. He immediately takes several hasty steps backward, and the half-woman writhing on the ground lets out a laugh. "Not so sure now, are you?" she - it taunts. He takes out a bunch of garlic and she stills, eyes wide and fearful.
"Not so sure now, are you?" the man echoes, mocking her. He crouches, careful to stay out of range of her tongue. Her needle tongue. "Now. I have a proposal for you. My name is Gabriel, and you must listen to me if you wish to survive this night."
And this is how she joins the revolution.
She remembers those days. Nights spent in espionage, feeding, and oh the wonderful thrill of the hunt. She got to go places. She was the secret weapon. She was everything.
(In the present she spies a wizened old man huddled alone at the end of a dark street. She feels her stomach rumble.)
It was a nice life, but there was the eternal overhanging threat of them killing her like they nearly did when they caught her. It wasn't fun living under watchful eyes, and she has no intention of doing it again.
(The old man looks up, spots her, screams. He points up at her, eyes wide, but before she can sink her teeth into his neck she is caught. She no longer understands what's happening. Someone's got a rope tight around her waist somehow. The taste of garlic. Her mouth. Burning.)
She remembers, vaguely, attending Jose Rizal's execution. There were so many people, and she had been so tempted. But she hadn't, and so she watched greatness die.
The country stabilized, you know, eventually. Or at least they no longer needed her, so one night she quietly vanished.
Now here she is, on the same dingy street in Ermita, a hundred-odd years on. It's just as sad and abandoned as it was the first time she came here, and she is, unfortunately, just as helpless - bound hand and feet, as they say - tonight as she was then.
Her enemy this time is a priest, a man of ponderous girth and nervous hands. Behind him are two sacristans carrying - what else? - the lower half of her body. Clustered around them are people with the look of terrified animals. Some of them are shouting. Others huddle together, staring at her in fear. Just for fun she flicks her needle tongue out at one of them, a teenage girl hovering too close for her liking. She skitters backward with a cry of fear, and the manananggal laughs, eerie and high-pitched. The crowd of onlookers shuffles backward. Most of them are people from the provinces come to the city seeking fortune and finding that it was all taken. So they lived in the backstreets and the alleyways, hoping fate would come seeking them there. It didn't, but she did.
How did they know she was here? Someone must have tipped her off, someone who remembers her from before. She searches the sea of legs and faces, and in the back, she sees someone she had hoped she would never see again. She knows it's him, despite the darkness.
As she watches, the priest sprinkles her lower half with holy water. It stings a bit, but she doesn't flinch. She will go bravely, as many of her kind have done. They are monsters, but they have dignity too.
When the priest, chanting, smears garlic all over her thighs and legs she watches with horror and cannot help but writhe and scream because it hurts, it hurts -
And like all storybook witches, she melts.
the end
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Date: 2012-12-03 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-03 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-05 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-07 08:49 am (UTC)It's not clear whether her abrupt end was a waste or a step forward in her long life. There's ambiguity here, and I think it helps give the story its mysterious tone.