The Comrade's Sacrifice

I looked down at my wristwatch as we made it to the village. It was twelve noon, but the day was pretty much gloomy. The sun hid behind the dark clouds, swimming like ghosts in the sky. The acacia trees enclosing us made the air cold, so that we didn’t take off our jackets.

The villagers waited for us at the village entrance, two wooden gates big enough for a ten-wheeler truck to pass through it. I could see Aunt Norma beckoning among the villagers. She was older and wearier than the last time I had seen her at my sister’s wedding. I and my comrades trudged, small rocks crunching beneath our army boots. This was not an army operation, but a matter of fulfilling a personal request from Aunt Norma. This also had nothing to do with my job as a land surveyor, although being one had helped us reach our destination. We were not soldiers, but we needed to wear army boots to sustain a long journey across mountains. We had crossed several of them and some hills and valleys. I didn’t understand why Aunt Norma stayed in a place far from civilization, as they called it.

Aunt Norma was the first to make a move to meet us. She hugged me. “How was the journey, son?” She knew it was apparently tiresome, but it was customary to ask.

“Obviously, we’ve made it, Aunt Norma,” I said and introduced my comrades; Vin, Rob, Fredo, and Nigel ‘the kid’.

“I know you’re all hungry,” said Aunt Norma. “Come and I’ll make you a meal.” She turned to a teenager to her right, whose face seemed to bear the entire world’s problem, stood with her hands at the back. “Nina, help me prepare for our visitor’s dinner.” The teenager nodded and sprinted to the house beside a Christian chapel.

Upon entering the wooden gates of the village, the crows lurking in the acacia trees yelled a disturbing sound. We stopped and gazed at where the sound came from.

“Omen of incoming danger,” commented an old lady who was sitting on her porch as we passed by.

“She’s one of the elders and is blind,” Aunt Norma said.

We continued walking until we reached the chapel. Some planks of wood hung loosely on the walls by the opened door. The lower wooden walls were thronged with algae. Surrounding the chapel was outgrown, struggling to grow.

Aunt Norma turned to us, as though she were a tour guide, to explain what we were seeing. “The lay minister has not come since it happened. We haven’t trimmed the grass. No one has dared to.” She drew near to us and whispered, “The elders don’t allow us to enter the chapel.” She continued to the house. “Come, let’s get into my house.”

This was my second time coming to Aunt Norma’s village. The first time was when I was a kid. My father took me with him because he and my mother got separated. I couldn’t remember how many days I had stayed here. Mother and my three uncles, her siblings, came after us to take me back to her. And so I grew up with Mother. What I only knew about Aunt Norma was that she got married to Uncle Joseph, a carpenter in this village. Yes, you heard it, Joseph the Carpenter. But not the father of Jesus. They never had a child for some reason.

Aunt Norma offered a seat to us. Vin was the first to sit down. I knew he was the most tired because he carried two backpacks. He was a witch hunter. He was a son of a wizard who was also a healer in the province of Samar, in a village that did not exist on the Philippine map. I met Vin when I was working at a call center in Bonifacio Global City. We both felt we were related as our eyes talked about our same origin. We are descendants of the same family of wizards. Our blood bears the same mix. Gallant witch hunters.

“Feel at home, guys,” I said, glancing at Rob and Fredo.

Rob was a Roman Catholic exorcist who also believed in witchcraft. It was a sin to believe in witchcraft for Catholics, but according to Rob, it’s the truth, it exists. He was already a deacon in Baguio but did not proceed to the priesthood because of his first love. She pleaded with him to remain unmarried with the church. He had a rosary slung around his neck, which made him look like a Tibetan monk. The rosary was made of brown beads half as big as marbles and a wooden cross, which he normally held up when he felt something bad might happen.

Fredo was a space pirate, as he insistently claimed. He seemed to be crazy. He always told us stories of his adventure in space and of his journey to find his kidnapped mother. He said aliens kidnapped his mother and that he still had to rescue her. It was nice listening to his space opera tales. They seemed fiction to us, but for him they were true. He’d been consistent with his stories. He had an indisputable will to make us believe. His belief in extraterrestrials was unquestionable. He even claimed that he provided service to aliens from other planets if they needed him about anything, they think he could help.

Nigel ‘the kid’ was not really a kid. He was a midget with a face of a five-year-old kid. He was in his early thirties already. He was Vin’s apprentice. Vin said that he was a member of the fairy family, only that his ears were not pointed, and that his wings were cut off when he was a baby. He was raised by a family in Cebu, discriminated against by the people there, and so he left the place, looked for his real family, and ended at Vin’s village. Luckily, Nigel’s real father was still alive and living in Vin’s village.

I had posted two jobs, a professional exorcist, and an extraterrestrial expert, on a job portal website a month ago. Rob contacted me first to offer his service. The next day Fredo knocked on my door and wanted to discuss the job. They both accepted the offer at no cost. Both of them just wanted to experience an adventure with me, as long as they would not spend money on fare and food.

Aunt Norma knew I was a witch hunter. I have the blood of my father, who was also a witch hunter of his generation but lived in Manila like a normal human. Aunt Norma and Father were half-siblings. Father met Mother when he was studying at a prominent university in the U-belt. I would not name the university, but it’s in Manila’s U-belt. When I was seven, Father was called to help his wizard relatives. Unfortunately, he was devoured by a place called Deepest Deeps during the battle of wizards in a faraway kingdom. To cut the story short, all wizards and witch hunters who were killed during the battle were dumped in the Deepest Deeps.

Aunt Norma had explained to me through her letter the dilemma that her village was facing. She used a letter to communicate because they didn’t have mobile phones and computers and the internet. They didn’t even have electricity. An errand teenage boy from the village had to go to the nearest town, which was almost fifty kilometers away, to mail the letter to the town’s post office. What she had told me, I had told my comrades. But they were free to ask for more details from Aunt Norma. Details that would help them perform their expertise to solve the mystery in the village.

“So, all the kids in the village have gone missing?” Rob started the conversation at the table.

“Yes,” said Aunt Norma. “The last kid was gone just yesterday.”

“What are the ages?” asked Vin, after wiping his mouth with a napkin.

“Between three and ten.”

Fredo, who was sitting at the other edge of the table, glanced at Nigel. “Kid, can you please pass the sweet potato?” Fredo said.

Frowning, Nigel stood up and took the plate to Fredo.

“When did it begin?” said Rob, and he sliced roasted chicken on his plate.

“Two months ago. Exactly on October 12 around midnight.”

“Can you tell me what happened that night?” Fredo chimed while chewing sweet potato.

Aunt Norma narrated one by one the missing of each kid. The common denominators? All of them went missing at exactly 12 midnight, below the age of ten, happened every other day, and after a moment of silence when the cicadas stopped its sound and smoke went around the village. She highlighted the last denominator. She said that the cicadas’ sound went dead exactly 5 minutes before midnight. And by that time, white smoke went around the village and through the gaps of the houses. And once the smoke cleared, the kid was already gone. The parents of the kids had all explained that before their kids went missing, they had been clutching them and that they hadn’t felt someone or something snatched the kids away. They just went off like bubbles. During those two months, the parents had become paranoid. They didn’t know who would be the next kid and the next, and so on and so forth.

It was unusual. The question of how they vanished in such a way remained a mystery. Vin and I initially concluded that this was a work of a witch, so we summoned all the elders in the village to ask some questions about the history of the place. We asked them about similar incidences or phenomena that happened in the past. And based on their accounts, we deduced that this happening was the first they believed to be caused by witchcraft. But the evidence we had did not conclude that this was indeed a work of a witch. We would need to observe the actual disappearance of a child. And Nigel ‘the kid’ would be our man. We had over 24 hours to gather evidence.

***

Before nightfall, Fredo readied his equipment. “Where is the nearest clearing outside the village?” he asked Aunt Norma.

“At the northern part.” Aunt Norma waved her hand. “I will have someone to take you there.”

Fredo nodded. “Before six we should be there.”

Aunt Norma called in Nina to fetch someone from the village to her house. Nina hurried out and after a few moments, a man who appeared to be one of the farmers was standing behind Nina by the door.

“Mang Rendo, I need your help. Come on in,” Aunt Norma said.

“What can I do?” Mang Rendo removed his conical hat.

“This is Matt, my nephew,” Aunt Norma introduced me and my comrades. “These are his friends. They are here to help us with the missing children.”

Mang Rendo shook our hands. His hand was rough, like the skin of an old tree.

At the clearing, we watched Fredo set up his equipment. It was a metal box with a small discone antenna on one side of it. On top of the box at the center was a tiny circle. At a closer look, it looked like a peso coin, only that the text on it was unreadable. The side of the box facing Fredo had a drawer handle. He pulled it out and dug a small touchscreen mobile phone. A black cord connected the phone to the box. He swiped the touchscreen and tapped an application. The text on the touchscreen looked like Chinese. He tapped a sign.

“What’s that text?” Rob asked.

“It’s a galactic text,” Fredo said at Rob. “This is the writing text we use outside Earth but within the Milky Way.”

Nigel ‘the kid’ frowned. He was about to laugh because of disbelief, but Vin gave him a scolding look.

Fredo tapped another sign on the touchscreen, and the coin-like cover slid open. A metallic tube slowly came out from behind it. It looked like a long muzzle of an M16 rifle with a length of three feet. From the gaps of the tube came out white laser beams extending to all sides across the clearing. The beams hit our skins like normal light waves. It felt a little hot, though.

“It will not burn you,” said Fredo. He tapped a combination button on the touchscreen. After a few seconds, it sucked the white laser beams back from where they had come out.

“What’s the laser for?” asked Rob.

“It’s not a laser beam. Though it looks like one. It’s a type of light beam made special to detect extraterrestrials and traces of them within 100 meters radius.”

“Did it detect?” I said.

“Let’s see.” Fredo swiped the touch screen several times. His eyes swelled at the touchscreen. I felt he observed something useful to help isolate the phenomenon. But he shook his head and declared, “No detection.”

Nigel ‘the kid’ clucked his tongue three times. Vin elbowed him so hard he almost fell down to the box. In their village, clucking the tongue is a sign of disappointment.

Fredo disassembled the equipment. “No detection. No signs of extraterrestrials, even traces of them in this village.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “We still have until tomorrow night.”

Rob held the cross dangling in his side. “Honestly, I felt nothing different here and in the village, particularly. I don’t think a demon possesses the village. I feel that witchcraft causes the vanishing.”

Vin and I looked at each other with interrogating eyes.

“I will still do a ritual in the chapel tonight, just to be sure,” Rob said.

***

Half an hour before midnight, Rob entered the chapel. Before closing the doors, he turned to us. “No one is allowed to come with me.” He shoved the door closed. Through the gaps of the door, we could see candle lights inside. I didn’t know what ritual he performed, but I was sure it was some sort of exorcism. We could hear him utter verses from the Bible repetitively. He also had prayers and called out several names from the Bible. At around 1 AM, we smelled burned candles and the door of the chapel creaked. Rob came out and announced, “I have called every existing demon on Earth but no sign of their presence.”

“You mean to say that the demons have not possessed this village?” Vin asked.

“Exactly.” Rob stepped out of the chapel and closed the door behind him.

“Let’s go back to Aunt Norma’s house and get some sleep. We need to prepare for tomorrow,” I suggested.

Author's note: Continue in Part II