Metaphysics of the Unknown (2019)
“It is our scared and fear-induced shrieks resound as we thrust ourselves further and further into the night that we leaves trails like breadcrumbs for the nether creatures and daemons to track us down as we lose our way; inching ever so further from God’s guiding light.
-Bishop Charles Balbuena
___
Just like Hell itself, there are layers to this accursed town, with the outer layers being actually inhabitable. On the very edge was a playground, one of the most innocent and heartwarming features of this town. A place where you could see the Ocangb locals actually smile for once. This was the place for children to remind themselves that they are children. A safe haven for the earthly angels with no wings. Now take that last line of poetry and twist it into a more morbid, macabre, and literal sense:
Angels with no wings, fell from the sky, cast down by God, and whose souls sank to the deepest depths. That last line of the last paragraph is indeed correct. In its midst lie angels with no wings, no doubt- but only one of them ever actually fell from heaven.
_
This account started when I was called in for a missing person’s case. Through some legislative miracle, Ocangb was back under the jurisdiction of Cebu. This legislation would make future home owning impossible, but this made Ocangb closer to the administrative reach.
No, I was not part of the investigation, I was called in to arrange an affidavit and act as a notary public for the victim’s parent’s public statements. As far as I was concerned, the victim was a small girl and neither word of her safety or at the grimmest, her corpse was ever found or heard of. This was long before I met Ashton and I had a different partner then, whose last name, which was Alcala, was the only thing about him I could really remember.
I took my leave and headed towards the bus station and made my way to the bull-pit. As I traversed the northern borough towards the downtown area, I looked to find that I was the only one on the bus. The creeping feeling of having a ghoulish head with piercing black eyes just jot out of one of those empty seats and stare at you. I don’t why. I’ve traveled at night before in similar scenarios and not once did I have this feeling.
I’ve never found solace in this city. Not when I slept, not when I awoke, not when I ate meals or brushed my teeth. There is something on the outskirts of Cebu City that keeps you on your toes. It was the fact that the place was always dark, even in the daytime. The climate had always been cloudy and rainy in that region, but the other places around the outskirts who shared the same meteorological attribute were a far better and cheerier place compared to it. But it was the corners and alleyways that were impenetrably dark, and once you were stuck in them, you could never escape.
There was almost nothing in those dark alleyways. No trashcans, no bins, no homeless, not even a back door that lead to there from the inside of the adjacent buildings. And if there were any, they were boarded up from the inside. It seemed as if any ancient evil that nobody is or was aware of, had taken up residence in the vantaesque crevices of this city. Part of its appeal I guess, along with the suspiciously tinted stains one can see when passing by.
This suspicion of mine was only cemented into and confirmed within the deepest crevices of my mind during the following days.
Officer Alcala had dragged me into the heart of Ocangb, where the outskirts ended and the alleys mysteriously connected into the Common’s many concrete veins and arteries, sharing a central corridor leading to the Diafold. He insisted that the experience would help make a more ‘convincing case’. Clearly this man of action was not familiar with legal machinations.
The Diafold was basically an amalgamation of the retired housing projects and packing depots that were left abandoned after the nation’s economic stagnation during the 1970’s. It was not to be considered the slums or be placed equivalent to the colloquial hood, for people still lived in those areas. This place was the dark jewel to adorn the outskirt’s morbid crown. Its hollow halls and pitch black alleyways screamed a thin whining screech that hit anyone’s ears as soon as they stepped into its premises
One particular building stood out. My diction here may not be completely correct, for by ‘stood out’, it called to one’s attention due to the fact that it was nearly crumbling and dilapidated. It barely stood, is what I meant. Although, one could still wander inside without having the ceiling above crush you. And even if it did, the beam would have been so tender and termite ridden, you’d be struck with a sprinkling of sawdust rather than an actual solid wooden beam.
Alcala, this staunch man of great bravados, took it upon himself to drag a sunken-chested, bony-shouldered, intelligentsia such as me into this place. It called to him, he told me. I replied by questioning his sanity.
“This building is worth investigating.” He proclaimed.
“Amongst all the other buildings this missing girl might be hiding in, what makes you think this one?”
“Just look at it!” Alcala told me as he gravitated closer into the building.
“What are you trying to prove, meat head?” I sneered at him. I felt confident in insulting him because despite our disparities in size, I would ultimately have a hand in incarcerating him should he try anything against me.
There in the old house we explored. I stayed in the well-lighted window by the front door while Alcala went on to explore the house even further. I felt as if I should not have accompanied him. He is the only one, legally that is, in this situation to carry on any further. I just hope that if I hear his faint, eldritch scream somewhere within the wicked blackness of the house, I could burst out of the door and come back running to the bull pit with the bad news.
But as he drove in further, I averted my gaze into the Commons beyond. It seemed scenic from the offset, but something just isn’t right with it. It leaves more of a bitter taste in my mouth than anything else. I turned to the fields beyond and realize that yes; there might be some redemption to this hell on earth. I could finally go back home to San Jorje.
All these thoughts piled up as I mused over a curious little scarecrow in the glen. This brought back memories of the farm, the sugar mills and the sweet smell of muscuvado- a dark, unrefined powdered molasses that were favored by San Jorjeneos on their coffee. All these lovely memories came to a halt when my vision seemed to have faltered. No, I thought. I looked at it for nearly twenty minutes. I thought it was just a person at first, but people usually die if you take their lower half off. Whatever it was, I swore I saw this scarecrow climb down its pole...
I called for Alcala. Thankfully, he had not been in too far that he could still hear me. I told him that I would be going ahead, making excuses of how I had things to take care of and ‘files to organize’. I had only turned my back slightly when I heard him scream out: “Hello?”
“I’ll be going out now, officer!” I chimed back. “Get home at a reasonable hour, I suppose…”
I heard no answer. The large winding house situated in the Diafolds was indeed spacious. It had many holes and gaps in the foundation. There was a patch of earth that no longer had any floorboards over it. If you looked yonder at the window sill, the etchings and paint had worn off. Of course, I noticed this only to have my attention robbed from the aging details and focused grimly on the absence of the scarecrow from its post. I had looked at it for what seemed nearly an hour: “Where did you go little one?”
Wheezing in an uneasy stupor by the anxiety that had made its way up my spine, I got out of the building. Fortunately, the building and the alleyway that lead back to the road towards Cebu City proper was just a few meters away.
I walked through the alleyway and waded through the stench that emanated from the sides of the walls that lay adjacent to the alleyway. As I immerged I approached the wayside. Fairly abandoned but cabs do still pass through this place if you know where to hail them. I waited at the spot where a waiting shed was situated, in front of a barrio that leads inwards from the main road. At the earliest hours of dawn, the local priest would assist the children to this shed and tell them to wait there until a pedicab; a motorbike with welded chassis with seats secured to its frame was to arrive. They were to hail it and get on as quick as possible. This fact was made all the more eerily unsettling when you look at the wooden arch of the waiting shed and find countless crucifixes and tin crosses ripped off of their rosaries nailed haphazardly to the wooden beam.
I sat in the shed. The benches of once rough hardwood have been polished and softened to a sheen through years of use. The foundation had sunken into the ground and the concrete walls showed signs of collapse. My impatience drove me from the shed and led me to wander to the threshold of the highway where the cement and the dirt met. I looked at the far view of each direction, looking for a cab in the distance. There was nothing there.
The adjacent bog that faced my direction was curiously foggy. It had this haze that made it impossible to see through. One could only see the few stalks of reed and sometimes the disgusting sewage water and trash the proliferated in its banks.
Despite my intelligence, I walked to the edge of the road where the asphalt meets the swamp grass. I saw a few sprigs of swamp cabbage and thought I could harvest some for dinner. I soon retracted, remembering that these plants grew on trash water. On the other side of the bog, I saw the old playground. This bog was cut through by an earthen bridge that made accessing the other side possible. But it was thin and crossing over required the agility and grace of an acrobat, or the callused feet of a Filipino farmer.
I watched through the water as it bubbled and rippled, thinking to myself how fish could survive in this toxic sludge. I then heard the old heathen cathedral ring violently its bells. It looked at my watch, not noticing the glaring yellow eyes that peered through me in the bog.
Mimi Miguelas was 14-year-old girl reported missing by authorities on March 23, 2014. She was last seen in her grandmother’s yard. She was suspected to have wandered off a few kilometers towards the Limbaga fish ponds as footprints matching the shoes which she was wearing on the day lead to there. There is no further evidence to suggest what might have happened to her.
___
The bell toll eluded all logic. It was well past 6 PM, and not at all close to 12 PM either- although, from what I heard, the ‘cathedral’ wasn’t Catholic, nor even any other denomination of the Judeo-Christian faith. From what I heard, the cathedral was heathen, built by heathens, worshipped in by heathens and tolls, I assumed, for heathens.
The Haneaic faith, as it was known. Not much is known about it besides the name, which is known. It came into light after this small town was brought into the jurisdiction of the province, but still, the faithful would not yield to the cowlings of journalists. And since the reformation, the Church couldn’t conduct any Inquisitions as of late.
As I looked through behind me, the belfry was nowhere in sight. It was further in than I imagined. I looked towards the bog and saw disturbances in the water. At first I saw the reeds bending. Thinking it was just the tilapia, I did not think to move away from the pond. Then, in an instant, I think I went blind.
I think I did, though I thought I wasn’t at the time. But everything seemed as if my vision was not functioning correctly. Then, as if in a sudden sigh of relief, my vision faded back, only to realize the paralysis I found myself in.
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It was one of the most terrifying nights of my existence. My paralysis had struck me from the lower torso down. All I could do is look forward, unto the bog and the disturbances on the water’s surface the fish were causing. Then as the last toll of the heathen cathedral’s bell rang and it left was the residual vibrations that coursed through my spine, the fish sopped churning the water. It was as if they had swum into deeper, safer waters.
I had felt a figure loom through me as if it were a shadow, extending it visage through the light in front of me. I could see it, but at the same time, I couldn’t. I could not discern if it were actually there or not. Its existence shifted from being just a figment of my imagination to being so real I could hear its raw mass drag itself through the dirt road that leads to the asphalt just a few hundred meters were I stood.
Out of my fear and the want for me to clarify the unknowingness that I so feared, I threw a single-worded question into the dark air, and hopefully to the ‘thing’ coming towards me. Hopefully, that ‘something’ turns out to be a more benign ‘someone’.
“Hello?” I asked.
My voice rang through the empty dark air, with no churning of the fish nor toll of the heathen bell to drown my voice out. Anything wandering around in this dark endless crossroads would easily find me from an earshot away. With an accursed town to my back, a dark bog to my front and endless dark corners between the even more endless trees adjacent to the roads beside me, whatever those ‘anythings’ maybe, they surely must have heard me. And they must be surely coming after me.
You will eventually hate your spouse; that much is true. But you will never stop loving your child…
-Narrator
___
Quarrel rips through the peace and quiet of the household. And the greatest stress and pain and anguish does not fall on the husband, whose liver is another jigger away from cancer and whose stupor and demeanor has been rendered violent by the very alcohol that will be the end of him three years later. It does not fall on the wife who sustains bruises and lesions from the beatings of her husband, being forced to run away with her high school ‘sweetheart’ due to her accidental conception of their child as a result of their unsuccessful attempt to elope in Senior Year.
The husband will soon die and the wife’s bruises will soon heal, but their screams and screeches will resound within the mind of their child, who buries herself under the pillows of the dusty cabinet she had locked herself in, for years and years to come.
The wife was a painter, the husband unemployed. The mother did her best to comfort her weeping child at times like this. But this was not always the case, mind you.
The arguments started when the child was roughly around the age where she could walk. The husband had lost his job, got into the habit of drinking and this caused tension between the two. The beatings started when the child was around three, but it was around seven when the child started to notice the scars and bruises on her mother’s face.
“Mommy, what’s that on your face?” the child so innocently answered.
The mother, quick to make an excuse, knowing full well the incapacity of a child to handle the truth, said to her:
“It’s just paint, honey…”
A phrase the child would hear for the rest of her life.
This did not stop here. The mother had to make more and more creative responses to deviate her child’s attention from her increasingly large and vivid scars. It became a bonding experience between them. It was the few lanterns that burned bright in the dark tunnel. They welcomed another, then one more, then one last into the family. This newfound happiness would be short however.
They found themselves face painting each other. Every day. For the lot of them, it was to alleviate the pain. To forget the night before, to know and feel solace in the company of themselves.
But now the cans of water and paint thinner lie empty on the ground, and the paintbrushes scattered and the assorted watercolors stain the floor. In the kitchen, dinner was on the floor and everyone would spend the night hungry, though none would spend it sound asleep. The two were arguing over expenditures and the sudden loss of an amount of four thousand pesos from their joint account.
The screams could be heard from the next town over, but no one bats an eye. Sleep is far more important than getting yourself into the machinations of domestic strife. Plus, you would be in no place to step into another family’s troubles. Who are you to do so?
Well, it turns out. That might have a saving grace no one wanted to enact. For the very next day, both the husband, the youngest and the eldest child went missing. The husband’s drunken escapades got him as far as the next city at times, so his disappearance was not supposed to be as bizarre is it turned out to be.
The CPD released some information to the public a few months after. A police incident report read:
“Fourteen (14) year old Mimi Miguelas was last seen in their family home at early evening at around 6:09PM, 3/22/14 by their neighbor.
The morning after, Mimi was reported missing when a local school teacher noticed her absence and came to her residence.
The case had gone cold. Even at the onset of their police report, it was evident that no new leads proliferated and the trail would no longer turn out new leads.
This is to be expected when the only thing that remains of the victim you are trying to find is an amalgamation of blood, skin and fat, and the bones; so brittle they could be thrown into a river and no one would be the wiser. The infant’s fate however was not known and it is speculated that the father must have taken her. This would not be probable, for the father’s corpse was to be found, ever so briefly after being lost again, without the infant.
It would be also worth noting, and would tie together quite logically, that in the father’s possession nearly hours before he shot himself was a receipt for sulfur, distilled water, and bleach- all totaling up to four-thousand pesos…
I should not have asked. I should have not said anything. I should have taken the benefit of the doubt. The benefit that whatever was out there was deaf and blind and was going to ignore me, paralyzed from the waist down and a sitting duck for anything else. Now I have forfeited two chances at survival. Whatever I was currently hearing was dragging itself towards me and is going to get to me. Every inch, it drags itself towards to me, the more the icy, chilling feeling crawls its way up my back.
Then, as the sound inched ever closer, the bog started to bubble again. I thought it was the fishes writhing in the water. Was this, I asked myself, the last image to imprinted onto my mind before the things behind me is to sink its teeth, slaws or any other method of violence into me and ultimately kills me?
The bubbling of the water stopped, and from its midst a hand reached out, palm facing towards me.
Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. At least with the bloody hand, I know what going to the end of me. In my mind, I was playing the ‘What-if’ game with myself like some lunatic instead of panicking and praying to God like any normal person. Believer or no, one still says ‘oh God’ in the event of any stressful or jarring situation.
So what was it going to be, I asked myself. Would I get dragged into the bog by some dark, mysterious hand or be mystery-mauled by the thing inching ever so closer towards me from behind. It was apparent that the hand would get to me first, seeing by the time I finished this thought, the hand had already touched my…
___
It is cruel for a child to suffer death, more so a death without rhyme or reason. To be ended abruptly due to drunken stupor. Unfortunately, God is a strict and austere administrator of the natural and unnatural affairs of the world. Those who die un-ritualistically will never find peace, and shall find themselves in the waiting room of limbo along with the missing, blindly-murdered, unburied, unborn, and unbaptized. This is where Mimi would find herself. In this place where the corpses never rot but still stink like it. Where the skies never go dark or go bright. Where it’s grey, but it never rains.
This is Limbo. Not a paradise, nor damnation; but a mirror you can walk on. It inhabits the very same space as reality, but it does not inhabit the same form. Buildings, spaces, forests, and environments that seem new and fresh to those alive will seem old and dilapidated to those in Limbo. A person in Limbo can experience those in the realm of the living, but not so the other way around. Along with the depressing, gothic features of limbo, it is littered with statues of the four Great latin fathers: Gregory, Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome- their bodies of stone and their eyes of pure black.
The only way someone in Limbo could ever make contact with someone outside is a complicated ordeal. In order to understand it, one must remember this simple fact as the basis of all understanding before we can proceed: “Limbo is a mirror you can walk on, in and through.”
This thing which I talk about is not an item; it is an event horizon, to say the least. Every summer equinox, the different suns of all known dimensions move in tandem, which causes deformities in space-time and photon reflection; causing a myriad of illusions that only the very observant or clearly insane can see.
Mirrors have been used by magicians and occultist for centuries. They portray the world against its normal directions, for it was believed that there is such a world out there wherein everything is in fact opposite to ours in every way and that we could see these worlds every time we peer into a mirror. And the occult metaphysics state that if glass or anything reflective was to be bent or coned, it would have the capacity to contain those worlds and also release them unto our own, like a prison made of one’s own reality.
For example,
Crystal balls do not allow you to see into the future, rather; they allow you to peek into another dimension that is identical to ours in every way, and the only difference is they are moving at a faster pace.
Another instance of this is how your ‘reflection’ bends when looking at a warped mirror. It is not your ‘reflection’ being bent; it is the alternate-dimension being in the mirror whose reality warps when you bend the reflective surface.
-Fenyir, 1879
This leads us to the legend of the Black Pontiff’s Cap: another of the world’s far flung mystical objects of power, albeit less known than say; the Holy Grail or the Philosopher’s Stone. It is more of an event horizon and natural phenomena than it is an actual tangible object. ‘Black Pontiff’s Cap’ or ‘beata Camauro’ is a nickname to what occultists and demonologist theorize as an incandescent, nacreous dome of aurora borealises that separate the different dimensions and keep them from merging into one another. It is the closest that actual occult and demonology has had to a ‘portal to hell’ or a ‘wormhole’. It is best described by a passage from occultist Jean Coussier’s 1763 ‘Les dimensions extérieures physiques et métaphysiques’, which was later translated to English by James Avon:
Contrary to popular belief, a world of form does exist, but not as philosophy concerns. There are worlds, many of them, held apart by large separate domes of incandescence. These domes, however, are not infinite and celestial. They have finite lifespans, and when they die, tis the responsibility of the domes of other realities to keep their reality from leeching into a different reality.
But there are certain phenomena that happen very rarely, but have been recorded at magnitude. The domes collapse instantly, but not all the time. They sometimes shrink, the space within can be found resting on our canon reality’s surface. These things are very dangerous, for the domes are at their weakest and only seal off access to and fro different realities when they collapse and die. The nature of these domes is yet to be researched and discussed.
-Coussier, 1763
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This myth has also been an inspiration to physics' greatest minds, taking it as a coincidental allegory to how the boundary between dimensions is bowl-shaped, and should that ever change; would cause the amalgamation and coalesce of all reality within the ever-expanding hairbreadth of time and space.
But the occultist and demonologists, their fiercest adversary and vice versa, would like to argue otherwise as they insist the Black Pontiff’s Cap is more than just an allegory and certainly more than just a coincidence.
One can experience these illusions by going out in the middle of the night; specifically at the very start of midnight on the first or last minute of the summer equinox. Bring with you either a bowl of water, a mirror with a handle and a large rock. Go out and sit on the ground. Position the bowl of water on the ground facing unto the sky or if using a mirror, rest it against a rock while having your hand at the handle.
Wait for the moon to be encircled completely then look into the mirror. There you will see whatever illusions the summer equinox brings you. But heed this warning. If there is to be another reflection in the mirror or water other than yours, do not allow it to touch you, do not prolong eye contact with it. Close your eyes and tip the bowl of water or if using a mirror, smash it against the rock. Close your eyes still and wait until you are certain the reflection has left you alone. Flee and never return.
It is recommended that you do this far from your dwelling place, however. After this little game, the area upon which it was performed will become eldritch. No clear definition has been made on what it means, but those who return to the area have been known to disappear. Some theorize the reflection of the summer equinox’s rays gives otherworldly creatures a chance to peer into our world as well. This has been known to work well with both mirrors and large bodies of water…
I had opened my eyes and found myself in the cement waiting shack. My clothes covered in sweat and beads of it dripping down my forehead. In the corner of my eye, I saw the grateful light of a tricycle. I hailed it and got on. I turned to the road behind me and to the bog. I had the slightest chance to see what was after me, or what was going to get me.
That was the final straw. The next day, I packed my things, left a stern but well-intentioned call to the precinct and the firm I was working for and booked a flight back to San Jorje.
I had soon found my self-thousands of feet in the air, and as luck would have it, back on the ground alive and well. I had gotten on another pedicab towards my old house which I had boarded up and am now planning to sell. As I rode on the cab, I took out my phone. I called my best friend and confidant, who is now a fresh graduate of Accountancy, Ashton Villenueva.
“Ashton…” I spoke, not giving him a chance to speak. “we’re starting a firm.”