[Fiction] A Monster on Church Grounds

This work of fiction was originally published in Likhaan 19, published by the UP Institute of Creative Writing. The issue was launched on December 10, 2025, during the UP Writers Night 2025, held at the Gimenez Gallery at the University of the Philippines Diliman. A digital version of the journal can be accessed here.

* * *

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

—Genesis 1:26

 

“Careful,” the sacristan Alvaro admonished the boy as he playfully, carelessly, skipped over the last step of the craggy stairs, landing on a section of the basement floor illuminated by the first of several torches that lined a cavernous hallway. Had the boy been a year older, an ounce heavier—and he was big for his age—he would have tugged Alvaro hard enough to lose his footing.

 

The boy’s huge head may have been concealed by a hood and dampened by the rain outside, but Alvaro could tell those wide eyes were gazing curiously at this new, unfamiliar place outside the kumbento. The torches suffused the space in a warm, spectral orange, but their glow ceased abruptly upon meeting the thick black slabs ensconced beneath stone arches that were evenly spaced along the walls.

 

Up until tonight, the eleven-year-old Pedro had been forbidden to leave the parish residence—and for good reason.

 

“Your lolo is in the fourth cell on the right.” Alvaro gestured with his torch. “You’ll know it because it’s slightly open.”

 

“You’re not coming with me?” Pedro craned his head as he asked, partially revealing that hideous mien Alvaro and a few of Padre Castellano’s altar boys had since grown accustomed to. In this darkness, however, the boy’s visage seemed to take on a menacing air, reminding the sacristan of the creature of folklore he’d seen days ago and its terrifying resemblance to Pedro that he couldn’t erase from his mind.

“No, no,” he told the boy, feeling a knot tighten in his throat. “I need to get back to the belfry. It’s my watch tonight.”

 

“All right, Manong Alvaro. I’ll see you again tomorrow then.”

 

With quivering lips, Alvaro forced a smile, and then shuffled back up the stairs.

 

Pedro proceeded down the corridor. With each step he took, the fascination with which he initially greeted this place gradually melted away into unease. There was something about this hallway that reminded him of the dark castles his mother made up in her stories. In one of these castles lived a heathen mystic whose days were numbered as a glistening knight-errant drew near, on a quest to obtain some potion of Oriental sorcery to revive a beautiful sleeping native woman.

 

As he passed by the second door, he thought he heard a howl, and his heart nearly leapt out of his heavy chest. It must have been Alvaro opening and shutting the door upstairs, unintentionally letting a draft in.

 

He paused at the slab referred to by his sacristan friend. The narrow crack between imperviously forged iron and roughly hewn stone revealed firelight much brighter, much hotter than what the torches along the corridor afforded. Pedro drew closer like a curious flying insect.

 

He slowly pulled the door open, the hinges groaning like an animal in pain, and squeezed himself in. A pale figure clad in a black robe towered over him. A bundle of rope drenched in fluid so thick, so dark it may well have been ink was firmly clenched in his grandfather’s hand.

 

“Oh, hello, Dodong,” Lolo Juliano greeted with a grin. Flecks of the ink-like fluid spattered over his lips; his face blemished what could have otherwise been a warm welcome. The sight that genuinely stunned Pedro into silence, however, was that of his mother’s dear friend, Toro, dangling from a pair of manacles fixed to the ceiling. His bronze torso, chiseled and scarred by years of labor, and often partly hidden by tattered cloth, was now fully revealed, shimmering with a mix of sweat and blood that dribbled out of cuts and gashes. His head hung disconcertingly low, and his eyes were shut in resignation. Had it not been for his heaving chest, Pedro would have mistaken Toro for dead.

 

“Lolo, what happened to Toro?” He would have wanted to ask What did you do to Toro? But some quick thinking rephrased the question at the last second.

 

Lolo Juliano let out a snort before spitting on the cell floor. “Dong Pedro, what did your mother tell you about your father?”

 

That question prompted an image of his mother in his mind’s eye—and the memory of her legs thrashing in the predawn darkness of the kumbento, Lolo Juliano’s towering frame pinning her down. Terrified, he ran back into his room that grim early morning. Hours later, Alvaro and two other sacristans would find his Mama Maria dead, her neck tied with a rope to a balustrade in the dining area. Lolo Juliano was seated at the table, weeping into his handkerchief, lamenting her damnation.

 

“That he was a good man,” Pedro answered, pulling himself back to the present. “That he and Mama truly loved each other. But he had to leave because he found another mission in life.”

 

Lolo Juliano let out a chuckle and raised Toro’s weary head. “But you know who he is, right?”

 

“Yes, he’s Toro. He’s Mama’s friend.”

 

“No, Dodong.” Lolo Juliano shook his head like one of those disconsolate drunks Pedro would notice loitering outside the church from his room in the kumbento. “This man…is your father.”

 

Toro slowly came to as his chin shook in Lolo Juliano’s grip.

 

“Come now,” the friar urged his captive. “Show yourself.”

 

Toro shook his head, a simple gesture which no doubt caused him great pain. Pedro could easily imagine this must have been how Christ felt as he was being punished by the Roman soldiers who insisted he perform a miracle despite his miserable state.

 

Lolo Juliano lashed his whip at the wall. The resulting snap echoed in the cramped chamber, stinging Pedro’s sensitive ears.

 

“Hesusmaryosep! Show yourself!”

 

Pedro had never seen his grandfather so red in the face. There were times when his mother would warn him that Lolo Juliano was coming back to the kumbento fresh from disciplining an erring indio laborer in the field. He would arrive pink between the ears, though Pedro assumed this was from the tropical heat and not from rage.

 

Toro reluctantly, painfully closed his eyes. A brilliant blue light issued from his bare, bloodied chest and quickly engulfed his body. Pedro watched, with a mix of disquiet and wonder, as the ordinary day laborer morphed into something right out of the indios’ strange imaginations.

 

* * *

 

Suliman and his kin never headed out on torrential nights like this. But the shivering he and his men endured—not to mention the seasickness felt by some of the weaker ones trying to quell the vomit welling inside them—was a small price to pay, and likely nothing compared to the chills, cough, and muscle pain his daughter, poor little Sarina, experienced on even the warmest of days.

 

Not a single medicine man of their faith could discern what ailed her, so Suliman consulted fellow raiders in his inner circle—desperate to see his beloved princess grow up to become a strong woman just like her mother. He turned to a heathen babaylan who lived deep in the island, far from the Christianized people’s reach.

 

With his daughter bundled in a cloth tied to a bamboo pole, he and a small band of men found the old healer who was said to be the last of her kind in these parts. Suliman was stunned by the height of the babaylan; she would have probably stood a head taller than him if her back wasn’t so hunched. She also spoke in a voice uncharacteristically deep and raspy for a woman.

 

The teachings of Suliman’s religion told him to be wary of these types of people, but the Moro warrior’s desperation and overall concern for his daughter’s mysterious condition swept aside all his misgivings.

 

He permitted the babaylan to inspect Sarina in her house. Several tense moments later, she emerged with news both good and bad. The good news: he had come to her just in time. Any further delay, and Sarina’s condition would have deteriorated beyond saving. The bad news: his daughter’s illness was quite rare—one that straddled both the physical and supernatural realms—and thus could only be remedied by a substance of such nature.

 

She needed to sip the ink of a Kamdiri, diluted in boiled water, over the course of several moons, until her health improved. The babaylan might as well have asked him to retrieve one of those white-tusked beasts from the large landmass to the West. But however difficult the task, it was not impossible, and for his daughter, he was willing to do anything.

 

He knew well enough from local folklore that certain Kamdiri who made their way upstream from the sea hid in the mountains, but he was certain he and his men had a better chance if they returned to the coast. The elusive squid-like creatures were rumored to swim in shallow waters and lagoons, waiting for maidens and wandering children they could lure into the depths.

 

A full moon cycle had passed, and six of the seven men he had sent out to various corners of the island to capture a Kamdiri came back empty-handed. The last one to return was Dakula, a brave young warrior who bore some promising news. Farther down the coast, in a little barrio called Sto. Domingo, rumors were circulating among the sacristans that the local parish priest, Juliano Castellano, had been keeping a Kamdiri somewhere in their religious complex.

 

Suliman had heard of that place and the pale man who ran it. Sto. Domingo wasn’t as well fortified as most other Christian settlements in the islands, but the parish priest there made up for things by cultivating a sinister reputation. Stories carried over by wind and waves told of other Moro raiders who had ventured there and never returned, their emptied pangkòs found adrift not far from the town’s shores. Where his daughter’s life was concerned, though, all risks were worth taking.

 

Now here he was, standing atop one of three proas, their sails nearly rupturing in the wind, as he peered through the thick sheet of rain that obscured the lone light shining from this ill-reputed town’s belfry. On a night like this, the last thing the priest and his savage cohorts were expecting was a Moro raid. The darkness and the downpour were to Suliman and his men’s advantage.

 

He motioned to the men who captained the two other proas: Dakula to his right, and Andung to his left. Out of the former’s prow jutted a heavy wooden beam they would use to force their way into the Christians’ sacred fortification.

 

“Head straight for the light!” Suliman roared above the surging waves.

 

* * *

 

Pedro couldn’t believe his eyes. Manacled and scathed right before him and his grandfather was no longer the laborer and his dear friend Toro, but a creature who in a lot of ways resembled the boy. Padre Castellano yanked his grandson’s hood back so the uncanny resemblance could be readily apparent to the three of them in that cell.

 

Young Pedro carefully observed the creature—a Kamdiri, he believed it was called—that now stood in Toro’s place. Though his Mama’s friend was tall for an indio, this Kamdiri’s height allowed its large, webbed feet to now touch the cold floor. Toro’s sun-burnished skin was now replaced with a deep blue hue reminiscent of the sea at dusk. Purple veins ran along the length of the Kamdiri’s four muscular arms—all of which were still restrained by the shackles hanging from the ceiling, but with their increased size, they trembled even more, especially at the wrists, as the tightness of the iron bit into them. Where the Kamdiri boasted long tentacles that drooped all the way to a scarred abdomen, Pedro had little stubs that only partially covered his mouth. Where the Kamdiri’s eyes were a round and deep—almost bloody—red, Pedro’s were more almond in shape, with a hint of green to them, betraying the Castilian blood that ran in him. Where the Kamdiri’s head was wider, more bulbous, Pedro’s was only enlarged, tinged with a gray-blue, as if his skull were merely filled with water.

 

“Now you know why you look like that, Pedro.” Lolo Juliano glared at him like he was some sort of freak. “You are the child of a heathen union. Doomed to spend the rest of your life as a monster of your parents’ transgression. God didn’t make you this way, Dodong. This…this thing did!”

 

He extended the whip to his grandson. “So flog him. For all those days you spent locked away in the kumbento. For all those times you heard the laughter of children playing outside but were unable to join them. For all those nights you woke up coughing and vomiting black fluid. And most especially, for your mother, who strangled herself upon learning the ugly truth about her lover.”

 

“You liar!” Toro—the Kamdiri—snapped, its voice gurgled but still undeniably, distinctly that of the man Pedro knew. “You killed her! You couldn’t stand the thought of your daughter—”

 

Lolo Juliano silenced the creature with a whip-blow to the chest, reopening a cut that had since partly crusted. Toro went limp, and Juliano held the whip again in front of the boy’s face.

 

“Lash him all you want, Dodong. You have every right to be angry.”

 

Pedro gazed at the whip, its strands frayed and caked with black blood—the blood of the being said to be his father, the same blood that also ran in him, mixing with his Castilian heritage.

 

“But will it bring her back, Lolo?”

 

“What?” Lolo Juliano’s olive eyes shone with a fiery orange in the torch-lit space.

 

“Will whipping Toro bring Mama back?”

 

Padre Juliano couldn’t believe the boy’s insolence. Here he was, offering him the chance to exact revenge on the cause of his incurable affliction, and he had the gall to ask what good it would do? Had the priest been given the same opportunity, he would have taken it, no questions asked—as a form of gratitude, of courtesy, of utang kabubut-on, as the indios in this part of the colony called it: for all the hours he had his sacristans spy on his daughter and her lover—time that could have otherwise been used to spread the faith or work the fields, for his shelling out of parish funds to commission the local smith to fashion manacles with jagged cuffs that guaranteed maximum pain for the pretender, for using his influence as the most powerful man in the barrio to have the cuadrilleros arrest Toro one unsuspecting day.

 

The friar’s grip around the whip tightened, his fist trembling. “You ungrateful monster!” He slapped Pedro with a left backhand, sending the boy hurtling with a grunt to the floor of a darkened section of the cell. With his right hand, Padre Juliano drove the whip right at the torso of the Kamdiri’s limp and shackled frame.

 

“You demon! You abomination! To hell with you and your poisonous kind!” he screamed, foaming at the mouth, flogging Toro’s body like the unnatural thing that it was. The warmth of blood streaked his hands, his face, his lips even more.

 

“The Lord Himself will judge—”

 

His mad rant came to a halt with the peal of bells from above. A ringing that loud and rapid could only have come from one place and meant one thing.

 

The belfry! Moros! Padre Juliano’s limbs went numb.

 

“Stay here!” he barked at his grandson, not bothering to look at him, and rushed out of the cell.

 

* * *

 

A good number of parishioners had already made their way into the church by the time Padre Castellano emerged into the nave. Women, some with babies still pressed to their waists, and children took seats in the front pews—perhaps the only time they would do so without hesitation—while the adult men ringed them, some of them gripping bolos and other farming implements they could use as weapons. Just after the last family, soaked from the rain and clearly distraught, rushed past the double doors, the cuadrilleros—a pair of well-built, taciturn indios—bolted the entrance with a single thick beam of hardwood.

 

The shepherd took account of his flock from the dais, counting the cranky, wailing, and wet heads by twos. Everyone seemed to be there except…

 

Castellano descended from his post and rushed down the aisle, hurriedly moving past the parishioners squatting there. He approached Kapitan Trajano, who stood at the transept and kept a careful watch on the doors with his men, their pistols ready for any incursion.

 

“Where is Alvaro?” The priest tapped the cuadrillero chief’s shoulder.

 

Trajano took a moment to survey the throng of parishioners, and the look he returned Castellano told the friar he wasn’t going to like his response.

 

“The bells. They’ve stopped ringing.” Trajano’s eyes widened. “It was Alvaro who was on tower duty tonight.”

 

Castellano grabbed the unbuttoned collar of the man’s shirt. “You had your men shut the door without confirming if everyone had made it in? That boy has a lot more promise in him than your drunken ass! God forbid, if those devils inflict even the slightest harm on him, I will gladly toss you outside for them to slit your—”

 

A loud thud emanated from the door, resonating across the nave and eliciting startled yelps from the indios.

 

“A battering ram,” Trajano, wide-eyed, head still tilted upward by the tall friar’s grip, stated the obvious.

 

Another thud followed, and another, each rattling the doors and provoking the cuadrilleros to grip their weapons even tighter.

 

After a sixth thud, silence. All eyes of those saved by God were fixed on the door, but an exchange of baffled glances soon followed. Castellano loosened his grip on Trajano’s collar and felt a tingling urge to rush back to the altar, where, if the Moros broke through, he’d likely be the last to fall to their blades.

 

But the doors didn’t burst open as everyone feared. Instead there came a knock and an amicable-sounding voice muffled by the thick doors and the rain.

 

“Hola, Padre Castellano,” the person on the other side said before continuing in Bisayan, with an undeniably mocking tone. “You know it’s very cold and rainy out here. You don’t want your poor sacristan, Alvaro, to get sick, no?”

 

The friar drew closer to the doors. Two of the cuadrilleros cautioned him with raised palms, but he paid them no heed. Castellano cupped his hands over the slit between the doors and bellowed, “Who are you, Moro? And why did you come here to our humble parish when we have neither gold nor precious stones to offer you?”

 

“Call me Suliman, Padre.”

 

Typical savage name, Castellano kept the snide remark to himself.

 

“And I do not care for your gold or whatever precious objects you have or claim to not have. I do not even care for any of your baptized underlings.” A short pause, before he continued. “You see, Padre, it is to my understanding that you have a living, breathing Kamdiri in your possession.”

 

“Padre,” Trajano interrupted, “what is he—?”

 

Castellano silenced the captain with a backhand while still keeping his lips close to the door.

 

“And where did you happen to come across this information, Moro?”

 

“Word travels fast across these scattered islands, Padre. Especially through the seas. Faster than it does over mountains or forests.”

 

Castellano’s gaze narrowed. He couldn’t help but liken this exchange to a confession—one where the penitent held hostage someone very dear to him, someone whose loyalty and love for God’s word was difficult to come by in this godforsaken corner of the world. The friar turned to the cuadrilleros behind him and motioned with a hand for them to move back, out of earshot.

 

This does not concern you.

 

The men cautiously looked to Kapitan Trajano, who nodded as if the hinges on his neck had rusted from the corrosiveness of Castellano’s grip. They all obediently inched back.

 

Once Castellano deemed them far enough, he returned his attention to the door. “Suppose what you say is right, Moro, and I do have a Kamdiri with me…what do you plan on doing with it?”

 

“My daughter, Padre, she is very ill, and a local healer said she can only be cured with Kamdiri ink,” Suliman all of a sudden sounded so vulnerable, almost…submissive. “Surely you of all people ought to know that the bond between father and daughter is indeed very special.”

 

Castellano wasn’t quite sure if the Moro was simply being honest, or if he was discreetly taking a swipe at him for his violation of his priestly vows. Still, there was an earnestness to the man’s voice that he found quite respectable.

 

“What if I were to tell you that the Kamdiri is in terrible shape? Perhaps even close to dying?”

 

“Then you have nothing to offer me in exchange for your sacristan. He’s a little frail, but that doesn’t mean he won’t make a good servant for some rajahs I know further south.”

 

* * *

 

The moments that followed must have been a cascade of shock to the indios: Castellano nodding to Trajano and the other cuadrilleros to unbolt the doors, the rush of wind and rain from outside, and the trooping in of an aged but still nimble-looking Moro chieftain and three other fearsome men. All of them drenched to the bone. How barbaric they looked with their bizarre headdresses and immodest attires that revealed a great amount of unusually dark skin. One of them, an imposing, younger-looking warrior whom the chief referred to as Dakula, stayed by the entrance with Alvaro in his grip, his wavy dagger at the sacristan’s neck.

 

Hard to imagine how my flock would react if they found out what I’d been keeping beneath their feet, Castellano mused as he led Suliman and the two other men down into the basement with a torch in hand. To Castellano, the scene seemed almost symbolic—an ignorant, uncivilized Moro following an adherent of Christ, a preacher of the one true faith illuminating the path to wisdom.

 

When they arrived at the cavernous hallway, the friar led them further, past the cells where some of Suliman’s kin must have languished, succumbing to the darkness before Alvaro or some other sacristan whose confidence Castellano could trust would dispose of their bodies. Though he didn’t bother looking back, the priest envisioned the pirate leader veering his head left and right, his Malay face a mix of awe and shock.

 

They drew near the cell that held Suliman’s prize and Castellano’s scorn. Torchlight continued to burn, spewing from the maw between metal and stonework. The friar halted the three Moros before entering.

 

“Only you.” He pointed to Suliman.

 

The two other men’s brows furrowed at the abruptness of Castellano’s gesture.

 

“And what assurance do I have that you do not have something dangerous for me waiting in there?” Suliman asked.

 

“Pray to your god, Moro. If you come back out alive, that means he heard you. In the meantime, I’ll go in ahead. At least I know my god won’t endanger me.”

 

Castellano didn’t have to wait long. Just after he squeezed himself through the door, the Moro chief shoved past him, alone, and halted in his step. A curse escaped his lips as he laid eyes on the limp Toro in Kamdiri form. The savage’s gaze moved up and down the creature, almost like it was some impeccably sculpted statue that completely gripped his attention. The Moro then moved forward, coursing his hands over the blue beast, feeling the softness of its tentacles and the firmness of the muscles in its four arms, and then tracing the gashes and bruises that riddled its bare body.

 

When one of Suliman’s hands found its way into the same wound Castellano had reopened earlier with his sudden lash, the Moro’s wonderment crumbled away like wet clay.

 

“What have you done?” Suliman snapped at the friar as he felt the black blood between his fingers.

 

“What does it look like? I gave the wretched being a lesson in—”

 

“It’s no longer breathing, you devil!”

 

“Why are you so angry?” Castellano retorted, taken aback by the Moro’s brash tone. No one had spoken to him like that in a long time; in fact, he couldn’t recall a single instance wherein a baptized indio addressed him as disrespectfully as this interloper did. “You said all you needed was the ink, right? I’m sure you and your men will be able to pump something out of those tentacles.”

 

“My daughter needs to drink the ink over several moons, Padre. Would you be willing to eat meat from a dead pig?” Suliman spat.

 

Castellano was spared from answering by a stirring coming from the darker reaches of the cell. The priest and the pirate turned to see a blue-tinged boy, rubbing his unusually large eyes, as if he’d just woken up from a nap.

 

“Lolo? What’s happening?”

 

“Pedro, not now, please.”

 

“This boy is your grandson?” The look on Suliman’s face readily revealed his shock at the boy’s bizarre appearance.

 

“Yes, I had him watch over the Kamdiri while I went…” Castellano paused as he watched Suliman turn away from the deceased Toro and approach his grandson, eyeing him with the same fascination as he did the corpse. “While I went upstairs. I thought it would be much safer down here.”

 

Pedro, with his bulbous head and large eyes and stubby tentacle-like protrusions over his mouth, shrunk under the Moro’s glare. Suliman then moved past the boy as something else caught his eye. He walked over to the corner from where the lad had emerged, and his gaze fell onto something that littered the dirt floor—droplets of black fluid.

 

Suliman turned back to the friar with an imploring stare.

 

* * *

 

They were already back at the beach by the time the gag over Pedro’s mouth slipped down to his thick neck and his hood came off after much squirming in Andung’s cradling arms. The grotesquery of the boy’s full head was revealed in the presence of Suliman’s men. A flood of disbelief washed over the Moros’ bony, burnished faces. Even the intimidating warrior who’d held Alvaro hostage, and who had since released the sacristan upon learning that it was time to go, looked visibly disturbed.

 

“Lolo, please!” Pedro squealed like a sentient suckling pig about to be roasted. “Don’t let them take me!”

 

The boy’s resisting was futile. His feet and hands were still tied, and the Moro warrior’s arms—toughened by years of rowing and raiding—were an iron cradle around him. Plus, the two adults’ minds were already made up.

 

“Quiet, Pedro! They might hear you,” Castellano, following behind Suliman, chided the abomination, referring to the parishioners still in the church.

 

The aghast men stepped back to clear the way for Andung and their leader. Andung staggered to the proa and dumped the crying boy into the hull. Suliman probed for something within the vessel and stood back up with a pouch that clinked with coins, offering it to Castellano.

 

“Why are you letting them take me away, Lolo?” Pedro bawled, attempting to lift himself off the boat. But his deformed body, its inhuman proportions, prevented him from even so much as sitting up.

 

Castellano ignored Pedro’s pleas and casually waved away the Moro’s offer.

 

Suliman kept his extended hand steady. “This is payment for—”

 

“I know, I know. Consider the boy a gift from one loving father to another, and from a shepherd of God grateful you didn’t slaughter his flock.”

 

“Lolo, please!”

 

Grinning, Castellano turned away from the Moro leader and headed back to the church to inform his indio parishioners that, by the grace of the one true God, and just as Pope Leo I did with Attila the Hun as his hordes were camped outside the gates of Rome, he had successfully dissuaded the barbarians from inflicting any sort of violence onto them.

 

To the friar’s ears, the boy’s pleas might as well have been indistinguishable from the lapping waves. When Castellano’s frame melded with the gray facade of the church, Pedro’s hoarse voice petered out. The welled tears and bright red veins in his bulging eyes made them look even more horrendous. Suliman had never seen his men so perturbed—and these were warriors of the sea who for years had plundered and torched coastal settlements, pulled children from the corpses of their mothers, and slit the throats of fleeing captives.

 

The seas were a lot calmer as the three proas headed back out. Everyone was silent, an invisible mist of unease wrapped around all of them. The men kept their sullen eyes to the waters while the boy stared down at the empty soaked hull. The image of his grandfather, a man he had known all his life, ignoring his cries would stay with him forever.

 

Suliman, feeling genuine concern for the deformed boy, tapped at his shoulder, and Pedro seemed to snap out of a trance.

 

“It’s going to be a beautiful day, Dodong,” the Moro said, nodding in the direction of the dissipating clouds to the east. “There will be no kumbentos to hide in where we’re going.”

 

Something seemed to pique within the boy. As if Suliman had tugged at a string, and a faint but hopeful note rang out.

 

“Your skin’s not overly sensitive to the sun, is it?”

 

* * *

 

Later that night, as the rest of the parish slept, Castellano had a very relieved Alvaro and Dante (another sacristan privy to his secrets in the basement) dispose of Toro’s Kamdiri carcass in the nearby woods. He advised them to stop by the church grounds before going home, even if a little briefly, just in case some spirit lurking in the shadows deigned to follow them back and haunt them in their dreams.

 

But it was the friar who had trouble sleeping, which he found rather odd considering things were a lot quieter now: no daughter to needlessly fill him in on the latest town gossip, and no grandson scurrying around the furniture, imagining this table was some silly Moorish fortification or that aparadaor was an approaching siege tower, in lieu of some actual playmates. After hours of tossing and turning in the darkness, he sat up to massage the back of his neck. From his bed and past the raked-back drapes leading into his room, he could see the contours of the dining area furnishings limned distinctly against the night sky. Moonlight—noticeably absent the previous evening—now gushed in from the balcony.

 

Strange, he thought. He could have sworn he’d left those drapes hanging before turning in.

 

As he peered closer, he thought he saw the silhouette of the Virgin Mary—veiled in black—by one of the balcony posts. She seemed stiff, like she was restrained by her neck to the adjacent balustrade. He shuddered and blinked, and the veiled figure was gone.

 

His thoughts inadvertently drifted to his daughter, beautiful Maria, how he genuinely loved her despite the taint of indio blood running in her veins. When her belly swelled to a point beyond concealing, it all but confirmed the fears materializing in him after months of her waking up early to fits of vomiting. He, of course, asked her who the father was, and she fingered one of those disgruntled sacristans who fled the parish months prior.

 

But for some reason, Castellano just wasn’t convinced. He couldn’t recall any significant moments between that young man and his daughter. He was a rowdy one, yes, disobedient even, but he and Maria never really developed a relationship beyond obligatory greetings. If there was a man who had more palpably caught his daughter’s fancy, it was the laborer Toro, who inspired a shy smile and a glimmer in her eyes whenever the three of them were in each other’s presence. His tall and muscular frame had suitably set him apart from the other shorter, skinnier indios, their growth stunted by their dedicated labors to the Lord.

 

When the child was born, he appeared normal, as far as second-generation creollos went, but over time his skin turned an inexplicable blue, his head and eyes bloated so large that they began to affect his walking, and beneath his nose began to form little stubs that would soon partially cover his mouth like a moustache made of loose, dangling skin. By the time Pedro—named after the most prominent disciple of Jesus—turned ten, the metamorphosis was complete, and the disturbing similarities to a certain mythical creature were undeniable. At day’s end, Castellano had Alvaro and Dante trail Toro—who still had the audacity to show his face in the parish years after the boy’s birth. Not only did they find out he didn’t live within hearing distance of the bells, but that he also ventured deep into the hinterlands, morphing into his “true” bestial form before slipping into a stream.

 

Castellano could barely contain his rage. When he confronted his daughter about it early one morning, she said she had known the whole time, and that she couldn’t wait for the day when she, Pedro, and Toro would leave the suffocating air of the kumbento, the parish, and settle in the place where he—that creeping monster—came from. The woman had clearly gone mad, for what greater privilege was there than to live right next to the house of God? But there was just no convincing her otherwise—no saving her.

 

Later that day, he ordered the cuadrilleros to arrest Toro the moment he showed up on parish grounds, unaware that his lover was no longer around. The laborer had violated his daughter, he said, prompting her to commit the most unforgivable of sins. Trajano and one of his other men personally accosted the shapeshifting charlatan down into the basement, where they shackled him and left him at the friar’s mercy.

 

Memories of that day left Castellano ruminating over the possibility that perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t known—if he hadn’t even endeavored to know—the true identity of Maria’s lover. Perhaps she would have still been alive on this night, and Pedro would have been sleeping soundly in his room. Is ignorance, unawareness, better so long as it does not disturb the peace? Were the indios, in their not knowing the true god before the Spaniards arrived on their shores, better off in their heathen ways?

 

There are some things better not known, he decided. He stood up from bed and retrieved his journal from a drawer, along with the baptismal certificates of his daughter and her child. He then strode over to the dining table, where he lit up one of the candles.

 

The first to burn were the certificates. He tore them into strips, and then fed them to the flame like shorn flesh for a hungry beast. Next, and with the aid of firelight, he reviewed every single page that made mention of anything about his grandson, his daughter, and anything too detailed about the dungeons in the basement. There weren’t really that many, to his relief, but when he found an entry with such references, he ripped them off as cleanly from the spine as possible, and indulged the fire again and again.

 

No one must know about Maria, her child, and the illicit affair that birthed Pedro. The last thing this blessed parish, these strange islands, and this world needed was another cursed monster.