My family is from Capiz, which if you know, you know — it's the province every Filipino kid gets warned about. I always treated the aswang stories as our regional branding. I'm an engineer. I live in Cebu City. I am not the demographic for this.
In March I went home because my younger sister was eight months pregnant, and per tradition my mother had the whole house prepared — salt at the doorways and windowsills, garlic and ginger tied at the corners of the roof, a buntot pagi my grandfather owned hanging over the front door. I teased her about it. She didn't laugh.
The third night, around 2 a.m., I heard it: tik... tik... tik... faint, from somewhere above the roof. I remember feeling relieved it was faint. Then I remembered what everyone from Capiz is raised knowing — the call is soft when it's CLOSE. I have never in my life felt a piece of folklore load itself into my body like that. Every hair I own stood up.
Then we heard the dog. Our askal barks at everything — tricycles, cats, the neighbor's radio. That night he wasn't barking. He was whining, backing against the wall under the kitchen table with his ears flat. Above us, on a galvanized iron roof, something SHIFTED ITS WEIGHT. One slow creak. My mother was already up, turning on every light, and she slapped the ceiling with a slipper and shouted words in Kinaray-a I'd never heard her use.
The tik-tik got loud — moving away, if you believe the folklore, which as of 2 a.m. that morning I do. We found nothing on the roof. No prints in the mud around the house. The dog wouldn't go outside until noon.
My sister delivered a healthy girl three weeks later, in a hospital, with the buntot pagi in her mother's bag. I don't tease anymore.