Infection

fiction by Roger B Rueda

He felt a sharp pain in his stomach. He sat up and tried to know what was wrong with it. All of forty-nine, never did he experience such a curious pain that was as if gnawing his insides.

A doctor himself, Edgar observed the pain and he knew it was not a usual pain because it seemed the pain was so fresh.

He didn’t sleep anymore. He took the novel he was reading and began to bury himself in it. His wife was by him, sleeping deeply. He looked at her and covered her up with a blanket.

After an hour, Edgar began to vomit up blood. He was on the toilet when his wife got up.

‘Honey, what’s wrong with you?’ Venus asked, trying to get some sort of answer.

‘I must have eaten something,’ he said, he wanted to hide his situation at first, for he didn’t want her to worry. ‘Please hand me my antacid.’

***

Edgar didn’t pursue his plan to move to the US, though, of course, everything was ready and there was a job waiting for him there. He decided to stay in the Philippines and tried to know what was wrong with him, because his laboratory results showed nothing and there was nothing wrong with his body. However, the pain he could feel was undeniable. He carried out some fascinating research into that pain. There was no known cure for his disease, so since then he had given himself over to his infection.

Following a routine checkup, Edgar was discovered to have an unknown disease. That shockedhis friend into helping him to find a cure for his disease. There was a little birdlike organism with a pointed beak and darting eyes inside his abdomen. It would scratch about searching with its beak for fresh blood. It would ruffle its feathers and he was really quite uncomfortable. He would drink fresh human blood to stop all the pain he would feel, but it was eating into his savings, so it started to worry him.

One evening, he walked home from the hospital where he was working. He fainted dead away when he was at the village green, but it took him a short while to recover. He crawled across the street and in the woods.The thought of fresh blood made him salivate. When he saw a man, he ran to him, grabbed a hold of his legs and held on so he could not get away, and bit into his neck. The helpless man was shouting his head off. He then stabbed at the chest with a stick and scooped out his liver. The next morning the news that a manwas killed by a supernatural being took everyone by surprise.

Edgar got really angry with himself while he was eating breakfast in front of the TV. He attempted suicide, but he was so weak to pluck up the courage to do it. He had a fear of death. Besides, he was a Christian. He had faith in modern medicine, so he hoped and prayed that the research would go well.

His wife had got plenty of jobs to keep her busy. Her work involved a lot of travelling, so they would meet for lunch once or twice a month.

His sons were both reading medicine abroad.

He had been keeping a diary for twelve years now and one by one he would narrate the sequence of events which led up to the disaster.Strangely, no one would believe him when he would tell them he had been infected by a strange disease, so he wanted to manage to keep his illness secret from his family until he was well.

The birdlike organism in his abdomen grew large branching horns called antlers. When it was wild with hunger, it would flap its wings furiously and fly upwards to his throat. He had to endure the pain. He would close his eyes and lie in his bed screaming in agony. Sometimes, he would cry himself to sleep.

***

Edgar and Venus got married twenty five years ago. They were childhood playmates. He went to Iloilo, in a hick town, on holiday and stayed in a manor house his maternal grandparents owned. There he met Venus, a daughter of a market gardener. They and the other children spent the afternoon playing on the farm.

He hadn't seen her since that memorable evening of Dinagyang whenhe left Iloilo until he bumped into her tray, knocking the food onto her lap, at the university cafeteria. In those early months, there was a very close bond between them.They courted for five years before getting married.

***

Edgar, a month before his illness, went to Iloilo for their summer holiday. Venus went with him but returned to Manila after three days. Edgar stayed at the manor house with his in-laws, who are both centenarian. They gently tended him. They seemed a lot happier since they met him. They cooked himspecial meals. One of Venus’s cousins brought them a pig. The couple, on that day, tied the pig's leg across its chest and lugged it along, keeping it off balance. The old couplestruggled to attach a second cord and pulled its legs back to expose its throat.One puncture began an inexorable flood of blood, and death came after a minute of unanswered trumpeting calls for help.

The pig almost broke free of its bonds, giving everyone a fright, and granting the couple a higher feeling of accomplishment when it was dead.

The couple cleaned the hair off the pig. Edgar couldn’t believe his eyes how they had been working energetically all morning. He was not allowed to help kill the pig nor cook the meals. So, he with his nephew exercised in the garden.

They served him a bowl of blood stew and barbecued liver at lunch.

After lunch, he took a little nap. Several poor children and their parents were waiting for him in the yard to consult with him, but he felt slightly dizzy and disoriented, so he excused himself and went inside his room. He vomited up all he had just eaten. His saliva seemed like letting it fall on the string. He was genuinely surprised at what happened to him.

In the night, the couple cooked him valenciana, sisig, and menudo. He buried himself in a novel.

***

Their neighbour died an agonising death. So now his funeral wake was in progress. When he went there, the family shooed him out of the house. They were glaring at him and muttering something. Most people hated his in-laws, but they didn't dare to say so. Edgar would nod as though he understood the people he would meet.

***

Edgar recalled that he first vomited up during his latest vacation in Iloilo. He could vividly remember the feeling of pain and horror.  It seemed that he had profound amnesia and now he was beginning to recover from it. It suddenly occurred in his mind that it must have been the food he ate that had caused his illness.

His skin turned so brownish and black. Minutes later some feathers grew and his hands became his wings. He couldn’t stop himself. He went out of the house and flapped his wings noisily. He then emerged to the roof of the house. He couldn’t believe that situation, but he seemed like dreaming. He perched on the mango tree to try how good he was at flying. He was so brisk and he flew and flew, soaring thousands of feet high in the sky. He could feel, too, how his eyesight had become sharp and he could see even the smallest creature on land. He was beginning to like his situation. But he was worried that his friends might disdain him or might condemn him whenever they’d discover he was so mystical.

***

Edgar's tinted glasses are perched precariously on the bridge of his nose. Without them, a loud reddish glow lit his eyes. People in front of him cast their shadows over his eyes, in reverse, however, so he could not look anyone in the eye. He was wild with pain whenever someone saw an image on his eyes.

Edgar went everywhere for treatment, tried all sorts of quacks, until he met a witch-doctor. He has to learn the most ancient, and holiest aswang rituals, so he has to spend his time in prayer. For one, the bird inside him started to moult at around sixty weeks of age. He’d got a healthy appetite for blood and liver.

He put a poultice over his stomach. The witch-doctor raisedhis tutelary ghost, thathe might get well, and he did.

‘You need strength of mind to stand up for yourself.’ The witch-doctor was deep, mystical woman. Her voice was warm with friendship and respect.

She raised the stone by magic. She lifted her glass of blood and took a quick swallow. Edgar’s eyes seemed slightly dilated, he nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw it. He was too weak to move or think or speak, however.

She plucked the black chickens’ feathers on their throats and then slit them, one by one. She dressed them.

The witch-doctor decided on roast black chicken and vegetables, with alopí, a rice-cake made of rice-flour mixed with sugar and coconut-meat, wrapped up in banana-leaves and boiled, to follow.

The witch-doctor’s family feasted well into the afternoon on black chicken, some bizarre vegetables, and alopí. Edgar stuck hisgreenish tongue out. It looked very long and sticky. His eyes seemed to bulge like those of a toad. He metamorphosed to a dog and emerged onto the living room. His ears stood erect. The witch-doctor and her helps dragged him back to the room. One helper burned incense. It then started to perfume the air. The witch-doctor tried an herbal remedy to calm him down.

A swarm of his hinúptanan composed of animals and birds encircled the house of the witch-doctor.Some blackbird flew down and perched on the parapet outside his window. Some dogs were waiting for him under the house, as the flooring was made of bamboo. In the last five hours he’d undergone a physical transformation. He became a terrifying half-human, half creature with long fingernails, long snakelike hair, fiery eyes, black teeth, and the tusk of a wild boar. Edgar had to adopt so many disguises his prey wouldn't recognise him. In a month he needed to eat man beef at least five times, according to the witch-doctor.
‘Being an aswang is just a matter of practice.’ She rubbed the back of his neck and smiled ruefully at him. She handed him a cruet after she smeared him with oil from it.

Edgar flapped his wings keenly and flew away.With no idea of what to do for his next move, hehovered over a small village. Later, he salivated over something delicious, so he followed his nose. By instinct, he took the soft pith of a banana plant and licked it with relish. Then, he attacked a pregnant woman, strangling her with his tongue that hung down at great lengths, and the unborn child, and pulling out their livers. The woman seemed to have died a natural death, as the pith became the woman’s dead avatar.

Before dawn, he went home lugging a sow behind. He tied it to one of the trees in front of their house and ran in a rush inside the house to get his iPhone, as he wanted to take some photographs of the sow. He then uploaded them to his Tumblr.

Since then, he’d never been sick anymore, and he became a fully-fledged aswang. He became evasive, to the point of secretiveness.