The Cabin
“How long are you going to stay in there and sulk?” I ask.
No answer. I rap on the door. Still nothing.
I sit on the couch and survey the rest of the room, placing my small machete on the table by the door. The living room had been commandeered for Leo Gries’s use; there is paperwork in small piles on the table and another area that has been allocated for his study, as neat as any clutter could manage. His laptop had been left open in his haste to leave.
I move toward it.
It’s confusing. There are emails: conversations between Leo and other staff, other producers of the show. There are discussions regarding how long they expect to stay on the island before filming wraps, the associated costs and expenses, along with bullet point presentations of how they expect to plot the show. I search for the emails that specify the Kisapmata and the Godseye, and find a thread dated four months ago.
Hemslock’s emails make up over half of the discourse; arguments over which parts of the island to focus on filming, the documentation and research they have for each episode, conjecture to make up for gaps in their knowledge.
“The Godseye is the real key,” Hemslock wrote. “There’s more than just treasure in that cave. If there’s any truth to what these myths say, then maybe we can figure out what they mean. There’s an eternity within a dream in there.”
“Surely you can’t believe these things?” one of the producers—Heussman, ironically—wrote back.
“We’re not ever sure of much in this world,” Hemslock responded. “And I’ve got bigger dreams beyond the treasure you’re all interested in. More than the supposed gold and trinkets that Cortes stole from the natives.”
“What are you doing?”
I turn. Chase stands in the doorway with his arms folded, frowning at me.
“Are you snooping through my dad’s stuff?” He marches over and shuts the laptop. “You know you’ll have to sign more than an NDA to read those, right?”
“I’m sorry. I was curious.”
“I’m not angry,” Chase says, sounding exactly that. “I just—I want to get off this freaking island, but everything’s conspiring to keep us here. Including Dad. Are they back?”
I glance at the time. “There’s another hour before sunset. I can get you an early dinner.”
“I’m not hungry. You don’t have to wait on me hand and foot.”
“I told your father I’d stay with you.”
“You didn’t tell him you would look through his stuff, and you did. I won’t tell if you won’t.”
“Are you trying to blackmail me?”
Chase turns back to me, fury on his face, and then the ire leaches out of him. “I’m not trying to do anything,” he says wearily. “I just—I just want to go home. Home where I can post some clown shit on my socials and not care about anything else. I want all of us to go home.”
He stares down at his phone and then thumbs through the gallery of photos he’d saved there. “You see this?” He waves it at me, and I see the image Rory sent him with that dark figure in the background watching us. Except now it’s an abstract blotch in the scenery. The background is inconclusive now, though it had been so clear the first time we saw the photo.
“Why is it stalking me? I haven’t had any visions like the others. Why is it toying with me? Didn’t you say the Diwata won’t harm the innocent? Am I guilty of something?”
“Absolutely not—”
“Hey!” He turns and shouts at nothing in the room. “Are you here? Do you want to kill me?” He pauses as if expecting an answer. “Then stop fucking around and say that to my face!”
“Chase!” I say sharply.
“I’m tired. I’m tired of Dad chasing after Mom’s ghost, him never having time for me. And I’m scared. I’m beginning to think that maybe Dad has more to do with all this than I thought he did. Am I going to be punished for being his son?”
“No,” I say, with a fierceness that surprises even me. “The balete creatures aren’t haunting you because you’re next. They’re haunting you because of me.”
He looks at me, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
After a pause, I make my decision and share. “They’re curious about you.”
“Curious?”
“I’m the only human this island has a longstanding connection with. When you arrived, it wanted to know more about you. Because of me.”
“Are you saying that the island is jealous of me?”
I gape at him, then surprise myself by laughing. “No. Maybe. I don’t think it’s capable of those kinds of emotions, but it can mimic them. It doesn’t understand personal boundaries the way you and I do.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Have you seen hallucinations of your ex on the island?”
He shakes his head.
“If He thought you were guilty, He would have used your conscience against you. What we’ve been seeing—they are manifestations of the god. I see them all the time. They can feel invasive if you’re not used to it.” I set my jaw. “I won’t let Him do that to you.”
“You’re a good person, ya know?” Chase says quietly.
I look away, not sure how to answer that. “I don’t know if I can claim that.”
“We’re here trashing your island, and you still want to keep us safe. I’m not used to that, you know? In California everyone just gets…caught up. We don’t think much beyond how we want people to see us, like us. I guess that’s what got me into posting videos. I just wanna be validated, you know? But being on this island’s got me thinking about a lot. My friends tell me Riley’s always been shallow—but maybe we got together because I’m also shallow.”
The boy’s starting to get a little weepy. I’m not sure what to do.
“You’re—you’re gonna laugh at me. But after saying this? My immediate thought is Hey, that would make an awesome caption for my next photo. I’m living my life to make goddamn posts on social media so I can get engagements for advertisers to pay me more. If I die, is that all people will remember of me? Some dude who got ‘hot boy summer’ trending that one time? Is that my biggest achievement?”
Askal, far better at offering comfort, pushes his nose into Chase’s arm. The boy lets out a choked, teary laugh, and then reaches down to pat him.
“It’s all right. S’alright. Saying it out loud kinda helps me feel better, you know? You’ve been helping from the very first day. You could have gone back to your dad and left us all here to die.” He hugs Askal with one arm. His other hand reaches out to pull me into a hug. “Thanks. I really, really appreciate it.”
I pat him on the back. He chuckles. “You’re not used to this, either, huh?”
“I don’t have many friends.”
“Can we be friends? Like, if everything here is done, I still wanna hang out with you. I can come here easier than you can fly to America, plus we’ve got the internet to connect. Do you have any social media yourself? I don’t mind emails or telephone calls. You can charge them to me.”
I don’t know why that makes me laugh, but it does. “I can find a way to stay in touch with you. But I promised your dad that I was gonna get you dinner.”
His arms tighten around me. “Rory was right. He said you sounded like the perfect package, and now that I think about it—”
His voice goes husky, deepens. “Now that I think about it—”
I don’t know what happens next. Only that he feels warmer to the touch. His thumb moves across my shoulder, and something inside me sparks electric at the friction. His face is close. Then he shifts and draws nearer.
“Alon, I—”
I shove at him.
Stunned, he falls over backward, flat on his butt.
“I’m going to go get your dinner,” I say brusquely, marching toward the door. Askal lies back on the rug and huffs.
“Alon wait, I—”
But I’m already outside and into the night, the door slamming behind me.
***
The dinner table is nearly deserted when I arrive. Most of the crew has chosen to retire early, and only a few linger in the mess hall, half-heartedly picking at their plates. Straw Hat is still at his workstation, going through the film footage and trying to make sense of the last few days. Melissa is behind him, studying the screen with a puzzled frown. Hawaiian Shirt is there too, and he gives me a miserable nod when I enter.
“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this show is as good as dead,” he says. “I don’t care what Hemslock thinks. It’s been nothing but one disaster after another. Lamarr’s looking through what we have—maybe we can scrape together enough for an hour, two-hour feature. Try to salvage something out of this.”
“We still got cameras out there rolling,” Straw Hat says despondently. “Gonna take them down when rescue comes. Still no contact with the Leyte team, but from the reports they sent before communication went down, the storm’s due to clear tomorrow afternoon. A rescue team should be on its way as soon as it lets up. We gotta wing it till then.”
“I’m not getting paid for any of this,” Melissa says miserably. She’s been carrying around a thick piece of driftwood for protection. The others have armed themselves with similar makeshift weapons. She had also taken to carrying her mace “because assholes always turn up at the most unexpected places,” she says, and it sounds like she says this from experience.
Hawaiian Shirt glares at the camera feed trained on the corpse trees by the sinkhole. “I hate that thing,” he says irritably. “That’s the one image we were hoping would sell the rest of this. I despise it. Everything’s been trouble since that sinkhole.”
His voice drops. “I…I…”
I see what stuns him. On the screen, the corpse in the tree slowly moves and stares directly at us through the camera.
Hawaiian Shirt backs away. “Shit,” he keeps saying. “Shit, oh, shit. Oh shit.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Straw Hat asks crabbily. Neither he nor Melissa have seen it.
Hawaiian Shirt points a finger at the monitor, his hand trembling. “You see that?” He cries. “It’s looking at me. It’s goddamn, fucking looking at me!”
But the corpse tree has already turned away, as if it has been that way this whole time.
***
Something’s wrong.
I exit the mess hall with two plates of food, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. I turn slowly, watching the trees, watching the shore, watching for anything that moves.
I see it soon enough. It stands just beyond the circle of comfort the electric lanterns provide, but there is no mistaking its bent form, the wet spindles of branches of its body, glossy against the brightness. It’s half obscured by shadows, but I know that it’s looking at me.
It’s the same tangled hair and the same pale absence of face. It’s the same jittered shape. It’s slightly hunched, the way Lindsay Watson must have crouched, prostrated on the ground when the roots had first taken hold of her, dragged her into the soil while the old grandmother bore witness.
Something at the center of its face opens—a long tongue snakes out from a row of tiny, thorn-like teeth within its flytrap mouth.
Forgive me, the thing says, distinctly. Forgive me.
We stare at each other, neither of us moving. Then I see the balete shift and twist, until they become other faceless women borne of a similarly twisted seed, all with the same elongated, hollow maws. Crooked against the unyielding straightness of the trees, they lurk, gathering behind the pale, broken form.
Slowly, the first creature takes half a step toward Gries and Chase’s cabin.
I’m surprised at my anger. “Huwag,” I say, my voice loud in the dim. “Hayaan mo siya.”
The spindles withdraw, but only briefly. The mouth opens and closes.
Gusto mo siya? it asks. Do you like him?
The Diwata is curious about Chase. Curious about what I think about him. Wary. Suspicious. Possessive.
“He’s not like the others,” I say.
It doesn’t believe me. The pale thing takes another step toward the bungalows—still keeping out of the light, its movements deliberate. It tenses, as if about to run.
“’Wag!” I shout.
I throw our dinner at it. It disappears, and the plates crash to the ground, shattering upon impact.
Melissa and Hawaiian Shirt run out of the mess hall. A few other crew members poke their heads out of their tents.
But Lindsay Watson is already gone, and the withered forests with her.
“I saw,” Melissa said, visibly shaking. “Those things. You told them to stay back, like in the footage—”
“You saw it, Melissa?” Hawaiian Shirt asks, placing his hand on my shoulder. I spin at the touch, ready to fight, and he jumps back. “Hey, whoa, whoa. It’s me. We’ve got a few cameras trained on those woods. We can—” He breaks off, starts laughing, a little hysterically.
“We’re sitting here, waiting to be picked off by spirits, and I’m still thinking about the show,” he gasps. “Fuck this.”
“Stay inside the mess hall,” I instruct him. “Don’t leave until I return, whatever you might hear. If you need to go to your tents, do it in groups.”
“We will, but what about you? Hey, where are you—”
I ignore him and run back to the cabin.
***
I arrive just in time.
I can hear Askal’s angry howls and Chase’s terrified shouts before I turn the doorknob, and I burst into the room where both sit huddled at the end of the couch.
Tree roots grow everywhere.
They hang down from the ceiling, probing through the roof’s material to infect every space and crevice they can reach. They grow over the walls, wrapping thick branches around the table and furniture. Gries’s laptop is nearly hidden under brown, withered bark. They surround Chase and Askal, moving closer.
A creature hovers before them, dangling upside down before Chase’s terrified face. Chase tries to shield Askal with his body, lashing out at the air before them with a clenched fist.
The tree makes an odd crooning noise. Its branch-fingers reach out to caress Chase’s hair, moving down toward his shoulders and neck.
Huwag mo siyang saktan, it says.
Askal reacts. Snarling, his teeth find bark. The thing rears back, but Askal refuses to let go, bravely engaging it in a tug of war, distracting it from Chase. The rest of the balete circles nearer.
I grab my machete and swing.
I chop at the nearest root, and it breaks easily, the cut branch shriveling. I lift the axe again, and this time bring it down on the largest of the roots that I can see. A fountain of ugly, black, sap-like liquid spurts from the gaping wound, seeping onto the floor.
“’Wag!” I shout.
More roots spring out from below. Only this time, the larger, thicker vines block the thing’s attempts to close in on Chase, who is frozen, gaping as the tree mutinies against itself.
I plant myself in front of it and swing my ax again.
The thing turns away from Chase and grabs at me, roots circling my wrist. Up close it shares similarities to a Venus flytrap; the sides of its head fold in on itself like makahiya leaves do, like a mouth. It drags me closer, jaws opening to reveal an eye surrounded by teeth.
Gusto mo siya? a voice whispers from within it.
While it’s distracted, Chase snatches up the machete and finishes the job; with his swing the mouth cleaves in two, and the thing staggers back. Chase attacks again, depriving it of its head.
The rest of the tree retreats, melting into the walls and floors, until only the viscous puddle remains. The head withers to ashes. We’re alone.