Back-Story Monday

Long ago in the Philippines, in a little town outside Quezon City, lived the Balgaman family. The patriarch of the family was named Grover. He had his wife, Adorinda, five daughters and one son. He also had two sisters but they died in a bus accident in the mountains. Grover and Adorinda adopted their five nephews after the accident and their family grew too large for their house. The Balgamans had always been the superstitious family in this small town. They were the one family that was gossiped about in the café on the corner. Their house was a haunted place where children dared each other to look inside. They were teased and tricked for talking to the air or pointing out things that weren’t there. The name ‘Balgaman’ would get rejected from jobs, expelled from schools, even denied insurance. They were all around notorious for “calling attention to themselves”. Ignoring the warnings, little did their neighbors know that the Balgamans were protecting them from things unseen.

            Grover was the first to begin ridding their neighborhood of these creatures. It was as though the things could tell that his children could see them and delighted in tormenting them. Howls in the night, a poltergeist upending their furniture, and thumps on the walls were the tamest incidences. Grover took it upon himself to fight them. With his two eldest nephews beside him, they would tread into the jungles around their home at night with torches to drive them away. During the day, the family traveled in pairs and had planned routes, arming themselves with strange weapons like spoons of garlic and a ring of roses.

Then one winter night, Grover’s middle child, Francine, was injured when an imp threw a side-table lamp at her. When taken to the hospital, Grover lied about their name. But he was denied entry into the emergency room because a nurse recognized him and thought he was raving. Francine was taken to a veterinary center and patched up nicely, but Grover was seething. He had had enough. He picked up his family from the Philippines and immigrated to the United States. He feebly hoped that their family curse would go for broke in sunny Santo Yago, a city famous for its beaches and tourism and busy population.

            All was quiet that first summer. Grover took up a job as a clerk in the Department of Fisheries and Adorinda offered piano lessons for the local elementary school. Their twelve children were enrolled in school without incident and all seemed to be settling into a normal routine.

 One day, Grover took his eldest daughter and youngest son Arthur to a local book fair. One minute he was gazing at an antique issue of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and he looked up to find his toddler son talking casually with a smiling policeman. Grover would have thought nothing of it, had it not been for the horned tail that swiped into his view from under the man’s shirt. In a blink he had upturned the table of books causing the bookseller to scream and distract the creature. Among the dust he snatched his son and nabbed his daughter, driving home at a hundred miles per hour on the freeway. Whatever this curse was, it had followed them from the Philippines. Once home, he delivered the news to the rest of his children, to no one’s surprise. Each of them had seen things: at school, at work, even at bus stops.

            Grover and Adorinda loved their family deeply. But this city was their home now, and Grover grudgingly agreed with his nephews to start up the “family business” again: a non-profit one, solely for the purpose of providing security against the unexplainable. Under the table of course.

            Grover was reaching his sixties by then and knew that his time to fight was wearing thin with his oncoming arthritis. He trained his five nephews in all the ways he knew how to kill the creatures, for they were much the same as the ones back in the Philippines. As the boys went out nightly to stalk and hunt, they began to notice a pattern.

            This city was too noisy for the creatures. It was much less wild and open then the Philippines, too vulnerable for them. It wasn’t until they found large gatherings of human that they would emerge to hunt in the crowds. The Balgaman boys realized this and started following hordes of the creatures to conventions and concerts around the city. The difference was staggering and to their dismay, summertime in Santo Yago was the height of the tourism season. Thanks to their couture hotels and countless arenas and convention centers, Santo Yago was the hottest place in the country to hold an event. And these were frequent, thanks to its close proximity to Hollywood and the banking of an international airport.

            What was more alarming was that the Balgamans began to feel an enormous weight. For all the seasons they began hunting the things, it became more and more apparent that they were solitary in this conquest. No one else in the city shared their gift or knowledge of the existence of the supernatural.