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.
