The Crate of Roots

I was seventeen when the house on Maple Street started feeling wrong. We’d moved there three years earlier, after my father’s transfer to a small Ontario town. It was an old Victorian with creaky floors and a basement that always smelled of damp earth—even in July. My mother, always busy with her real estate clients, hired a live-in helper named Julek to manage the house and watch over my younger sister, Lena, and me. Julek was a wiry man in his early forties from a rural part of the Philippines. He was quiet but had a warm smile and an easy laugh. I was the only one who’d sit with him on the porch and ask about his family back home, and he’d tell me stories about fishing and the typhoon that took his village’s coconut grove.

One Tuesday afternoon, I came back from school to find the house unusually still. My grandmother, who lived with us, was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes with a faraway look. I asked where Julek was, and she said he was lying down in his basement room. ‘He’s not feeling well,’ she said, but her voice had a tightness that made me uneasy. I shrugged it off and went to my room.

The next morning, Julek was up as usual, serving breakfast with a smile, but I noticed a faint brownish stain on his white shirt, and when he bent to pick up a fallen fork, I saw a dark, circular mark on his neck, like a bruise but too perfectly round. I asked him if he was okay, and he said, ‘Just a mosquito bite, don’t worry.’ I didn’t believe him, but I let it go.

Over the next week, things began to shift. The basement door, which we usually kept closed, started opening on its own. I’d hear footsteps down there at night, heavy and deliberate, but when I’d go to check, Julek would be asleep in his bed, his chest rising and falling in an unnaturally even rhythm. One evening, I was in the kitchen getting water when I saw Julek kneeling on the basement floor, his back to the door. He was chanting something in a language I didn’t recognize, and in front of him lay a small wooden crate I’d never seen before. It was old, the wood dark and cracked, and wrapped in what looked like dried vines. I must have made a noise because he turned suddenly. His eyes looked different—duller, like they’d lost their usual glint. ‘Just cleaning, young sir,’ he said, but his voice was flat, and he quickly closed the crate and carried it to a corner, covering it with a dusty tarp.

I asked my grandmother about the crate. She pursed her lips and said, ‘It came with him. Personal belongings. Don’t touch it.’ That night, I dreamed of roots. Thick, black roots weaving through the floorboards, wrapping around the foundation of the house. At the center of the roots was the crate, pulsing like a heart. I woke up in a cold sweat to find the room shrouded in a cinnamon-like smell, so strong it made my head spin. When I went to the window, I saw that the rose bush outside had bloomed overnight—but the flowers were black, and they turned toward the basement window, as if bowing.

A week later, my cousin Andy came to stay with us for the summer. He was a rowdy sixteen-year-old who loved making fun of everything. The first thing he did was bound down to the basement and start rummaging around. I heard a crash, then a muffled curse. When I got there, Andy was standing in front of the crate, which he’d knocked over. The lid had come off, and inside were not roots, but a bed of dark soil and a single, gnarled tuber—like a deformed ginger root, but humanoid, with tiny, finger-like projections. Julek came rushing down, his face pale. He carefully set the crate upright and looked at Andy with an intensity I’d never seen. ‘Do not touch,’ he said, his voice low, almost a growl. Andy shrugged, but I saw his hands were shaking.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing a rhythmic thumping from the basement, like someone beating a drum but soft and wet. I crept to the top of the basement stairs and peered down. The door to Julek’s room was open, and he was sitting on his bed, facing the crate, which he’d placed on a chair. In the dim light, I could see the tuber’s finger-like projections moving—slowly, deliberately, as if it were stretching. Julek was whispering in his native language, and I caught the word ‘utang’—which means ‘debt’ in Tagalog. I backed away, my heart pounding.

The next day, I confronted Julek. I told him I’d seen the thing move, and his face went blank for a second, then he sighed and said, ‘It is an old thing from my village. It holds a spirit that was wronged long ago. I brought it here to protect it, but now it wants something more.’ When I asked what, he just shook his head and said, ‘It wants a new vessel.’

From then on, the house became a different place. The air was heavy, and the smell of cinnamon never faded. My sister Lena complained of nightmares where roots grew from her mouth. My grandmother found hen scratches on the kitchen floor in the shape of a circle. And Julek grew thinner, his skin taking on a grayish tint, always weary. I tried to reason that it was stress, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that the crate’s tuber seemed to be growing, its finger-like projections elongating.

One night, I woke to the sound of muffled screams from the basement. I rushed down to find the crate open, but the tuber was gone. Julek was on his knees, clutching his stomach, and dark lines were spreading up his arms like veins. He looked at me with desperate eyes and rasped, ‘It’s inside me now. It will devour my soul unless I give it another.’ He held out a photo of my sister.

I didn’t hesitate. I grabbed the nearest object—a heavy iron candlestick—and brought it down on the crate, shattering it. At that moment, Julek screamed a scream that wasn’t his voice. It was a woman’s voice, full of hatred and sorrow. The lights flickered, and the temperature plummeted. Then silence.

The next morning, Julek was gone. The police found the basement empty except for a pile of black roots and a faint circle burned into the floor. They wrote it off as an accident—maybe a gas leak. But I know what I saw. I spent the next years trying to forget, but sometimes, even now, I catch the smell of cinnamon, and I see a shadow at the edge of my vision, shaped like a woman. And I pray that wherever Julek went, he managed to keep that thing away from a new vessel. But the roots, I know, are patient. They always find a way.