The Hollow Lot

In 2016, the city of Angeles was a furnace of fear. The anti-drug campaign had turned neighbors into informants and quiet streets into war zones. My father, Ernesto, had a reputation that preceded him, not for violence, but for his weakness for the white powder that had ruined him. When three bodies were found dumped near our old row house in Balibago, I knew it was a warning. We packed our bags and fled to the outskirts, to a town called Porac, where the rent was cheap and no one asked questions.

The house we found was a narrow two-story structure at the end of a cul-de-sac, a dead end the locals called ‘Tumbok’. It was a hundred square meters of peeling paint and creaking floorboards, with two bedrooms upstairs. The landlord, a gaunt man with rheumy eyes, offered it for five thousand pesos a month. ‘Good luck selling it,’ he muttered as we signed the lease, and I ignored the chill that ran down my spine.

For the first few weeks, the house was quiet. My daughter, Lila, who had just turned three, played in the small yard while I cooked and my father tried to stay clean. But then, the bulldozers came. They cleared the wooded lot behind our house, razing ancient acacia trees and flattening the earth for a new subdivision. The day they finished, the air changed. It was as if the ground itself had been wounded, and something had seeped out.

It started with small things. Lila would talk to someone in the corner of her room, a ‘friend’ she called ‘Mang Ben’. At first, I thought it was imaginary. But then, she started waking up at 3:00 AM, pointing at the ceiling and crying. ‘He’s pounding,’ she’d say. And sure enough, I could hear it—a rhythmic thumping, like a fist against wood, coming from the empty attic above.

My father laughed it off, blaming rats. But I saw the fear in his eyes. He started drinking again, and one night, he swore he saw a man in a white shirt standing in the hallway, his face a blur of shadow. ‘He had no face,’ my father whispered, his hands trembling. ‘Just a smooth, pale void.’

The incidents escalated. Dishes would slide off the counter and shatter. A heavy picture frame fell from the wall, narrowly missing Lila. And every night, the pounding grew louder, more insistent. One evening, I found Lila standing at the top of the stairs, her small hand pressed against the air as if touching something. ‘He wants his trees back,’ she said, her eyes vacant. ‘He says we’re standing on his bones.’

I tried to rationalize it. The stress, the fear, the guilt of uprooting my family. But my father was unraveling. He refused to sleep upstairs, claiming the ‘faceless man’ watched him from the corner. He started talking to himself, muttering about the trees and the land. And then, one night, he woke me with his screams.

I found him in the backyard, digging with his bare hands, his fingers bloody. ‘They’re here,’ he sobbed, pointing at the earth. ‘I can feel them squirming.’ I pulled him inside, but he fought me, his eyes wild. ‘The land is hungry, Carl! We should have never come here!’

The next week, I decided we’d leave. I had saved enough, and I couldn’t bear to see Lila’s face contorted in fear. But as I packed our things, I noticed the silence. The house was too still, the air heavy. I called for Lila, and my blood froze. She was in the hallway, facing the wall, her head tilted. ‘He’s inside,’ she whispered. ‘He’s in the walls. He’s in the floor. He’s everywhere.’

I grabbed her and ran, my father stumbling behind me, but the front door wouldn’t budge. It was as if the house itself held us. I turned to the window, and through the dusty glass, I saw the empty lot. The flattened earth was undulating, as if something was rising. And then, I heard the pounding again, but this time it wasn’t from the attic. It was from beneath our feet.

We finally escaped through the back, scrambling over the fence as the house groaned behind us. We didn’t look back until we reached the main road. I clutched Lila, her tiny heart beating against mine. ‘We’re safe now,’ I whispered, but even as I said it, I knew it was a lie.

We never went back, but the nightmares followed us. Lila still talks to ‘Mang Ben’, and sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear that rhythmic pounding in the walls of our new apartment. And I wonder—did we escape, or did we bring it with us? The land remembers, and so does the hollow lot.