The Pigs of Purok Dos

The sun was a pale smear behind the sawtooth ridges of the Cordillera when my father and eldest brother, Mang Enrique, left for the weekly market in the lowland town of Sabangan. Their boots crunched on the frost-hardened trail, and I remember how the mist swallowed their forms until they were just two gray shapes, then nothing. My mother, Ines, tied her apron tight and said, ‘Come, children. We have peanuts to pull before the dew dries.’ My older sister, Fely, who was twelve and already had the stern look of a woman who had buried two younger brothers, helped me with the burlap sack. My other brother, Tomas, was seven and could dig faster than anyone, his thin arms moving like pistons.

We worked the terraced field on the eastern slope, the soil a dark, crumbly loam that smelled of rain and decay. The peanuts came up in clusters, gnarled and earth-colored, and we snapped them from their roots with a rhythm that soon became numb. By mid-afternoon, my back ached, and my fingers were raw. Mother called a halt, and we sat under a lone narra tree, eating cold rice wrapped in banana leaves and sipping from a coconut shell of tepid water. The afternoon was a long sigh of heat and dust, the only sound the chittering of cicadas and the far-off bark of a dog.

As the sun began to slide behind the western ridge, we heard the sow. She was a massive black-and-white sow, weighing perhaps a hundred and fifty kilos, and she was squealing—not the usual grunts of hunger, but a high-pitched, frantic sound that made the hair on my arms stand up. Mother frowned. ‘Fely, why is the sow still tied up? I thought you moved her near the piglets.’ Fely’s face went blank. ‘I did, Ma. I moved her to the grove by the pit, so she wouldn’t bother us. But she’s been like this for an hour.’ Mother sighed and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘We’ll have to feed her. You and Tomas go—’ But Fely was already walking toward the grove, her bare feet flattening the wild grass.

The grove was a tangle of bamboo and acacia, where the ground dropped suddenly into a limestone pit—a sinkhole that had been there since before the war, the old folks said. No one knew how deep it was. We called it ‘Butas ng Lolo’—Grandfather’s Hole—because a long-ago ancestor had supposedly thrown himself into it during the Spanish times. We never went near the edge. Fely had tied the sow to a guava tree at the mouth of the pit, thinking the shade would keep her cool. But now the sow was lunging against her rope, her snout pointed directly at the dark opening, and she was making a sound I had never heard from a pig—a low, guttural hum that seemed to vibrate in my chest.

Fely stopped at the edge of the grove, her hand covering her mouth. ‘She’s not hungry,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘She’s scared.’ Mother came up behind us, her face shadowed. ‘What is she scared of?’ she asked. We stared at the sow. The rope was taut, digging into the tree. The pig’s eyes were wide, whites showing, and she was pulling backward, away from the pit, as if something was trying to drag her in. But there was nothing there. Just the gaping mouth of limestone, black and silent, with faint dripping sounds echoing from below. Then the sow stopped squealing. She went rigid, her ears flattened, and she stared into the hole with a terrible concentration. A low, rhythmic sound rose from the pit—not a growl, not a screech, but a wet, suction-like noise, like something large being pulled across mud.

Mother’s face drained of color. She grabbed my arm and pulled me back. ‘Everyone inside. Now.’ We backed away slowly, not taking our eyes off the pig. As we reached the house, I looked back. The sow was no longer struggling. She was lying on her side, as if exhausted, her flank heaving. And something was emerging from the pit—a pale, fleshy thing, like a mass of gray skin, slick with moisture, with no discernible head or limbs. It moved with a sickening ooze, flowing over the edge of the pit like a slow tide, and it began to envelop the sow. The sow didn’t even squeal. She just quivered, and then she was gone, swallowed by the thing that had come out of the earth. The gray mass pulsed, then slowly withdrew, disappearing back into the darkness.

We didn’t sleep that night. We huddled in the house, the oil lamp flickering, listening to the silence. Mother kept muttering prayers, and Fely sat with her back to the wall, her knees drawn up, her eyes empty. At dawn, we crept to the grove. The guava tree was still there, but the rope was snapped, as if bitten through. The ground around the pit was churned and muddy, and there were drag marks leading to the edge. The sow was gone. Mother sent us to the neighbors’ house, but when we came back, the soil around the pit had been disturbed—there were fresh mounds, as if something had been buried, then dug up again.

We heard the piglets. They were in a pen behind the house, and they were squealing, but it was a different sound—hungry, demanding. Mother went to feed them, but as she approached, she stopped. The piglets were all dead. Lying in a row, their throats torn, but there were no bite marks. Just clean, neat cuts, as if by a razor. And lying among them was a single gray lump, about the size of a fist, wet and glistening, with a faint pulse.

Mother didn’t speak. She just took a hoe and crushed it. White fluid oozed out, and the smell—a sweet, rotten smell—made me gag. For a week, we didn’t go near the pit. We didn’t talk about the sow. We tried to pretend it never happened. But on the seventh day, my father and brother came back from the market. They were tired, carrying sacks of supplies. Father asked about the sow. Mother told him, ‘She ran off. Probably into the forest.’ Father didn’t believe her, but he didn’t press.

That night, I woke to a sound. A low hum, like the sow’s hum, but deeper, and coming from outside the window. I crept to the sill. The pit was glowing—a faint, phosphorescent green, like fireflies, but steady. And standing at the edge of the pit, silhouetted against the glow, were two figures. One was small, like a child. The other was large, hunched, and I knew it was my father. The large figure turned its head, and in the glow, I saw its face—but it wasn’t my father’s face. It was a mask of gray skin, featureless, with a dark slit for a mouth. It raised a hand, and from the pit, something rose—a long, pale tentacle, slick and glistening, reaching for the small figure. The small figure didn’t move. It was my brother Tomas.

I screamed. The lights flickered. The glow vanished. When my mother ran in, I was crying, babbling. She held me, rocking me, saying, ‘It was just a dream, a dream.’ But when she turned to look at the window, there was something on the sill—a small, wet gray lump, pulsing, the size of a fist. She didn’t sleep the rest of the night. In the morning, the lump was gone, and no one would look at me. They blamed me for the sow, for the piglets, for the nightmare.

We left that place three days later. We moved to the city, to my aunt’s. I am sixty years old now. My father and brother never returned from that trip. My mother died last year, and on her deathbed, she whispered to me, ‘We didn’t abandon them. We ran. But the pit took them.’ I never went back. But sometimes, at night, when it’s quiet, I hear the hum. It’s not a pig. It’s not a sound. It’s a presence, a cold vibration in the air, and I feel something calling me. I’ve seen it in my dreams—a gray mass, pulsing, with a mouth that opens like a pit, and it’s waiting. It’s always waiting. And I know that someday, it will come for me, as it came for the sow, as it came for my father and brother. And when it does, I will lie down without a struggle, because I’ve known all my life that the pig knew—the moment we tie something near the mouth of the pit, we are already feeding it.