The Rain on the Capiz Shells

I was eleven when I learned that the old house on Mendoza Street kept its secrets locked in the rain. It wasn’t the house my grandparents built, the one with the wide veranda and the mango tree that dropped its fruit like heavy green stones. No, it was the house that came after, the one with the concrete walls and the iron gate that groaned whenever the wind pushed it. We moved there in 2003, when I was still small enough to believe that the dark corners of a room were just shadows waiting for the light. But that Sunday afternoon, the rain came down in sheets, turning the streets into rivers, and I found out that the shadows had been waiting for me all along.

My room was at the back of the house, facing a narrow alley that no one used except for the stray cats and the occasional drunkard who stumbled home from the karaoke bar three blocks away. The window had wooden louvers, the old-fashioned kind, and when the rain hit them, they made a sound like nails being tapped against a coffin. I had just finished my homework—a set of arithmetic problems that I hated more than I hated the taste of bitter melon—and I decided to lie on my bed and read the comic book I had bought the day before. It was a horror comic, of course. I was at that age where I thought I was brave because I could read about ghosts and monsters without flinching. But the rain was loud that day, louder than usual, and it kept pulling my attention away from the page.

I looked up at the window, and that’s when I saw her. A woman, standing in the alley, her face pressed against the louvers. She was wearing a white dress, the kind you wore to a funeral, and her hair was long and black, dripping with rain. She didn’t look at me directly, but I could see her eyes, dark and empty, as if they had been scooped out and filled with the night sky. I froze. I couldn’t move, couldn’t blink. I wanted to call out to my mother, who was in the kitchen cooking sinigang, but the sound got stuck in my throat. The woman tilted her head, and I saw that her neck was bent at an unnatural angle, as if it had been broken and healed the wrong way. Then she smiled. It wasn’t a smile of welcome or even malice. It was the smile of someone who knew something I didn’t, something terrible.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, like my grandmother used to tell me to do whenever I was scared. When I opened them, she was gone. The rain had let up a little, and the alley was just a wet, dark slit between the houses. I told myself it was my imagination, that the comic book had gotten to me, and I put it down. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else in the room with me. The air had turned cold, and the shadows in the corners seemed to shift, not with the light, but with a purpose of their own. I turned on the lamp by my bed, but it did nothing to dispel the chill. I got up and walked to the door, planning to run down the stairs and throw myself into the safety of the kitchen, but my feet wouldn’t move. I was rooted to the spot, and I could feel something breathing behind me.

That’s when the whispers started. They weren’t words, not exactly, but they were sounds that almost formed words, like a language I had forgotten in a dream. I tried to scream, but my voice came out as a thin, reedy whimper. And then I heard a voice, clear and close, right by my ear: ‘You can see me, can’t you?’

I don’t remember how I got out of that room. I think I broke into a run, and I tumbled down the stairs, and I must have made enough noise because my mother came rushing out of the kitchen, her face a mask of worry. She asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t tell her. I just pointed upstairs, my hand shaking, and I said, ‘There’s a woman in my room.’ My mother looked at me with that look adults give children when they don’t know whether to believe or dismiss. She took my hand and led me up the stairs, and we went into my room. It was empty, of course. The window was closed, and the rain was drumming against the louvers as if nothing had ever happened. My mother said, ‘It was just a dream,’ and she left, and I was left alone with the feeling that she had missed something, that the room was still tainted.

From that day on, I couldn’t sleep in that room without the light on. I didn’t tell anyone about the woman, not until years later, when I was old enough to understand that the feeling of being watched is not always your imagination. I moved out of that house when I was eighteen, and I thought I had left that rainy afternoon behind. But sometimes, on rainy nights, I hear the tap-tap-tap of fingernails on the window, and I see, out of the corner of my eye, a shadow that doesn’t move with the curtain. And I know she followed me. Not the house. The woman. And she always will.