The Tarpaulin of Saint Lucia

When I was twelve, my father died, and my mother moved us from the clamor of Manila to the quiet, humid town of San Isidro, where her mother lived. We rented a sprawling, old house that had been a convent in the 1920s, its walls thick with lime and its windows tall and arched. The garden was overgrown with hibiscus and an enormous balete tree that scraped the roof at night. I was enrolled in a Catholic school run by stern-faced nuns, who told us that ghosts were pagan superstition, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the house was watching me. The air inside was always cool, even at noon, and the floorboards groaned in patterns that didn’t match the wind.

On the third night, I woke to a sound like wet cloth rubbing against the wall outside my bedroom. I lay still, listening. It was a sliding, dragging noise, slow and deliberate, moving from my door to the end of the hallway, where a framed picture of the Virgin Mary hung askew. I thought it was a rat, or maybe the house helpers, but when I peeked through the keyhole, the hallway was empty. The sound stopped. The next morning, I told my mother, who laughed and said it was just the old pipes. But I saw her glance at the picture, and the way she straightened it made my stomach drop.

A week later, our house helper, Lita, quit without notice. I found her in the kitchen, her face pale, sweeping the floor for the fourth time. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, and when my mother asked her what was wrong, she said she had seen a figure in the garden, a woman in a white dress standing under the balete tree, waving at her. The woman had no face. Lita packed her bags that afternoon and left. My mother scolded me for telling ghost stories, even though I hadn’t. That night, I heard the sound again, but this time it was accompanied by a rhythmic tapping, like fingernails on glass. I pulled the covers over my head and prayed to the saints I didn’t really believe in.

The following Sunday, my grandmother came to visit. She was a tiny, wrinkled woman with sharp eyes who always smelled of mothballs and dried herbs. She walked through the house, running her fingers along the walls, pausing at the hallway picture. She asked my mother when we had put up the tarpaulin of Saint Lucia. We didn’t have a tarpaulin. My mother looked confused, and I followed her gaze. The picture of the Virgin Mary had been replaced by a faded plastic tarp, strung across the wall, with the image of a serene, wide-eyed saint holding a platter with two eyeballs. I had never seen it before. My grandmother’s face went stern, and she spat on the floor. “That’s not a saint,” she said, “that’s a gate.”

That night, my mother and I ate dinner in silence. The house felt colder, and the air seemed to press in around us. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t stop staring at the doorway, where the hallway light cast a pale rectangle. At 3:33 AM, the clock on my nightstand, which had never worked, began to tick. The sound was like a heartbeat. Then the tarpaulin, which had been nailed to the wall, started to flutter, as if there were a breeze, and I saw the saint’s eyes move. They weren’t eyes on the platter; they were alive, and they were looking at me. I wanted to scream, but my throat was frozen. The edges of the tarpaulin peeled back, revealing a blackness so deep it drank the light, and from it came a voice that was not a voice, but a vibration in my bones: “Come, child, I’ll show you what I see.”

I don’t remember what happened next. I only remember waking up on the floor of the dining room, surrounded by shattered glass from the windows, and my mother kneeling over me, shaking, her face streaked with tears. The tarpaulin was gone. The wall behind it was scratched and gouged, as if something had clawed its way through. My mother took me to my grandmother’s house the next day, and we never returned. She later told me that the locals said the house had been built on an old burial ground, and that a so-called “curate” had performed rituals there in the 1930s to communicate with the dead. He had left behind a tarpaulin, a relic, they said, to keep something trapped. We had disturbed its prison.

To this day, I can’t look at images of saints without a shiver. I still see her sometimes, in dreams, her empty eye sockets fixed on me, and I feel the platter in my hands, heavy and wet. My mother refuses to talk about it, and I’ve never told anyone the full story. But I keep a small, blank canvas in my closet, and I sometimes catch it trembling at night, as if it, too, is waiting for the tarpaulin to be drawn back.