Irkalla Read online

  Irkalla

  John Triptych

  Published by John Triptych, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  IRKALLA

  First edition. October 16, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 John Triptych.

  Written by John Triptych.

  Also by John Triptych

  Expatriate Underworld

  The Opener

  The Loader

  Stars in Shadow

  Nepenthe Rising

  Shards of Eternity

  Wild Sargasso Space

  The Dying World

  Lands of Dust

  City of Delusions

  The Maker of Entropy

  The Dying World Omnibus

  Wrath of the Old Gods

  The Glooming

  Canticum Tenebris

  A World Darkly

  Wrath of the Old Gods Boxed Set 1

  Wrath of the Old Gods (Young Adult)

  Pagan Apocalypse

  The Fomorians

  Eye of Balor

  Wrath of the Old Gods: Box Set 2

  Standalone

  Stars in Shadow Omnibus 1

  Irkalla

  Watch for more at John Triptych’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By John Triptych

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

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  Further Reading: Nepenthe Rising

  Also By John Triptych

  About the Author

  To all cave divers: intrepid explorers of Earth's last frontier.

  Profound thanks to cave diving experts Bernil Gastardo, Dalen Vigil, Richard L, and Caroline Hoyal for their thorough fact checking to ensure that my work was somewhat accurate. Also, another big thanks to Mark Dobson for the cover photo.

  1

  HAVING JUST FINISHED eating a dinner of rice and dried fish at their desks inside the tiny police station, the two cops were lethargically watching a pirated movie on a worn DVD player when a fearful old man came rushing in through the open entryway.

  Both men immediately recognized him. Rolando Tuban was the longtime barrio captain of their village, tasked with settling disputes and other small governmental duties deemed too frivolous for the country’s slow and beleaguered court system. Everyone called him Rolly for short, and he was a respected member of their small community.

  Police Staff Sargent Elmer Santos was the veteran, having been a cop for almost twenty years. Short and swarthy, his potbelly had grown to the point where he had to unbutton the lower part of his uniform when not on parade review. Scratching his moustache, he looked up at the town official with a slightly perturbed glint in his eyes. “Good evening, Rolly.”

  Rolly’s normally calm demeanor had been replaced by nervous anxiety. The old man’s frail shoulders trembled with apprehension. “I saw her.”

  Patrolman Mario Morales was the junior cop, having just finished his basic training a little over a year ago. “Who?”

  “Luz. Her hair was messed up and covering her face, but I’m sure it was her!”

  Elmer raised an eyebrow. Luz Cabanog had stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife and ran away when she found him in bed with another woman a few weeks before, taking her newborn baby with her. “I thought she had gone back to her family in Roxas?”

  “No! I called up her parents last week on my cellphone, they had no idea what had happened and they haven’t spoken to her since the wedding.”

  “Okay, so where did you see her?”

  “I was walking back to my house after visiting Ramon, and I saw something moving out by the trees near his place. It was too big to be a dog, so I tried to get closer, that’s when I saw her.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I called out to her but she ran deeper into the jungle. I followed and got lost because it was dark and I only had my cellphone as a flashlight,” Rolly said. “I must have been wandering for almost an hour when I caught a glimpse of her near the old trail.”

  Mario rubbed his chin. “That’s close to the private land owned by the mayor, right? The fenced off place with the large compound? We never searched that area when we were looking for her.”

  Elmer rolled his eyes. “I went there already and asked the security guards at the gate if they had seen Luz, and they said no. I believe them.”

  Rolly didn’t seem to be paying attention to their side conversation as he went on. “My right flip-flop broke, and I cut my foot on the rocky soil, so I was starting to limp back to where the road was, and that’s when I ended up running into her.”

  Mario stood up and leaned beside his shabby wooden desk. He could see that Rolly had wrapped an old t-shirt around his right foot as a makeshift bandage. “Did you talk to her?”

  The old man looked down. “I was about to, but then I saw her eyes. Then I got really scared.”

  “Why?”

  Rolly stared at the younger cop. “Her eyes were like red with blood. Her teeth and gums had sort of blackened and she tried to attack me.”

  Elmer tried his best not to laugh. “You probably had too much lambanog at Ramon’s place.”

  “We had a few drinks, but I’m not drunk,” Rolly insisted. “I tell you it was Luz. She had gone crazy, like being possessed by an evil spirit!”

  Mario crossed his arms. “What happened then?”

  “The moment I saw her face I screamed, then I hit her on the side of the head with my cellphone when she tried to grab hold of my arm and bite me,” he said, holding up his forearms to show the lines of red scratches. “I still don’t know how, but I managed to get away. I ran as hard as I could to get over here.”

  Mario turned to look at the police sergeant. “Maybe we ought to check it out?”

  Elmer shook his head slowly. His wife’s cooking and the late evening had made him sleepy, and the last thing he wanted was to get up. “Okay, go.”

  The younger cop knew he would be doing the dirty work, and he started to put on his pistol belt. “The police car still isn’t fixed, and that area is almost three kilometers away.”

  “You’ve got a motorbike, don’t you? Use it.”

  Mario turned away as he gestured at Rolly to follow him out the door.

  2

  THE BARRIO CAPTAIN insisted on going with him, so Rolly ended up clinging to Mario’s shoulders as the cop drove his secondhand Kawasaki Barako down the dirt road before turning onto a seldom used rocky trail. The motorbike’s headlight needed to be replaced, but Mario still hadn’t come up with the money to fix any of his stuff, and it cast a dim radiance over the route they were taking.

  When the path had finally ended at the edge of the thick jungle of swamp taros and coconut palm trees, Mario stopped the motorbike and the two men went out on foot. The flashlight the young policeman had also nee
ded new batteries, and the fuzzy beam it shone was only effective for a few meters at the most, but with no other recourse they decided to forge ahead.

  Trudging through the dense foliage wasn’t easy, but they could see a clearing not far from where they were. Rolly tried to keep up as best he could, but his injured foot slowed him down, and Mario had gotten ahead by almost a dozen paces.

  Making his way into the small dell, the patrolman’s flashlight illuminated something close to the ground. When Mario shone the light onto the grassy soil, his eyes opened wide in shock. A trail of black ichor could be seen leading off to the base of a forested hill up ahead of him. It smelled like a combination of rotten shrimp paste and vomit.

  Rolly was out of breath as he stood beside the gawking cop. “That was the liquid coming from her mouth.”

  “Okay, stay close to me.”

  “Alright.”

  Using the flashlight, Mario began to follow the fluid trail. The hairs at the back of his neck began to stand up, making him nervous. He didn’t want to tell to the barrio captain but he could swear that the black bile on the ground would actually glow somewhat in the dark whenever he shifted the flashlight’s beam away from it. No, I’m seeing things, he thought.

  Moments passed, and the only sounds they could hear were their rustlings along the vegetation and the distant screeching of bats out in the distance. The night air seemed still, as if holding its breath in anticipation of what was about to happen.

  Eventually the jungle began to clear away as they got to the base of the hill, replaced by rockier white soil with only the occasional tufts of hardened grass growing in sparse clumps in between the fossilized sediment.

  Mario’s heart began to race as he got ever closer to it. My mother told me about this place when I was growing up. She said this is where all the bad little boys end up if they don’t behave.

  The locals called it the Aswang Caves, a set of limestone caverns sitting at the edge of the national preserve. In Philippine mythology an aswang was a sort of legendary creature that fed on blood, similar to a vampire. Even though the country had been mostly Christianized when it became a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century, many of the old folktales and native beliefs continued on, never to be forgotten.

  Mario could see that the ichor trail continued down amongst the rocks, right by the opening of one of the larger cave entrances. Has Luz been hiding here since she disappeared with her baby?

  Rolly finally caught up with the patrolman. “I know we searched this place when she ran away.”

  “Yes, I was there, but we never ventured into the caves.”

  The old man rubbed his sides. “Because there’s a curse to whoever goes inside, that’s why. In all the years I’ve lived in our town, no one has ever dared to go in there.”

  “If she’s in there, then we might have to look.”

  “But how? No geological team has ever gone past the main cavern; they said they would need special equipment but they—”

  The barrio captain immediately stopped talking when they heard a baby’s shrieking coming from somewhere inside the cave mouth. Both men stood frozen for a full minute, their minds unable to comprehend what they had just heard.

  Mario remembered his oath, and he started to make his way down the rocky edge, careful to keep his balance along the jagged limestone shards jutting out from the ground. If a child was in trouble he felt it was his duty to save it.

  Rolly didn’t move at all. “I’m staying up here.”

  The young patrolman’s boots were already worn out, and a part of his right heel began to separate from the constant abuse of being used as a footpad on the sharp rocky ground, but Mario soldiered on, and made it to the mouth of the cavern.

  There seemed to be a stable path all the way down to the floor of the cave entrance, but the descent was slippery as he could feel bits of moisture on the limestone. Holding the flashlight and only using one arm to balance himself was tough going, but Mario felt he was athletic enough to make it all the way down. There’s no way Elmer would have even gotten this far, he thought.

  Another shrill scream coming from somewhere below distracted him, and Mario suddenly lost his balance. He instinctively held onto the flashlight as he tried to stay upright, but his left hand failed to get a proper grip on a nearby cleft of rock and he suddenly slipped away, right into the empty darkness.

  Within seconds, Mario let out a shout of alarm as he tumbled down sideways, his back, neck and shoulders banging against the sides of innumerable broken rocks as their sharp edges lacerated his knees and forearms.

  The next thing he knew he was laying on his back within the base of the cavern. Mario felt a crushing pain in his lower spine, followed by a series of sharp, burning discomforts as his mind began to register the other injuries he suffered.

  Rolly cupped his hands around his mouth, his succeeding echoes reverberating into the cavern. “Mario, are you alright?”

  Mario groaned as he slowly twisted his body and got on one knee. The flashlight he had dropped was nowhere to be seen, and he figured it probably broke when he fell. “I’m okay, but I lost the flashlight.”

  He could see the small flashlight from Rolly’s cellphone up above him, and he pulled out his own cheap device from his pocket to turn it on as well. The moment he shone the light on the stone floor to see if he could find out where he was, Mario gasped in fright.

  The damp ground was covered in blood. Rotten entrails—whether human or animal he couldn’t tell—were strewn all along the limestone. He suddenly remembered handling complaints about missing pets and livestock from the town’s residents over the past several weeks, realizing he had found out where those poor animals ended up.

  Mario had yet to recover from this latest shock when something leapt up from behind him, and began biting into his arm, making him drop the cellphone. He tried to grab his service weapon, but his fingers were quickly bitten off.

  ROLLY HAD HAD ENOUGH when he heard Mario’s screams. The old barrio captain turned around and ran back into the jungle.

  Unlike the younger generation he had not been brought up in the digital age, and he kept remembering all the old stories his grandmother used to tell him. Of creatures with long tongues that would suck out the blood from their sleeping victims, or about the accursed demon who looked like a woman, but had wings of a bat and could split in half at her waistline in order to fly around at night, looking for blood to satiate her infernal hunger.

  Although he felt that he was too old to believe in them nowadays, his mind quickly relapsed into a primordial state, which made him feel both childlike and helpless. It seemed he had been once again transformed into a scared little boy, only trapped in an elderly man’s body as he continued to flee through the dark forest.

  With his mind forgetting the aches in his feet and lungs, the adrenaline spurred him on, giving his tired old legs new life. Rolly felt that if he could just keep moving, the farther away from that scene of horror, then the safer he would be.

  His hands were full of cuts as he pushed away the razorlike leaves and entangling vines trying to hold him back, but Rolly knew he would not be denied. They might call him a coward for not helping Mario, but at least he could go on living and tell them what had happened.

  When the foliage in front of him began to clear, the spark of hope that he had been nurturing almost burst out like a supernova, but his expected euphoria quickly faded when his fingers ended up touching a chain-link fence. He had somehow made it to the outskirts of someone’s private property, and Rolly could only stare up at the twisting razor wire snaking around the top of the barrier.

  He could see the compound beyond, a small cluster of low concrete buildings that signified the triumph of civilization over the wilds of nature and superstition. Free-standing lampposts illuminated this testament to Mankind’s progress, right at the heart of a primitive jungle.

  “Help me!” Rolly yelled. He didn’t see anyone in the compound, but the lights were on s
o someone would have to come and notice him.

  He kept shouting for a few more minutes until he was exhausted, but not a single human being came out to look.

  Rolly figured that he just needed to walk parallel along the fence until he got to the front of the property. There ought to be a gate with some guards for sure, he thought.

  A low hiss over his shoulder made him turn around. What Rolly saw compelled him to press his feeble body against the artificial barrier in a vain hope of somehow getting past it, but to no avail.

  In the end, he was too tired to even scream.

  3

  JASON BERINGER LEANED over the dining table while staring at the virtual map being shown on the laptop’s screen. He had just started to wear reading glasses a few months back, and it made him somewhat irritable. “Where’s this place again?”

  His best friend Wyatt Ryback stood beside him. “Palawan. It’s an island province in the Philippines.”

  “Okay,” Jason said. Turning to look at his wife, who remained sitting down on the chair in front of the laptop, he made a slight pause. He had expected her to make a comment by now, but she remained focused at the images on the computer. “What do you think, Pen?”

  Penny had short auburn hair, and she also wore a pair of reading glasses while scrutinizing the data in front of her. “Seems interesting so far.”

  “Totally,” Wyatt said to them both. “You’re looking at a vast, unexplored cave complex that stretches for miles. One local geologist I talked to on my last visit back there says that it’s highly possible that it may connect with the sea.”

  Jason scratched his grizzled chin and brooded. At forty-seven, he had logged hundreds of cave dives at each major site in Northern Florida. His passion for this highly technical and dangerous sport made him move his family from Miami over to Gainesville, right where the action was at. After quitting his job as an electrical engineer, he became a full-time instructor and had worked off of referrals for the past fifteen years. Known as one of the best cave diving gurus in the area, he had made enough to send both his kids off to college.