INTO THE VALLEY

He squinted his eyes against the brightness that spilled from above -- a warm, garish glare that pressed down on his head like a board laid flat across his skull. He tried to summon rage, or terror, even joy, but what came instead was a kind of resignation. He’d expected thunder, some vast rending of the veil, a trumpet blast from the hidden machinery of the cosmos. Instead, there was only this --a narrowing, a dimming at the edges, a slowing down as if the world itself had grown weary of turning. The body, stubborn, clung to its rhythms: the heart thudding, the lungs sucking in air, the stomach churning away. But signs of breakdown were becoming apparent. He’d lost all movement in his right leg. His arms were stiffening. The lungs leaked a sour, metallic taste in the mouth; and the mind—ah, the mind—was already loosening, drifting toward that borderland where thought became dream, and dream dissolved into nothingness. Is this dying?

He would laugh if he could, but his jaw hurt. It was likely broken. He had tried to lift a hand to touch his face but found he couldn’t move his arms all the way up. Dust rose from the ground when he shifted. Where was he? The floor beneath him was not a floor at all, but a patchwork of rotted boards, rocks, and earth where the structure – a house -- had surrendered its bones to time and the elements. Above him, the sky poured in where the roof had collapsed, bright and endless, and the bare rafters jutted skyward like ribs on some vast carcass. Vines crept along the walls, their green fingers prying at the seams. Rats moved along exposed plumbing. Leaves drifted down through the gaping roof, settling on his chest, his face, his legs, as if nature were laying a quiet shroud.

The rats had kept him awake through most of the night. The pipes ran across the wall and into the floors, and the rats followed the line, pausing to sniff, their bodies brushing the iron, their tails dragging heavily behind them. Last night, he had worried they would eat him. Big, heavy rats with grey-brown fur. He’d heard stories of them eating sick babies in the shanty colonies. He’d always wondered if any of the stories were true.

He tried to move his leg. It answered with a twitch, feeble and convulsive, reminding him of his childhood, the flutter of moths in a glass jar. He tried again. Nothing.

The checkpoint had loomed out of the dark as the car rounded the corner. Five or six uniformed policemen stood behind the barricade. Two of them lifted their assault rifles. Another – to the left of the car – reached for his sidearm. Flashlight beams slashed across the windshield, blinding him briefly. He froze, hands on the steering wheel. The bag was on the passenger’s seat beside him. The thought of throwing it out the window crossed his mind, but he realized the motion would mark him. Reverse. The tires screamed against asphalt. The car lurched, fishtailed, his pulse hammering in his throat. Too late. Too late. The noise came—metal tearing, the windshield cracking, the snapping rattle of M16s. Pain flared – white hot, thumping like a jackhammer in his skull. He knew he’d been hit, but where? He tried to locate the wound with his free hand, but the body was no longer his to command.

Then the car went over the ridge.

Now here he was. He had never dreamed big, not even as a young boy. For all the teachers who once praised him—for all the friends who swore they would stand by him, for all the women who promised they would never leave—the damage to his faith in people had hardened into something unyielding early on. Though he would not entirely deny the possibility that a few of the people he’d encountered meant well, he was grimly skeptical, to say the least. He’d had plenty of time to think—plenty of time to replay his own failures, his whole body flinching at the images shooting past his mind. His voice leapt out of his mouth as if a curse could perhaps drive the memories back into their cave. He hadn’t lived his life to be a likeable person. He was, he had to admit, inherently false, a spiritual defective, a fraud. But – still -- this was death? No grand curtain call, no angels, no dead ancestors to welcome him, no shining revelation. Kings, poets, presidents, pickpockets, former beauty queens: countless millions had passed through the same gates before him. Had it been any different for them?

The notion had, of course, begun in futility -- one more absurd attempt of his mind to reconcile the insoluble matter of death with the disappointing tractability of his own life, this time by imagining it as a rehearsal, a stage stripped bare of actors, props, and audience. He had erased the play, the theater, the city beyond, and then—like some parody of a philosopher—he had tried to rebuild it, brick by brick, gesture by gesture, until the whole edifice stood again, hollow and unconvincing. Kierkegaard, he thought. Nothing.

There had been a moment when it would have been almost poetic. For a brief instant, as the car flew over the edge of the ridge, he was airborne. In that instant, he was alone, suspended in the vast cathedral of night, and the sky engulfed him in a silence so immense it seemed to echo. He felt at once infinitesimal and infinite, a tiny, fragile body tethered to machinery, careening among immensities. He should have died then, among the cold, pulsing stars. But then there was the plunge, his head thrown against the seat, the steering wheel jerking from his grip, the sound of branches snapping, stone striking metal, rocks and dust flying into his face, the roof caving in increments. His head slammed against the steering wheel, shoulders wrenched sideways, and his hands clawed at the air. The world narrowed impact after impact. He felt the car twist, felt the frame buckle, felt the earth rise to meet him again and again until the motion slowed and the wreck lay still.

Did he pass out? If he did, the hiss of something leaking behind the shattered dashboard brought him back. He was worried about the smell of gasoline. His hand slid across to the passenger’s seat, touched the bag. The fabric was damp with blood. He thought of opening it, thought of tearing it apart, scattering its contents in the brush, but would it have mattered? They would have killed him, anyway. They were killing people for carrying a gram of methamphetamine – sometimes less. The statistics were against him. He pushed at the door, but it held against the crushed frame. He shoved harder, shoulder and head against the metal, until it gave with a groan. He pulled himself out, knees scraping against the bent door frame, hands slipping on glass. His breath came fast. The night air was cold, smelling faintly of leaves and damp earth. Gunfire cracked as soon as he rose from the wreck: sharp popping sounds from up the hill, instantly followed by the sound of metal striking metal around him, metal ripping into tree trunks in the dark. He dropped low, pressing himself to the ground, feeling the grit under his palms. Terror coursed through him like an electric current, short-circuiting his thoughts. The beams of flashlights swept across the clearing in the dark, white circles jerking from one place to another, hunting. They moved over the wreck, over the broken branches, over the dirt where he lay. The beams crossed each other, paused, then shifted again, scouring the wreck. He could hear them talking to each other up the hill, their voices overlapping, a chorus of coded signals in the night air.

He tunneled into the brush, scampering downhill in the dark. The earth was slick beneath his palms. Branches whipped his face, stung his skin, but he kept moving, half-crawling, half-falling, until the ground leveled out. They were shooting halfway up the hill. What were they shooting at? He was sure they couldn’t see him. The flash beams were five hundred yards away – pointed in the opposite direction. A creek shimmered faintly, a broken ribbon under the stars, and he plunged through it, water biting at the wound in his leg. He staggered on, limping, lungs burning, every breath bubbling blood in his mouth. The house appeared suddenly, vast and hulking against the treeline, its roof sagging, windows black and hollow. He lurched toward it, driven by the animal need for shelter, for silence. The porch groaned under his weight, boards splintered underfoot, and then he was inside—dust, rot, the smell of old wood, mildew, and the residue of life, foul and unmistakably human. He collapsed against a wall, his body folding as he slid down. He reached into his pocket. His phone was gone. It must have fallen out of his pocket when the car went over.

He lay in the darkness a long time. He thought they might come for him, but they did not. The boards creaked once or twice during the night, and rats moved in and out of shadows, but otherwise there was nothing. He sat against the bare cinderblock wall, knees drawn up, listening, and the hours went by. Toward morning a jagged line of hills began to emerge from luminous darkness to the east. Light came into his eyes through the gasp in the roof and through the empty windows. First it was a gray, then pale blue, then almost yellow. A dove called in the trees outside. Another answered. The timbers showed their cracks, then the iron pipes and the nails revealed the slow work of years, the strain of holding on when there was nothing left to hold. He slid all the way down against the wall and lay with his back on the floor, looking up at the clouds, which were so white they shined like newly minted coins. It occurred to him that he had never really looked at clouds before. Never really paid attention to them, even when the air carried the smell of a coming typhoon.

He had not heard her coming.

Half his mind was submerged in a fog of exhaustion, hazy and dense, and for a moment he wondered if she was real. He automatically looked around for others-- expecting to see an older sibling, or playmates, or perhaps even a parent. But she was alone. She was about ten feet away, sitting on her haunches like a gargoyle with her arms around her knees, staring at him.

“Are you alive?” she said. She was perhaps nine or ten years old, with short hair and a slender neck. She wore a faded dress that was two sizes too big for her. Her feet were bare and muddy.

“I think so,” he said. His voice was feeble, and he realized he hadn’t spoken loud in a long while. “Have you been there long?”

She studied him as if lost in thought, and it seemed to him he knew what she was thinking. She could see he couldn’t move. He was harmless. “Are you the man they’re looking for?”

“Who are they?”

“The men with guns.”

He looked around again, this time raising his head a little. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Do you live around here?”

“Up the creek a little.”

“How far up the creek?”

“I don’t know. I walked for a long time.”

“Are the men with guns at your house?”

She frowned, studying him more intently now, or perhaps looking through him, and he watched her face. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, it’s always good to know if there are men with guns around,” he said. “Best to stay out of their way.”

“They came and went. They were looking for someone. They talked to my mother. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I heard one mention the president’s name. They talked to our neighbors, too. Then they left.”

“How many were they?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t count. They came in two cars.”

“They left?”

“They’re gone now but my mother says they’ll be back,” the girl said. “Were they looking for you?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody’s looking for me.”

“My mother said they were looking for a man who did something very bad,” the girl said. “What did you do?”

“Do I look like a bad man?”

“What a silly question.”

“Silly how?”

“I don’t know what a man bad man looks like,” she said. “All I know is that you’re bleeding and you smell.”

“I know,” he said. “You can smell me all the way there?”

“Are you really dying?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Why don’t you go to the hospital?”

“It’s too late for that,” he said. “I’ll die before I get to a hospital. I can’t walk. Why bother?”

“Should I call for help?”

“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t.”

“Why not?” the girl said. “If you’re dying, you need help.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But the people who did this to me are probably still out there, looking. They’ll want to hurt me.”

“Hurt you more than they already have?”

“Yes, much more,” he said. “They’ll have questions. They’ll want to know who else they can hurt. They wouldn’t mind hurting me some more to find out.”

“You ought to try to go on living,” the girl said. “That’s what everybody else does.”

He thought about it for a long time -- or tried to think about it. His mind was not running. “I suppose. But it’s not easy.”

The girl smiled.

“Why are you smiling?” he said. But now she was not smiling, and his question seemed to baffle her.

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy,” she said. “I think that’s just how it is. I’ve heard my mother say life is hard for everybody – but hard in different ways.”

“Maybe that’s true,” he said.

“For example, I thought fishermen must live an easy life,” the girl said. She looked at him as though waiting for some kind of reaction.

“You did?” he said. “How so?”

“I thought they just sat in a boat with their fishing rods in the water and waited for the fish to bite. Then I went down to the coast with my mother to visit my aunt’s family. My aunt’s new husband was a fisherman. It turns out that fishing wasn’t what I thought it was. It was much, much harder than I imagined.”

“I would think so,” he said.

The girl looked like she was about to say something, but she changed her mind. Then, lowering her eyes, she asked, “Is dying painful?”

“Yes, it’s quite painful,” he said. “But you get used to it after a while, I guess. The pain is just there – like an arm or a leg.”

“My grandmother died last year. She died quietly. She said she was tired, and she went upstairs to sleep. When I went up to tell her lunch was ready, she was dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. The memory of his own grandmother returned to him, her blue-white skin sagging under her arms, sipping coffee in bed, her hair silvery in the early morning. She had died in the fetal position, as though she was already preparing for her next incarnation.

“Her mouth was open,” the girl went on. “Her eyes were open, too. I think she was looking out the window when she died. She looked like she was about to say something. Then a bird flew out of her mouth.”

“A bird?”

“Yes, a bird flew out of her mouth. My mother says it was probably her soul going up to heaven.”

“You weren’t scared?”

“I was,” the girl said. She studied him a moment, then she asked, “Are you scared?”

“I’m very scared,” he said. “I’m also very thirsty. Can you get me some water from the creek?”

“That water is dirty. It’ll make you sick”

That was true, he thought. But he knew from his childhood, when rats occasionally drowned in the well and float around there for days, obscenely bloated, that polluted water did not necessarily mean instant death. In a day or two, there would be some unpleasantness: a fever, a taste in the mouth that would build up until suddenly you were seized by an urge to vomit.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “Doesn’t really matter now. Like I said, I’m dying, anyway. Find an empty bottle. I’m sure there’s plenty about. Go down to the creek, fill the bottle with water, then come back. You think you can do that? I’ll pay you.”

“All right.”

The girl got up and went out through the door – or the opening that used to be the front door. He noticed how thin and small she was. She walked carefully, wary of protruding nails. She was gone for around fifteen minutes. When she returned, she had a bottle of water in her arms. She was cradling it like a baby. She put the bottle down on the floor beside him. He reached into his pocket and handed her a few bills.

“You’ll have to help me,” he said. “My arms won’t move.”

She lifted bottle from the floor, unscrewed the cap, and knelt beside him. She smelled of sunlight and dried grass. He lifted his head up and she put the mouth of the bottle between his lips. He swallowed two gulps and then turned away. “That’s enough,” he said. “Thank you.”

The little girl put the bottle down and returned to her spot ten feet away.

“Did anyone see you?”

“No,” the girl said, squatting on the floor. “Nobody ever goes here. Sometimes, when the weather is bad, homeless people spend the night here. But they always move on as soon as the weather clears. I think it’s because people think this place is haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“You know,” the girl said, “ghosts and stuff.”

“But you come here.”

“Sometimes, yes, when my mother is drinking,” the girl said. “I come here to hide.”

“So, she’s drinking now, is she?”

The girl nodded her head.

“Ghosts don’t scare you?” he asked.

“They do, of course,” the girl said. “But I’ve never seen any ghosts here. Nobody has. I think people just don’t like how this place looks.”

“I don’t blame them,” he said. “Your mother drinks a lot?”

“She drinks as much as anybody, I guess.”

“What happens when she drinks?”

“She gets angry.”

“So, you hide.”

“There’s nothing else to do,” the girl said. “It’s either hide or she beats me with a belt. Or maybe a broom handle.”

“I see,” he said. “Don’t you have any friends? Can’t you go to them, instead?”

“I don’t have many friends where I live.”

“What about school?”

The little girl lowered her eyes. “I stopped going to school after my father left. That is only for now, though. I’ll return next year.”

“You and your mother live alone?”

The girl nodded. “My father doesn’t live with us anymore.”

“Oh,” he said. “Did they fight a lot?”

The girl nodded her head. “I hated the sound of it.”

“Them fighting?”

She nodded her head. “I hated the sound of it when they weren’t fighting, too.”

He smiled. “I think I know what you mean,” he said. “I used to hate that, too.”

“My father used to sit in the kitchen at night, smoking. He wouldn’t say anything. Just sat there, staring at the table. When he did speak, e. When he did speak, it was short, like he was answering a question no one asked. He’d say things like, ‘It’s late,’ or ‘The lightbulb’s about to go.’ Then he’d go quiet again.”

“He sounds like a very sad man.”

“You think?”

Shafts of sunlight drifted down through the roof, forming pools of light between them. It was nearly noon. Without thinking about it, he began to trace with his eyes a path through the light and the dark patches on the floor. The surface was rough, not as smooth as it would once have been. He imagined the whole house would have been glorious once.

“Do you have children?” the girl asked.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “I would have wanted a few. I think that would have been nice.”

“You never married?”

“I was married once, yes. But we never got around to having children.”

“You can’t have babies?”

“I can,” he said.

“How would you know if you’ve never had children?”

“I got a girl pregnant once,” he said. “Once.”

“What happened?”

“We lost the baby.”

“What do you mean lost?” the girl said, frowning. “How do you lose a baby?”

“Well, I don’t mean lost as in misplaced. His mother got sick. He died before he was born.”

“What did the mother get sick of?”

“Do you remember the pandemic?” he said.

“Yes, of course I do,” she said. “Everybody does.”

“Well, the mother got sick. Then the baby inside of her got sick.”

“Our neighbor died of Covid,” the girl said. “He believed Covid came from somewhere else. Then he got sick and died of it.”

“Somewhere else?”

“From another planet,” the girl said, suppressing a laugh. “He said aliens came to earth and experimented with people. Some of the people got sick with Covid.”

“You can laugh,” he said. “It’s kind of funny.”

The idea of dying flooded in again like a dam breaking. But even now, lying on the floor of a rotting house that looked up higher on the grey-green sunlit hills, talking to a strange little girl he’d never met before, he could not quite embrace the fact. He had gone over it in his mind through the night, and through most of the morning, sometimes very rationally, sometimes in a panic, but mostly in a kind of bewildered and anxious desperation, as one goes over and over an unusually large bill. He had thought, a long time ago, that a man who has come close to dying more than once should be better prepared than another man for the coming of his own death. He was wrong. He is merely prepared to die a different way. He would have preferred not to die at all, of course.

“What do you do for a living?” the girl asked.

“I used to build computers,” he said.

“What kind of computers?” the girl said. “Computers like we have in school?”

“No,” he said. “I built very powerful computers.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was fired.”

“Weren’t you good at your job?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

The girl pursed her lips and looked up at the rafters. There were sparrows’ nests on the beams. He thought about all the sparrows that had nested in the house, generation after generation.

“How long do you suppose they live?” the girl said.

“Sparrows live a few years, I think.”

“But not as long as people?” the girl said, squinting at the daylight coming in through the roof as she watched the birds.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“They don’t seem to mind that they live shorter lives than us, do they?” the girl said. “They always seem so --” she paused, hunting for the right word, “cheerful.”

“I don’t think they know that their lives are shorter than ours. I don’t think they care. They can fly. That’s not a bad trade off at any rate. Do you mind not being able to fly?”

“I wish I could,” the girl said. “But I don’t feel sad that I can’t.”

“There you go.”

He watched a sparrow hop along one of the beams and cock its head at them.

“Do you think they know that they’ll die sooner or later?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think all they care about is what’s in front of them.”

“Is that smart?”

“I don’t know.”

The girl chewed her lip, watching the sparrow preen. “They probably don’t know about later,” she said at last. “If you don’t know about later, you don’t have to think about what happens next. You just do the thing that’s in front of you.”

He looked at her and said, “That would be a mercy.”

“Then you should try it,” she said. “You should only look at what’s in front of you.”

He let out a breath that might have been a laugh. “All right.”

He was hungry. Ravenous. It occurred to him that he had never been hungrier. He tried not to think about food. He felt, suddenly, a physical heaviness, a leadenness of limbs and heart, that it took him a moment to understand. He had lost a good deal of blood.

“I think I have to go,” the girl said after a while. “It’s going to rain. My mother will be looking for me.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” he said. “Not that I don’t enjoy your company. But it suddenly occurred to me that it isn’t safe for you here. I’m sorry I didn’t think of that earlier. My mind isn’t as sharp as it should be. I’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“Why isn’t it safe for me here?”

“Because if the men who want to hurt me find you here, then --” he said.

The girl bit her lip and looked at the rafters, turning his words over like a stone in her palm, then she said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Don’t,” he said. His voice sounded gloomier than he’d intended. “Come back in a few days.”

“All right,” the girl said. “But you’ll have to tell me your name, so I know what to call you.”

He told her.

“That’s a strange name.”

“I know,” he said. “What is your name?”

“Mirasol.”

The girl rose slowly, slapping the dust from her palms, and stood for a moment as if listening to the timbers creak. Then she stepped lightly across the warped boards and the stones, her bare feet making no sound. At the threshold she paused, half in shadow, half in the dazzling yellow glare of the world outside. She looked back once and then slipped into the brightness.

“Wait,” he said, lifting a hand. But she was gone.

The house seemed larger without Mirasol’s presence, emptier, as though her leaving had drawn away the last trace of warmth in the bones of the house. He held one fist to his chest and inhaled deeply. He flattened his shoulders on the floorboards, listening to the wind move through the cracks in the walls, the sound like voices in another room. He tried to think of what the house must have been once. He imagined it full of cheerful light and laughter. He imagined tables set in the parlor: a wedding banquet, perhaps, or a birthday feast, the clatter of plates, the laughter of guests. He imagined children running in the halls, the pitter-patter of small feet, doors opening and closing, the smell of cooking from the kitchen. But the images, once summoned, slipped away almost at once, leaving only the hollow sound of the wind and the faint scurry of rats in the walls. Whatever had been promised here once --family, celebration, love—had long ago been withdrawn. He thought of how easily things were lost, how quickly laughter turned to silence, and, though he tried to push the thought aside, it lingered, until the whole place seemed less a shelter than a reminder. He felt the weight of his own solitude, not sharp, not unbearable, but steady, like the gradual settling of dust on furniture.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think.

He heard them coming from a long way away. At first the sound was only a faint scatter of voices in the wind. After a while, he thought he could distinguish one voice from another. How many? Three? Maybe four? Must be a team from the checkpoint. The smell of damp wood and mildew drifted to his nostrils, mixed with the sourness of his own sweat. Sunlight, bright and golden, touched the dust rising from the floorboards when he tried to move his leg. His heart thumped against his ribs, heavy, irregular.

The voices drew nearer. He could almost make out the words now, though not the sense -- only the tone, casual at first, then excited and urgent. They must have spotted the blood, the trail he had left, and the thought filled him with humiliation. The knowledge that he was exposed, that he had no defense, that his own blood had betrayed him made him feel stupid and helpless. He tried to pray, whispering words he had once known, but the words were empty, without force or power, and he understood that he did not believe them. He had never believed them.

The voices stopped. Silence swelled against the walls, against his chest. He heard the careful shifting of weight in the undergrowth outside the house as one of them mounted the porch, testing the floorboards. A twig snapped in another part of the house. They were moving quietly now, stepping lightly, and he knew they were encircling the house, knew they were listening as he was listening, knew they were waiting for the moment when he betrayed himself one last time. He lay completely motionless save for the twitching in his fingers. The house seemed to crowd around him. This was it. The body was broken, the mind circling its failures, spiraling, the spirit emptied. He waited, because there was nothing else left to do.

Carlos Castillo studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in the Republic of the Philippines. He published poetry and fiction while in college and has since written for various digital marketing companies. He regularly submits prose for literary magazines and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.