THE LITTLE PEOPLE by Maria Aleah G.

Taboclaon

THE elves came to stay with us when I was nine. They were noisy
creatures and we would hear them stomping on an old crib on the ceiling.
We heard them from morning till night. They kept us awake at night.
One night, when it was particularly unbearable, Papa mustered enough
courage and called out. “Excuse me!” he said. “Our family would like to
sleep, please? Resume your banging tomorrow!” Of course, we had tried
restraining him for we didn’t know how the elves would react to such
audacity.
We got the shock of our lives when silence suddenly filled the house–no
more banging, no more stomping from the elves. Papa turned to us
smugly. Sheepishly, we turned in for the night, thankful for the respite.
When dawn came, the smug look on Papa’s face the night before turned
into anger for shortly before six, the banging started again, and louder this
time! We got up and tried speaking to the elves but got no response. The
banging continued all day and into the night, and stopped at the same
hour–eleven o’clock. And at exactly six a.m. the next day, it started again.
What could our poor family do?
Papa tried to call an albularyo to get rid of our unwelcome housemates but
the woman was booked till the end of the week. Meanwhile, the elves had
become our alarm clock. When they start their noise, we would get up and
do our errands. Papa would start cooking, I would start setting the table,
Mama would sweep. The whole house–my older sister and my cousin
would water the plants, and my brother would start coloring his books.
(We really didn’t expect him to work, he was only four.)
After a week, we got hold of the albularyo. She spent the night in our
house and by morning, she told us to never bother her again. The elves
had already made themselves a part of our life, she said. Prax, the leader
of the elves, had spoken to her and had told her that his family had no
plans of moving out. They liked things as they were.
We eventually settled down to a comfortable coexistence with the elves.
They woke us up at six, they let us sleep at eleven, and in return for the
alarm service we would leave food on the table. By morning, the food
would be gone and the table cleaned.
All in all, it was a very good relationship.
After three weeks–the first week of May–I met Prax, the leader and oldest
in the clan, and I met him literally by accident. I was climbing the mango
tree in our yard when one of its branches broke. I fell and broke my ankle.
The pain was so great that I just sat there numb, staring at my ankle which
had begun to turn blue. I could not move or cry out. I went to sleep to
forget the pain. My last conscious thought was that the ground was too
cold to sleep on.
I woke to a hand touching my foot. It belonged to someone–something
nonhuman, for his hand radiated warmth that seemed to penetrate to my
bones. His hand was small, wrinkled and felt like dried prunes.
Although I was curious, I kept my eyes closed. I imagined a hideously
deformed face, with long and sharp teeth. Would he disappear when I
open my eyes? Or would he devour me? I pretended to be asleep.
After several minutes, I could pretend no longer; I was too curious to
remain still. When I opened my eyes, the horrible sight that I expected
was not there. Instead, there was this old, wrinkled creature, even shorter
than I was although I was the smallest in my class. He wore overalls
unlike any clothing I knew of. Its texture was a mixture of green leaves
and earth. It clung to his skin and writhed with a life of its own. Its color
continually changed from deep to light green, to dark to light brown, and to
green again. It was fascinating to look at. I felt a sense of awe and respect
towards the elf.
He was good with his hands. My ankle already felt better. He was
massaging it with an ointment that smelled nice. Before I could stop
myself, I sniffed deeply, bringing the healing aroma of the ointment deep
into my lungs. Detecting my movement, the elf turned to me and smiled
kindly. Although I didn’t see his mouth moving, I could hear him talking.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. His voice was so soothing that I had to fight my
urge to snuggle and sleep in his small arms.
I shook my head slightly. What was I supposed to say? Hello, elf? How
are you? I could not. I didn’t even know if I was supposed to call him that
or just say Tabi or Apo.
As if knowing what I was thinking, the elf smiled again. “You call our kind
dwendes or elves, no?” I nodded. “I actually don’t mind if you call me an
elf, but please call me Prax.”
Seeing my astonished look, Prax laughed. His laugh sounded like the
whistling of wind through the trees and a bit like the breaking of the waves
on the seashore. I thought it nice and longed to hear more. And I wanted
to know more about his kind. Did they have children? Wives? Did they
play games like patintero? Habulan?
But Prax was not in the mood to chat. He told me that I should have been
more careful. I could have been seriously hurt.
I nodded absently, thinking that I liked his clothes, his laugh, and his
voice. He reminded me of my grandfather who had died a long time ago.
I closed my eyes, letting Prax’s healing massage lull me to sleep. Thirty
minutes later when I woke up, the elf was gone. Only the lingering
fragrance of his balm remained.
When Mama and Papa arrived, I told them what had happened. It was
really frustrating seeing their reactions. They became pale, then collapsed
on the sofa. I had to douse them with water before they revived. Why
couldn’t they be like other people and be glad that I had been befriended
by a supernatural being? I had told them about my first encounter with a
real elf, and they fainted on the spot! I sulked for the rest of the evening.
Mama told me to never, never talk to elves again. Or did I forget the
countless tales of elves taking people to their kingdom after killing them? I
just shrugged. After all, the elf had saved my life!
I thought no more of it and, indeed, began to enjoy the banging and
stomping on our ceiling. I almost wished to be hurt again just so I could
see Prax. But nothing happened and I passed the rest of my summer days
dreaming about playing with elves.
I met my second elf in school. I was in Grade 3, a transferee to a new
public school that had a haunted classroom. My classmates related tales
about dwendes, white ladies, and kapres in our school. I believed their
stories readily.
I tried to tell them about Prax but since they were skeptical, I decided to let
them be. As it was, I was excluded from their games.
In the classroom, I chose the seat I felt was the most haunted, the one
farthest away from the teacher’s table. Nobody wanted to sit near me.
Behind me was a picture of the president. Without the company of my
classmates, I expected elves to make their presence felt. So I waited.
By the third month in class, it happened. We had a very difficult math
exam. Our teacher left us and went to gossip outside and all around me
my classmates were openly copying each other’s work. I looked at their
papers from my seat, hoping that their scribbles would mean something to
me but the answers to the blasted long divisions eluded me. I looked at
the ceiling, trying to see if my brain would work better if my head was tilted
a certain angle. It did not. I looked to my right, nothing there. And finally, I
looked down and saw this tiny little elf, smaller than Prax by as much as
six inches, sitting on the bag in front of me tap-tapping his foot impatiently.
“What took you so long to notice? I’ve been here for hours!” he said.
What gall! Did he really think that his race would excuse his bad
manners? I ignored him and frowned at my test paper. What was 3996
divided by 6?
Immediately, he apologized and told me that his name was Bat. He had
seen me play outside and thought that I was beautiful, sensitive, and
romantic. Did I want him to help me in my test?
Me beautiful? I enthusiastically agreed to let him answer the test. I
showed him my paper, and he snorted. “For us elves, this is elementary!”
he said. I wanted to tell him that to us humans, these problems are also
elementary, third-grade in fact, but I changed my mind.
Bat and I became friends. He helped me with my homework and gave me
little things such as colored pencils and stationery that were the craze in
school. He cautioned me strongly against telling my parents of my
friendship with him. After all, he said, some people might not understand
our relationship. They might forbid us from seeing each other.
I thought nothing of it and kept silent about my friendship with Bat. I
enjoyed his company, for he was very thoughtful. He was a good friend
and I thought we would be friends forever.
The time came, though, when he declared that he loved me. He wanted
me to go with him to his kingdom and be his princess. I refused, of course.
For God’s sake, I was only nine! I didn’t know how to cook or do the
laundry or do the other things that wives are expected to do. And he was
an elf! Short as I was, he only came up to my knees. What a ridiculous
picture we would surely make. He pleaded with me for days but out of
spite I told him that I had already confided to my parents, and that they
were very angry. It was not true, but Bat didn’t know that. He got angry
and launched into diatribes about promises being made and broken. Then
he vanished.
That night I dreamed that Prax talked to me. He told me that I should have
never offended Bat outright. “That elf is a stranger in our town,” he said.
“We don’t know his family. He might be violent.”
But I had already done what I had done and there was no use wishing
otherwise. I told Prax I’d never worry. After all, he’d always be there for
me and my family, right?
“Wrong,” he said. His gift was for giving good luck and for healing minor,
nonfatal injuries. “What good is that for?” I asked. He couldn’t answer, and
left me to a dream of falling houses and shrieking elves.
The next day, I got sick and did not get well even after the best doctor in
town treated me. My parents had grown desperate so the albularyo was
called once more. She told my parents to roast a whole cow, which they
did willingly. The albularyo and her family feasted on it. When I was still
sick after a few days, she instructed my parents to cut my hair; she told
them that elves liked longhaired women. The problem was Bat liked my
new look, and in my dreams, he was always there, entreating me to go
with him. I got sicker than ever.
The albularyo, getting an idea from a dream, then tried her last cure–an
ointment taken from the bark of seven old trees applied to my hair. It cost
more than the cow and nobody could enter my room without gagging. The
smell was terrible. That did the trick. Apparently, Bat was disgusted but he
would stop at nothing to get me, even if it meant getting my family out of
the way. I told him again and again that I didn’t love him and would never
go with him, but the elf’s mind was set. In the end I just ignored him, for
who could reason with an elf, and a mad one at that?
He did not turn up in my dreams the next few nights. In a week, I was up
and running again and I thought that all was right. My parents decided that
I should transfer to another school, this time a sectarian school.
Then something happened. My mother had a miscarriage. People blamed
the elves and talked about it for a long time. I remember the sad and
fearful looks of my parents every day as they heard the banging on our
ceiling. Were they friends or were they responsible for the accident? I had
never told them about Bat, who Prax said was the one behind all these
incidents.
Years passed, and since nothing untoward had happened since my
mother’s miscarriage, we began to let go of our fears. The alarm service
continued, and our belief that my mother’s miscarriage was the elves’
doing was discarded. It was simply the fetus’s fate to die before it was
born.
“Bat left town, probably to look for some of his kin to help him,” Prax said.
It was a chilling thought, and with Bat’s words the last time we talked, I
was terrified. I laid awake at night thinking of a way to protect my family. I
had Prax, but what about them?
When I was twelve, the banging on our ceiling stopped. We were having
lunch, feasting on the pork barbecue my mother had bought after her
experiment with chicken curry failed. The sudden cessation of the noise
we had been living with for years was jarring. The silence grated on our
ears. For the first time, we could hear ourselves breathe.
No one moved. Even my brother, who was now seven, stopped chewing
the pork he had just bitten off the stick. Papa stood up and called to the
elves. Nobody answered. Gesturing for my cousin to follow him, they got
the ladder and prepared to climb to the ceiling. They took with them an old
wooden crucifix and a bottle of water from the first rain of May. My cousin
brought along a two-by-two and a rope. I didn’t know what they wanted to
do but we looked on, our barbecue forgotten.
Papa went inside the ceiling and my cousin followed. Moments later, they
came back running. My cousin descended the ladder first and I don’t know
whether it was because of fright or just because he was careless, but a
rung broke and he fell to the ground, back first, hitting the two-by-two he
had dropped in his haste. He lay there, unmoving except for his ragged
breathing, his back bent at an angle we never thought possible.
Mama fainted, Papa stood still, my sister called an ambulance, my brother
wailed, and I sat in the ground, laughing. It was not a laugh of gladness,
just my nervous reaction to what happened. But they misunderstood and
locked me in my room. I cried, shouted, cursed, but remained locked in.
From inside my room I could hear them talking, the medical help coming
in, and relatives pouring inside our house. I was ignored. I slept and
dreamed that an elf was laughing. When I woke up, the whole house was
filled by elven laughter. Then my cousin died.
After another year, my little brother followed. He was run over by a postal
service van. I can still hear the anguished wail of the driver as he asked
for forgiveness. He claimed that a tiny creature had run in front of his van
and he had swerved to avoid it. My brother was unfortunately playing by
the roadside and the van ran straight into him. Witnesses say they had
heard laughter at the exact moment the wheels caught my brother.
The driver was imprisoned, but the deaths did not stop there. Barely six
months later, my father drowned while fishing. A freak storm, the
fishermen said, but for us who were left alive there was no mistaking that
our family would die one by one.
There were only three of us left: my mother, my sister, and I. We tried to
seek help, but the policemen laughed in our faces. We were branded as
lunatics. And Prax was gone, defeated by Bat and his family apparently on
the day the banging stopped. Even the albularyo could not help us. What
use were her potions and ointments? What the elves needed was a good
dose of magic, and the albularyo was primarily a healer and an exorcist.
She had no training when it came to defending a whole family against
vengeful elves.
And poor Mama! A mere week after my father died she followed. Extreme
despair, the doctors said but we knew better.
My sister and I left home and went to live with our relatives in the city,
hundreds of kilometers away. We told them about the elves but they
laughed and told us we were being provincial. “It is the 90s,” they said.
“Belief in the little people died a long time ago.” We knew they were
wrong, but how could two orphaned teenagers convince the skeptics?
Perhaps, we should have insisted on talking more but, as things were, our
aunt had already scheduled counseling sessions for the two of us The fear
of being sent to a mental institution stopped us from further trying to
convince them. In the end, we just hoped that the distance from our old
home would keep us safe from the elves.
But they followed and, one by one, our foster family died. Car accidents,
food poisonings, assassinations through mistaken identity–there were
logical explanations for their deaths but we knew we had been
responsible. We could only look on helplessly, and despaired.
We traveled again, haphazardly enough to let us think that we could outwit
the elves. But they finally caught my sister about a year ago. We were on
the bus bound for another town when a tire blew out. The bus crashed into
a ditch and although most of the passengers including myself were
injured, the only fatality was my sister. I realized then that there was no
escaping the fury of the little people.
After my sister’s death, there was a period of silence from the elves. I
decided to continue studying and enrolled at the local college. I had no
problem with finances. I had inherited a large sum from a relative I had
unwittingly sent to death.
After I got settled in the school dormitory, Prax appeared in my dreams
again. He told me about a chant that he had dug up in the enormous
library of a human psychic he had befriended. It was a weapon against
any creature–effective against those with malicious intentions, whether
towards humans or other creatures. Prax thought it would he better if I
could defeat Bat myself. After all, hadn’t Bat done me great harm already?
I agreed and prepared myself for the battle that would decide my fate.
It was not long after my conversation with Prax that Bat tracked me down.
It was a weekend and I had the room all to myself. I looked up from my
notes and saw him–much older, his once clear complexion now marred
with dark, crisscrossing veins. Hate screamed from him, and he stooped
and walked with great difficulty. I pitied him.
He gave me an ultimatum: go with him or die on the spot. I pretended to
look defeated and worn out. My act was effective and Bat looked pleased.
He wanted us to go immediately but I dallied. At the pretext of packing my
few valuable possessions, I told him to wait outside and count to a
hundred.
When he was gone, I took out the ingredients I had prepared and the mini-
stove I had borrowed. I boiled a small amount of sweet milk. I unwrapped
Bat’s image made in green and brown clay, with strands of his hair given
to me by Prax, and started blowing and chanting words that meant nothing
to me.
Blow. Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.
Blow. Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.
Blow. Allif, casyl, zaze, hit, mel, meltat.
Outside the room, Bat’s count reached 70. I put aside the image and into
the pan I poured hundreds of brand new pins and needles that had been
blessed. The count reached 80. I repeated the chant and immersed the
image in the boiling liquid. I waited.
Bat’s count reached a hundred but I did not worry for it had become faint
and weak, just as Prax had told me. Then Bat dissipated into a mist–
shrieking, I might add–to where, only God would ever know.
Prax appeared again in my dreams that night and told me that they–Bat
and his family–would never bother me again. He himself would move his
family away from humans to avoid similar incidents in the future. It was too
bad he didn’t discover the old book with the vanquishing spell earlier for I
could have saved my family. I could not bring them back, he said, but I
could build a good life of my own. With the luck he bestowed on me, I
would never be in need for material things the rest of my life.
I kissed the old elf, knowing that we would never see each other again. I
watched him fade away, seeing the last of my family go.
When I woke up, I went to my desk and studied math, remembering where
it all began.
©2000 by Maria Aleah G. Taboclaon