Chapter 4: The Taga-Bakal

Chapter 4: The Taga-Bakal

Anya ran.

She didn’t remember drawing her weapon or stumbling backward over the police tape. One moment she was staring in frozen horror at the creaking, shifting limb of the metal statue, her own childhood scream echoing in her ears; the next, she was crashing through the claustrophobic walls of cogon grass, the sharp leaves slicing at her face and arms. She didn’t stop until she burst out of the field's edge, gasping for breath in the twilight, her lungs burning.

She didn't run towards the car. She didn’t run for Marco or the flimsy security of the barangay hall. Logic, procedure, and evidence had evaporated in the face of that impossible sound—the scrape of rust on rust, the mimicry of a memory so private she had barely allowed herself to recall it.

There was only one place to go. One person in this godforsaken town who might have an answer that didn't involve psychological breaks or mass hysteria.

Her feet found the old paths automatically, a muscle memory from a childhood spent running through these same dusty lanes. She bypassed the brightly lit town center and headed for the cluster of older houses near the river, where the nipa roofs sagged with age and the air smelled of woodsmoke and dried fish.

She stopped before a small, neat house surrounded by a fence of crooked bamboo. Pots of herbs lined the walkway, their fragrant leaves releasing scents of lemongrass and oregano into the humid night air. This was Lola Elara’s home. The town’s unofficial elder, the keeper of stories, the woman everyone went to for herbal remedies and whispers of the old ways. When Anya was a child, her own mother had warned her to be respectful of Lola Elara, for she “remembered things the earth had forgotten.”

Anya hammered on the wooden door, her knuckles rapping sharply against the aged mahogany.

The door opened a crack. A pair of dark, knowing eyes, webbed with wrinkles, peered out. Lola Elara’s face was a roadmap of a long life, her skin the texture of a dried tobacco leaf.

“Detective Reyes,” the old woman said. It wasn’t a question. Her voice was thin but steady, like the rustle of dry leaves. “I was wondering when you would come.”

She opened the door wider, allowing Anya to step inside. The interior was a single room, dimly lit by a gas lamp that cast dancing shadows on the woven banig walls. The air was thick with the scent of ylang-ylang and something medicinal, like boiled roots. There was no television, no radio. It was a pocket of the past, insulated from the modern world.

“You know why I’m here,” Anya said, her voice still ragged from her run.

“A boy is missing,” Lola Elara stated, moving to a low table. “And you have returned. These things are not a coincidence. The land remembers you.”

Anya’s hands trembled. “I was at the field. The clearing where the children play. There was a seventh statue.”

Lola Elara’s back stiffened. She stopped pouring water into a clay cup. “Made of metal and rags,” she murmured, not turning around. “With too many arms.”

“It had a piece of the boy’s shirt on it. And his toys,” Anya pressed, her voice rising with a desperate urgency. “And it… it spoke. It used his voice. And then… it used mine. A voice from fifteen years ago.”

The old woman finally turned, her dark eyes boring into Anya’s. The feigned placidity was gone, replaced by a deep, ancient sorrow. “So, it has become bold again,” she whispered. “It wants you to know it has not forgotten.”

“What is it?” Anya demanded, taking a step forward. “No more stories, no more riddles. Tell me what took my brother. Tell me what has Leo Santos.”

Lola Elara gestured to a small wooden stool. “Sit. What I have to tell you is not a story for standing.”

Anya sat, her entire body thrumming with a terrible, frantic energy.

“This place is old, child,” the woman began, her voice taking on a rhythmic, storytelling cadence. “Older than the church, older than the name San Isidro. There has always been a spirit here. A guardian. Not good, not evil. It was simply the land. It kept the balance. We respected it.”

She paused, her gaze distant. “Then the wars came. The Spanish, the Americans, the Japanese. They brought guns and cannons. They bled into the soil. And after they left, they buried their broken metal deep in the fields, like a poison you cannot see. They forgot it, but the land did not.”

The mention of metal sent a shiver down Anya’s spine.

“The spirit of the land,” Lola Elara continued, her voice dropping lower, “it slept for a long time. But the rust from the buried iron seeped into its heart, like a sickness. It twisted the spirit. Changed it. It woke up hungry, and its new hunger was for the metal that had poisoned it. It started to build itself a new body from the forgotten violence buried in the earth.”

“The Taga-Bakal,” Anya breathed, the name surfacing from a half-remembered childhood ghost story, a name used to scare children into coming home before dark.

Lola Elara nodded slowly. “The One of Metal. It is what it is made of. But it is also drawn to more than just scrap. It is drawn to turmoil. To great passion. Great fear. Great grief. These feelings are like a scent to it, a beacon in the dark.”

Anya felt the room tilt. Great fear. Great grief.

“It does not just kill,” the old woman said, her eyes locking onto Anya’s, filled with a terrible pity. “That would be a mercy. It is a collector. It takes pieces of those it chooses. A toy from a pocket. A scrap of clothing. Sometimes… a hand. A lock of hair. And it takes things you cannot see. It drinks their voices. It swallows their memories. It weaves them into itself, and into the effigies it builds as markers of its territory.”

The bottle cap. The marble. The melted toy soldier. Leo’s voice whispering for help. Her own voice, screaming for Joshua.

Everything clicked into place with the sickening finality of a tomb door swinging shut. The monster was a mimic, a psychological predator, a living graveyard. The scent of rust was not just a smell; it was the stench of its corrupted soul.

But it was Lola Elara’s next words that shattered Anya’s world.

“It is a creature of instinct. It hunts what is brightest. What screams the loudest in the silent world of spirits.”

Anya’s mind flew back through fifteen years of darkness to that single, horrifying moment. She was in the tree, safe. Joshua was on the ground, frozen in fear, but silent. She was the one screaming. She was the one shrieking his name, her terror a wild, uncontrolled siren call in the night. She had been a beacon of pure, unadulterated fear.

The blood drained from her face, leaving her cold and numb. All these years, she had carried the guilt of a survivor. The guilt of climbing the tree while her brother was taken. But this was a new and infinitely more monstrous realization.

Her quest for justice, her burning need for vengeance, was built on a lie. She hadn't just been a failed protector.

She had been the bait.

Her fear hadn't been a reaction to the monster’s arrival. It was the very thing that had summoned it from the whispering grass and drawn its attention to the two small children playing at the edge of its field. It had come for the turmoil. It had come for her. And it had taken her brother instead.

The weight of that knowledge was crushing, absolute. It wasn't just guilt anymore. It was complicity. The rust she smelled wasn’t just the monster’s scent. It was the corrosion of her own soul.