Philippine Speculative Fiction by Andrew Drilon Page B

He’d have to delay the races again. What was the matter this time? Didn’t the owners realize what delays
cost them in lost sales?
    He lifted the phone to call the broadcast crew. They’d have to make an announcement to the bettors about “technical difficulties.”
    WHEN THE NEXT Santa Alma raceweek rolled around, Jane mulled over the odd incident of the phone in her mind. Niño told her it had been going on for a couple of months
now, and that it was disturbing the crew. None of them could account for it.
    She decided to ask the stewards. Climbing up one floor to the stewards’ stand, she saw the racing secretary with a hand on the doorknob, about to enter the room. It was a restricted area;
even Jane was forbidden to go inside during the races.
    “Aileen, wait!”
    The secretary turned. “Yes,
po
?”
    Jane put a hand her shoulder. “After the last race, do any of you stay up here?”
    Aileen shook her head. “Of course not. We want to go home as soon as we can. Most of us ride the company bus back to Manila. We don’t want to be left behind, so right after we and
the judges give you guys in broadcast the official order of arrival, we run down.”
    “You’re saying the stewards, judges, and the rest of the staff here leave before we do?”
    “Yes, because you still have to wait for the computer to calculate and send you the official results—the dividends, and so on. Then you do your closing spiels, right? The goodbyes
and thank yous and see you again tomorrows. Or next week. We don’t wait for all that anymore. The bus would leave us and how would we get home?”
    Jane was puzzled. It was certain, then, that after the last race, there were no calls made from the stewards’ stand to the broadcast room. Why did the phone sometimes ring?
    She set off in search of the racing manager, Den Valtorre, and found him with the handicappers going over the next day’s race lineups.
    “Boss Den, may I please have a word?”
    He looked up from sheets covered closely with horses’ names and time clock-ins.
    “Sure, sweetheart. What about?”
    She told him about the phone calls.
    A troubled expression came over Valtorre’s face. He looked around to see if the handicappers beside him had heard her. They seemed engrossed in their work. “Let’s take a ride
to stables,
hija
,” he said. “I’ll show you the new stalls we added. You can announce over the broadcast tonight that they’re open for rental.”
    A non sequitur if ever she heard one, but she followed him to his car. He drove aimlessly around Santa Alma’s 70-hectare spread.
    “I don’t want anyone else to hear this,” Valtorre said. “But I’m not surprised your crew has been hearing things.
Wala kang
third eye,
ano
?”
    “
Wala po
,” Jane replied. “I’m not sensitive to such things. I don’t believe in the supernatural! That’s not rational.”
    “That may be so, but ‘there are things, Horatio’. The security guards and janitors say they hear footsteps and unearthly noises at the top floor of the grandstand, when no
one’s around. The jockeys in their quarters complain about babies crying and women screaming in pain. Usually the reports come from the riders in the last race, washing the sand off before
leaving.”
    “But that’s absurd!”
    “Even the construction workers who built the grandstand and stables had their stories. Many of them left. Those who stayed on the job wouldn’t work alone in certain places, always
two-by-two. There were too many reports to ignore.”
    “All this is illogical.”
    “Just because you haven’t seen or experienced it yourself,
hija
, doesn’t mean a thing doesn’t exist.”
    “Alright, granted. So how did you resolve all that?”
    “Santa Alma Park’s owners, who are Filipino-Chinese, had a Taoist shaman come and perform a cleansing ritual. He said he felt evil influences here. Naic was a dumping ground for the
corpses of murder and salvaging victims, didn’t you know? Or at