How I Escaped the Island of People with Red Eyes, Red Hair, and Stained Teeth

Part 2 - My First Attempt To Escape

I observed everyone in my first month of stay. I no longer cared about being isolated. It was better that way. I kept everything from Girong and Dadang. They’re out there in the sea every morning (except on Sundays because they go to the cave to worship). They usually go back before sunset and we did the only thing that I loved in the island: roasting and eating squids on the shore.

I drew a map of the island using charcoal on a flat piece of wood I found on the sands. Of course, I didn’t touch the seawater. I was shit scared of the fungus. I made weapons of my own from scrap metals that I also discovered on the sands. I had to protect myself in case those people begin to attack me. I kept my weapons (three short knives) beneath my pillow so I could grab it any time. One night I accidentally cut my pillow. They do not use feathers for stuffing but rather the fluffy pulp of a dried fruit they call ‘doldol’.

On a bright full moon, exactly two months since I found myself in the weird island, I had my first attempt to escape.

Girong and Dadang were fast asleep, so as the gecko in my room. There was only silence. I grabbed my weapons and dropped them in a pouch I improvised from old fish nets. I used the window for escape. I jumped into the sandy ground as clueless as a cat that just snatched a meal from the kitchen. Then I headed into the cave. It’s the safest route in my plan. There was no Plan B. There’s only escape or getting caught to be eaten by the cannibals. Thanks to the bright moon in the sky. I had no difficulty trekking my path.

I was halfway into the cave when I heard a great sound. It sounded like a horn, a humungous horn perhaps for the sound echoed throughout the village. Then I saw lights breaking through the silhouettes of the eastern mountains. I was horrified.

I began to run. The last time I looked back, three huts had lighted their lamps. Then after a few seconds, I heard Girong scream, “LUMOT IS GONE!”

I knew my escape was about to fail. Damn that horn. I miscalculated these weird and (pardon for the word) uncivilized people. They must have watchers in the mountains and one of them spotted me and blew the horn and released the light signals. Fuck them all.

But I tried to run as fast as I could. Fortune favors the bold. I was thinking that even if my escape plan failed, at least I tried my best and would not end in regrets.

An arrow passed by my right side. Who would have thought they have arrows? I was lucky I wasn’t hit, though. But I tripped. I realized that I was no longer running on the sands, but on the slippery rocks. I was a few meters away from the cave. I could have made it. I lost my balance in the end and fell into the waters.

Into the seawater.

***

I woke up the next day screaming.

“What was that?!” I asked Dadang. She was putting some bandage on my right foot, up to my knee. I was able to see a part of my skin on my foot before my foster mother finally closed it. It didn’t hurt. I just slipped into the water, not hit a rock or something. That’s what I remembered before they caught me and bound my arms and put something in my mouth and then nothing.

I was screaming because what I saw was something I have never seen. My foot’s skin turned green, green as pounded leaves. And the hairs grew thick, thick as some hairy tarantula.

My foster father explained that I was contaminated by the fungus. And so it seemed that I was grounded. No, they didn’t throw me chained into a dungeon or something. Girong said that I broke two rules: (1) I tried to go to the cave even if I don’t have red eyes and red hair and stained teeth and (2) I let myself drenched in seawater and I am just 13 years old. So from then on, I was guarded. Two people stayed by my window every night. One I recognized as that old bald man with a ‘binangon’.

Shit!

I realized that I should have a Plan B. I thought of a hundred ways to escape and that included killing my two guards if necessary. Better them than me. I’d been spying for the watchers in the mountains from time to time. I was lucky to find half of a halved binocular on the shore and used it as a telescope. But so far, I saw no watcher.

I was beginning to wonder what really lies beyond the mountains. Maybe there was no watcher. Maybe something worse. Maybe a monster, a ‘bakunawa’ like one of the guard said one night. The bakunawa is a huge serpent in their tales, large enough to swallow the moon. I thought it must be (indeed) the bakunawa, the one who gave the sound the first time I escaped, and whose eyes shone into the skies as those lights on air. It gave me the chills thinking of the serpent. No. I didn’t ever put passing through the eastern mountains in my escape plans.

Then one night, I discovered that the gecko could talk.