Stranger Quiapo

The Nightmare Radios and Demon Televisions in Raon

A stranger place in Manila is that old Quiapo Church downtown, with its everywhere nooks and anywhere crannies and its circuitous paths of tiangge-crowdedness with armpit-to-armpit ripening,  in and around the hallowed ground of a Franciscani cloister that knows more secrets than most Filipinos would even dream of or know from either lore or from ghastly rumor.  

Say, do you really know everything about old Quiapo Church?  Black Nazarene festival you say?

The Black Nazarene festival in January is just a misguided tourist magnet circus for Catholic mad-on follies,given that the local Church never ever really teaches the Word of the Lord to pacify Filipinos of even the smallest minds to be confident that the Lord's will is good for them in His own time as long as they actually read and understand what it means. The local Catholic Church prefers theatrical pageantry.  From most priests' homilies during the Holy Mass and for patron saint fiestas like the Feast of the Black Nazarene.  Pinoy rabble behave like orangutans, devoid of all Biblical smarts and hug a heavy float of  some turn-of-the-century smoke-blackened statue, while doing the Asian version of football chant jeering with absurd prayers of devotion to the statue itself and not to God Almighty.  

But this is not the holy secret that olde Quiapo Church is all about.  Or hiding in plain sight.

In every part of the world, one can walk paths and ways and come out in an entirely different place, one that may not even be where one came from.  Even in the Quiapo Church area in Manila.

Ekaterina grew up an urchin in Quiapo.  Not this world's downtown Manila.  But the strange place lying just around the corner.  Walking in a pattern resembling the number 6, three times around the Black Nazareno walkway, you enter the same Quiapo Church but with a different setting just outside Plaza Miranda. 

A bazaar of the unholy.  A perpetual night market that is a circus of evil, you wouldn't want to be caught alone in without a local guide.  Like Ness.  

People in the church fondly call Ekaterina Petra as Petra Pandakekak.  Not knowing her brother, Pedro Penduko, from Pinoy folklore was an actual person from this Stranger Quiapo side of the world.

Not the real world of downtown Manila.  Stranger Quiapo was always on the verge of losing the only thing that kept it safe from the denizens of the Bazaar of the Unholy in Stranger Plaza Miranda.  

The holy candles lit around that world's gothic version of Quiapo Church and inside its sconces and candle-holding racks are actually the only things keeping out the forces of darkness around Stranger Quiapo from crossing over.  Into our own world.  Waiting to pounce on the unknowing and unexpecting throngs from Friday Mass devotees to the hooplamongers of January's Nazarene fiesta circus.  

Holy candles, with both holy light and holy incense. Blessed by the priests from our side of the world.  To keep the other side from losing its only unswerving protection.  From the shadows and demons disguised as both human, humanoid and in forms and structures never ever seen by man, not even in nightmares or grindhouse zombie movies.  The holy candles light prevent the shadows of Stranger Quiapo from entering the church threshold and crossing over into the real world.  

Ekaterina, aka Petra Pandakekak, knew she had to cross over into the real world again and get the help of her great, grandchildren there.  Kids she won't have until 20 more years in her future in Stranger Quiapo.   It's a complicated quantum event.  

In her future, she will sire one daughter who eventually becomes a police officer S.W.A.T. specialist in the real world.  And that grand daughter isn't a shorty punk squab like she is.  Her daughter actually looks like a celebrity idol.  And looks really hot in a police uniform.

Gathering at least two rucksacks sturdy enough to carry two boxes of holy candles from Plaza Miranda, her life savings in gold trinkets that can be converted to currency used via real world panwshops in real world Manila downtown, and some mementos that she does not want left in Stranger Quiapo lest someone filch them or use them to do more harm than good to the remaining good people living around the Bazaar of the Unholy, the Plaza Miranda of stranger Quiapo.  

Ekaterina practices her camouflage wobbly walk, like a pop-lock poppet barely able to keep her pee in while trying to look for the nearest toilet, as she saunters on towards the shifting maze of Stranger Quiapo's Raon street, and carries her baggage tight to her, as she hopes to make it into our own world in one piece.

As Ekaterina made her crawling, start-stop, wobbly walk to the Quiapo Church after safely scrambling down from her protected room in one abandoned building along Evangelista, she made sure her earphones were at max volume for her ungainly 90s Walkman. 

She would be passing through those evil shops with their Nightmare Radios blaring all sorts of horrid. 

Heinous crimes blurted in a war bulletin style that would actually bring the perps from around the corner if they snared some poor bloke listening to the news. 

Bad Europop music filched from real-world 80s downtown Manila and smuggled into stranger Quiapo playing off cursed ghetto blasters which would force you to dance and twist around until you broke your limbs, and the evil shopkeepers of Raon get free dinner.

Worst would be the giant, unwieldy TVs showing some godforsaken drama from Hell, if these caught your fancy, you would find yourself actually inside those stories in after the commercial break.

Pray you aren't distracted long enough for one movie to catch you inside its story with some ugly madam sitting on your lap and feeding on your soul, or a disaster movie drowning you in a flood of sewage water. 

Raon in the real world offers the best of cheap electronics that may or may last part of your lifetime enjoying your media collection. Strange Raon in Stranger Quiapo has nightmare radios and Demon Televisions, as well as other cursed electronics that lure unsuspecting passerby into a most unfortunate end or maybe the cheapest way to die.

Ekaterina made it past the section of shops with the blaring nightmare radios fine, having her own Walkman blast Duran Duran's The Reflex and New Moon on Monday plus her favorite song, Girls on Film, just because it had a cheap hook she could loop into her mind to keep the unholy music outside from drawing her soul into oblivion.

Then came the damn video players and the flaring, old tech televisions and theater screens with bulky and outdated home projectors that showed the latest in mind numbing entertainment and soul stealing eye candy.

She pretended to look at each show on display just long enough so that the shopkeepers would think she was some unholy squab not really interested in the unholy shows and poverty porn documentaries from the 80s and 90s, and too dumb to figure out what they were anyway to fall prey to the supernatural trap.

Then she spied on an old TV episode of Voyagers, the one with her idol, Meeno Peluce, the time traveling duo of heroes who fixed history by stopping unwanted events or time disrupting criminals. 

Ekaterina  stood for a while hovering over the episode, like she was watching, but not really getting engrossed enough for the cursed TV set to draw her soul in for the nightmare loop. 

Voyagers was her favorite TV series because she got to learn about the world on the other side, the real Quiapo's own dimension. After the episode finished, she walked on at a beggar's bored crawl while looking wobbly and pee desperate at the same time, until she had traversed Raon and was at the entrance to the Black Nazarene walkway.

Now, came the hard part. Doing the same thing after passing through the Quiapo Church and hope the Raon demon shopkeepers wouldn't notice that she was actually crossing over. 

Into our world. 

To find her great granddaughter and grab as many holy blessed candles from Plaza Miranda and Evangelista in 72 hours before the cannibal spooks in her realm noticed the kid who was stupidly hanging around Raon, was more than a local thief or pickpocket.