The front gate of the old house in Kapitolyo, Pasig, was fused shut by a seam of angry, orange rust. A five-year seal of urban decay and neglect.
Great.
I kicked it, because what else was I supposed to do? The impact sent a painful, vibrating jolt up my leg and produced a dull, unsatisfying thud. The gate didn't budge.
"Hoy!" Aling Josie, my godmother, yelled from the window of her sari-sari store across the narrow street. A tricycle roared past, its two-stroke engine momentarily drowning her out in a cloud of exhaust. "Konting pasensya, Pepito! Don't break your foot before you even get the keys to your pamana!"
"It's already emotionally broken, Ninang," I muttered, turning to ram my shoulder into the metal.
With a pained groan of protesting steel, it creaked open just wide enough for me to slip through. The sound was straight out of a horror movie. Appropriate. My hand scraped against the tetanus-kissed edge as I squeezed past, leaving a raw, bloody line on my knuckle. I hissed, shaking my hand.
Standing before my late Lola Ynez and Lolo Rogelio's house felt like facing a final boss. The ancestral home of the Espiritu, two stories of concrete and wood, stood proudly defiant against time-just like her. The her I thought I knew.
The garden was a riot of untamed bougainvillea, their magenta bracts bursting through a jungle of weeds that choked the life out of what used to be a neat row of gumamela.
The cold, impersonal letter from the NBI last month had made it final, declaring her deceased after five years without a trace. The inheritance papers followed. Lola Ynez was gone, and this house, with its jungle of a garden and paint peeling like sunburnt skin, was now mine.
My parents wanted to sell, but the online marketplace told the story. "Haunted," the comments whispered. No takers. So the pamana fell to me, the jobless one.
I took a deep breath, the air thick with the taste of Metro Manila dust and the weight of five years of unresolved grief, and stepped over the threshold.
The air inside hit me first-a physical presence, heavy and still. It was a trinity of scents so familiar it made my chest ache: the sharp tang of mothballs, the waxy perfume of old narra wood, and beneath it all, a faint, ghostly whisper of her sampaguita perfume. Lola's signature scent. My throat tightened instantly.
Sunlight, thick with dancing dust motes, streamed through the grimy windows, illuminating the living room. Antique furniture, like sleeping giants, were draped in white dust cloths. A towering altar in the corner held enough faded plastic flowers to supply a Santacruzan.
And on the wall, Lola's last official portrait-her eyes twinkling, her lips curved into a smile that, in hindsight, looked like she knew a cosmic joke I wasn't privy to.
Creepy. Nostalgic. Utterly bewildering.
My backpack-holding a phone, a change of clothes, and a few useless tools-dropped to the floor with an echoing thud. The silence that followed was louder than any noise, pressing in on me, a stark contrast to the soul-crushing job I'd just quit as a call center agent in Ortigas.
My main skill had been mastering the polite but firm, "Ma'am/Sir, have you tried turning it off and on again?"
I was officially jobless and directionless. My severance pay of ₱3,200 felt impossibly small as I stared at the daunting task ahead. This inheritance was supposed to be a foundation, not another problem to solve.
My eyes caught a dark scuff mark on the polished wood floor near the staircase-the exact spot where I'd crashed my little red toy car, earning a sharp scolding and, minutes later, a secret cookie from Lola, her finger pressed to her lips in a silent conspiracy.
A ghost of her laughter seemed to linger in the still air. I could almost feel the buttery warmth of the cookie in my palm.
I had to shake it off. There was one place I needed to check first, a room I'd both dreaded and longed to see.
Lola Ynez's sanctuary. Her room.
The room was a preserved slice of her world. More narra furniture stood against the walls, their intricate carvings worn smooth. Colorful woven banig mats covered the floor, a welcome softness.
In one corner loomed a massive aparador, its dark wood swallowing the light and emanating the strongest scent of mothballs and dried ylang-ylang.
The windows, with their capiz shell panes, cast a pearlescent, milky light that felt cool on my skin. It felt calm. It felt like her.
Drawn by nostalgia and duty, I went to the aparador. I half-expected to find her old baro't sayas, maybe take a shawl for remembrance. I pulled on the heavy, carved handle.
That's when the ordinary Tuesday I was having decided to clock out and let its unhinged cousin take over.
The closet... coughed. A dry, hiccuping sound from deep within the wood.
Then a breeze-not the stuffy, humid Pasig air, but a cold, sharp, sea-scented one-blasted my face, raising goosebumps on my arms. It smelled of salt and distant storms and carried the faintest whisper of a sound, like waves crashing on a shore I couldn't see.
And then, a light. Not the gentle glow of a dusty bulb, but a swirling, silent vortex of it. The entire back wall of the aparador was gone. In its place shimmered a tapestry of impossible stars, deep violet and silver, moving in slow, hypnotic currents.
I slammed the heavy wooden door shut with a boom that shook the floor. The silence rushed back in, broken only by my own ragged breathing. My palms were slick with sweat.
"Okay. Hindi. Hindi pwede." My voice was a strangled whisper, swallowed by the blood pounding in my ears. This wasn't a grief-induced hallucination. This was... something else.
My old team leader used to praise my ability to handle irate callers. An irate caller was nothing compared to a star-filled void in a piece of furniture.
My heart hammered against my ribs like it was trying to break out. I had to look again.
I yanked the door open. Still stars. Still that otherworldly glow casting shifting shadows on the banig mats. Still that impossibly fresh, cold air that had no business being in Metro Manila.
This was definitely not covered in the inheritance paperwork.
My gaze, frantic now, darted around the room, searching for any rational explanation. My eyes snagged on her small, narra bedside table.
Placed deliberately on top of a worn Tagalog romance pocketbook were three items: a small, dark leather bracelet, a little antique-looking abaca coin purse, and a single, oddly iridescent SIM card resting on an envelope like a final punctuation mark.
My name, 'Para sa mahal kong Apo, Pepito,' was written across the front in Lola's elegant, familiar script.
My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped everything. I fumbled the envelope open, the fine, heavy paper a stark contrast to the chaos in my head.
The first lines were penned with a formality I rarely associated with her:
"To my dearest grandson, Sixto Pepito. If you are reading this, then official channels have likely declared my absence permanent from your world."
My breath hitched. Sixto Pepito. She only ever used my full first name when things were dead serious.
My eyes scanned the next line.
"But I am not dead, apo ko, my little 'Pito-pito'."
The world fell away. Not dead. The words didn't compute. They were a bug in my code, a system error in the reality I had spent five years building. A wave of hope so fierce and painful it felt like another form of grief washed over me, and I braced myself against the aparador, the cold sea breeze from the portal washing over me unnoticed.
Pito-pito. The silly nickname from when I was small. It was her. It was really her voice on the page.
"I am a Babaylan," the letter continued, the script losing its stiffness, becoming more the Lola I knew. "A guardian, an immortal being. I am from the world called Maniuaya - a place that desperately called me back five years ago. I did not abandon you, your mother, your father, or the twins. Mahal na mahal ko kayo. I simply went where I was needed, a duty I could no longer ignore."
"I could not tell you," she'd written, and my finger traced a spot where the ink was slightly blurred, as if a tear had fallen. "The knowledge would have been a danger. Forgive this old woman her secrets. 'Ika nga, 'Ang lihim na malihim, sa patalim nasisiwalat.' My secrets were kept to protect you."
My brain felt like it was short-circuiting. My Lola. An immortal Babaylan. From Pasig. Right. And I thought my life couldn't get weirder than navigating EDSA during rush hour.
The letter went on, explaining the portal-a lagusan, she called it. A gateway between her duty and her heart.
And then, the gifts.
First, the simple bracelet:
"This will serve as your tongue and ears in Maniuaya. It will bridge the understanding between languages, directly in your mind."
Next, the abaca coin purse:
"This munting pitaka is a little piece of my practical magic. It will convert any currency you might encounter into good old Philippine Pesos. A Babaylan needs her resources."
Finally, the shimmering SIM card:
"And this SIM card," she wrote, "will turn your phone into a Babaylan's carry-all. Think of it as your magical toolkit, one that fits in your pocket. Once the bloodline is awakened, it will unlock an application only you can see. You will be able to store physical items into a pocket dimension using your phone's camera. It can scan, catalogue, and contain-whether supplies, sacred tools, or even a ridiculous amount of pasalubong if you ever return home."
There was more:
"This phone will also be your beacon. Once activated, it will serve as your compass to Maniuaya, able to detect nearby lagusan, sacred sites, and signal flares from me alone. Do not expect network coverage. But if I call, answer."
A crucial detail followed:
"These items, and the lagusan itself, are tied to our bloodline, Apo. They will only respond to you now. A small offering of your blood on the bracelet's clasp will awaken their full potential."
I slumped onto the edge of Lola's bed, the papers rustling in my trembling grasp. Not just an inherited house. An inherited destiny.
Driven by a strange, new impulse-a need to see if any of this was real-I took out my phone. With the small metal pin from my keychain, I popped out my old SIM tray. My Globe SIM, with its remaining 50 pesos of load, seemed laughably mundane.
I slid it out.
I inserted the iridescent, enchanted SIM.
For a moment, nothing happened. The phone screen stayed dark.
I picked up the leather bracelet. My finger, still scraped raw and beaded with blood from the damned gate, brushed against the anahaw-leaf-shaped clasp. A tiny speck of blood transferred from skin to metal.
A jolt, sharp and distinct, shot up my arm. Not static. Something warmer, deeper, older. A current of ancestral memory.
The bracelet pulsed with a soft, golden light. The leather felt alive, as if it had remembered who it once belonged to.
Beside me on the bed, the pitaka throbbed once-like a tiny heart remembering how to beat.
And then my phone lit up. Not with the usual boot screen, but with a spiraling galaxy-shaped glyph. Light flowed outward, forming a halo that shimmered and shrank down into the shape of an app icon I'd never seen before.
And just like that, the home screen returned. Like nothing had changed.
But everything had.
I squinted at the unfamiliar icon on my screen-a tiny glowing tampipi symbol in the corner like it had always belonged there. No label. No app update. Just there.
I tapped it.
The screen shimmered and opened into a simple, elegant interface. No frills, no ads, no "Sign in with Google." Just three tabs: Inventory, Map, and Messages-each glowing faintly with the same golden hue from the bracelet.
A single line blinked at the top:
"Awaiting first item."
I blinked. "Wait, you're serious?"
My eyes landed on a spoon on her nightstand. Slightly tarnished, totally mundane. Perfect.
"If this app eats my phone or teleports me into a fork dimension, I swear..."
I opened the camera from inside the app. A square frame appeared. I pointed it at the spoon. A soft ping, and the words "Confirm storage?" appeared.
...Sure?" I tapped yes.
The spoon glowed gold for half a second-then poof. It vanished from the table.
I nearly dropped the phone. "Oh. Okay."
I flipped to the Inventory tab. There it was:
Item 001: Kutsara ni Lola (Stainless Steel) Tag: Sentimental Junk. Condition: Slightly Bent.
I stared. "Wait, it judges my stuff too?"
I tapped the tiny "Restore" button. A golden glow appeared, and with a soft shoop, the spoon reappeared on the nightstand, still warm to the touch.
I sat back, wide-eyed. "Alright," I whispered, half in awe, half in panic. "So this is real."
My gaze lifted from the phone screen, past the familiar clutter of Lola's room, and settled on the impossible sight still shimmering in the frame of the aparador.
The magic wasn't just a story in a letter anymore.
It was in my blood.
It was in my hands.
It was in my phone.
And in the closet, a gateway to a world I couldn't imagine-and a grandmother who was waiting for me-was wide open.