THE SHADOW

My younger brother and I used to kill bats with a scoped .22 rifle in pitch black darkness. We did it by shining a flashlight on a tree across the street and then shooting at the luminous red dots of their eyes. In the dark, a bat’s eyes will glow red when lit with a flashlight. This phenomenon is called eyeshine. It is the result of millions of years of evolution. Like many other nocturnal animals, bats have a layer of tissue in their eyes called the tapetum lucidum. This layer is situated behind the retina and contains reflective cells. The primary function of the tapetum lucidum is to amplify available light when it is dark.

When light -- such as those from a flashlight -- enters a bat’s eye, it reflects off this layer, enhancing the amount of brightness that reaches the retina. In bats, the tapetum lucidum reflects light in the infrared spectrum. This is why a bat’s eyeshine appears glowing red to human eyes at night.

The house in which we grew up was built on a low hill above a stream which, as a child, I had imagined had been there since before the Neolithic. The bats fed on the small yellow-green oval figs of an Indian rubber tree that stood on the grounds of a Buddhist temple across the street. My brother and I would position ourselves out back of the house at dusk and watch the bats descend on the tree about 50 yards away as the evening deepened.

The shooting would begin at around seven o’clock in the evening. It would last deep into the night. Since there was only one rifle between us, my brother and I took turns of three shots apiece. The monks that lived in the temple never complained.

We shot from a sitting position on the ground and used the backrest of a chair as a rifle rest. To aim, you settled the rifle’s forestock on a groove in the chair’s top rail to steady the shot. At that distance you could not see the bats in the crosshairs of the scope. You went for the eyeshine in the arc of the flashlight. The trick was to time your shots whenever a bat settled on a branch. The red dots of the bats’ eyes gave you some idea where your target was, but you wouldn’t know where the rounds were hitting. This was the challenge. You would simply pick your target and squeeze off a round.

While it was impossible to keep score, there was a kind of competition going on. My brother and I didn’t speak to each other except maybe to advise – or, more accurately, mislead – with casual remarks: “That one was low,” or “I think you are hitting high.”

The plinking would last until around 11 o’clock in the evening. That was when our grandmother would cross the yard from her house and order us to bed. By then, we would have gone through two boxes of reloaded ammunition.

In the morning, we would find dozens upon dozens of dead bats in the grass by the roadside outside the temple walls. They looked like rats with huge wings. I was sure my brother had killed most of them.

I was a decent shot. But my brother had always been the better marksman. He was the better hunter and outdoorsman, too. Everybody knew it. I knew it, too, but I never admitted it to his face. Perhaps that was why we often fought.

I forgot about the bats when my brother passed away some years later. I forgot how much fun we had shooting them in the dark at night with a flashlight. I never touched that rifle again after he died.

We remember and we forget. In the 1980s, researchers discovered that the human brain has special receptors that fit the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, Tetrahydrocannabinol – THC to the pothead. Marijuana makes you forgetful because it has THC.

The presence of the special receptors baffled the researchers. Why, they wondered, would our brains have receptors for THC?

The answer is that they do not. Later on, the researchers found that our brains produce their own cannabinoids, called endocannabinoids, that fit the receptors exactly. Dogs, cats, birds, and sea urchins have endocannabinoid systems, too.

In humans, endocannabinoids help to regulate mood, pain, and appetite. They also wipe your mind clear of certain memories as you might with a wet rag.

But the bats would come back to me in an instant two decades later, when I saw what looked like a bat’s eyeshine in the shadows of our old house late one night.

I had come home from work just before midnight. I had not used the doorbell because everyone in the house would have been fast asleep on a weekday at that hour. As was my routine in those days, I lifted myself over the back wall of our property and jumped down onto the grass in the backyard. The headlights of a passing car threw shadows against the house, suggesting the shapes of powerlines, trees, and rooftops. The car moved on, and the world returned to grey and black.

From where I stood, the backyard narrowed onto a path that drifted along the side of the house and slipped around a corner to the backdoor. I was on that path when I saw two glints of bright red eyeshine in the dark about 15 paces ahead of me. There may, for a moment there, have been some murky, vaguely manlike figure beginning to form among the shadows there. Then it was gone.

My mind cycled through a number of explanations: a bat, perhaps, or some other nighttime animal. There was also the fact that I had been having trouble sleeping at the time. Sleeplessness can cause hallucinations. When prolonged, it can lead to encounters with all kinds of visual deceits, especially in the dead of night: shapeshifting objects, wayward apparitions, and phantoms. I know this because I have suffered bouts of insomnia all my life.

Whatever it was, it had spooked me. The hairs on the back of my arm stood on their ends, and for a brief instant, I wondered whether I had seen something otherworldly. But my mind was not to be convinced so easily. I was certain I had seen something there – so much so that I armed myself with a rock the size of my fist as I advanced -- but I did not know what it was.

The blur had disappeared behind the corner at the end of the path – or at least, that was what I had assumed. I approached the corner as you would a dog that bites, inching toward it so that I could see more and more of what was beyond the turn as I moved forward.

When I finally rounded the corner, I found that the shadow had disappeared. I became aware of an uncanny stillness in the air – as if I had walked into a photograph of the world. The laundry area was empty. The backdoor was locked. I distinctly remember using my key to open it. Inside, the house was dead still and everything was where it should be. There was nothing to suggest that the house had been burglarized. I went to the bedroom to check on my son, who was five years old at the time. I found him gently snoring under a blanket on his bed.

When I told a neighbor about the encounter two days later, she said I had probably seen a ghost or some kind of spirit. I laughed.

“I don’t believe in any of that,” I told her.

“You should,” she said. “What else could it have been?”

I have always held myself to the straightforward notion that reality is everything that exists. I know that everything I can see, touch, taste, hear, and smell is real. I know galaxies too far away for my eyes to see are real, too, because people have built telescopes powerful enough to reveal their existence. I know microscopic bacteria exist because we have microscopes. I know radio waves exist because the radio in my car can convert them into signals I can hear.

I know love is real, too, because I have felt it. I know that I’d die for my children if necessary because I love them. I have loved three women with the same unquestioning certainty.

Ghosts and beings from the spirit world are an entirely different matter. I am simply unable to bring myself to believe in them. Unlike love, faraway galaxies, women, and bacteria, there are no mathematical equations, no physical presence, or scientific instruments to prove their existence. Instead, there are Youtube videos and ghost stories and horror movies.

For years, I have struggled to explain the strange encounter I’d had with the shadow at the end of that path. If you believed in them, you would think it would be easy to come across a ghost on the property on which our old house stood. My grandparents had purchased the property after the Second World War. My mother grew up in the house right next door. The neighborhood legend was that the property had been the site of a Japanese field hospital during the Second World War. As far back as I can remember, those grounds had been different from others in the neighborhood somehow, as if its purported history had left it with the imprints of haunting: unexplained sounds, disembodied voices, and shadows and footsteps when there was no one there. From time to time, neighbors would call in the middle of the night to tell us that they had spotted a prowler walking between the two large mahogany trees that presided over the yard. That happened so many times that it became something of a routine. We never saw or found any trace of the intruders.

I understand why people feel old neighborhoods and homes are haunted. I had lived in the same neighborhood, in the same house, for nearly thirty years. I moved out only after I got married. People walking along the street outside have often reported seeing shadows pass through walls there. Others have felt a tightness or a great weight on their chests. I had also heard the pipes creak and groan in unpleasant, unfamiliar ways in our house, as though the walls and the ceiling were alive, breathing.

The entire neighborhood was spooky, if you ask me. I had walked down its quiet streets at night, half assuming that some murder was taking place in one of the houses. I had considered the idea that some trace of the violence would come to inhabit the walls like a stain. In fact, the dimly lit street behind our house had been a dumping ground for murder victims in the 1970s, during the Martial Law years. As a child, I had seen countless dead bodies along that street: hogtied, gagged, and stuffed into cardboard boxes. I remember one woman’s corpse, in particular. Someone had blown the top of her head clean off with a large caliber pistol or a shotgun loaded with buckshot, presumably at point blank range. Even so, no headless ghosts wandered that street at night. If there was, I never saw it.

Yet the most notorious haunts in our neighborhood are said to have quite a few lost souls tapping around. You could ask anyone who lived there, and chances are they would have a story to tell. For a skeptic, the most frustrating thing about ghost stories in that neighborhood is that everybody else seems to have had some legitimate encounter with lights being turned on and off and doors suddenly swinging open at night. One of the more recent stories I’d heard involved a couple that had just moved into an apartment two streets down from our old house. One night, the couple had heard children laughing and furniture being moved around downstairs. They ran downstairs and found no one. But the table in the dining room, they noticed, had been shoved across the room.

I had no such story. Many years ago, I tried writing a ghost story. I ended up abandoning it halfway. I write what I know, and I decided that I know nothing about ghosts. I do not know anybody who claims to be an expert on ghosts, either. The best ghost story I have ever read is “The Turn of the Screw,” which is more than a hundred years old. I was twelve years old the first time I read that story. I do not know whether Henry James believed in ghosts, but I have not read a better ghost story since.

What I do know is that I wish ghosts were real. Ghosts offer the prospect of forgiveness. Ghosts suggest that redemption might exist beyond life. If my encounter with the shadow had been told to me when I was a child, I might have, in a deep and true sense, remembered its details more clearly, and with the same immediacy with which I can remember what I had for breakfast. But my memory of the encounter, removed from the physical world that might have given it flesh, is no more real to me now than the monsters I read about in books when I was a child.

I can hold the shadow in my mind only as one does a character in a book. But if any such character were ever shaped in words, the story that I have, as a personal story, would be even less mine than it is now. The truth is that, now, I suspect the story isn’t mine at all: that my mind conjured some of its details from stories I’d heard other people tell. It has somehow become a contrivance -- a story that I should remember in detail, but no longer do. What might have been a deeply personal story dissolves into a thousand other ghost stories -- and in that sense, whatever personal memory I might have of it now belongs to everyone else who lives with regret and has a ghost story to tell.

Carlos Castillo studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila, in the Republic of the Philippines. He began honing his craft under the guidance of the Filipino poet, Ophelia Dimalanta. He has since written feature articles, blogs, and digital ad copy for American and Australian websites and marketing companies. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.