“What happened to him?” Manuel asked. The filthy soccer ball he had been dribbling along the jungle floor rolled to a stop in a mud puddle on the side of the trail, suddenly forgotten.
Manuel’s older sister, Liliana, stood next to him, looking up at the body hanging high in the tree overhead. The carcass was little more than a shriveled husk of a man, a wrinkled bag of skin draped boneless and formless across the jungle’s dense lattice of vines and branches. It was almost as if the man had been turned into a garment, as if someone had slit him down the back, extracted his skeleton, then tossed him carelessly into the tree like an old bathrobe.
Without a skull to give form to his face, the dead man’s eye sockets were empty chasms. His mouth hung open in a gaping, toothless scream framed by ash-colored lips. Oily black hair dangled damp and rope-like from his flattened scalp. There was no blood on his skin, nor on the ground below. Aside from a round hole the size of a thumbnail punched through his scalp, his body seemed wholly undamaged on the outside. There wasn’t a scratch on it.
Liliana swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat. There was only one way the body could have ended up in that state. “It was an abúhukü,” she whispered.
“Stop.” Manuel pushed her hip playfully. “Be serious.”
“I am being serious.”
Manuel regarded her skeptically. “You said those weren’t real.”
“I didn’t think they were.”
The elders had cautioned Liliana about the abúhuwa, but she had never paid much attention to their warnings. She thought the creatures were merely legends, superstitions, figments of the elders’ imaginations. But when she saw the skin hanging in the tree, all of the folk tales instantly came to life. The stories were true. The elders were right. The abúhuwa were real.
“What do we do?” Manuel whispered.
“Shh!” Liliana listened for any signs of the abúhukü that had killed the man. The air thrummed with the sounds of the rainforest, a cacophony of buzzing insects, calling frogs, and screeching birds. Droplets of water from a recent storm made flat slapping sounds as they tumbled from the trees and dimpled the muddy ground. A howler monkey’s throaty growl echoed through the treetops. Another howled in reply.
Liliana’s eyes scanned the canopy, looking for any movement in the sprawling branches and drooping vines. Abúhuwa were agile climbers, long-limbed and lean, able to scale virtually any surface with the help of barbed hairs that coated every inch of their lithe bodies. Each abúhukü had arms like a spider monkey and an insectile head with bulbous black eyes and a large proboscis, as if the gods had grafted the head of a giant mosquito onto the body of an oversized primate. They were bigger than most men. Stronger too.
According to legend, the creatures moved silently through the trees, sneaking into villages at night to abduct grown men—and women—for their meals. They immobilized their victims with a paralyzing embrace, then carried the humans’ unconscious bodies high into the trees to feed upon them. There, an abúhukü would puncture the victim’s skull with its proboscis, inject a liquefying venom into its body, then suck the dissolved bones, muscles, and entrails out through the skull, leaving nothing but a desiccated corpse behind.
Judging by the relative freshness of the skin Manuel spotted, it appeared the man had been killed as recently as last night. The abúhukü that took him may have sated its appetite, but that didn’t matter. There could be others. The only safe place was back in the village, back in their tiny, ramshackle hut with the thatched roof and the straw-lined floor, back where their father and the other men in the village could protect them from the abúhukü. Liliana and her brother had wandered far from home, mindlessly kicking the lopsided soccer ball between them while dodging mud puddles and ducking under low-hanging vines. She wasn’t sure how far they had gone, but she was sure they were too far to yell for help—the abúhukü would surely get to them before the villagers … if their cries were even heard in the village at all.
No, there was no help coming for them. They were on their own.
Liliana spoke quietly into Manuel’s ear. “This way.” She turned Manuel back in the direction of the village. “And no matter what happens, don’t stop. They can’t see you when you’re moving.”
Liliana remembered the elders telling her the abúhuwa had notoriously poor eyesight. Their large eyes let in a lot of light, which allowed them to see perfectly at night. But that night vision came at a cost: their eyes took a long time to focus, so it was hard for them to identify moving targets. That’s why they usually attacked after midnight, when their victims were deep asleep.
At Liliana’s urging, Manuel began padding through the jungle, picking his steps carefully to avoid any snapping branches or crunching leaves. Liliana followed close behind, cursing herself for not being more careful, for not paying more attention to their surroundings, for not heeding her elders’ advice. She should have known better.
The abúhuwa were not a new threat—her people had been hunted by them for centuries. Ancient carvings in the cliffs overlooking the village depicted scenes of carnage, with hordes of abúhuwa attacking terrified villagers. In most instances, the creatures were shown seizing adults, while children were left behind, defenseless and alone. Liliana wasn’t an adult yet—she was only twelve—but she was close enough. If an abúhukü took her, Manuel would be left alone in the wild with less than an hour until sunset. Once the sun went down, the rainforest came alive with dangers. There were jaguars and anacondas in the trees. Caimans and piranha in the water. Poisonous spiders and frogs in the undergrowth. Nowhere was safe, especially for a five-year-old child.
Of course, being eaten by a jaguar might be preferable compared to the alternative. It wasn’t depicted in the carvings, but the stories about what happened to the children orphaned by the abúhuwa had been handed down through the generations. After the creatures devoured the parents and left their empty skins in the trees to rot, the abúhuwa returned to the village for the children. Not to eat them, but to abduct them. To adopt them. To raise them as their own.
Children reared by abúhuwa grew up to be bloodthirsty and murderous. They weren’t physically consumed; they were drained of their humanity instead. They forgot where they came from and who they were. They found pleasure in cruelty. Delight in suffering. Pleasure in pain. Some even returned to their villages to aid the abúhuwa in abducting other children to add to their perverse little families. In some ways, they were worse than the abúhuwa, because they still looked human. They weren’t though—despite their innocent appearance, they were monsters.
Manuel looked back over his shoulder at Liliana. “I’m scared,” he said, his voice trembling. Tears cut clean tracks down his dirt-streaked face.
“I know,” she replied softly. “Me too. But just keep moving, okay? We need to—”
Liliana was interrupted by a deep growl that seemed to vibrate the air around her. The hair on her arms stood on end. A rancid stench attacked her nostrils, an odor like burnt hair and spoiled meat.
Manuel spun around, his eyes as wide as full moons. Liliana held her finger to her lips in the universal gesture for quiet. Manuel nodded. His chin quivered. Fresh tears streamed down his cheeks.
The growl rumbled again. This time it was answered by a series of clicks that sounded like pairs of large river pebbles knocking together. The clicks seem to ricochet off the ground and the surrounding trees, making it impossible for Liliana to triangulate their source. It was irrelevant though. Wherever the abúhukü was, it was close.
Suddenly, Manuel came to an abrupt halt, stopping so quickly that Liliana nearly collided with him.
“Don’t stop—”
“No, look!” He pointed at an enormous tree a few yards ahead of them, directly in their path. It was truly massive, so large that it would take several men linking hands to fully encircle its trunk. Its bark was like armor, heavy and thick, with a soft green coating of moss clinging to its surface near the ground.
As Liliana watched, the bark seemed to ripple and buckle, as if the trunk was collapsing in upon itself. It wasn’t bark at all—it was an abúhukü. The creature’s mottled brown hair had camouflaged it perfectly against the tree; it only became visible once it began to move. The monster’s horrifying insectile head rotated almost fully around, then tilted down as it spotted Liliana and Manuel standing frozen just below where it hung. Its eyes were like polished orbs of volcanic glass, pure black and glistening wet. Its proboscis looked like an obsidian dagger, straight and sharp, with an elongated, pointed tip. A menacing rumble reverberated in its chest.
“Go! Go!” Liliana cried. She grabbed her brother’s arm and swung him around, pointing him back in the direction from which they had just come. It was the opposite direction from their village, but at the moment it didn’t matter. They just had to get away. “Run!” Liliana pushed Manuel to propel him into action. The boy stumbled, his arms pinwheeling as he tried to keep his balance. He fell to one knee, then scrambled to his feet and began to sprint.
Liliana was about to follow when she was knocked to the ground by what felt like a thousand-pound weight. The abúhukü had dropped from the tree, landing directly on top of her. She could feel the creature’s barbed hairs tearing at her skin as it wrapped its long arms around her, enveloping her in a crushing embrace. It pressed down on her, grinding her face into the soft peat of the forest floor, suffocating her. Mud filled her mouth and nose, clogging her nostrils and blocking out the rotten carrion odor of the monster’s hide. Her eyelid tore against the sharp edge of a broken rock, blurring her vision with a wash of bright red blood.
With her arms pinned at her sides, Liliana was unable to fight back. She tried to lift her head in an attempt to free her mouth from the mud so she could breathe. Through one half-closed eye, she saw that Manuel had stopped running. He stood motionless, glaring at the abúhukü.
“Let her go!” the boy shrieked. He picked up a fist-sized rock from the ground and threw it at the creature. The projectile bounced harmlessly off the abúhukü’s back. Undeterred, Manuel picked up two more and threw those too.
Liliana spat the dirt from her mouth as best as she could. Her lungs were so constricted by the abúhukü’s crushing hold that her words were little more than a whisper. “Run …” she gasped.
Manuel ignored her. Instead, he picked up a large branch and charged at the abúhukü. Liliana couldn’t see where the boy hit the creature, but it seemed to have little effect. The abúhukü made a sonorous clicking sound, then tightened its grip on Liliana’s body. She felt her ribs break. A bolt of searing pain caused her to scream into the dirt.
Then everything went black.
Green and blue. Leaves and sky. That’s all Liliana could see as her eyes drifted open. She stared at the foliage, momentarily amazed at how large the leaves were. She had never seen them up close. How could she, when they were so high overhead?
A series of realizations hit Liliana, one after the other. She was in a tree. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. Her body felt like a bag of broken glass, with shards poking out in all directions. She had no control over her arms or her legs; her limbs hung limp and useless in their sockets. Her mouth was full of grit and slime. Her pulse throbbed in her temples. Every heartbeat felt like a foot stomping on her skull.
Liliana allowed her head to roll to the side. Directly beside her, no more than three feet away, was the empty skin of an elderly man. Tufts of white hair encircled what was left of his head. A neat round hole was punched in the center of his scalp, near the crown. His skin was a deep brownish-red with dark striations that reminded Liliana of salted meat that had been dried for storage. The holes in his face—his eyes, nose, and mouth—teemed with beetles and millipedes. As Liliana watched, a sharp-legged centipede emerged from the dead man’s mouth and disappeared into a gash in his chest.
The elderly man wasn’t the only empty skin she could see. Parts of at least a half dozen more deflated bodies in various states of decomposition were visible around her. Some hung draped over branches like laundry hung out to dry. Others were folded into messy piles of boneless flesh. One was spreadeagled across the web of dense, interlocking branches, leaves, and vines that formed the floor of the abúhuwa’s nest.
A nest? she thought. Is that where I am? She assumed that she was. She must have been carried high into the trees by the abúhukü that had attacked her. But it hadn’t killed her yet. Why?
A whimpering sound caused Liliana to turn her head in the other direction. Manuel was huddled in the nest nearby, his knees drawn to his chest, his arms hugging his shins. A heavy trickle of congealing blood ran down his face from a deep gash on his forehead. Long cuts and scratches crisscrossed his forearms—defensive wounds, from the looks of them. His eyes stared at his bare feet, as if he was trying to ignore his terrible surroundings by fixating all of his attention on his toes. Unlike Liliana, he didn’t seem to be immobilized or seriously harmed in any way. Not physically, anyway.
Liliana tried to speak to get his attention. “Mm,” she mumbled. “Mmm.”
Manuel looked at her. His face lit up. “You’re alive!” He glanced around the nest, checking to see if any abúhuwa were around. Then he crawled over to her. “Can you move?”
“Nnn,” was all Liliana managed to say.
Manuel peered over the edge of the nest. “We need to get down before they come back.”
They? Liliana thought. There was more than one? She wished she could ask Manuel what he meant—how many were there?—but her mouth wasn’t cooperating. Her tongue felt thick and numb in her mouth.
“I think I can climb—”
“Nuh!” Liliana grunted. She tried to scrunch her eyebrows to convey her disapproval. There was no way he could climb down the tree without falling. There were no branches for the last thirty feet before the ground. He would need to descend the sheer vertical trunk with nothing but his bare hands. It was impossible.
“What, then?” His chin quivered. His eyes brimmed with tears. “We end up like them?” He gestured to the collapsed sacks of empty skin scattered around the nest. “I don’t want to die like that. I want to go home. I want to see Mama. I want Alma.”
Alma was the name of the stray dog the family had adopted when Manuel was just an infant. It had wandered into their village one night while they were asleep, finding its way into their house through a gap in the wall. The family awoke to find the dog curled protectively around Manuel’s sleeping form, one paw resting on the boy’s chest as it snored in time with his breathing. Their father had wanted to get rid of the dog, to send it back into the jungle where it came from. He barely had enough food to feed the family, let alone a snaggle-toothed mongrel with a broken tail. But when he saw how attached Manuel had become to his new friend, he relented. Alma was allowed to stay.
Liliana wondered what Alma would do if she were in the abúhuwa’s nest with them. She pictured the dog’s wiry black hair standing on end, its lips drawing back to expose its crooked yellow fangs, its brow drawing low over its cloudy gray eyes, a deep growl rumbling in its chest to warn off the abúhuwa. Alma wouldn’t let anything bad happen to them. She would protect them. She would save them.
As if on cue, a resonant growl vibrated the floor of the nest under Liliana’s body. For a moment, she believed she had summoned Alma, as if the dog had somehow been magically transported into the nest. She felt an unexpected surge of hope. Everything is going to be okay.
Then Manuel began to weep.
“Th-They’re back,” he whispered. He retreated into the corner of the nest where he had been sitting before, pressed his back against the tree trunk, and hid his face in his hands.
The nest swayed as something heavy climbed into it from below. An odor like decomposing flesh wafted over Liliana’s face. Her stomach convulsed at the smell, causing a jet of hot bile to stream into her mouth. She swallowed the acid back down, grimacing at the sharp sting in her throat and the sour taste in her mouth.
It wasn’t Alma. It was an abúhukü.
As Liliana watched in horror, the creature crawled past her toward Manuel. It wasn’t the same abúhukü that had attacked her, she was sure of it. This one was a female. It was smaller and less muscular than the first, with a half-dozen elongated, pendulous breasts dangling from its abdomen. Beads of yellow-white milk seeped from its nipples and dripped onto the floor of the nest.
Liliana tried to move, tried to scream, tried to do anything to distract the creature from approaching her brother, but her efforts were futile. As the female drew close to Manuel, it made a cooing noise. It seemed gentle. Affectionate. Almost … maternal.
The abúhukü reached out one of its long, multi-jointed fingers and touched the gash in Manuel’s forehead. Manuel jerked away and sobbed into his hands. His entire body began shaking with fear. The abúhukü cooed again, then scooped a drop of milk from its breast with its finger and wiped it across the cut. Surprisingly, the gash began to close. The skin was healing.
The abúhukü sat on its haunches in front of Manuel, wrapped its arms around him, and pulled him closer, like a mother hugging its young. Manuel tried to twist away, but the thing was far too strong. With one enormous hand, it drew Manuel’s head back so that his face was out of his hands. His eyes were squeezed shut. Mucus ran from his nose and over his quivering lips. He moaned in fear.
The abúhukü forced Manuel’s face against one of its breasts. He tried to resist, but he was unable to break away from the creature’s powerful grasp. The abúhukü pressed its fingertips against the hinges of Manuel’s jaw, forcing it open against his will, then inserted its thumb-sized nipple into his mouth. His body tensed, then relaxed. His mouth pulsed involuntarily as he began suckling on the abúhukü’s breast like a newborn. The creature cooed again, then lovingly stroked the boy’s cheek with its finger.
The female abúhukü turned its head and stared in Liliana’s direction. At first, Liliana assumed it was looking at her. I’m next, she thought. But then she heard a low-pitched snarl behind her. A powerful pair of arms lifted her from the ground. As her head flopped back on her limp neck, she found herself staring into the soulless eyes of the male abúhukü. Her reflection was distorted in its glassy black orbs, but she could still recognize the look of abject terror on her face.
The male abúhukü wrapped its fingers around the sides of her skull, held her head steady, then pressed its proboscis against her scalp. She felt a distinct pop as the blade-like appendage pierced her skull. A searing pain raced through her body like liquid fire, radiating down from her head, into her torso, and out through her extremities. She wailed in agony, expelling every ounce of air from her lungs. Drawing another breath was impossible. Her oxygen-starved brain began to shut down. Her vision blurred. Her heart seized. Her breathing stopped.
As Liliana lost consciousness, the last thing she saw was Manuel nursing contentedly on the female abúhukü’s breast. His eyelids fluttered open. He looked directly at her. There was no flash of recognition. No hint of concern. Just a small, satisfied smile as he watched her life slip away.
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