May agimat ang dugo ko
(My talisman is in my blood).
~ Bamboo, Noypi
CHAPTER 1—Recover Yourself First
Swirls of dust welcomed her footfalls, the motes of years dancing in the emptiness of abandonment.
Haunted houses are scary, but condemned structures outdo even the psychological danger posed by restless spirits
. Tala Bienvenido repeated her grandmother's advice as if it were a verbal talisman, a recited
anting-anting
, that would keep her safe from rotted floorboards and crumbling ceiling plaster. Her grandmother, bless her departed soul, had warned her against coming to this old building time and again.
The decrepit old house on Leveriza Street last saw better days in the late 1990s, when she was still a pre-school student at St. Scholastica's College in the city next door, Manila. It was once a grand structure that boasted of a well-appointed great room, an ornate formal
sala
and a huge dining room that could easily seat 12. it was in these once-magnificent rooms that important guests were received and entertained in style.
The house had six bedrooms with their own indoor
batalan
and chamber pots from the outset—plumbing facilities that were later upgraded to more modern fixtures. There was a
silong
, a semi-basement that opened up to a backyard with fruit trees, a gazebo and swings that had once sloped gracefully down from the streetside wrought-iron fencing and gate to a burbling fountain that had become a trash bin full of rusting tin cans, slashed tires and whatnot. The fountain's fat little cherubs had turned black from the soot of the city and crusty layers of pigeon crap. Now they looked sinister in their unwashed state, as if they were hunting prey.
She'd had to use a heavy, old-fashioned key on the rusted gate lock, as well as more modern (but no less weighty) keys for the sturdy Yale padlocks holding the inch-thick chains binding the gate closed. The house had once been the jewel in the clan crown, the Manila seat of a sugar-baron family that had been blessed with wealth, good looks from their mixed Spanish-Chinese heritage and a surfeit of talent and brains that enabled them to shine from boardroom to ballroom.
Like almost everyone in the capital, however, the Bienvenido family had suffered much during World War II and four years of Japanese occupation. Their holdings in the islands of Guimaras and Bacolod dwindled and, post-war, had to be sold off parcel by parcel so each generation of the genteel family's survivors could continue studying at the prestigious Catholic schools that were their birthright. The years of occupation had drained all life from their once-thriving businesses. Land reform took the rest.
The last holdout was this house on Leveriza St., in what used to be an enclave of the rich and reclusive. By the early years of the new millennium, it, too, had to be let go as the neighborhood went to seed and the family fortunes shrank to the point that Tala's parents were pitted against her father's kin over what remained. The ancestral home was one such disputed property, held in escrow by the courts as the case wended its slow way to resolution.
Tala's black jeans of heavy denim, long-sleeved black shirt and knee-high black boots would take care of the rest. Or so she hoped—she was in the tropics, after all, where such clothing was already considered too heavy for the late summer evening.
Tala swept her powerful LED flashlight beam steadily across the great room just off the old mansion's foyer in a systematic pattern, searching for the stairwell that would take her to her goal: The storage crates made of now-brittle
palo china
wood left in the old attic at the mansion's fifth level. The scritch-scratching of rats and roaches made a creepy accompaniment to her tentative steps across the cushion of dust and dust-bunnies on the planks of the hardwood floor and she shivered, praying that she and those creatures would not meet.
Up the creaky steps she went, testing each stair before putting her full weight on each one. Her ascent was slow, and the late afternoon sun began to fade to twilight as she reached the fifth level of the careworn structure, the light coming in diluted bursts through the grimy, beveled glass of the lead-lined windows of the stairwell.
It has got to be here, Tala thought to herself when she got to the attic, it just has to. The book she wanted had been left with many other things too heavy or complicated to move—cheval glass mirrors, floor to ceiling window shutters made of delicate
capiz
shells and hardwood, ironwood trunks cladded in brass and inlaid with mother of pearl and
carabao
horn, old plantation chairs with wicker weave for seats.
She picked through the junk of the ages—literally from the early 19th century, at least, that lined the ruined old attic. Darkness had fallen completely by the time she'd picked through the musty old photo albums with their faded pictures, old wedding dresses gnawed by rats and several steamer trunks packed with the detritus of a family torn asunder.
Then she found it. The book she'd remembered sneaking up to the attic to read. The one her
Abuela
Selo had once spanked her soundly for reading. The memory washed over her like the Manila Bay breakers over breakwater rocks at high tide.
She could be stalwart and not give in to the rush of emotion as she picked the book up out of its swaddling of red Chinese silk, but she'd be lying if she thought she wouldn't remember the only time her
abuela
