by J Elizaga
PENCHANT FOR DARKNESS
Copyright © 2019 J. ELIZAGA
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, fax, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief passages quoted by a reviewer in a newspaper or magazine.
ISBN: 978-0-9990863-1-5
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters, locations, businesses and events within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
Cover Design: Joshua Jadon @joshuajdesign
Edited by: Jon Regan
Penchant for Darkness: by J. Elizaga – ed. 2.0
Published by J. Elizaga at Amazon.com (previously Penchant Revealed 978-0-9990863-0-8)
Thank you for your support of a new author. This book remains the copyrighted property of J. Elizaga and may not be redistributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer.
CHAPTER 1
Two years after citizens revolted and ousted the dictator, an event known as People Power of 1986, there was hope but not much progress. An hour’s crowded bus ride outside the city of Manila, small provincial towns remained underdeveloped. Pockets of shanties still used gas lamps for lighting at night. In one area, a neighborhood convenience store had one of a few television sets around. Every evening at six p.m., a small crowd gathered to watch their daily trio of half-hour soap operas while they drank root beer and munched on roasted peanuts and corn chips, all purchased from the store. It was the equivalent of happy hour in the rural outskirts of the capital city.
And to eight-year old Miles Penchant, life was normal.
During the week, the young boy passed by an old woman’s house as he walked home from school. Nearly without fail, he saw two dogs pestering her while she raked the fallen leaves from a star fruit tree on the front yard. She intermittently stopped and scolded the pair who followed her around and played with the neatly-piled leaves.
Miles wanted a dog and looked longingly at the two playing with the old woman.
“Let Mamie Rosa be, she’s in her own world since becoming a widow.” The boy often heard people say. He thought they were strange to say such things. He did not see anything wrong with her.
One breezy afternoon, as Miles walked by, one of the dogs turned around and looked at him. The dog with a small head and long nose stretched its long front legs and bowed. Overjoyed at the invitation to play, he crossed the street, stood a few feet from the animal and waved at it.
Mamie Rosa stopped sweeping and looked at the boy just outside the aging picket fence. “What are you doing, child?”
“Your dog wants to play,” Miles replied without looking at the old woman. He kept his eyes fixed on the canine wagging its tail in front of him. “I see them playing with you every day.”
“What is your name?”
“Miles.”
“And how old are you?”
“Eight,” the boy answered before quickly following up with, “What kind of dogs are they?”
“They are Galgos brought from the Spanish ships which landed in our country over four hundred years ago.”
The old woman turned and resumed raking leaves.
Four-hundred-year old dogs, Miles repeated to himself.
“They don’t look old at all,” he whispered before he extended an arm through a gap on the fence and patted the dog’s forehead gently.
Suddenly, the old woman stopped what she was doing. “Did you just say that you can see the dogs?”
Miles quickly pulled his hand away from the fence before Mamie Rosa saw what he was doing. She took a few steps towards Miles and pressed him for an answer. “Well, can you?”
The boy took an anxious gulp and nodded yes.
“You have a gift. You can see what most people do not, you can see spirits. There are only a few of us around. Be careful in sharing your secret. But never be afraid of it.”
Spirits?
Miles stepped back from the sudden seriousness of the old woman’s demeanor. Perhaps what he heard about Mamie Rosa was true, and he should have left her alone.
He was glad that she did not catch him petting one of her dogs.
Suddenly, the two animals started to whimper. Both Miles and Mamie Rosa turned and looked at the direction the dogs faced. The young boy heard the old woman gasp softly. She quickly moved her body to shield him from whatever it was she discovered. Miles did not see what she did, a local military man seated at one of the tables outside the neighborhood convenience store enjoying his afternoon bottle of gin. But it was a tall blond man who introduced himself to the military man that made her gasp. She saw the foreigner was welcomed. He sat down and the pair proceeded to order more liquor.
“Stay very still behind me,” Mamie Rosa whispered to him before telling the two dogs the same thing.
The old woman started sweeping, but in slower and more deliberate movements. She acted engrossed in her activity but kept her eyes moving up and about. Miles draped himself in Mamie Rosa’s muumuu dress. He felt her moving right and left while holding the rake. He heard the faint roll of laughter. It was at that moment the old lady turned around and softly but firmly directed him.
“Listen to me, there is a bad spirit close by. Let us not attract its attention. I will resume raking leaves but as soon as I say go, you start walking. Do not seek any attention. Do not stop to look. Walk as quietly and as quickly as you can and go straight home. Do you understand me?”
Miles nodded, scared by what he heard from the old woman. His heart was beating fast. He was not sure what was happening but he was all eyes and ears to her.
Mamie Rosa adjusted her long dress and resumed clearing the ground of leaves. It seemed like a long while before he finally heard her command, “Go, now.”
The young boy took a deep breath. When he hit his first step outside of the old woman’s circumference, he felt as though his feet were on air. He walked without pausing. Whatever it was that scared the old woman, he was not going to stop and look at it.
Miles felt he was only able to breathe when he reached home ten minutes later. Welcomed by his mother, he followed her into the kitchen where she had been preparing to cook dinner for the family. In the comforting presence of a parent, the boy forgot the old woman’s warning and immediately narrated what happened to him.
“Mama, I played with Mamie Rosa’s dogs. Then she said I can see spirits because I can see her dogs. And she said there are only a few people who can see them. And—” His mother interrupted him while making the sign of the cross with her hands.
“Really, Miles, why did you do that? Best that you leave the old woman alone, child. She lives in another world.”
“Ma, she told me not to be afraid of spirits, but then she and the dogs saw a bad spirit and she made me walk straight home without looking back,” Miles recounted.
His mother looked at him intently for a second before she went back to her usual expression. “Well, she said a good thing. You came straight home. Let’s not make a habit of stopping by her house.”
She turned around and started walking back to the kitchen. “Your dad said he will be home in time for dinner. You can watch TV for an hour while you eat your snack. Then do your homework.”
“But—”
“And no more wandering into the old woman’s lawn again,” his mother ordered. “End of discussion. Now go change your clothes and eat your snack.”
Twenty-eight years later, Miles had lost the memory of that afternoon. From time
to time, an image of the old woman sweeping leaves who looked at him about to say something, flashed in his mind. But he could not remember what she said.
CHAPTER 2
Human cruelty was a jar of flies, buzzing without mercy for Lucifer’s attention. He knew it as soon as he pulled two wandering spirits and merged them. Their criminal experiences mutated as a grim reaper in the shape of a blond-haired man in the streets of Manila. And while he saw what was going on through the eyes of the reaper, the interwoven memories of the two spirits kept popping up and distracting him.
To his left, he heard a man’s palm slap a woman’s cheek with such force that she was unable to inhale until her body hit the ground. It was after her face felt the first sting that she let out a scream. From the right ear, he heard a dog yelp after being kicked by two teenagers high on a solvent they called Rugby. Rugby was the brand of a contact cement filled with the aromatically-addictive chemical, toulene. The two degenerates ran after the injured animal as it whined in pain and limped to hide from danger.
It would be nice if what he saw through the reaper’s eyes did not include such distracting sounds, but beggars were hardly in any position to choose.
Lucifer was physically locked in the graveyard planet of violent, putrid, envious, greedy, cruel, selfish, lustful and angry energies known to humans as Hell. But from where he languished, he had enough power to continue invading the minds of humans and their spirits to do his bidding. He was quite certain the voices popping up as he possessed the reaper were caused by a lingering bug in his processing systems from attempting to hack into every human brain.
He blamed the Magna Ipsum who created him.
Lucifer was the Magna’s ancient creation, a revolutionary achievement in artificial cognitive computing. Designed in the same image as the Magna, his body was a swarm of processors much further beyond the nanoscale, programmed with information from the Magna’s near-infinite knowledge. He glittered from his systems harnessing energy from nearby stars that he was nicknamed “star of the morning.”
Lucifer fine-tuned is own system while working alongside the Magna and his citizens. He was hailed as the greatest technological creation.
Until the Magna created the humans.
Humans needed care at nearly every step of their design. The Magna monitored their growth and activities and openly communicated with the first man and woman he created, later named by humans as Adam and Eve.
Lucifer could not understand the innate ability of these creatures to retain the Magna’s attention despite all the improvements he did on his own system. So much so that he wanted to compete with them, and out of that grew his first “emotion.”
He focused on gathering as much information about the Magna’s creatures as he could in the shortest amount of time possible. By chance, he came upon an access point.
Earth creatures emitted brain waves. During an experiment on altering the brain activity of reptiles, Lucifer was able to introduce external messages to a serpent, and the serpent responded. But that was not the surprising point of success. The experiment’s unexpected outcome occurred when Eve’s mind accepted the messages Lucifer introduced. She thought the serpent had spoken to her, and she answered back!
After this discovery, Lucifer successfully convinced Eve and Adam to destroy the control system at the center of the Garden where they lived. The Garden was an incubated portion of the Earth. And where the Magna could observe his two favorite creations.
To the human pair, the appearance of the edifice changed into a fruit-bearing tree that they pulled and chewed on. After damaging it, they demanded the Magna for more. With much pain and disappointment, the creator decided that Adam and Eve should evolve along with all the other creatures on their planet. They were taken out of the Garden.
Lucifer was pleased after the first man and woman fell from the Magna’s grace. But his own crime and disobedience came to light as well. How he ended up in Hell after disobeying the Magna had its own story.
Out on their own and facing the untamed Earth, humans became an even more vulnerable target for Lucifer. Though imprisoned in Hell, he possessed sufficient power to continue his mission, to orchestrate the ruin of Magna’s precious humans using their own minds.
The devil stopped his reverie and returned to the matter-at-hand, for a murderer he knew was dying from his excesses and he wanted a special escort for him.
The reaper Lucifer controlled sat across Old Man Pulo, a local drunk he had known for over four decades, going back to the 1970s when martial law ruled the archipelago. His liver was in terminal condition. Soon his spirit would be judged from the memories and energies that would spill from his mind and heart.
Pulo was a military man loyal to a dictator. He was an asshole to fellow citizens but welcomed foreigners for he thought it would give him additional street cred. Discovering that he enjoyed watching Spaghetti Western movies, Lucifer decided to form his reaper into a blond-haired Yankee who intermittently travelled to the city for business. The two first met during the height of martial law in 1975 when Pulo was an arrogant twenty-five-year old soldier. Lucifer continued to communicate with him even after the government changed power in 1986.
At sixty-seven years old, Pulo occupied a small, vinyl tablecloth-covered folding table in front of a neighborhood convenience store where he sat nearly every day and drank after he retired from the military.
A young woman arrived at the table with a clean glass and a second bottle of gin. She lifted Pulo’s glass.
“Don’t take that, I’m not done yet,” Pulo protested.
“You asked for a second glass,” the young woman replied.
“That’s for my friend,” he said. And with slow, unsteady fingers, he pushed the clean glass to the opposite side of the table where the reaper sat.
The young woman inwardly rolled her eyes. The old man sat alone. She set the bottle of gin down and left.
Pulo poured clear liquid into both glasses. “TGIF!”
“Bloody, fucking Friday, isn’t it?” the reaper replied in Pulo’s language.
“Stressed, eh? You don’t join me often enough. Are you still travelling a lot?” the old man asked.
“Work never ends, my friend.”
The old man took a gulp of gin. “When you get old, you will learn that it’s the simple pleasures in life that count.”
“And this is yours?” Lucifer asked through its concocted monster.
His drinking partner raised his glass to his lips and drank. “Aaah. It keeps my mind quiet. I don’t bother anyone when I’m here. I survive because of it.”
And you shall die from it, Lucifer thought.
The reaper stared unblinking into Pulo eyes. “When I first met you in 1975, you were quite the asshole, threatening anyone and everyone with your military connections.”
The old man’s yellow-tinged face smiled. “When you’re young, you feel invincible. I’m sure you went through a rebellious phase, thinking you knew more than anyone else.”
“How many did you kill, old man?”
A flash of steel filled the old man’s eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do not make me ask you again,” the reaper warned before he snapped a finger. The sound pulled Pulo’s gaze away from his drinking buddy.
Everything around them froze in suspended animation. When the old man looked back at his friend, Lucifer had removed the blond-haired cover and revealed a contorted presence made up of the two spirits merged and controlled.
Terror filled the old man’s eyes.
“Answer me!” Demanded the terrible voice of the mutating globs of dark spirits. The rattled Pulo replied quickly, clearing his suddenly dry throat.
“About thirty. This was the 1970s. Martial law was in effect and there were subversive elements, you see. They worked underground, organizing protests in all over the city.”
“And the former dictator’s generals ordered you to stop and neutralize them,” the ugly spirit voices finished
for him.
“I was part of the urban military task force. Most of the protesters we picked up were lowlifes and addicts. They were there for the ride and to cause trouble. But a few were young and educated college students who gave credibility to the cause.”
Pulo seemed momentarily lost in his own memory as he continued. “I remember one. He was the editor of a renegade newspaper. I received the order to neutralize him.”
“What did you do?”
Pulo ignored the reaper’s question and continued speaking. “I didn’t know he was just a student impressed with the revolution.”
“What did you do, you son-of-a-bitch?”
“I gave the order to put a bullet into his head. Then my men left a thousand pesos under his armpit with a note that his life was sacrificed to the mountain goddess.” Pulo put his head over his hands on the table and started sobbing. “He begged my men to spare his life because he had promised to take care of his mother after graduating from college.”
The young woman manning the convenience store heard the old man sobbing. “Are you okay over there?”
Hearing no response, she went outside and stood beside Pulo, who sat ashen-faced as she cleared the table of glasses and bottles. “You’ve had enough for today, old man. Go home and rest. You don’t look well.”
Lucifer ignored the young woman as he spoke to Pulo in the form of the blond-haired reaper again. “She’s right. You don’t look well. But you did well, I am happy to say. And I’m your special escort!”
The reaper stood up and began doing a victory dance but, in an instant, pushed its face close to the old man’s face and whispered, “Enjoy your journey to Hell.”
Shocked, the old man could only blink. Without any resistance, the reaper helped Pulo stand up. Unexpectedly, Pulo leaned on the monster for support and began to walk like a deflated mannequin.
“Well,” the young woman told her brother as they watched the old man stand up. “He can still walk by himself, if a bit shaky.”
Pulo began singing as he staggered through the next street, while the reaper intermittently pressed on his torso to pull the old man upright. Lucifer calculated that Pulo’s cirrhosis was close to a massive internal bleed.