House of Monstrous Women

A young woman is drawn into a dangerous game after being invited to the mazelike home of her childhood friend, a rumored witch, in this gothic horror set in 1986 Philippines. Josephine del Rosario feels like a pariah in her town. Long ago orphaned after her father’s political campaign ended in tragedy, she’s all alone, taking care of the family home while her older brother is off in Manila, where a revolution brews. And it’s starting to feel like he’s abandoning her. When she receives a letter from a cherished childhood friend, Hiraya, inviting her to play a game, she jumps at the reason for leaving town. Josephine will have whatever her heart desires if she wins. Maybe she can change her life. It doesn’t matter that dark rumors;have always surrounded Hiraya. Except Hiraya’s house is strange--labyrinthine and huge, and something seems to be following Josephine everywhere she turns. What’s worse is there’s something her old friend isn’t telling her. There is something insidious about this invitation, and if Josephine isn’t careful, she’ll find that change is sometimes bought with blood.

Autorentext

Daphne Fama

Leseprobe
ONE

February 23, 1986

Twenty-five years in Carigara and yet she still felt like a stranger in the plaza where she'd grown up. Women who should have been her friends leaned together, their eyes bright, their lips the same shade of rose red, given bloom by the communal lipsticks they'd swapped multiple times a day. Dirt-streaked children ran circles around one another. Men rolled dice on the street, throwing down coins as they made bets.

But all of them were watching her. She could see the way their dark eyes flitted to their peripheries, glancing at her again and again. She could almost see their mouths shaping around her name. Josephine del Rosario. The daughter of dissidents. A political orphan. The heir to a crumbling house and a legacy of blood. Perhaps even worse than all that, a spinster in her midtwenties.

She was so sick of it.

The same rumors floated over the courtyard walls into her house, month after month, year after year. Even the maids she'd grown up with, girls she'd always thought of as practically family, had started to speak with low, husky whispers. As if they were afraid their voices would carry in the dark del Rosario halls and worm their way into Josephine's ears. But not once had anyone ever had the spine to say a word to her about it. Everyone in town seemed hell-bent on pretending she didn't exist at all.

But today they were having a hard time of it, and Josephine smiled bitterly. She sat alone on the concrete bench of the jeepney stop, her long hair pulled back into a low bun, made shiny with coconut oil. Her father's old suitcase sat beside her, and she wore her mother's clothes. An ostentatious dress with bell-like sleeves and a long skirt, made of muslin dyed a subdued emerald. A decade out of fashion and a little too over-the-top for a ride deep into the countryside.

She could almost hear the wheels in their heads turning as they tried to find out where she was going. It was rare for her to leave the del Rosario house unguarded. And with her brother in Manila, she didn't have a single person to chaperone her out of town.

Her gaze skipped over the plaza, across the women slowly turning pork on iron skewers in market stalls, filling the air with the scent of sizzling meat. It was a smart business tactic to set up shop close to jeepney stops, when jeepneys were perpetually late and timetables were only vague promises. Plastic chairs scraped across the concrete nearby, and she glanced to her side to see the mayor of Carigara, flanked by his sons, settle at a white table only a few yards away. Eduardo Reyes held her stare as he leaned back in his chair, its plastic groaning, a satisfied smirk creeping across his wet lips. The woman at the stall rushed to put sweating glass bottles of San Miguel beer in front of him and his boys, popping their metal caps before rushing off to fetch a fistful of pork skewers.

A decade's worth of nightmares crept into Josephine's throat, but she refused to be the first to blink. He was the reason the del Rosario name was pronounced like a curse. In the light of a sweltering afternoon, he looked like any other old man on the plaza. Just a man grown round with age and luxury, his white shirt pulled taut over a sloping stomach, tucked into his black slacks.

He'd been lean when he orchestrated the death of her family eleven years ago. When her father had run against him on a platform that promised to push back against President Marcos's martial law and oppressive taxation. The combination had proved to be a potent threat to the incumbent Eduardo. For weeks during the campaign, her father and mother, and their cousins and aunts and uncles, had all piled into a caravan of open-air trucks to drum up support in the neighboring barrios. Music would pulse out of their speakers, filling the streets. Her father would shout out his joyful promises to the crowds that gathered around the trucks, and her family would distribute bottles of beer and bags of rice. The bright promises and gifts garnered them enough goodwill to win the votes of the people, and every poll pointed to a del Rosario landslide victory.

But a week before the election, her father's convoy had been rerouted by police cars and led outside town. The fine details of what happened next had never passed through anyone's lips, but the gunfire ended an hour after it started, and it left the sole coffin maker of Carigara hunched and solemn for days. Josephine's parents, her family, everyone who'd had the bad luck to be part of the convoy that day, were tossed into a pit that'd been dug days before, their bodies covered in a thin layer of dirt. It was almost insulting, how little they tried to cover it up. But the police were bought and paid for by Eduardo, and rumors swirled that it'd been Marcos himself who'd funded the guns and bullets that had torn her family apart. She and her brother, Alejandro, had avoided the execution only because their mother had demanded they stay home to study.

A cursory investigation had taken place, and a few triggermen had taken the fall. But Eduardo ran unopposed, and the roots of his political dynasty had only deepened since then. He and his sons filled the seats of the local office, following Marcos's word like biblical law. She couldn't tell if he just delighted in watching her squirm or if he was using her as a living warning to everyone else. Either way, no one had dared to run against him since.

Eduardo was a wart, but Marcos had been a cancer rotting the country from the inside out for the past two decades as he grew round and smug on his presidential throne. She could scarcely remember a time before he'd been in power. Of a time when the world was still in love with the young and decorated war hero dripping with charisma and medals.

But with each passing year, the effect of his rule had only become more prominent. The country had become lean beneath rampant inflation and taxes. The dissidents, once loud and proud like her parents, had been silenced by death, coercion, or greed. But now hundreds of protesters, emboldened by Cory Aquino, were gathering in the streets in Manila, demanding that Marcos end his dictatorship. Aquino was the widow of Marcos's most prominent political opponent, a man who'd been assassinated in full view of reporters. The protesters and the church had rallied around Cory after that, as if she were the Holy Mother given flesh, in the hopes that she'd deliver them from Marcos's evil.

And yet that ferocious, hopeful spirit still hadn't reached Carigara. Their little village, tucked between sea and mountains, was caught in the web of the past, drowning in the long shadows of Eduardo and Marcos.

There's no …