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Read an Excerpt From The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo
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Read an Excerpt From The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo
A dark history is unearthed amid crumbling façades in this gothic tale of family, homecoming, and postcolonial vengeance…
By Victor Manibo
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Published on November 5, 2025
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Villa, Once Beloved, a new gothic horror novel by Victor Manibo, publishing with Erewhon Books on November 25th.
Villa Sepulveda is a storied relic of the Philippines’ past: a Spanish colonial manor, its moldering stonework filled with centuries-old heirlooms, nestled in a remote coconut plantation. When their patriarch dies mysteriously, his far-flung family returns to their ancestral home. Filipino-American student Adrian Sepulveda invites his college girlfriend, Sophie, a transracial adoptee who knows little about her own Filipino heritage, to the funeral of a man who was entwined with the history of the country itself.Sophie soon learns that there is more to the Sepulvedas than a grand tradition of political and entrepreneurial success. Adrian’s relatives clash viciously amid grief, confusion, and questions about the family curse that their matriarch refuses to answer. When a landslide traps them all in the villa, secrets begin to emerge, revealing sins both intimately personal and unthinkably public.Sifting through fact, folklore, and fiction, Sophie finds herself at the center of a reckoning. Did a mythical demon really kill Adrian’s grandfather? How complicit are the Sepulvedas in the country’s oppressive history? As a series of ill omens befall the villa, Sophie must decide whom to trust—and whom to flee—before the family’s true legacy comes to take its revenge…
April 7Monday
The walls of the stone manor gleamed full under the moonlight. The masonry, weathered by what now had been a century and a half, finally seemed to show its age. What once was the pride of the Sepulveda clan—no, the pride of the entire province, the jewel of Leyte—looked as though it was built with chalk, under threat of collapse from the faintest breeze.
This was how Don Raul Sepulveda saw his ancestral home as he looked upon it from the driveway, barefoot in his nightclothes. The stiff wind and the cloud-laden sky told him typhoon season had arrived much earlier than expected. He worried about the coconut plantation, tallying in his mind the acreage he might lose, but more than that, he worried about Villa Sepulveda, fixed in the firm yet absurd belief that the manor would dissolve in the rainfall.
The old man fastened his robe, which did little to prevent the chill from seeping. Arms wrapped around himself, he made his way through the garage and into the silong and its maze-like walls. He felt his way through the dark, guided by the mahogany posts of the manor’s foundations, until he found the room where the groundskeeper stored the tools that, for weeks, had been waiting to be used. He took the shovel and the pickaxe down from their hooks. He felt their heft in his hands before placing them into a wheelbarrow. He took an electric lantern too, the only one that had some charge left. Bags of cement languished next to stacks of marble tile. He felt his blood pressure rise.
Raul had unfinished business, and he didn’t have a lot of time.
He carted his implements back the way he came, then around to the back of the manor. Past the veranda, he traversed the large expanse of lawn, stopping as he reached an overgrown depression close to the stone fence that bounded the villa from the plantation’s groves. Under his instructions, the groundskeeper had erected bamboo stakes to demarcate the plot for the don’s project. Raul squinted to find them and thanked his stars that Tiago had tied a tattered shred of red cloth at the end of each stake. This should not take too long. He set the lantern down by the wheelbarrow. Shovel in hand, the old man began to clear the soil.
His eyesight had not left him in his dotage, and he found little difficulty in spotting the rocks that needed to be sifted. The difficulty came in getting them off the ground and hauling them back onto the cart. He didn’t mind the roughness under his bare feet, or the chill wind that turned his skin into gooseflesh, but the strain on his back and the tightness on his forearms worsened with each load.
At length, Raul began to slow down, both to give himself a respite and to make as little noise as possible as he placed the rocks into the cart. The crickets’ chorus was not loud enough to drown the clang of rock on metal, and he didn’t want to stir his wife from sleep. Catching him at work in the dead of night wouldn’t surprise her; she knew of his plans, and she knew of his bullheadedness. Still, he was not inclined to get into another argument, to be mocked for his folly. Oh, how he longed for those days when she never gave him back talk.
Once the wheelbarrow’s load was heavy enough to support him, the old man sat on its lip for a rest. He gazed upon the manor once again. His papa, and his before him, had boasted that Villa Sepulveda had been built from stone dug from the very land they owned. They boasted too that the men of the family built the place with their own hands, with calluses to show for it. Raul easily dismissed that claim. His forebears had laborers, retinues of able-bodied peasants. He saw them himself, and when his time came, he too had his own army of workers. They would have been doing the backbreaking work instead of him, if he hadn’t fired the architect and the contractors, if he hadn’t berated every single mason, one after another, until they all quit, until no one in the entire town was left to take the job. No matter. He had exacting standards, and if no one could meet them, then he would do what his father and his grandfather had only claimed to do. He would build something with his own two hands. He would erect the mausoleum himself.
All the Sepulveda patriarchs were laid to rest in a graveyard on the west of the property, on a hill far enough away from the groves and where the trees had long been cut down. The family had a special dispensation from the bishop that let them eschew the Catholic cemetery by San Isidro Church. And when Raul broke ground to build his mausoleum, he did so without obtaining a special permit from the municipio. “This is our land,” he’d said, “and we’ve been here even before the diocese was established.”
Raul resumed his work with more vigor, out of spite for the lesser men who’d left him to toil on his own. He imagined the laborers laughing at him as they did when they walked away from the job, shaking their heads at the crazy old man. He imagined his late papa too, and his lolo, both looking down at him, their arms crossed in smug expectation. “I’ll show you,” Raul spat between heaving breaths. With each load, he imagined his great-grandfather who’d built the stone house, his grandfather who’d replaced the quarry and planted the coconut groves, his father who’d bought the neighboring parcels and expanded the plantation to cover an entire face of the mountain. Raul wouldn’t just restore Villa Sepulveda to its former glory—though he knew such revival was only needed because of his own neglect—he would preserve the family’s legacy, more than any other Sepulveda before him did. The mausoleum, strong and grand, would stand on this spot for centuries, protecting them all.
His vision for the project was influenced by mausoleums of antiquity and great monuments he’d seen in his travels. It had to be sizable, as he planned not only to house himself and his wife in it; he wanted to move all the other bodies from the family graveyard. He planned on exhuming the noble Bartolome, the enterprising Oscar, and Raul’s own father Claudio, the fierce general, plus their wives who’d been laid right next to them. The family had only ever considered the patrilineal heirs to be entitled to a plot. The long series of firstborn males and their wives. Not even the second-born sons, nor the daughters, were on the hill. They were in the town cemetery, side by side with other members of the extended Sepulveda clan, both the ones who were legally acknowledged and those who were not. And, boy, were there a lot of those.
A gust whistled through the palms of the coconut trees. Raul heard a rustle in the overgrown grass beyond the bamboo stakes. He stilled to listen. His lands didn’t have wild animals, Tiago and the farmhands made sure of that, but just the same he lowered the rock he was holding.
The rustling grew louder, this time from another corner of the plot. The scrap of tattered cloth danced in the breeze.
Raul squinted at the gaps beyond the tall grass. It was probably Tiago’s cur, Askal. “Haaaaa—” the old man half yelled, hoping it would scurry away. The rustling stopped.
In measured steps he made his way back to the silong to get a bolo, just in case. He found one with a worn leather scabbard and slung it around his waist. He returned, setting the lantern closer before swiftly resuming his work. If he were an honest man, he’d admit that his haste was out of fear, but he told himself that it was out of annoyance with all these interruptions. He had a plan, and it needed to be done now, before the torrents came.
Before death came for him.
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The Villa Once Beloved
Victor Manibo
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The Villa Once Beloved
Victor Manibo
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He had seen its omens and heard the cries of its herald. His time was coming. The mausoleum needed to be built soon— for himself, for every Sepulveda buried on the hill beyond the stone fence, and for the sake of the few Sepulvedas still living. He wasn’t crazy; he just happened to be the only one who could see all the signs.
The mausoleum hadn’t always been the plan. At first, Raul only wanted to spruce up the graveyard, update the markers, and most critical of all, build some sort of enclosure. Tiago had told him that wasn’t necessary—the site had been unmolested for decades—but he’d be happy to maintain it more often, especially after the don and doña’s return from the States. Yet Raul insisted. He contracted a builder to erect a stone fence around the plots. In the last few weeks, however, Raul grew to believe that a fence was not going to be enough. His ancestors had to be locked up in marble. When the contractor said the section of the hill was neither large nor stable enough for the structure, the old man was only too happy to have it built much closer to the manor. They would be better protected that way, he said. At first, he never spoke of what these long-dead bodies needed protection from, but in those moments when he lost control of his tongue, he would say it. The balbal was lurking, eager to come dig up the corpses and devour them. It didn’t matter if they were bones and dust at this point. The monster wanted them, and Raul wouldn’t let it have them.
The electric lantern dimmed. He gave its case a couple of hard taps, which only caused it to flicker and then die.
The tall grass shook violently. The rustle was all he could hear now; the crickets had grown silent. The old man placed a hand on the bolo’s hilt. In the corner of his eye, he saw the dog’s hindquarters dive into the brush. He called out to it. “Hoy! Kadna ngadi!”
Askal turned toward the call but then disappeared into the shadow of the trees that lined the stone fence. Raul followed the dog, shambling on the uneven ground. It was easy to miss the rotting head of coconut in his path. The pain came first, then the fall, flat on his face, having failed to brace himself in time.
Groaning, the old man lifted his head. Inches away, a smooth, white stone stuck out of the soil. It gleamed even in the dark. He lifted it with his fingers, brushing the dirt off.
It was a bone, the joint of some small limb.
Raul flung it away and hurried to get himself upright. As he did, more bones caught his eye. Underneath the dislodged soil were the ends of long, narrow tapers: five human fingers, still held by a knot of wristbones.
He knelt up, legs quaking in pain and dread. Then, a shadow came before him, darkening the unearthed bones. Raul raised his head at the hem of a flowing gray skirt.
The figure floated above the ground, its soiled feet and blackened toenails peeking from underneath tattered cloth. A low murmur issued from above him, repetitive and pressing. The words sat on the edge of comprehensibility. He stumbled onto his rear and found himself beholding a pale, faceless woman.
Raul froze, every part of him paralyzed. His joints locked in place, and no sound came out of his open mouth. Even his eyelids couldn’t blink to shield him from seeing. The specter raised an emaciated finger, its veins pulsing blue beneath the paper-thin skin. She hovered closer, pointing at him.
He began to hear the woman’s words as though they were whispered right into his ear. Tears streamed down his face. He recognized her now.
Then, the icy tip of her finger touched his forehead.
With impossible force, the old man fell back as though pushed into an abyss so dark and vast it seemed to consume all of him, and the villa and the land it stood on, the coconut trees, the bones, all those bones, the whole island, the oceans, the planets, all light and all life and the very universe itself. An eternity seemed to pass as his consciousness screamed, trapped in a leaden, unmoving body, calling for his wife, for God, calling for mercy, begging, begging, begging until his fall was finally arrested.
Yet instead of landing on the dirt among the weeds and the carabao grass, his body found a soft landing. Everything remained dark, but in due course, his sight was again aided by the moonlight streaming through embroidered lace curtains. Above him he saw the drapery that hung over his four-post bed.
A nightmare, he told himself. That was all it was. He’d had another one.
Raul wiped the sweat off his brow. His robe had been soaked with sweat, and worse, his pant legs were drenched with piss. “Putang ina!” he cursed as he sat up. The incident brought him back to the worst nights of his Alzheimer’s, before the treatment worked. He may have regained his faculties and his memories, but he’d also gotten night terrors alongside them. Part of him still felt the price was not worth it. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He had half a mind to call for help, but he wouldn’t stand for the shame of having soiled himself.
Then, a great figure overcame him, pinning him back onto the mattress. It fell on him with the force of the Almighty’s fist. The wooden bed frame cried from the impact, its creaks joining the old man’s bones as they cracked. He screamed in pain.
A massive hand, or hands, he could never quite tell, held down his head. His vision adjusted to the dark and he saw a naked gargantuan straddling him, crushing his torso and pinning his limbs. A giant, he thought, but no—it had too many parts. What he thought were thick folds of fat turned out to be several bodies. Arms and thighs, heads and backs, bellies and breasts and buttocks, all writhing against each other, piled on top of him, on top of each other, growing and expanding into a living monument, a pyramid of flesh. Starving mouths, agape with yellowed teeth, moaned with the old man’s muffled groans, and their frantic breaths matched his own as the monstrosity grew to reach the canopy, tearing the sheet that hung above the bed. Raul felt his rib cage collapse, his insides pierced by his own brittle bones. He coughed up blood and his mouth became a fountain of red spray that rained on the sheets and the undulating bodies that kept growing and crushing and forcing him to take his last gasp, choking in his own blood.
* * *
In the morning, after Doña Olympia arose from her own four-post bed, and after she made her way across the hall into her husband’s bedchamber, the first thing she noticed was the window. Odd that Raul would leave it open. Did he want to be feasted on by mosquitoes? As she went to shut it, she noticed her husband’s face. He was drained of all color, and his hands clutched his chest. His mouth was agape and so were his eyes, which stared fixedly, almost maniacally, at the canopy above his bed.
The doña screamed, throwing herself onto her husband’s cold body. The caretaker, Remedios, tried to shield her away from the master’s corpse, but Olympia refused. She tearfully held onto his arm, her body half collapsed onto the floor by his bedside. She reached for his hands and enclosed them in hers. She wailed. Fifty years. Who was she without him? Had there been life before Raul? She didn’t remember anymore. She wailed and wailed, her eyes an unstoppered dam. Half a century’s worth of sorrow was only interrupted by a feeling of roughness on her skin. Olympia unclasped her hands around the rigor mortis of Raul’s fists.
With effort, she opened his petrified fingers. Then she found, to her utter confusion, enough to stem the flow of tears, that her husband’s palms were completely covered in dirt.
Excerpted from The Villa, Once Beloved, copyright © 2025 by Victor Manibo.
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