The Villa, Once Beloved

by Victor Manibo

Genres: Asian American; Horror; Gothic

Synopsis

A dark history is unearthed amid crumbling façades in Lambda Literary fellow Victor Manibo’s new gothic tale of family, homecoming, and postcolonial vengeance . . .

SOME LEGACIES ARE BEST LEFT BURIED . . .

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 . . .

Release date: November 25, 2025

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

THE WALLS OF THE STONE MANOR GLEAMED DULL 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 beheld 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 toward the back of the manor. Past the veranda, he traversed the large expanse of lawn, stopping as he reached a 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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 first-born 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.

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, her 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 passed 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.



HER EYES PEELED OPEN, BUT ALL SOPHIE Anderson saw was darkness. Sleep clearly hadn’t helped with the exhaustion, and with the thin air and disorientation, she’d forgotten to take off her eye mask.

In the dim light, her cabin looked like her dorm room, only better appointed, slicker. It sure wasn’t smaller by much. The display panel on the wall came alive as she sat upright. She fumbled with the controls on her bedside and after a few clumsy attempts, she pulled up the flight map. The tiny airplane icon blinked on a downward slope over the Pacific.

Five more hours.

She was certain they’d be closer by now. As it turned out, she hadn’t slept as long as she thought. Well, at least she got a nap in. She reached for her phone.

No new messages. The same emails stared back at her no matter how much she refreshed. Updated links to the shared drives, follow-ups from her course advisor, reminders from her research partner. That last one closed with “Have a safe and fruitful trip.” An unwritten postscript: Two weeks is a long time to be gone during your junior year, so you better find a way to get stuff done. Unread newsletters and journal articles, an ad for Instacart that she didn’t send to Trash; the $10 off promo code would still be valid when she got back.

On her video console, the carousel of movie selections remained unchanged too. She shot another text to her friend Coralie. i didn’t know there was a new gladiator sequel, upsidedown smiley face emoji. It went through, but as with the others before it—thank fucking god they have wifi, and then this is wild af, followed by a snap of the cheese plate and champagne flute that greeted her in her luxe cabin, and then adrian says hi btw—she knew it, too, would go unanswered for a few more hours until shift change at the clinic. All the futile scrolling and texting was a bid for distraction. Sophie could at least admit that to herself.

She pulled up the flight map again and noticed the date had already changed. While she slept, she’d crossed the date line and jumped into the future. She stared at the airplane icon, willing it to fly faster. It followed a dotted arc that straddled the ocean over Hawaii, over nothing but water, sloping back down to SFO. A surge of exhilaration rippled in her veins. The trip marked a lot of firsts: her first time on a plane, for one, and in such style too. It was also her first time outside the country. Before this, the farthest she’d gone was leaving Ruskin to go to Stanford. Her father had protested, argued there were plenty of fine community colleges in Nebraska, as though they were comparable. No, Sophie would go to the finest school that would give her scholarship money. She would leave the farm. She would find herself, whatever that meant to a sixteen-year-old, but she’d known it required getting as far away from her parents as possible. On the map before her she imagined her own path from three years ago: The fifteen hundred-mile drive down the I-80 on the beat-up cobalt blue Dodge she bought with money from her late shifts at the Dollar General in Hebron and a small fundraiser by the church choir. Over the deserts of Nevada, the forests of Utah, the mountains of Colorado, Sophie drove for twenty-four hours, only stopping twice, so eager was she to start her life out west.

Now here she was, going farther than she’d ever gone before.

Yet the decision to go on this trip had been fraught, and she felt uneasy traveling on a chartered jet, all expenses paid. Until today (yesterday?) she didn’t even know that planes could be built like hotels, with suites, showers, a stocked bar. To allay her misgivings, Adrian had been quick to point out that his family didn’t usually travel this way when they visited the Philippines. His comfort and familiarity in these surroundings cast this claim in doubt.

More than that, she worried about spending that much time in the Sepulvedas’ ancestral home. There simply were too many opportunities for a misstep. Sophie was liable to struggle whenever the conversation inevitably veered into Filipino. She’d misunderstand a word, or she’d make a rude gesture, or be overly polite. She’d be unable to stop from wincing whenever the family referred to their coconut groves as the “plantation.” She’d somehow offend the elders, or the help, the way she felt she sometimes did whenever they spent time in the homes of Adrian’s trust fund buddies, despite his assurances that she was doing great, she was perfect, in fact. She was fitting in nicely. She never quite cared about fitting in then, but now …

And then there was, of course, the fact of the funeral.

A low rapping came from the other side of her cabin door. It slid open as soon as she said “come in.”

Adrian entered and sat by her bedside. “Hey there … did you get some sleep?”

“Not as much as I’d like.”

He gave her hand a kiss. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yes, well. You’re here because of me.” Adrian pulled a baggie out of his jeans pocket, and though the lights were turned low, she could tell it wasn’t your standard bag of multicolored gummies. “You sure you don’t want some? I got six hours on just half a gummy.”

Sophie swatted his hand away playfully, turning toward the open door. Across the aisle, his parents’ cabin door was shut.

“Look, I’m telling you, they don’t care,” Adrian said. It was somewhat attractive, the way he was so cavalier about sneaking contraband into another country, but it was also another stinging reminder of how he moved through life so differently from her.

“I don’t want to give them the wrong impression, that’s all.”

Sophie asked him about his film, and it was Adrian’s turn to see if anyone heard. He smiled askew, recognizing her attempt at evasion. He stowed the baggie away and slid the door shut. “Been at it for a while,” he answered. “Sorting through pics, old home videos. No time like the present, right?”

“In more ways than one. Is it … helping?”

“I like seeing what he was like when he was younger. Before the Alzheimer’s. He was a lot funnier than I remember.”

“You know,” Sophie started, gently, “you could just reminisce about your lolo. It’s okay. You don’t have to get your work done while you’re at it.”

Adrian smiled wryly, a glint in his eye. “Lolo would disagree—that would be … inefficient. And maudlin. Two things he hated.”

Sophie thought Don Raul Sepulveda would also disagree about the subject of his grandson’s secret project, but this was not the time for snark. A personal documentary about the Sepulveda clan and its thorny history in the style of Stories We Tell and Sherman’s March would be too vérité for his family’s taste. It was bad enough that Adrian majored in film, but his course mentor loved the pitch, and if he does it right, it was likely to get him into the honors program.

“Besides, I’m already missing school so soon into the quarter,” he continued. “I might as well come back with some progress.”

Sophie couldn’t blame him. There was guilt over the secret, over the subject matter, guilt over the very fact that his grandparents were cozy with—were closely related to!—a dictator. Guilt over his circumstances, his privileges, the very clothes he wore and the very Gulfstream they were on. Adrian had plenty he’d want to avoid, and if he could use schoolwork as a means to distance himself from them, how could she fault him?

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.

Adrian leaned in and caressed her ear lobe. He knew how much this calmed her. “I just want you to get some rest while we can. We still have a way to go.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You know you have nothing to worry about, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Everything will be fine.”

“I know that too.”

She sounded abrupt without meaning to, and she hugged him to make up for her tone. His grandfather had just died. His family was beset with grief, as was he, and that grief was compounded by travel fatigue, jet lag, and soon, the sensory strain of having to acclimate to the tropics. She was supposed to be here to support him, yet there he was, taking care of her again. She knew the questions still swimming in his mind, the same ones he’d asked several times in the last few days. Was she comfortable? Scared? Stressed about meeting the rest of the Sepulvedas? And what about going this far from home? To the Philippines, of all places? She raised her head and saw them all in Adrian’s downcast, slightly bloodshot eyes. She’d been giving him hollow assurances; she didn’t really have any answers. At the very least, she could do things for his sake, like she promised herself she would.

“All right,” Sophie said, holding out an open palm.

Adrian drew the bag from his pocket and held it up in front of her. He grinned. “Pick a color.”



By the time they arrived on the island province of Leyte, the high had worn off, but the haze did not lift. It became a new haze, caused by the noontime heat that prickled her skin and the humidity that sapped her of strength. Sophie felt rested at least, knocked out on half a dose.

The sign greeted her as she descended the boarding stairs. Daniel Z. Romualdez Airport. From Adrian’s stories, a not-so-distant cousin of his late grandfather’s.

Bodyguards with dark sunglasses waited on the tarmac. The cars would be slightly delayed, they informed Adrian’s father Eric as he descended the plane. He took the news without a hint of annoyance; if anything, he seemed overly gracious toward the men, as though he’d inconvenienced them. His wife Margot only smiled meekly.

Sophie had only met them once, two years ago, during her first Stanford Family Weekend. As she’d expected, no one came to visit her, but less expected was Adrian’s offer that she spend the weekend with his folks. For one, their relationship was so new. For another, she assumed quite reasonably that his parents would want alone time with their only child, even if Adrian didn’t sound too psyched about it. Didn’t he at least want to give them a tour of the university grounds, show off his hastily tidied off-campus bachelor pad for their inspection? He brushed the idea off. What he’d been most excited to show off was her. Sophie thought it was the most romantic thing.

She didn’t realize how serious he was. From the very first moment of introduction, Adrian sang her praises, casually dropping how tough and selective the computer science program was, and how she was top of her class, with a full course load and research assisting, not to mention extracurriculars. Adrian segued to discuss their activities with PASU, the Pilipino American Student Union, but he soon found his way back to talking about Sophie. Eric seemed genuinely impressed, and Margot even teased that she hoped Sophie would be a good influence on her son.

Sophie took everything in stride, ignoring the undercurrent of cringe. She instinctively knew that Adrian admired her achievements, but she’d never been raised in an environment that lavished her with praise. Roy and Frances Anderson were humble Midwestern folks who rarely showed pride or gave encouragement. They never wanted to spoil their daughter. Said daughter might have also believed that their restraint was tinged with resentment at how exceptional she’d become, despite everything. It was a new and foreign feeling, being lauded by someone who loved her. That was the reason for her unease, nothing more. Affirmation felt good, and in time, she could get used to this. She could come to enjoy it, even. Seeing the glimmer in Adrian’s eyes as he spoke, she felt well on her way.

The afternoon was a greater success because Adrian’s parents, deftly deploying that upper-class conversational sidestep of anything unpleasant, avoided asking about her own parents’ absence. Sophie was relieved she didn’t have to use any of the excuses she’d prepared on behalf of Roy and Frances, who would have balked at the idea of having to explain themselves, let alone have their daughter apologize to complete strangers on their behalf. She was also relieved that the big question was raised only once—yes, I am Filipino—and then the topic was swiftly dropped after some noises of approval. For a moment she worried that Eric might test her by conversing with her in Tagalog, but there had been none of that, not even a vernacular aside between father and son. No questions about her background, no “Do you know so-and-so?” or “Where in the Philippines, exactly?” This unspoken dance lasted . . .