Excerpts from Prologue 1 of "Parman"

Eric Ramirez holds his bright, shining future in his hand. In a perfume bottle, actually.

Estee-Lauder, he thinks. Or something like that.

It isn’t perfume in it now, of course. Not anymore. The liquid that’s in it is primordial. Seething with divine, miraculous power. Eric had seen what it could do.

He’d needed a demonstration, naturally. He wasn’t about to spend every single peso in his bank account (as well as every single dollar he’d stolen from work) on a few ounces of tap water in a used perfume bottle.

So he’d watched as the old man had taken the cat’s corpse, crawling with maggots and putrefaction, and flicked a single drop of the water on it.

It twitched.

Then it stood up, its head lolling. It was effectively blind, all that was left of its eyes leaking out of its sockets in a runny torrent. It was trying to meow, its legs shaky, in danger of collapse. It was making a strangled, liquid noise in the remains of its throat, a wave of maggots surging out of its mouth in a white, festering tide.

Eric was blinking madly, nodding his head, Yes. Enough. You’ve made your point.

And without a word, the old man raised the rusty shovel, and brought it down on the cat’s lolling, idiot head.

When the man in black smiles, Eric knows it is far too late.

“Our shadows have lives of their own. Did you know that?”

Eric begins to shiver.

“You dabble in the occult. Surely you know that many cultures, including some tribes in our archipelago, believe that a man has more than one soul.”

It is a shaking that borders on the violent, on a frenzy whose source, whose origin, is quite unknown to him.

“The soul that finds its shape and form in a man’s shadow is the most… unstable, the most volatile, of a man’s souls.”

Eric feels a tearing, as if his skin were being flayed from his body, and he screams, a long, drawn-out wail of agony.

Dimly, he realizes he is on the street, and the man in black towers over him, as does another man, a man too dark and hazy to look at, as if he has no features to boast of, though somehow, Eric senses something familiar about this man.

“Happy is he who speaks the tongue of shadows, for he can have an army at his beck and call.”

The man in black bends down, and reaches into Eric’s pocket. Feebly, Eric tries to stop him, but the other one—the dark man—takes hold of Eric’s wrist, and his grip is ice, is frost, and darkness, and Eric whines.

* * * * * * * *

PARMAN cover by Oliver Pulumbarit

PARMAN, CRAVING, and TAKOD are now available in Powerbooks. (Php120 each)

Find them in the Filipinina section of the store. You can also ask the people at the Customer Service Desk to help you look for them.