She was about to go to sleep that cold November night when she felt a chill envelop her. She tried to scream, but no sound escaped her lips. She was frozen to the spot, as if she had been dumped on cold water which immediately turned into ice, trapping her inside, even before she was able to summon all her courage to try to counter the spell casted upon her. She tried to tune out of her surroundings to block the fear creeping to her mind. She saw images: memories of her family, her mother, her father, her sisters and brothers. Her younger brother, her playmate and bestfriend, with whom she shared her dreams. She tried to gather all her strength. She tried to fight. But everything she did was useless. It was inescapable.

She had first felt the presence a couple of weeks ago in their kitchen. She wasn�t able to eat breakfast and she felt her stomach complain around midmorning. She had to wait for her classes to be over and when it did, she run full speed to their house. She was rummaging their kitchen for anything to eat when she felt it.

It came like a stranger knocking at the door. The stranger felt very familiar that she opened wide the door and bid it permission to enter the house. It was handsome, the stranger, and she found herself attracted to it. Since then it became a frequent visitor. Sometimes it doesn�t even knock before entering the house. But soon the girl noticed something: every time the stranger visits her, she feels a black veil cover her heart.

The black veil becomes heavier and colder every time. It tightens around her heart until it stops beating. Fear envelops her, but at the moment she becomes sure that she�ll die, the veil disappears. The stranger will be gone too, and her heart will start pounding on her chest again.

But that night, the girl realized the visit was different from the stranger�s other visits. She realized that once her heart stop, it will never beat again.

Her body was already cold when her family found her. Nobody knew why or how the incident happened. She was simply found dead. The pain she suffered that might have caused her death was etched on her face, but the police declared that she committed suicide.

Nobody would believe it, but Marianet, a child of poverty, was actually murdered. She was a victim of a heartless and greedy aswang that lurks in the town a few kilometres away from their barrio. Nobody believes that a monster that eats people lives in the modern world. They were blinded by their awe of the great people who said that no sufficient scientific evidence proves that monsters indeed cohabitate the earth with humans. They junked claims of seeing a manananggal or kapre as coke-induced.

*The Murder, even though I would like to claim it as a true-story, is fiction, except for Marianet and the aswang (plus the fact that it eats humans alive; beware: its kits and kins are out to get us all).

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