Shadows

By Mikel Atz

This time the plot shifts to the millenary Castile and a town that was a meeting place for witches and Templar knights. Enriquito, our protagonist, is sent to his aunt and uncle's house by Auxilio Social, after his parents died in Madrid in a bombing. There he spends his days running around with his new friends from the village, especially Cipri, and seeing shadows and ghosts in the old family house. One of these 'ghosts' is his uncle Paulino who, as things stand, prefers to play dead. The mean counterpoint is provided by Don Pascual, the village priest, a hardcore Falangist, who denounces his neighbors as reds and is a miserable person. Until the Templar knight, one of the shadows, decides to take revenge. Castilian Gothic takes on a new meaning with this title by Mikel Atz.
If you loved the atmosphere in the film 'Pan's labyrinth' by Guillermo del Toro, if you want to know how people lived in the postwar years in deep Spain, if you'd like to confront harsh reality with magic and local legends, don't look any further: this is your story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Pallol
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215858516

Mikel Atz

Este escritor de nuestra colección es, ante todo, un chicarrón del norte que envuelve su ficción en la bruma y las leyendas de ese mítico territorio. Igual nos traslada a Euskadi que a Asturias que a Galicia que al norte más remoto de Castilla. Su nombre, de hecho, viene de Mikelatz, uno de los dos hijos de los dioses vascos Sugaar y Mari. Su nombre es de por sí evocador, pero no hay nada más evocador que su prosa.

Book preview

Mikel Atz

© iPulp Series

All rights reserved

Translator: Karen Gutierrez

B etween childhood, boyhood, adolescence and manhood (maturity), there should be sharp lines drawn with tests, deaths, feats, rites, stories, songs, and judgements.

Jim Morrison, The Doors.

Dress warmly because it's colder where you're going.

Doña Amparo pulled his cap down tight, put his scarf back on and adjusted his coat. Enriquito looked around to say goodbye to his neighborhood and the city. He was leaving for the north of the north, to a remote part of Old Castile. Quintanilla del Castillo was the name of the town, and it was up there, in the province of Burgos, Soria or Palencia, he wasn't sure. His aunt Carmela lived there. He was accompanied by one of his cousins, of legal age, so that Enriquito would not travel alone. They went together by train to Miranda de Ebro, from there by bus to the town.

We are in the middle of the post−war period: 1941.

The Nazi troops seem unstoppable in Europe.

Enriquito is the son of a married couple killed in a bombing of Madrid.

Auxilio Social is sending him to his aunt Carmela, who had recently been widowed by her husband, uncle Paulino. His aunt lived in an imposing mansion that she had inherited, next to some farmland, since his older brother had died in Cuba of a fever while he was a soldier, and the little boy was taken away by pneumonia at a very young age. She married when she was very old; she was going to be a spinster. Her uncle Paulino, may he rest in peace, had been quite a character: notorious freethinker, avowed atheist, and convinced republican, of Azaña's kind. Theirs had been a late but happy marriage, well−matched despite their differences, but childless. Enriquito came to make up for that. While his aunt went out to greet him and bid farewell to his cousin, who was on his way back to Madrid, Enriquito dedicated himself to observing his aunt. She was an island of flesh. Enriquito thought of the uproar she would have raised in the streets of Madrid a few years ago, besieged and starving. Either she would have been eaten alive like a mere snack, or she would have been stoned for being a hoarding sow. Then he looked at the garden around the house. It was neglected. Here and there some fruit trees − walnut trees, almond trees, apple trees and a majestic fig tree − still bore fruit; there were other trees in the garden: a chestnut tree and a couple of ash trees, their rough bark dotted with the copper−colored crusts of the tinder fungus. There was also an iron pergola in which an exuberant vine was entangled, loaded in autumn with bunches of grapes like fleshy marbles.

The house was too big for his aunt alone, Enriquito thought as soon as he saw it. But she lived with Tomasa, who was her maid and kept her company. Tomasa was only a few years older than Enriquito and was from the next village, which had a reputation for being very rough. The young maid was very outspoken and brash.

As soon as she sees him, she tells him:

Well, you're a proper gift of meat. What rickety legs you have, you look like Popeye's girlfriend.

His aunt, all in black, sighs and says:

You look so skinny, son.

In Madrid we go very hungry, aunt, argues Enriquito.

"Thank God you're no longer with those reds. Oh, your uncle, what a bad side he chose!"

And she crossed himself. Then she said.

Come on in, don't stay out there.

Before showing him what was to be his room, they went to the kitchen.

Tomasa told him:

"Don’t say, you’re