The Twilight Region

The Twilight Region is a collection of stories that will shake the cultural edifice of your mind. Written by established writer Carlos B. Camacho, some of them are thrillers; the others are psychological, horror, science fiction, historical and philosophical stories but all of them are gripping and spellbinding: '....He drove a short distance and stopped at the entrance of the old sugar mill. He got out and pushed opened the heavy front gate. Seizing his arms, he pulled the gardener out of the car. Then he dragged him all the way up through the tall grass to the monolith in the back yard, breathing loudly and stopping here and there for a rest. When he finally got the rhomboid monolith, Mathias slightly opened his eyes and mumbled something.Benjamin hurried up. Leaning over and setting one foot forward on the sacrificial stone bed that lay below the monolith, he grabbed the gardener's arm and leg. Then he tugged his body with all his strength onto its hard surface. With the rocky sharp edge rubbing and hurting his back, the gardener fully woke up, opening wide his eyes. However, before the gardener had time to rise, Benjamin moved quickly and managed to put the shackles on his wrists and ankles on time. Mathias tried to sit up, but he could only raise his torso a few inches then fell back on the hard bed."What am I doing here?" the gardener asked, looking anguishedly into Benjamin's eye."I'm sorry Mathias. You've been chosen to be the offering to my friend, the Devil," Benjamin said, chuckling, feeling pathological elated."Let me go!" the gardener yelled at him, pulling and jerking on the shackles chains. Benjamin went back to the mansion. Despite his elation for his future business prospects, he felt a sudden pang of guilt as he ate his dinner. Lying in some deep corner of his heart, his empathy with human beings was still alive. Outside the full moon was climbing up across the starry night sky. When it had almost reached the zenith, at around 11:50 at night, Benjamin had already turned in. However he could not go to sleep. He just tossed and turned, thinking about the fate of Mathias, whose voice echoed in his mind, imploring him to take the shackles off and let him go. However, all of the sudden, his greed spread out across his heart like a dark, soft velvet, as if it had been cast by Evil himself, overriding his feelings of guilt.Outside, the bright full moon cast melancholy silver light on the rolling landscape. Exactly at midnight, as Benjamin was about to fall asleep, horrific, loud howls ripped through the night air. They were not the kind of howls usually emitted by wolves or coyotes, but they seemed to come from the throat of some uncanny, beastly creature just out of hell...', excerpt from 'The Contract'. '....As the black clouds came over and cloaked the morning sun, it suddenly dawned on me that I had read a piece of foreboding information the week before. I could not remember exactly what type of information it was, but I had the feeling it was certainly ominous. My head hurt when I tried to remember the details. Then, with a sense of impending evil, I did as the voice had said. I filled my backpack with food and cartridges and took my old, Ithaca 37, 12-gauge shotgun that I kept in the closet. As I came out onto the front porch, strange lightning broke loose from the black clouds above and hit the distant ground. They were not ordinary, jagged bolts of lightning that we usually see streaking across the sky during a summer storm but smooth, tubular ones, like beams of violet light vertically projecting to earth...', excerpt from 'The Voice'.