The story
The night in Barranquilla stretched out thick and silent, barely interrupted by the humid heat seeping through the window louvers. Inside her apartment, located in a traditional building in the Atlántico department, Mariana lay fast asleep in her bedroom. The exhaustion of the day had plunged her into a heavy sleep, completely oblivious to what was about to interrupt the calm of the early morning hours.
Suddenly, a horrible crash tore through the air. The sound, dry and violent, came directly from the living room. It sounded like the impact of something heavy, followed immediately by the harsh, metallic scraping of several chairs across the ceramic floor. The commotion was so sharp and close that the woman bolted upright in bed, trying to snap her senses back to reality. However, before she could move to turn on the light or check the source of that uproar, an invisible, heavy force descended upon her body.
A horrible, compact, and suffocating pressure settled directly onto her chest. Mariana tried to sit up, scream, or at least turn her head, but she discovered with terror that her body was not responding. An implacable paralysis had pinned her to the sheets. Her eyelids felt sealed with lead; no matter how much her mind commanded them to open to check if there was an intruder in the darkness, the inability was absolute. Her breathing turned short and desperate beneath that invisible mass oppressing her.
Fighting against the panic that threatened to overwhelm her, she concentrated every drop of her will into a single supreme effort. She forced the muscles in her face and, after a few seconds that felt like an eternity, managed to open her eyes. The room was plunged in shadows, but the immediate danger was still there, hanging in the air. Although the pressure on her chest began to dissipate slightly, the noises in the living room did not stop; the dull thudding and the sound of moving chairs continued with a chilling constancy, as if someone or something inhabited the adjoining space.
With trembling hands and her heart pounding against her ribs, Mariana groped around in the darkness until she found her headphones. She put them on immediately and tuned in to a late-night radio show that usually covered paranormal topics and urban mysteries. The voices on the other end of the line, calm and everyday, flooded her ears. That thread of human normality acted as a balm against the terror; the initial fright began to subside little by little, managing to anchor her back in reality, even while the mysterious noise kept echoing on the other side of her door.
