The story
The marks of the inexplicable tend to etch themselves into memory from the tenderest years of childhood. Esteban learned this at six years old, when on a random night, upon looking out into the hallway of his house in a Colombian region, the cold stillness of the early morning was broken. Before his childhood eyes appeared an unusual figure: a man with his hair pulled back, firmly holding a tray upon which rested three glasses, as he slowly ascended the stairs. The boy was completely paralyzed, mute with an ancestral terror that froze his blood, until a desperate impulse restored his voice and he managed to let out a piercing scream that dispelled the vision, though the fear had already settled inside him forever.
Time passed, but the shadow of tragedy soon knocked on his door. One of his closest friends, consumed by despair after failing a university semester and carrying out a macabre threat he had made days before, decided to take his own life. The pain of the loss was barely beginning to settle when, exactly eight days after the event, the heavy front door of the house swung wide open with a dry screech. From then on, every night for an entire month, Esteban experienced invisible siege: he felt and saw an ethereal handkerchief spinning incessantly around his bed in the darkness. Tormented by panic, he invariably slept with all the lights on, until, at the limit of his strength, he begged the presence out loud to leave him in peace. That very night, the lightbulb blew out abruptly and, with that cold gloom, the apparitions ceased.
The phenomena, however, knew no boundaries. Years later, sleeping in separate rooms under the same roof, Esteban and his brother lived an experience as strange as it was disturbing: both had the exact same chase dream simultaneously. Waking up startled in unison, they bolted out into the hallway only to run face-to-face, terrified, searching for answers in each other's eyes.
Life later led him to the other side of the ocean, to the city of Valencia, in Spain, where he rented an old apartment charged with a dense and melancholy atmosphere. There, within those very walls, the landlady's son had died of sudden death. The first night was an unbearable ordeal for his brother, who could not fall asleep due to unexplained lights and strange phenomena roaming the room. The next day, searching through the corners, they found a forgotten ID card belonging to the deceased young man. It was at that moment that the presence made itself manifest, asking Esteban to pass on a last, urgent message to his mother: it begged her to stop crying, for only thus could his soul finally rest in peace.
