The story
The stillness of the early morning hours in Valle del Cauca is usually wrapped in a thick, almost tangible silence. For Leonardo, a man weathered by security work, the pre-dawn hours were the heaviest part of his shift. For some time now, however, fatigue had stopped being his only worry at his workplace, a commercial establishment where the dark hallways and lonely corners seemed to take on a life of their own.
It was roughly three-thirty in the morning when Leonardo jolted awake, his breathing rapid and a strange sense of heaviness hanging in the air. As he sat up, he noticed a stinging burn on his skin. Puzzled, he turned on his flashlight and, checking himself in the mirror, discovered several red marks, very similar to hickeys, scattered inexplicably across his neck and back. There was no trace of insects or any logical explanation for those injuries.
Driven by routine, Leonardo set off on his usual rounds through the building. As he walked among the shadows, accompanied only by the beam of his flashlight, the air around him turned freezing cold. He felt, unmistakably, that someone was walking right behind him. Every step he took seemed to be echoed by stealthy footsteps stalking him from the darkness. When he passed near the cracked or torn mirrors that decorated a section of the place, he thought he briefly caught the blurry silhouette of a woman reflected right behind him, but when he spun around quickly, the hallways were completely empty.
Fear began to seep into his bones when, in the middle of that oppressive silence, an ice-cold whisper brushed directly against his ear, a whispering, incomprehensible voice that made his blood run cold. Almost instantly, an intense burning sensation scorched the skin on his neck and back once again; when he touched himself, he confirmed with horror that new marks had appeared on top of the old ones, as if that invisible presence had touched him again.
The incidents weren't limited to the marks and the whispers. A few days earlier, waking up from another exhausting shift, he had left his issued revolver loaded on the table when he fell asleep. Opening his eyes, he discovered with bewilderment that all the bullets had been removed from the cylinder and placed meticulously outside the gun, a maneuver he never would have performed while asleep and one that showed deliberate manipulation by someone or something sharing the room with him.
That silent terror wasn't entirely new to Leonardo. His mind drifted back in time, recalling the years he lived in another area of Cali. Back then, the exact same inexplicable episodes had tormented him: he would wake up repeatedly with those strange marks on his back, having no idea what was happening while he slept. He then remembered the advice a local resident had given him during those years, suggesting he place open scissors under his bed or near where he slept to ward off the heaviness and stop the trouble. Back then, unlikely as it might seem, that simple remedy had worked temporarily.
Now, in the middle of the present night, as the echo of his own footsteps rang through the commercial establishment, Leonardo understood that the shadow which had chased him since his past in Cali had caught up with him once again, waiting crouched in the darkness of the early morning.
