The story
The constant drizzle of Bogotá fell on the asphalt as Marcela unpacked the last of her boxes. It had been two years since she arrived in the capital looking for a fresh start, loaded with hopes and the promise of an independence earned through hard work. In the middle of that adjustment to the cold of the savanna she met Julián, a boy with an evasive look and calculated manners who soon became her boyfriend. At first everything seemed to flow with the usual warmth of budding love, but the calm soon cracked in the darkest corners of her mind.
It all began in the realm of sleep. As soon as she closed her eyes, Marcela fell into a suffocating abyss where a colossal, faceless silhouette waited for her. It had no eyes, no mouth, no nose, yet it radiated pure, palpable evil that chilled her blood. That demonic presence hovered over her night after night, giving her no respite. The nightmares became continuous, a methodical torment that stole her rest. Marcela would wake drenched in cold sweat, her heart hammering against her chest and a visceral certainty that something sinister was watching her from the corners of her room.
Exhausted from lack of sleep and feeling an inexplicable heaviness whenever she was with Julián, Marcela decided to end the relationship after barely a month and a half of dating. She naively thought that closing that door would bring back peace. However, the real nightmare was just beginning. The first night she slept completely alone in her apartment after the breakup, in the half‑awake state and the dense silence of early morning, she felt an unmistakable pressure on the mattress. It wasn’t a hallucination: invisible, icy hands began to glide over her body under the blankets, caressing her with a perverse, suffocating familiarity that left her frozen with terror.
Fifteen days after that first spectral contact, the horror crossed into the tangible. When she stepped out of her morning shower, Marcela discovered, to her horror, violet‑colored marks on her thighs and arms. They were deep bruises and thin scratches, as if made by tiny yet ruthless claws. Over the weeks the bruises multiplied and the nocturnal assaults grew bolder and crueler. Desperate, with a sore body and her sanity teetering on the abyss, she decided to show those injuries to her family.
The silence that followed her confession was tomb‑like. Her relatives, hardened by popular beliefs and Andean mysticism, didn’t hesitate a moment: the girl was being besieged by an incubo, a male night‑mare demon, an entity from the lower astral plane sent or incarnated by the devil himself. Alarmed by the severity of the harassment, they took her to the outskirts of the city to consult a chamana, a traditional healer, renowned for dealing with witchcraft and spiritual bindings.
The healer’s office smelled of rue, burnt tobacco and melted wax. The woman, with eyes as piercing as glowing coals, barely looked at Marcela before laying out the truth bluntly. She didn’t hesitate to point to the source of everything: Julián. She explained that the young man wasn’t a simple spurned suitor, but a high‑rank initiate in satanic practices, someone who had sealed a pact with the devil and possessed the ability to split himself and teleport at will to torment her. Those invisible hands that violated her at night, invading her most intimate areas and leaving scars on her skin, were the boy’s, using dark arts to exact revenge for the rejection.
To break the siege, the chamana imposed a rigorous path of faith and atonement. Marcela had to pilgrimage to seven Catholic churches in the city, pray with relentless devotion at each, and have a bottle of water blessed at every baptismal font. But the most chilling warning was still to come: the healer revealed that Julián had buried a doll stuffed with his hair and intimate clothing in the damp earth of a cemetery, binding his flesh to the shadow. To be freed completely, a family member with superior spiritual power and a clean soul had to undertake the dangerous task of exhuming and destroying that fetish.
Driven by desperation, Marcela followed every instruction to the letter. She toured colonial churches in downtown Bogotá, kneeling in solitary naves and gathering holy water with a fervor that bordered on tears. Meanwhile, her family took care of the dark assignment in the graveyard to neutralize the burial.
The remedy worked. From the night she sprinkled the consecrated water on the four corners of her bed and the walls of her bedroom, the icy presences never touched her again. The marks on her skin began to fade gradually until they disappeared and the shadows stopped shaking her sheets. Yet, although the assaults ceased, tranquility never fully returned. Today, Marcela remains trapped in a state of silent shock, watching the shadows cast by the streetlights on her window and fighting in vain to erase from her memory the certainty that evil walks among us, waiting for any lapse to slip under the blankets.
