The story
The sharp smell of burning wood and damp earth seeped into Mateo’s life as soon as he was barely a teenager. Seeking better economic horizons, his family moved to the steep edges of a *vereda* (a rural settlement) called La Candela, a rugged, isolated corner of the corregimiento of San Antonio de Prado. The plan was to start a small family business making charcoal from wood. Those steep lands, almost permanently shrouded in a dense, icy fog that rolled down from the summit, seemed to have a temperament of their own—a hostile will that didn’t welcome outsiders.
When Mateo was eleven and twelve, he would climb that hill on foot after his soccer practices. With his cleats slung over his shoulder and his legs aching from the field, the boy felt a disturbing physical sensation as he gained altitude. His chest tightened suddenly, the hair on the back of his neck stood up, and a dry shiver ran down his spine, as if the earth itself were rejecting him and demanding he turn back toward the valley. Yet, in the light innocence of his few years, Mateo simply ignored those warning pricks, convincing himself it was only the mountain’s cutting wind.
The real horror began when he turned fifteen. One night, eager to hang out with some friends from the lower hamlet, Mateo ignored his mother’s insistent pleading. She, who knew the heavy silences of the mountain well, warned him not to stay out late, reminding him that that hill forgave no stragglers. Youthful stubbornness won out. Hours passed with laughter and chatter until night fell with its full weight. To get home, the boy had to catch a rural public transport that slowly crawled up the rocky trail and dropped him at the entrance of La Candela, completely alone in the gloom.
In front of him the horseshoe‑shaped trail opened up. The first obstacle was a rustic wooden footbridge under which a raging waterfall roared. The moment his foot touched the damp planks, the mountain’s rejection slammed into his body like a physical blow. The air grew thick, almost unbreathable, and an instinctive terror nailed his boots to the ground. Every fiber of his being begged him to turn around, but his parents’ home was up ahead, beside the charcoal ovens, and he had nowhere else to go.
He swallowed hard and kept moving. As he rounded the first bend of the steep climb toward the charcoal pit, the solitude turned into a suffocating presence. The boy, trembling from head to toe under the invisible drizzle of the páramo (high‑altitude moor), began to pray desperately. In his mind he invoked God and Jesus over and over, begging for an invisible shield of protection while his clumsy steps splashed in the mud.
He made it through that stretch and reached the second bend, where an old *marranera* (a pig farm) operated. The stench of manure and pigpen was instantly eclipsed by a bizarre phenomenon: out of nowhere, the air filled with the shrill, wailing cry of a newborn, interspersed with the metallic, repetitive chime of a house that didn’t exist. That absurd, sinister sound tore the mountain’s silence apart. A spectral cold froze his blood, and, blinded by panic, Mateo clenched his legs and ran uphill for about twenty meters without daring to look back.
With his heart hammering against his throat, he arrived at the third bend. There the darkness was absolute. The night sky was completely closed, not a single moonbeam to guide his steps, and visibility vanished entirely after barely thirty or forty meters. In the midst of that abyssal blackness, the trail seemed to freeze.
Then it emerged from the gloom. It was a dog of colossal proportions, a monstrous beast two to three meters tall that planted itself firmly in the middle of the road, blocking his way. The creature didn’t belong to this world: its open jaws spat out blasts of living fire that lit the stones beneath, and its front paws bore sharp, threatening claws capable of tearing a man apart with a single swipe.
Mateo felt his life slipping out through his eyes. Unable to run, he understood he was lost unless he turned to his faith. With the little voice he had left, broken by tears and terror, he began to cry out to the four winds: “In the name of Jesus there is power! There is power in his name!” He uttered the phrase once and the beast roared with the crackle of embers. He shouted it a second time, fists clenched, eyes streaming. On the third consecutive invocation, the phenomenon yielded in an inconceivable way: the massive flaming creature shrank upon itself with a dull creak, turning into a tiny, harmless puppy that trotted calmly into the brush and vanished around the bend.
Exhausted and with legs feeling like rags, Mateo made it to the charcoal pit that night, knowing the mountain kept abominable secrets. Yet the earth still held more macabre visions for him. Some time later, on December 31, around eleven‑thirty at night, the young man stayed alone watching the firewood and the smoking pits while his parents went down to visit relatives for the year‑end holidays.
The night seemed strangely still until a freezing gust shook the trees. Suddenly, moving at a dizzying speed like the violent stroke of a lightning bolt, Mateo saw with horror a group of eight wandering souls sprinting wildly, a coffin slung over their shoulders. They were spectral silhouettes that didn’t touch the mud, advancing with a silent fury that chilled the bones.
The boy reacted on pure survival instinct: he threw himself onto a rotten log, stayed completely still, and turned off his flashlight so as not to draw the attention of that funeral procession from beyond. As soon as the procession disappeared into the thicket, a coppery glow stained the ridge of the mountain. From the peak of Las Tres Cruces, a gigantic fireball rolled down the slope at high speed, leaping over ravines and scorching the air in its wake before vanishing into the deep shadows of the valley.
That final vision filled the cup of what could be tolerated. The mountains of La Candela were not made for the living, but ruled by ancient, malevolent forces that claimed dominion over the trail. In 2017, tormented by the indelible memories of the infernal dog, the cries at the pig farm, and the coffin carried by swift spirits, Mateo packed his few belongings and left the *vereda* for good, seeking refuge in the cement of the city and swearing never to set foot on that cursed hill again.
