The story
Marcos never forgot his uncle Efraín’s warnings about the mud of Boyacá. In the early nineties, near Ventaquemada, Don Efraín had overseen the subdividing of a cheap plot of land to build the first houses of a neighborhood that grew in a rush. Only the oldest residents knew that beneath the foundations slept the forgotten bones of an old cemetery. In those rustic brick homes, the night was never peaceful: sharp blows shook the doors at dawn with nobody on the other side, and smoke-thin silhouettes glided right along the walls. Marcos grew up hearing about these spooks as dinner-table stories, until the highway made him pay for the audacity of defying the dead hours.
It was past two in the morning when the freezing paramo, the high-altitude, treeless moorland wind began to slip mercilessly through his clothes. Marcos was riding his motorcycle down a semi-urban road on the outskirts, wrapped in a dense fog that barely let the flickering light of his headlight through. The solitude was absolute, watched over by an endless row of giant pine and eucalyptus trees standing on both sides of the road. Suddenly, as he entered the darkest stretch, the engine coughed dryly. The spark died without warning and the momentum of the machine faded away until it ground to a dead standstill.
The young man got off in a hurry, kicking the kick starter persistently while the vapor of his ragged breathing clouded his helmet visor. The silence of the paramo was so thick it hummed in his ears. In the middle of that quietness broken only by his own desperate attempts, a loud crack ripped through the heights. It wasn't the usual rustle of the wind through the leaves; it sounded like the massive weight of a body falling onto wood.
Marcos instinctively looked up toward the treetops. Through the gloom and the mist, he made out a dark silhouette, far too dense to be an ordinary shadow and shaped like a hunchbacked man. Before he could process what he was seeing, the figure made a prodigious leap, arching through the empty air to land on the neighboring treetop with inhuman agility. The branches cracked beneath its landing and, almost immediately, the entity lunged forward again toward the next tree, shortening the distance between it and the motorcycle.
Terror paralyzed the young man’s muscles, leaving a bitter, dry taste in his mouth. That presence wasn't crawling: it was leaping from treetop to treetop with a deliberate purpose, setting its trajectory directly toward the spot where he stood frozen. The air around him turned freezing cold, filled with a stench of damp earth and rotting wood.
With a final burst of lucidity, Marcos threw all his weight onto the kick starter. The engine roared with a wild bellow just as the shadow reached the branches hanging directly over his head. Without looking back or waiting for the silhouette to drop onto the asphalt, he threw it into first gear and tore off wildly through the fog, feeling on the back of his neck the icy wind of something that watched him escape.
