The story
Midnight on that finca, a small country farm, used to be an exercise in patience and silence. Rodrigo, with the weight of the hours on his shoulders, took his post in the open-air guard shack, a fragile shelter surrounded by the impenetrable blackness of the Colombian countryside. The early morning chill slowly descended, barely softened by the constant, distant murmur of the communication radio, through which he listened to the routine reports from his partners stationed at other points around the perimeter. It was a false sense of companionship that broke sharply when the air seemed to turn heavy, thick as a freezing syrup.
In front of the structure, silhouetted against the pale moonlight, a figure emerged. It was a woman wrapped in garments of a white so crisp it hurt the eyes, with a head of black, wavy, shining hair cascading down her back. Rodrigo tried to sit up, reach for his flashlight, or grab the shotgun resting beside him, but his body betrayed him. An implacable paralysis took over every muscle; his limbs refused to obey, turning him into a captive spectator of his own terror while the ticking of his inner clock seemed to stop.
The entity advanced without haste, floating rather than walking over the dew-damp grass. With macabre naturalness, she moved into the shack and settled directly onto Rodrigo's legs. The weight was strangely cold, as if he were carrying blocks of ice. The guard, his eyes wide open with despair, felt ethereal hands take his own. An excessively long, wet, and rough tongue began to lick his fingers and palms in a grotesque ritual. In the distance, over the radio, a partner's voice was still transmitting reports of normality, an absurd echo of an everyday world that no longer seemed to belong to him.
In a deliberate movement, the apparition crossed his hands over his chest, simulating a funeral prayer posture. Feeling on the edge of the abyss and with his heart hammering frantically against his ribs, Rodrigo squeezed his eyes shut and began to beg in silence, holding on to any prayer his frightened memory could conjure.
A flash of vertigo enveloped him. When he dared to open his eyes again, the suffocating heat and the dimness of the shack were gone. He was sitting in his same chair, but the surroundings were completely different: he was fifty meters away, beneath the leafy canopy of an old avocado tree that cast long, grotesque shadows on the ground. The silence around him was absolute, broken only by his own ragged breathing.
With his strength recovered by a rush of adrenaline, Rodrigo grabbed the radio and called his closest partner and the supervisor. His voice trembled, broken by the unspeakable experience. After stammering out what had happened, he made his stance clear with a terror that still froze his blood: he flatly refused to ever set foot in that cursed shack again, where the night stopped being just darkness to become a perpetual nightmare.
