The story
Darío kept in his memory the dense shadows of El Palmar, a rural settlement tucked into the mountain foothills before reaching Dagua, in Valle del Cauca. During a time in his youth, he stayed to sleep at the finca, a small country farm, of a relative, a silent corner guarded by coffee plantations and banana groves. Among the peasants, people spoke with uneasy whispers about an elderly neighbor whom everyone accused of practicing witchcraft. On a random night, shortly before that woman's passing, Darío peered out the window and spotted a strange floating light in the exterior gloom. At that precise moment, the house's electrical supply failed, plunging him into impenetrable darkness.
The true confirmation of terror came on the day the supposed witch breathed her last. Without the slightest breeze blowing in the stifling countryside heat, the trees on the property and the extensive banana crops began to shake with overwhelming violence. The branches and leaves thrashed against each other with a frantic fury, cracking without any logical explanation while those present watched the shaking with their hearts in their throats.
Years later, fate led Darío to live in a rooming house in the Venezuelan city of San Cristóbal. The shadows, however, were not left behind. In the hallways of that building, he began to experience a piercing cold on the back of his neck, his hair standing on end, and the overwhelming certainty of being watched by an invisible presence that seemed to stalk him from the emptiness.
Overwhelmed by anguish, he told what had happened to a local neighbor. The woman, hardened in popular lore, gave him a blunt instruction: the next time he felt the stalking, he had to insult the entity with the worst curse words and finish the challenge by telling it to show up the following noon to ask for salt. Darío swallowed hard and carried out the ritual with fierce spite.
The next at noon, the echo of heavy footsteps interrupted the calm of the rooming house. A heavy, dark-skinned, very tall woman dressed in a long skirt that dragged on the dust climbed the spiral staircase with deliberate slowness. Upon reaching the upper landing, she fixed her wide, bulging eyes directly at Darío, holding his gaze with a silent defiance, and then headed toward a nearby room pretending to look for a place to rent.
Panic took over the young man, but the need to defend himself was greater. With his body shaken by trembling, he crossed himself with fervor, began to recite the Lord's Prayer out loud, threw a handful of salt at the visitor, and furiously condemned her to the fires of hell. The woman, visibly altered and with a distorted countenance, turned around and left the place in a hurried step.
That territory held other mysteries that defied reason. On another occasion, right around midnight near the bank of a river, Darío spotted a hen with small black and white spots walking accompanied by several chicks chirping in the shadow. The locals soon confirmed to him with sternness that this sight was not an ordinary animal, but another witch who adopted that form to prowl in the river solitude.
The final harassment occurred when Darío was working building the walls of a house. Out of nowhere, he began to feel constant little stones falling onto his back and head; however, when he looked up, no projectile could be seen falling through the air, and when he checked the ground, he never found a single stone, as if those attacks were springing from an invisible dimension determined to remind him of his fragility.
