The story
The characteristic dawn mist of the Cundiboyacense high plateau used to chill the young men doing their duty in the army straight to the bone. That time, the clock was barely marking four-thirty in the morning out in the middle of a vast rural training zone. Rodrigo, wrapped in his overcoat to ward off the intense cold, suddenly opened his eyes following a strange gut feeling and decided to look to his left, where the rest of the platoon was resting on makeshift cambuches, temporary shelters made of poles and tarps.
That was when shock froze his breath. Hovering right above the hammocks of two brothers who served in the same company stood two humanoid silhouettes of such a deep blackness that they seemed to devour the meager dawn light. They were compact, threatening masses looming over the sleeping bodies. Upon realizing they had been spotted, those dark forms turned their featureless faces to stare right at him, and in the blink of an eye, they flew off with astonishing agility into the dense brush, vanishing into the fog.
Hours later, with daylight now fully settled, the unease wouldn't leave Rodrigo alone. He decided to question the brothers separately so as not to raise suspicions among the superiors. To his amazement, both recounted the exact same nightmare: during the early morning they had felt an unbearable pressure on their chests, a sudden suffocation accompanied by the strange and disturbing sensation that someone was choking them and kissing them by force while they lay paralyzed in sleep.
Time passed between marches and field exercises, until a new event put the nerves of the troops to the test. On another patrol mission along the rugged roads of the region, night caught up with them without tents or shelter near an old municipal cemetery. There was no other choice than to improvise a place to rest by hanging their hammocks between the trees and the cemetery walls, beneath a heavy, moonless sky.
Deep into the night, the silence of the rural area was broken by strange, close-range sounds. Among the hammocks, muffled groans and murmurs could be heard, which Rodrigo at first mistook for the commotion of some fellow soldiers fooling around in the dark. Uncomfortable with the noise, he decided to get out of his hammock to put a stop to it.
The moment he put a foot on the ground and looked up, the frozen terror of the first time rushed through him all over again. The same dark, humanoid shadows were prowling among the trees of the cemetery. Upon seeing themselves discovered for a second time, the silhouettes shot off rapidly, losing themselves among the graves and abandoned crosses.
With his heart pounding a mile a minute and seeking to prove that all of this wasn't just a product of exhaustion, Rodrigo walked over to where the sergeant in charge of the patrol was sleeping. When he shone a small flashlight on him to wake him up and report what was happening, the surprise was massive: the superior officer lay fast asleep, but on his neck he displayed very clear reddish marks, unmistakable hickeys that made it obvious that that invisible darkness had been physically interacting with them.
