The story
Mateo's devotion had always had an unsettling edge, but that afternoon in Bogotá he crossed a threshold from which there was no return. While they were trying to work out a melody on the guitar, a heavy silence fell over the room. Julián watched his friend set the instrument down and, his gaze fixed on an empty corner, begin to scratch furiously in a notebook. He didn't blink. With tight, jagged strokes and a handwriting that wasn't his, he filled whole pages with the same insane warning: “The closer you get to the light, the hungrier the adversary that comes to hunt you.” When Mateo came to himself, he was shaking as if an icy wind had pierced his bones.
A short while later they set off on a night drive down a secondary road hemmed in by the dense fog of the hills. The wet asphalt barely glimmered under the car's headlights and the páramo (high‑altitude moorland) air seeped through the cracks, bringing a scent of damp earth and something stale, almost vegetal. Suddenly a dark silhouette shot across the road at full speed. The impact was dry and violent, shaking the shock absorbers with a crack like broken bones. In the rear‑view mirror, just a few meters behind, lay the limp lump of what looked like a big dog.
Julián reached for the door handle to get out, but Mateo grabbed his jacket with a desperate grip. His eyes were bulging and his skin was ashen. “Don’t get out, Julián! For all you love, don’t open that door!” he pleaded, his voice cracked with panic. Julián, assuming the reaction was just the shock of the crash, let go and stepped down into the gloom.
The night’s cold bit his face as he moved toward the middle of the road. But when he focused, the silhouette no longer had fur or legs. Lying on the pavement was a naked woman, twisted at impossible angles, her spine arched in a way that defied any human anatomy. Thick, matted black hair covered her face, but when the head slowly turned toward him, revealing milky eyes and a crooked grin, the breath left his lungs. A crushing vertigo clouded his vision and he fell to his knees, on the brink of fainting.
Before the creature could fully rise, Mateo sprinted to him, yanked him by the collar of his shirt and shoved him into the car. “I told you it wasn’t an animal! It’s not a person, they’re after me!” Mateo shouted as he floored the accelerator, making the tires scream. Julián vomited onto the passenger seat, terrified by the sound of uneven footsteps that seemed to chase them a few meters through the fog.
That night their friendship shattered forever. Unable to process the horror and gnawed by fear of the sickening atmosphere that surrounded Mateo, Julián cut off all contact. Six months passed in a tense silence until the inevitable news arrived: Mateo had taken his own life in his apartment. On the dining‑room table, police found a final note written in the same violent, jagged handwriting from that musical afternoon: “I can’t run any longer. They broke the door and they’re claiming what’s theirs.”
