The story
Nights in the foothills of the Tolima mountain range used to be dense, wrapped in a silence barely broken by crickets and the wind whispering through the coffee plantations. In that old house, without electric light and sheltered under a wide roof of baked clay tiles, darkness took on an oppressive weight as soon as the oil lamps went out.
Lucía was only sixteen when rest turned into wakefulness. Every pre‑dawn, on the wooden beams of the roof, an ominous concert began: slow steps, heavy creaks and the harsh rustle of what seemed to be wings scraping in the gloom. Don Horacio, her grandfather, tried to brush it off with a weary gesture, blaming the racket on greedy opossums or wild cats. But Lucía knew no forest animal walked with that deliberate cadence. They weren’t feline pads; the sound was dry, sharp, like the calculated advance of iron claws across clay.
Uneasy rumors were already circulating through the region. The day laborers talked about winged shadows that prowled the trails and about peasants who woke up lying in the ditches, bruised and with a blank stare, unable to recall what—or who—had robbed them of their mind and strength. The air smelled of foreboding.
One pale‑moon night, driven by a mix of terror and stubbornness, Lucía grabbed her father's field binoculars and perched by the half‑open shutter of the window that looked out over the highest eave. The creak started, slow and resonant. With her pulse racing, the girl focused the lenses on the roof’s ridge. What she saw froze her blood: hunched against the milky sky, a monstrous figure rested. It had the lanky silhouette of a crouched woman, but its entire body was covered in black, glossy, filthy plumage. It wasn’t a bird; it was a hybrid entity, a grotesque being that flexed long fingers armed with curved claws while its head twisted in dry spasms.
Lucía swallowed a scream and backed away, unable to close her eyes for the rest of the night. At sunrise, the shared terror forced the family to act. Don Anselmo, the finca (a small country farm) steward, propped a ladder of guadua (native bamboo) against the roof and climbed up with a machete in hand to unravel the mystery.
What he found on the tiles confirmed the worst suspicions. There were no ordinary nests, but a butchery: shattered shells of tinajos (small wild birds), unrecognizable scraps and tiny skeletons of animals completely skinned with a macabre precision. Shortly after, while they were inspecting the area around the house, the men discovered among the branches of a leafy guamo (a tropical tree) something even more baffling: a gigantic egg of emerald green with a rough shell, impossible to attribute to any known species in those lands.
No one dared touch it or break it. That same noon, Lucía gathered her belongings and left the finca forever. Years passed, but the certainty remained etched in her memory: up on the heights of that house did not dwell a forest animal, but embodied evil that stalked the shadows of the Tolima countryside.
