The story
Julián’s memory isn’t a file of peaceful recollections; it’s a map of terrors that have shaped his life since he was a teenager. It all began in the alleys of Siloé, back when the world still felt like something a fourteen-year-old’s curiosity could conquer. That night, the air felt heavy, thick with a humidity that had no business being there that time of year.
He and four of his friends had gathered at his father's old house. The plan was simple, the kind of reckless stunt only teenagers pull: summon something that didn't belong to this realm. On a worn wooden table, they drew a five-pointed star on a sheet of paper and placed a silver ring right in the center, an anchor for the unknown. They traced a circle of salt around the table and, fingers brushing the cold metal, whispered words they didn’t fully understand. They wanted to feel the power of the unseen.
But the void didn't answer with silence—it answered with violence. While the other boys sat in a trance of anticipation, Julián felt the floor vibrate beneath him. Suddenly, a harrowing sound began seeping through the walls: the sound of something heavy being dragged, like a sack of raw meat, followed by dull, rhythmic thuds against the wall. His friends, however, heard nothing; to them, the silence was total. Panic seized Julián as an invisible force blocked their escape, as though the air itself had turned solid, trapping them inside that ring of salt.
After what felt like hours of agony, the pressure finally broke. They managed to close the portal, catch their breath, and bolt from the house, shivering beneath the moonlight. Reality didn't take long to hit them. The next day, a neighbor from down the street, her face twisted in horror, told them that in the house next door, a young girl had been murdered that very night. Her body had been dumped into a nearby river. The terror of the coincidence struck them completely speechless.
Driven by an almost pathological need to understand what he had witnessed, Julián checked his old Sony Ericsson phone for the recording he had made during the ritual. Playing it back alone in his room, his heart stopped. The audio captured not just his friends' silence, but the bloodcurdling screams of a little girl, the heavy thuds against the wall, and a spectral, ancient voice carrying a warning that froze his blood: "Don't you ever play with this again."
His father's house was never the same. For weeks, the atmosphere remained hostile. The curtains would violently jerk open on their own, and one morning, Julián found the dining table completely flipped upside down, legs in the air, yet with the eerie, unsettling perfection of every single object on it remaining untouched, as if gravity had briefly taken a break.
Years passed, but the past refused to stay behind. Life took him to Popayán, where he thought he had left the darkness of Siloé for good. But fate has a strange way of reminding us how vulnerable we are. One night around two in the morning, Julián was riding his motorcycle down a deserted road. As he crossed a small bridge over a creek, his headlights caught something impossible: a black trash bag was drifting across the open space beneath the bridge, floating not above the guardrails, but gliding through midair below road level, as though swept along by an invisible current beneath the water. He braked to a dead stop, his engine idling in the dead of night, and by the time he finally made it home, his lips were purple—not from the chill, but from the electric shock of pure terror.
The encounters became an everyday occurrence, almost routine. One morning at eight o’clock, just as the sunlight was beginning to wash away the shadows, Julián saw his three-year-old son standing behind the bedroom door, staring at him with a blank, hollow look. He rushed toward him, but when he swung the door open, he found only an empty hallway. From the bed, his wife confirmed in a sleepy voice that the boy was still fast asleep right beside her.
Another time, while walking through an unfinished section of the house that was still bare concrete and exposed brick, he saw a figure dressed in white standing still in the doorway of a frame that had no glass. It was a motionless silhouette, a patch of light in the dimness that vanished the second he stepped closer to check.
The house seemed to have been claimed by other tenants. In a neighborhood where locals whispered about a duende, a small goblin-like creature from folklore that prowled the area, Julián began hearing children's laughter echoing out of nowhere and the sharp clatter of glass marbles dropping rhythmically onto the rooftop terrace at midnight.
Yet the most visceral encounter came on a night of unnatural cold. The air grew dense, almost solid. The family dogs, which usually barked at any shadow, let out whimpers of sheer desperation and froze in place, petrified, staring fixatedly at an empty spot in the dark. Then came the footsteps. Heavy, loud, stalking across the roof of the house with deliberate purpose. Between one and two in the morning, the corrugated zinc roof of his dog's shelter began to rattle and clang with metallic strikes.
His heart pounding against his ribs, Julián tried to see what it was. On top of the dog shelter, he made out a bizarre shape: an oval mass, about a foot and a half long, that seemed to pulse with a wicked life of its own. When he tried to snap a picture with his phone, the device started glitching erratically; the screen flickered, the buttons wouldn’t respond, and the system seemed to crash under the presence’s influence.
Right then, a physical sensation washed over him. It wasn't just fear; it was a violent biological reaction. The hair on his skin bristled with such intensity it felt like his flesh was peeling away from the muscle. The temperature plummeted until his breath fogged in the air. Through the haze of his own terror, the shape seemed to morph into something monstrous, an entity that defied all visual logic. He was gripped by such sheer panic that his hands refused to cooperate; he tried to pull back the curtain to get a clearer view, but the violent shivering tearing through his body stopped him cold.
In desperation, he reached for help the only way he could: he called his brother-in-law, who lived right across the street. The man looked out his window, searching for any sign of what Julián was describing in a breathless, trembling voice. But outside, the Popayán night was a blanket of utter darkness. There was nothing—no shadows, no shapes, no sounds. Just the silence of a night that was completely ordinary to the rest of the world, but to Julián, was the battleground of an invisible war he would never finish fighting.
