The story
That dry, metallic echo reverberating off the zinc sheets of the old rural school seemed to come from another dimension. Esteban, with the typical rashness of his twelve years, looked up at the ceiling and let out an imprudent mockery toward the dark silhouette prowling the beams. He didn't know he was opening a door that would take years to close. From that afternoon on, the blackness stopped being just a schoolyard fear and followed him into the privacy of his bedroom, located in a lonely house on the outskirts of the town.
The nights turned into a two-year ordeal. As soon as twilight took over the house, the dull thuds would start sounding on the roof, as if someone were walking heavily looking for a crack to get through. Esteban's parents, bewildered and prey to anguish, tried to protect him by placing a heavy open Bible on the nightstand, but the ink and the sacred scriptures seemed to have no effect against the visitor's hostility. The household's religious objects would inexplicably turn up broken in the morning.
The true terror happened in the darkness of the bedroom. Every dawn, an invisible, freezing force would immobilize Esteban. Several faceless shadows would station themselves around him, gripping his limbs with a silent violence that knocked the wind out of him. The boy would wake up exhausted, with a deep sense of weakness and his body marked by grotesque purplish bruises, as if he had been brutally crucified on his own mattress by unseen hands.
The nightmare reached its breaking point on a winter night, when the cold in the room became unbearable. Amidst the paralyzing terror, the atmosphere shifted abruptly. A faint light, of an almost translucent whiteness, materialized at the edge of the bed. It was the figure of a baby with snowy skin, who completely naturally lay down on the left side of the mattress, hugging the terrified Esteban with an inexplicable tenderness.
At that instant, a wordless voice echoed directly in the boy's mind, assuring him firmly that the darkness would never hurt him again. And so it was. The shadows vanished into the corners and the thuds on the roof stopped forever. Years later, when the echo of those days seemed buried in the past and his second daughter was born, Esteban felt a familiar chill upon seeing, for a fleeting second, that same white baby silhouette watching over the newborn's sleep.
