The story
The humid heat of the Caquetá department usually eased a bit when midnight enveloped the police post in the rural area of Florencia. That small station, built a few meters from the bank of a rushing river, looked like a safe haven amid the thick green foliage. However, for the officers on guard duty, the hours between twelve and three in the morning had become a recurring torment, especially when Tuesdays rolled around.
It all started with a dry, steady sound. Medium-sized stones, hurled with inexplicable force from the surrounding darkness, pounded relentlessly against the sides and the zinc roof of the guard booth. The officer on duty, a weathered veteran named Rodrigo, gripped his rifle with frustration while trying to peer into the blackness of the night. There were no enemy patrols in the area, nor village vandals who would dare challenge authority in that manner. The danger was of a different nature.
Upon lifting their gaze to the starry sky, which seemed to watch impassively, the agents discovered the worst. Floating at a great height, silhouetted against the glow of the stars, massive silhouettes crossed the firmament. They were birds of an absolute blackness, so huge that their wingspan blocked out the scant moonlight. But what was truly chilling wasn't their size, but their shape. On more than one occasion, when focusing his binoculars, Rodrigo clearly made out that those creatures didn't possess the sharp beak of a bird of prey, but rather the head of a person with long, straight hair floating in the night wind. Their faces were dark, indecipherable patches that exhaled a cold hostility.
Fear seeped through their pores, freezing the blood of men hardened in a thousand battles. That particular dawn, the tension reached its limit when one of the entities seemed to dive downward, brushing the treetops nearby with a heavy, silent beating of wings. Rodrigo felt the air become unbreathable, thick as river mud.
It was then that his fellow guard, a non-commissioned officer originally from the region and well-versed in old country customs, remembered an ancestral remedy. With shaking but resolute hands, he pulled out a handful of grains — lentils and rice they kept in the pantry — and began throwing them hard against the patio floor, murmuring words to the wind.
"If they're what I think, this will scare them off," the sub-officer whispered with a cracking voice.
The effect was immediate. As soon as the grain touched the damp earth, the gigantic winged shadows hovering in the sky vanished into thin air, as if they had never been there. Silence swallowed the night once again, leaving the policemen with pounding hearts and goosebumps.
The true horror, however, awaited with the sunlight. At daybreak, as the tropical heat began to dissipate the river mist, the officers went out to the patio to inspect the grounds. Among the tiles, crouched down and with meticulous patience, they found doña Rosa, the kind woman in charge of preparing their meals every day. With mechanical gestures and a disturbing calm, the cook was picking up, one by one, the grains of lentil and rice they had thrown the night before to drive away the monster. The men looked at each other in silence, understanding with a freezing shiver that the threat didn't come from outside, but had always been serving them at the table.
