The story
Night in the department of Atlántico was falling with a thick, muggy heat that slipped through the cracks of the clinic in Barranquilla. The early morning hours turned the medical center into a silent maze, where the flickering of the fluorescent lights competed with the distant hum of the life support equipment. Esteban, a laboratory assistant, was walking in a hurry down the hallways because of an outside emergency that required his immediate attention.
As he walked past the second floor, near the waiting room that led to the operating theaters, a freezing sound cut off his breath. It was a deep lament, a prolonged and heartbreaking wail that seemed to drag itself along the walls and slowly move away. Esteban stopped dead in his tracks. The entire floor was plunged into a sepulchral darkness; the windows remained tightly shut and there was not a living soul in sight. The echo of that crying seemed to multiply, ringing out with more force and lingering in the stale air. For a second, Esteban's mind went blank, thinking that perhaps it was the recent passing of some patient forgotten by the staff.
With his heart pounding in his chest, he hurried down toward the Intensive Care Unit on the first floor. When he got there, he found the nurses on duty chatting with apparent calm. After asking them urgently, they shook their heads: no patient had died and the night was passing without any critical news. Relieved but unnerved, Esteban looked for the night watchman to report the strange event. He found the man curled up and pale inside his booth, trembling with fear. The watchman confessed to him that shortly before, he had seen two nurses head down toward the dark basement, immediately followed by hurried footsteps running aimlessly through the empty hallways.
Minutes later, the tension in the atmosphere increased when LucĂa, Esteban's wife who also worked the night shift, looked through the large windows of the main wing. A tall figure, covered from head to toe with a hood of a black so dense it seemed to devour the surrounding light, was moving with an otherworldly grace. Shortly after that sighting, the wail of an ambulance broke the outside calm and a female patient was admitted to the emergency room in a state so critical that the doctors couldn't save her life; her heart stopped inexorably.
The early morning hours were ticking away and the atmosphere was turning more and more unbreathable. LucĂa spotted the same dark silhouette once again, lurking and hiding stealthily behind the doorway of a side hallway. Intrigued and with a cold chill sinking into her bones, she managed to intercept one of the watchmen patrolling the area. With a broken voice, she asked him if any of the employees was wearing a jacket or coat with those characteristics. The man looked at her strangely and shook his head flatly, assuring her that no one dressed that way. In the hallways of that hospital, death didn't just prowl around in silence, it had a tangible presence that no one dared to challenge.
