The story
The night in Neiva unfolded with a thick, silent heat when Rodrigo took on his first shift as a security guard in the general consultation area of that hospital. The hours dragged on with the heaviness typical of the early morning, barely interrupted by the distant hum of the air conditioners and the warnings his shift partner had dropped on him as he walked in: that in those dark hallways, shadows sometimes came to life on their own and frightened the unwary.
It was past two-thirty in the morning when the air suddenly stretched tight. Rodrigo heard strange, metallic sounds coming from the pipes, a dull knocking that shook the oxygen and medication conduits. Trying to calm his own nerves, the rational man reasoned away the noise, thinking of a loose valve or water pressure, looking for any earthly explanation to chase away the sudden chill that crawled down his spine.
Yet the calm didn't last. He decided to do a round and headed toward the outer area, where the makeshift morgue operated, a converted shipping container fitted with refrigeration units. As he got closer, astonishment paralyzed him: a hospital orderly was pushing a stretcher toward the inside of the container. The strange part wasn't the task at that hour, but that the door had remained locked and he hadn't seen anyone open it. Rodrigo spoke to the worker, trying to find out who it was, but the orderly moved forward in absolute silence, completely ignoring his words. With a hint of annoyance, Rodrigo noted the event in his logbook and walked behind him until leaving him at the back of the enclosure.
When he turned around to head back toward the elevator area, a new encounter shook his pulse. Among the dim shadows of the hallway, an old man of about eighty, with a blank stare and a hesitant walk, was wandering aimlessly. Feeling pity and the duty to protect him, Rodrigo approached him gently.
"Grandpa, you can't be around here at this hour. Are you lost?" he asked, kindly guiding him toward a safer place before going up to the upper floor.
Already on the upper floors, he mentioned the incident to the coworker monitoring the cameras. The veteran worker looked at him seriously and suggested that this wasn't a stray patient, but rather one of the hospital's usual apparitions. Rodrigo, skeptical, brushed off the comment and preferred to chalk it up to the confusion typical of old age.
The true scale of the nightmare unleashed itself later, when duty forced him to descend back down to the morgue in the company of another stretcher and a new deceased person. Upon opening the refrigerated container to make the intake, his blood froze in his veins. Resting on the cold steel slab was the lifeless body of the very same old man he had intercepted minutes earlier, alive and disoriented, walking the hallways.
The rest of the early morning turned into an eternity. Rodrigo stayed motionless at his post, his eyes fixed on the horizon of the window, fervently praying that the first rays of the Huila sun would break the darkness and put an end to that disturbing nightmare.
