The Sanatorium of Murcia

by Claudio Hernández

  The position of the wheelchair was not the same from the moment he had entered that strange museum of forgotten pieces until he stopped to observe it.

  The rat came out of the hole screaming and was quickly lost by the gadgets that it had. in the floor.

  Wheels, lamps, urinals and bottles, many bottles. They were not beer precisely. Then he notices how he started to sweat more. The sweat was born on the scalp, it flooded on the forehead and approached the bushy eyebrows.

  While listening to the crying of the wind as it brushed against the window and what it supposed were the eaves in the center, far from the west and east wings, something strange happened with the wheelchair.

  It was as if someone had sat on it.

  The almost red upholstery, was sunken, drawing two slits the size of an ass.

  While listening to the crying of the wind as it brushed against the window and what it supposed were the eaves in the center, far from the west and east wings, something strange happened with the wheelchair.

  It was as if someone had sat on it.

  The almost red upholstery, was sunken, drawing two grooves the size of an ass.

  Riley was bewildered and did not believe that everything that was happening to him was real.

  The madman was in the hall, with his crossbow. He had not seen it, but he supposed it.

  So, who was sitting in the wheelchair?

  - "It cannot be," -he panted, knowing he would soon panic if what he saw was real.

  The chair turned a quarter of a turn, and the cobwebs extinguished to pieces, like a broken dress.

  His heart was now accelerated. After the calm comes to the storm, he thought, but in his case, there was a storm beforehand. His head was now chaos, and his verbal diarrhoea had disappeared, as well as his mental brilliance. Now he was shaking like a little bird. With Gianna's face in mind.

  The chair was moved again and sitting there was a shape that seemed human, but it was visually transparent and with opaque shades. He could distinguish some legs, some arms supported on the arms rest and a glassy torso in the light of the moon that drew a head of a woman with long hair. Like Gianna. It reminded him of Gianna because he was beginning to see long golden hair.

  The glass of the window was fogged, as if someone breathed there, supported. And an invisible finger began to write a single word in the mist; Help.

  -"It cannot be," -he whispered as if he were playing a horror movie. His features turned white and his breathing began to accelerate. His lungs looked like two bellows blowing incandescent iron to cool it down. Each of the syllables of that word had been written slowly. But there was no one there, except the spectrum.

  Leprosy and tuberculosis patients. They went to the Sanatorium to remedy these two diseases, he recalled at a very inopportune moment. The human form became more solid and was no longer a silhouette drawn in the air as taken as a canvas.

  How naïve to think of those patients in a moment like this, right?

  You left me.

  The voice bounce like an expansive wave in the attic, moving even the fragile cobwebs. A buzzing went through both eardrums until it reached the center of the brain through nerves. That voice was, a voice that had sounded loud and clear. But it reminded him of his beloved, because it was Gianna’s voice.

  - “Honey are you there?” –his sweaty forehead marked the beginning of a face wrapped in madness. The wheelchair began to move again to the other side while what seemed like legs were formed under a white skirt made of dotted. A tedious job he thought and once again he committed an attack against the difficult situation he was experiencing.

  The appearance of Gianna.

  A white blouse was now displayed on the top of the wheelchair. As balloons, two big tits got swollen and trapped under the corset. The sleeves of the blouse that ended in a thread embroidery did not dare to go beyond the wrist, leaving the long and pink hands uncovered. The fingers were at the edge of the support and hung inert in the air. The long nails transmitted a libido sensation. He was perplexed that this was so.

  The hair was thicker now, blond, almost the platinum color even. Her face was covered by her hair as if she had stretched her hair with a quills brush. I hardly noticed a fleshy lip in a half-open mouth. About the eyes, forget it!

  Riley, felt he would panic shortly. Fear is the deadliest weapon for animals and humans, he recalled. Once again, he deviated from the attention given to what he was witnessing, still, immobile, but with his feet trembling and his teeth clashing with each other until he bit his tongue.

  - "Sweetie?"

  But no voice answered him now, nor before. He had only heard what so many times everyone had already heard, that fucking night. He thought someone wanted to drive them crazy. Well, but how the hell could you explain the appearance of that body in the wheelchair?

  He told himself that the delirium produced by stress, shaking his head, as if life depended on it. He was sure. It was delirium. Soon he would come back to his sense because Kevin or Chase would smack him. A big smack that would turn his neck to the back. And then he would open his eyes, and none of it would be happening. A fucking insect, that was the cause of the fever, he kept thinking. That's it! A fucking insect.

  But the fact is that in the attic room it was cold. An intense cold close to the ice. He could see his breathing turned into little clouds that dissipated in the air, like the rings of cigarette smoke and for the first time in his life, he wishes that the fumes were from a cigarette getting out from his mouth.

  But it was the fucking cold.

  Then she was entirely formed. Still. Sitting in the wheelchair. The hair was covering her face. Sparkly. Gianna had returned.

  His heart had begun to gallop like a horse and would soon run like the pistons of a racing car. The light of the moon seemed to gain intensity. He had the flashlight in his hand and in all this time he had not turned it on. He had just forgotten that in his stiffed hand he held the lantern. What a fool, he thought. Now would be the time to turn it on, but it did not.

  He did not need it.

  The flashlight escaped from his stiff fingers.

  It hit the ground and shattered, as if it had been hit hard. The plastic on one side, the reflective oval on the other, the LEDs on the left and the batteries almost under a small table with two drawers that were on its side, where on top, rested a blackened teddy bear, with its eyes like buttons on a raincoat.

  He turned his neck to look at that body. That of his beloved Gianna. That I was looking at him through the dense hair like she was doing, after finishing making love. She always put her hair in front of her eyes and approached his mouth. Now she had adopted the same form.

  So, she is not dead?

  Everything has been a bad dream.

  She is alive.

  But Riley's eyes widened as she shook her head to the side and her hair let her long-lashed green eyes glimpse. The upturned nose and fleshy mouth half open, revealing a pink tongue, wet and caressing her teeth perfectly aligned and white.

  Even though his heart was already at the speed of the roar of a racing motorcycle, he thought maybe he would not panic, because of a fucking bug ...

  She slowly moved her head to the right, as if thousands of slides were projected onto a whitish wall. Riley's heart was about to reach the maximum speed of a racing car. His sweaty forehead was now thousands of pores dripping steam. His eyes, glazed, were reddening at times and his teeth were clenched.

  Her face showed the front profile, her hair almost completely covered her face, but she thought that her eyes had turned dark, sinister, that all the skin was the same. But that was a vague idea of ​​what he thought he had seen.

  And he was not wrong.

  His feet began to tremble like two fragile twigs of a rose in the middle of a strong hurricane.

  Something in the intestine purred and then became pain.

  Now the woman's face, of her supposed Gianna, turned to the right and her hair was turning towards her shoulder,
exposing her true face.

  Her eyes were dark, like two scrawls, drawn by a child on crumpled paper, with a depth in them, which only showed death. Total darkness. The cracked and blackened skin showed a sinister dark and gloomy face. Her lips were purple and quite swollen. The mouth closed, but this was disfigured as a vertical stain on three parts of the face, like a scribble painted with a brush with very dark paint. And suddenly from the eyes there were two red dots, like the brake lights of a car. They were small but very similar to fire or even more red. The hair became copper-colored, platinum and finally, gray. He began to fall on his legs and a gust of cold air raised her up into the air, as if she were a model posing, except that the movement of the hair was rough. Hidden beneath the roots of the hair, the skull shone like a gigantic billiard ball.

  It was not Gianna.

  And suddenly he got up with outstretched hands, in less than what the heart needs to stop. She leapt on toward Riley with those claw-like fingers that looked like cracked spatulas. The dust rose in the air like a dense, sticky fog and the cobwebs shattered as another gust of wind, this time hot, poured through the attic and blew out the glasses of the window. Thousands of pieces of glass shining under the moon, as they fell to the ground, were the last thing Riley saw before going black.

  His heart had burst, and his eyes had remained open. So open that you could see the basins inside. The mouth had taken the form of a capital O tilted, almost deformed, like a latex doll. The body of the spectrum went through all his muscles and clothes and disintegrated into dust. Riley was already dead and had remained standing up, like a statue wrongly carved by his sculptor.

  The panic had overcome him. The young man of wisdom. The scholar was now a rigid body that slowly, like a high tower, collapsed to the ground with a loud bang.

  And it was not a sweet death.

  He would not wake up from the fucking nightmare.

  And the wind continued crying in the eaves of the Sanatorium, and they heard. Damn! They do listen.

  29

  The pain in the eye was intense, so much, that Carlos urinated on himself again. Now the stain was much larger and mixed with the drops of blood that splashed from his chin to his pants. It could be said that Carlos was the man of the piss without removing his cock. His hand was now precisely closed around the small knife that shone beside the window. I was afraid to take it off, but the damn eye or what's left of it hurt too much to leave that razor pinned there, no more.

  With a lot of pulses, he slowly pulled the razor that seemed to make a strange noise inside the socket which resounds inside his head. Like those voices of the forgotten. His fingers, now like tweezers, lifted off the handle of the knife and heard the noise as it came out of the bottom of the socket. He could not see anything through that eye and felt like there was something else there, next to the emerge of blood. Something thicker that came to the lip and had a sweeter taste than the blood itself and was thicker. He licked it, and his other eye closed in a grimace with the whole face. And at first, he thought if it was his own brain, but he remembered that the eye contains a uniform mass inside. He had just shattered the eye that was now like a grape crushed by a boot.

  His scream echoed throughout the hall to the end of the east wing, going over the twenty-five rooms like a blast of pressurized air. The walls responded to the scream. That lasted while he was taking out the knife out of the socket. Afterwards, he observed it between his fingers with the healthy eye. He generated a large amount of saliva and spat on the knife and his own palm. He let go of the razor that hit the ground with a metallic blow, almost like if he had thrown a spoon on the concrete of a half-finished building.

  His lips formed a wince in a smile and his heart relaxed under his chest, but the blood continued to spurt out, so he had to take off his shirt and with all that bundle rolled-up, plug the socket until the blood clot.

  The crossbow was still on the floor and the arrows too, and that's when he saw them in pairs with his healthy eye. They were hunched and starved bodies that left the rooms on one side to enter the other on the other side of the corridor, crossing it.

  He saw them all.

  30

  Knowing that his girlfriend Sadie had succumbed to terror a few meters from where he was, Chase had undoubtedly returned down the hall in search of his warmth. But she was now rigid, with a grimace of terror etched into her face, her fingers choking the air in the room. But that he did not know, and now he was leaning his back against the door while a few steps slid down the corridor, stopping a moment and resuming shortly after the panting of the boots, this time by the stairs. Chase snorted loudly and dropped to the floor, crawling with his back through the rough, rusted door. His shoulder had stopped bleeding, but it seemed that the intense pain had come back like throbbing or throbbing.

  However, he relaxed, and his ass landed on the cold floor. Despite having a sweaty ass, he felt like the ground was frozen and he thought he had sat on a puddle of water. With the knees bent, I extend its big arms around these to squeeze its breast adopting a fetal form. By his head, passed all kinds of ideas, from crazy to logical. But he noticed that from the beginning everything had been absurd, and his constant smile was on strike right now. Adopting the new face of bitterness was not exactly an easy task. Lucky for him that he did not know the luck Sadie had. A mortal fate, full of terror and fright.

  - "This is a fucking madness," -he sobbed. And his eyes filled with tears.

  In the distance and without even listening to it, the blows of the footsteps were, just a memory. Supposedly that man was crazy, and everyone was running away from him. He thought of his words as repetitive as they listened in the dark and discovered that he was continually referring to them. The ones he saw. And they could be the same, his girlfriend, Kevin, even Jayden. But another part of him told him that this man was referring to other people. He did not believe in ghosts or anything paranormal. He just knew that he had lost at least half a kilo in the intense sweating. However, Chase did not know what awaited him.

  -We are a lot. The forgotten and people always come, but you are not our relatives.

  Chase had heard it clearly.

  It was the voice of a possible old man.

  Possible, because he did not see it and it, and based on the tone of that damn voice that resounded again and again inside his head. He was going crazy. Something similar to what preceded Sadie and Riley and now they were stiff as a tuna jerky.

  Who could tell him that he would be next?

  Would that man and some of the companions be the cause of everything?

  He had no answers and went unnoticed even for the shadows.

  He had the flashlight held in his chubby hand, and with his thumb, he decided to turn it on. The first thing he saw was a rusty bed, leaning against the broken wall. The springs looked like tissues like a spider's web. On one side, it was a chair, and on the other side of the wall, there was a small table with an open drawer, apparently with nothing inside.

  Everything was placed to the left of the door. From the floor, he discovered on the opposite wall, a mirror with a crack on one end. When he illuminated it, the mirror reflected the light in all directions, until Chase was blinded for a few seconds by the reflection.

  Why would a leper want a mirror?

  This question had been asked without getting the final step, the logical answer.

  The fact is that the mirror was hanging there and under this, there was no sink. Not a tap.

  There was only the fucking mirror, and Chase seemed to have focused all his interest on the damn mirror without borders.

  Now that his forehead stopped sweating copiously and his heart returned to normal.

  Because he believed that each of his friends, including his girlfriend, were hiding in a room, all in the same area. Very far from reality.

  However, he was tremendously wrong.

  The lady in black will discover you.

  The female voice this time, resounded on the walls that answere
d with an echo.

  Chase's eyes widened, and his forehead wrinkled like bacon.

  He had heard it again and thought that they were behind the door, which was blocked by the weight of his body.

  He believed for sure that the madman of the crossbow was coming accompanied.

  But what followed later, made him understand that they were not alone in the Sanatorium and that Gianna's killer was going to his fucking ball.

  But by the time he understood, it was too late.

  - "This can not be happening," -he said with the certainty that now everything fits. There were the forgotten ones. The madman of the crossbow and themselves, who as time went by diminishing in number, but he could not verify it with his own eyes.

  Because everything happened very quickly.

  From being the funny chubby Chase he became the most terrified chubby. Now that he seemed to have understood, everything was also going to be his last experience, and the wrinkles on his face showed his destiny. Death.

  A blurred silhouette reflected in the mirror, and he had seen it, as he had also seen a kind of hand that said hello or was just alerting him about something. Chase did not believe in paranormal things and let his imagination fly in the world of ghosts was something unusual in him. But everything happened so fast that he did not have time to assess what the hell was happening to him if something was really happening to him. Although he would have understood everything, he did not believe and was bewildered. Too lost.

  - "This cannot be happening," -he repeated, his voice trembling.

  But spring in the ass made him stand up with such speed that he could have been thrown towards the old, oxidized bed like a simple pillow. But none of that happened.

  He kept looking at the fucking mirror as his feet guided him to the bed of rusted and ruined docks.