She also knew that she could not talk to them, although in this she doubted a little. But it was not the time to think about certain things, but to run away from there. However, her paralyzed feet prevented her from doing so, while that skeletal woman and walking like a spider was approaching her more and more quickly.
She also knew the effects of delirium or certain inhaled drugs. She stopped thinking about this last thing. What if the guy with the crossbow had sprinkled hallucinogenic drug?
Do not think, act, she told herself.
But the silhouettes were transformed into people. Strangers. Stooped over, naked some with other broken nightgown, but always showing the ass or tits. They were the lepers of the Sanatorium of Murcia. Was it true that they had been trapped there forever?
Do not think more, act.
Her arms became stiff this time, and she dropped the flashlight in a loud bang, but it did not break, it continued to illuminate on the floor, from where she could see dirt, dust and the passage of thousands of rats in all this time abandoned.
The rats have fed on the bodies of the lepers, she thought.
And she had nausea.
Then it was a drug and everything else a hallucination, but the graze of one of those deformed hands on her shoulder brought her back to reality. They were not hallucinations and her heart speeded up a little more. Her blond hair was now a mop of damp hair, wet with sweat. Her eyes, however, continued to shine in the gloom, since the lantern only lit the ground.
Another characteristic symptom of a panic attack.
Her face and tongue were numbing. It felt like an unpleasant tingling in the face that left her almost deformed. Like a poorly made wax doll.
She was aware that this could end badly. Very bad.
Her heart was now pounding on the tip of her tongue, and her arm began to hurt very intensely. She turned around and found that the hand that had touched her was that of a leper who looked at her without his eyes and his mouth deformed. He had little hair and bulges of frightful shapes protruded through the gaps.
She began to have real fear. It was dread. And felt the urine escaping and moistening her cotton panties. Her whole body trembled, but she could not move it. She was rigid like a mummy. The anguish overtook her, and her mind was gone. She was getting dizzy.
That woman on the floor, with her arms at an angle, was advancing towards her and it seemed that she was never going to get straight when she suddenly stopped and her limbs twisted in the most complicated way to the sound of bone crunching. She was standing up.
And the long hair was moving away from her face. That horrible face that she did not want to see. Dark eyes stared at her with hatred and cynicism. Her skin was pale and wrinkled as if she had been under water for a long time. She had no mouth. In its place, there was a huge dark blur that lengthened at times, as if it were going to fall apart.
Behind her, she saw a woman in a black dress and lace, swinging from side to side in the room. She was not looking at her. She just walked with her head down and had a veil that inspired more terror.
Taylor, conscious always of the phases of the panic attack, knew that the traumatic stress that reverberated in the heart, this could jump through the air. So she hyperventilated dangerously. Suffocating and fainting, but still seeing those forgotten, surrounding and touching her with their hands full of pus and greenish liquid, he knew he was going to die.
So, that is how it went.
33
Carlos stopped at the end of the hall. The scream was heartbreaking, and he heard it clearly. It had left from one of the doors in that long corridor. But not far from where he was. He stopped and turned his head as if it were rolling on a friction mechanism the way he did and saw nothing.
Except for one detail.
A tongue of light that jutted from the bottom of one of those rusted doors. Crossbow in hand turned around the way back, towards that light. He already imagined what he would find. He was not afraid of any of them or the lady in black.
A few seconds later his boots stepped on the floor with light. And although he felt a tremendous pain in the eye that no longer existed, He knew that it had stopped bleeding and that he would come out of this. But they did not because they would all die of fear. He was not afraid if not delusions and he knew what it was like to see those shadows and those wandering souls.
He was not afraid of the lady in black.
With the crossbow, he pushed the door that squeaked, breaking the silence that now reigned in the corridor. Leah was also hidden on that floor but inside the janitor's house. It was just a much larger and more comfortable space, but it was still part of the corridor of the less sick who could go for a walk holding hands and breathe the aroma of the leaves of the trees. It was at the end of the corridor, in the west wing.
But Carlos did not know that, and now he was watching the lantern light. He knew it was their work; that a LED flashlight could not fail, less doing intermittent. It was not a light bulb. They were fingers that played with the switch. He saw them and raised his eyebrows. On the side of the empty basin, that movement was barely noticeable.
And when the door opened completely, he saw her.
It was contorted in a challenging way to imitate. The arms back and legs at awkward angles. His mouth was a poem. A deep crack is showing tonsils torn off by the scream. His lips were deformed, and his eyes were wide open, they were still shining as if they wanted to see everything.
Fear terrified her, and she had died of panic.
Her heart had been irrigated like his whole body, and now she was on the stretcher, under the lamp of six empty, dark eyes.
Even the hair seemed to have been stiff.
- "I warned you about them," -Carlos said in a whisper and went to get the flashlight.
He needed it.
34
Not far from there was Leah. At the end of the hallway, at the concierge's house. In which a hunchback of barely a meter and a half who had been responsible for checking a list of the lepers on the first floor, after they returned from their daily walk. The man complained about the cries of pain that came from the upper level. Then all were alive though dying at the gates of death. Once they passed to a better life, their names were written down in a notebook by the janitor. With his own handwriting, he wrote their names and the dates they died. He also pointed out how long they were in the morgue. Then the lady in black did not walk around because she just did not exist. But the man sensed that some of the dying would return to regret again in the Sanatorium. The date of the closing of the Sanatorium also indicated in the small notebook. September 21, 1962. Two days later he appeared dead, hanged in one of the trees near the great Christ of the entrance. That was not written in the notebook. And that was what Leah was reading precisely at the time, focusing on the dirty yellow pages with smudges letters.
It was clear that Leah had forgotten Gianna, her boyfriend and the crossbow man.
Now I was absorbed in the diary.
But things would change soon.
This man was also abandoned to his fate.
Her head suddenly turned aside. Focusing on the corner from where she thought came the voice. The voice of a woman, but it sounded torn and something dangerous. But without a doubt, it was the voice of a woman. She had heard it clearly.
-He was also abandoned, -she thought, as she wrinkled her forehead and frowned.
From where the voice was supposed to come, she saw nothing. There was only a small table with a rusted drawer, and in the lock, it hung inert, a rusty key inside the metal ring that joined it with the key that was inside the lock.
As she passed, a rat walked with a disturbing safety over the springs of the bed.
Now the flashlight illuminated on the taut springs of the bed and saw it disappear into the gap of a hole, a long gray tail.
Leah was disgusted by the rats so she could not dispel the nausea she felt.
However, it would not be the rats that would end her life. If not the t
error caused by them and the lady in black. Although they did not seek death but remembered that they had been abandoned to their fate and the lady in black, it would be the ghost that would never show her face and as a result would be the great unknown. Only a lady in black who was walking around the Sanatorium. The terror produced by their faces, their ungainly shadows, their laments. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the most terrifying. It was like the fish that bites its tail. A circle without end, because the mind was allied with them and saw things that did not even exist between them. Like what would happen to Leah in a short time.
An absolute fear of the unknown.
The presence of the spectres and the lepers, which made your mind turn in another wave. An unpredictable terror that left you dry as a leaf in autumn.
Leah was inside the boat.
Of the strangest fate of those who knew each other and knew each other.
Scare, it put you on alert.
But fear caught you from within, and you had no escape.
While she left, the diary forgotten, the long shadows began to come out of the walls, under the bed, the floor and the ceiling. And they took shapes, like what they were and others were enough to be simple silhouettes in the dark.
And the sound of their voices.
The human mind was incapable to endure so much horror.
And Leah would not be an exception.
Her vision clouded in an absurd confusion and she was reluctant to believe in what she saw at that moment. Shadows with the human form, crawling everywhere, like giant lizards, with their suckers stuck in the brick of the wall or the plaster of the ceiling.
She put the flashlight on the table where she had taken the janitor's diary. The lantern was illuminating the back of the hall and those things. There was enough light even to see her hands. And see them all. Including the lady in black who stood still, watching her behind the dark veil that did not let her eyes see or look. It could not be determined if it was a young woman or an old woman full of lumps. Her gloves with open ends, so that the fingers were free could be covering a necrosis up to the elbow, but there was no way to guess, or desire to do so.
She was reluctant to believe what she was seeing all that, and her heart began to throb disturbingly. She resisted, but it was real even though she thought that everything was the product of the imagination. Everything was wrong from the beginning, and Gianna had fallen down with an arrow that pierced her skull. But this had nothing to do with the crazy man, she thought without hesitation. This was the work of his sudden dementia caused by something. This could not be happening, she thought and remembered that Riley, the scholar, never spoke of urban legends about the Sanatorium or the castles of Lorca and Aguilas, the next places they were going to visit.
It was tremendously complex to describe what was happening to her and something repetitive if all those who died of fear and panic had to speak. And that was also real. Terror measured on a scale of zero to five, and if you reached the top, you were lost. There were two paths, go into a deep coma and let your heart stop like a piece of rock.
And they kept crawling towards her and taking human shapes, horrendous and deformed. From hump in the back to bulges in the forehead like the cancer that does not stop growing, showing its most frightening side.
And the moans became laments and pleads when rotten hands reached out to her. If you tried to think it over, they did nothing more than materialize and show themselves, with no intention of killing you or taking away what is yours. But, the scenario allowed the heart to become a heavy hammer and the most atrocious fear surfaced on the skin and escaped through the eyes like a jet of hot air, when your face was icy, although sweaty.
They held out their hands and Leah hid her hands and backed away until her back touched one of those bodies. They were solid. After being shapeless shadows, they became horrible solid deformed ones that you could touch. Knowing what had already happened to Sadie, Chase, Riley and Taylor, she would have discovered only one small change in each form of death, but the basis was always the same. However, that she did not know. She had never fallen into a vacuum from an elevator, nor had he crashed to the ground after her parachute failed. Each one felt the fear, the panic, the terror and the fright in a similar way, although different at the same time. The symptoms associated with a psychiatric illness, anxiety disorder and panic disorder.
But Leah, knew this was different.
Under the lantern's low light, for it was illuminating straight towards the wall and not like a ball, everywhere, she looked at her hands because something strange was happening to her. The itching was unbearable and felt as if thousands of ants were moving under her skin. A weird feeling, that she had never felt. Apparently, her skin was intact, except that her hands were wet, full of sweat and she could feel the pulse of the heart in the tips of her fingers, when, the thing could not get worse. While those lepers now materialized extended her hands that were sometimes necrotic stumps, Leah saw dozens of bubbles struggling to get out of her skin.
She could not escape from all of them. They were surrounding her, and their hands were changing and transforming into a couple of decayed masses when those bubbles became blisters and then lumps with a mouth through which the pus came out. Her attention was therefore divided into two scenarios of which worse. The tension was breathed in the air, but she could not decide. She knew that all this was true. The doubt, in this case, unlike her dead colleagues, did not exist.
The fucking sanatorium was full of souls in pain and horrible beings who showed themselves, as they were when they were left forgotten and although they did not want anything other than to show themselves, the same answer always obtained.
Death.
Leah felt a lacerating pain in her hands and saw how mixed with the pus there was blood, as viscous and greenish as before. And it slipped like a cream melted to the elbows. She looked at her forearms that ran the same fate and wanted to scream, something she got.
Then they shouted in unison like a fright made a sound. Their mouths expanded and from those rotten throats, those disturbing cries rose, a few shouts that revealed the great vulnerability of Leah.
She was not mentally strong.
Like almost none of the mortals, although there is always an exception that breaks all the rules. But this was not the case, at least for the moment.
And the lady in black was still there, looking at her in profile, at the end of the corridor, right next to an open window. Her veil moved like a perennial leaf. As mysterious as it is terrifying. As disturbing as beautiful.
But Leah kept screaming, and they did not either. The noise was deafening and echoed the concierge's house, from the door to the window. It was an agonizing scream for her and symbolic for them. Impressed so much, that Leah's heart exploded into a thousand pieces. She could not stand. Her heart stopped before time. Before seeing what, she could have seen more. Before the sigh of a bird dies between the fangs of a cat. Too weak she was, that she collapsed at the first change in a loud fleshy blow, while around her a cloud of dust rose and then there was no one in there, more than her abandoned body.
Her soul had started the journey to its destination.
35
Carlos entered the forest guided by the low light of the moon that was already above the center of the sky. It was the crack of dawn, and he kept hearing screams. He knew what it meant, but his goal was to pursue and destroy them. With a crossbow? Shoot them? He knew not because the erratic shadows continued to appear and that told him, that they were many or all that he was doing was useless. Better the latter. Although his delirium, already in advanced state and showing his darker side, pushed him like a maniacal way to pursue them.
His body was entering the forest like a machine cutting the branches of the trees and crushing the bushes. His boots seemed to walk on fluffy surfaces that creaked under his weight.
He decided it was time to hide again and wait.
Wait to see what happened.
36
/> If the delirium and the disorder of it, was a consistent mania, Luke was the king of the mentally ill, that with his obsessions, especially, to get good glasses continuously, exceeded all expectations. That, inside a filthy building, full of dust, cobwebs and rusty empty beds, was a time bomb.
And if on top of it he ran into the forgotten ones, he finished making the fusion. Although unaware of all this, his eyes were watching that disconcerting room, behind the crystals of his glasses, while, apparently, he was calm in spite of everything.
Why the hell everyone forgets what happened an hour ago when one finds something new to explore?
That only had an explanation for him.
That the brain deals with other things that for, do not continually think about the same thing and go crazy. But he was not a clear example of that. The persistent image of Gianna on the floor and the noise of the skull being pierced were still present in his mind and repetitively.
Perhaps he should forget in such a short time?
His conscience told him no.
But when they discovered what those rooms contained, some more than others, his mind wandered for the new reign and behind it was Gianna with her head drowned in her own pool of blood. Had Riley said there were ghosts in the Sanatorium? Had Riley noted that the Sanatorium was for the lepers of the time?
With a movement of the head like if he were nodding, he recognized or managed to remember, the latter clearly. And the patients with tuberculosis. So, was he at the mercy of all those viruses or bacteria after so many years? His skin gets goosebumps at the thought of it. His fingers caressed each corner of his forearms and rubbed his hands, as he exchanged the lantern of the hand. He did not want to leave it on the floor or any of those strange mattresses beds. He thought he was going to be infected.
The Sanatorium of Murcia Page 10