The Sanatorium of Murcia

by Claudio Hernández

  -Do not leave, dad.

  - "Damn! The fucking kid! -He exclaimed this time, shaking his head like a ball on a pier. He looked at the lectern, at the Christ and saw her.

  Strolling from one place to another, a beautiful lady dressed in black, with the veil hiding her tearful eyes, and her hands hanging on both sides of her body, as if desisting from life.

  - "Hey! Hey, lady ...!"

  But she had disappeared.

  - "We're not alone in this fucked up Sanatorium," -he shouted as he combed his curly, stiff hair. I'm very good at talking to myself."

  Now he felt his feet free and decided to leave, but something caught his attention again.

  Now the lady in black, tall and with an apparently sculptural figure, was right next to the coffin. His fingers were caressing the edge of the splintered wood, and she was silent. The veil probably covered her beautiful eyes. The black dress reached her ankles. Jackson knew all that because he was lighting up her with the flashlight and it was real. She was there. At three and a half feet, but as he got closer, her body faded into the air like gaseous matter. Jackson raised his eyebrows.

  - "This is crazy," -he said. - "Mrs!"

  And nobody answered.

  Now Jackson's fingers touched the edge of the small coffin, one of the songs that appeared nibbled, probably by the rats and his eyes were lost in the search for that woman in the whole room. Now he was sure it was not Chase, but he seemed to play it down. He did not believe in certain things, period. He thought he was delirious about something he could not see now. The sting of an insect.

  Soon he would wake up, and everything would be over, that's for sure.

  Suddenly, he felt a tingling in the tips of his fingers and light them up with the flashlight. His fingertips were slightly pink at the ends; lower were black. And then he saw how a small fog came out of the coffin. Smoke as if suddenly the wood had caught fire. But it did not smell burned but rancid. Like everything else.

  - "Holy crap! What the hell is that?" -He said with wide eyes. He retreated one step away from the coffin and rubbed his fingers in his shorts. The white shirt, which contrasted with the black color of his skin, was now a large dark stain stuck to his body.

  The dense, sticky fog now came slowly down the edges of the coffin, as if it had weight. Jackson's eyes widened and showed empty sockets highlighted by eyes as white as billiard balls. Small fingers with broken nails peeked out from the edge of the coffin. Jackson took another step back, keeping the focus on the flashlight. Now it was showing a nape covered with coppery hair. Slowly and heavily, a small head. Jackson's heart began to beat with intensity, and he sweated profusely. He noticed that the hand holding the lantern was shaking. Dark eyes peeked out over the fog, and a small nose rested on the edge of the wood.

  - "Fuck! Who are you kid?" -Jackson was bewildered and scared. His feet trembled. - "Did your mom wear black?"

  The kid answered. He just extended his hand. A small hand with outstretched fingers, apparently normal.

  Jackson discovered that he was speaking to himself too long. Ultimately, he thought he was raving because of a high fever caused by a bite, and at dawn, everything would have happened. But it was not like that.

  The kid had a mane that could not cover his thin neck. His childish features astonished by his thinness. You could see all the bones in his face. His eyes were sunken, and he looked dehydrated. His hand remained spread out as if asking for something, which Jackson could not give him. Then suddenly from his neck appeared dark flesh lumps and began to beat him in a controlled manner, as if those lumps breathed.

  Jackson's heart plummeted to the gut. He felt a strong pain in his chest and belly. He was still sweating profusely, and his face was freezing. His hands trembled. Both. And it felt cold.

  Those lumps burst and released the greenish pus. The boy's face wrinkled like dry streaks, like scabs and part of the skin of his face fell to the floor, letting his teeth and red cheeks see throughout the blood. Jackson saw black spots in his vision and felt like he was going at times. He was fainting or worse; he was in the process of a crisis of acute anxiety.

  The mouth of the kid opened, and the cheeks stretched like chewing gum. Suddenly and before he fainted, his head fell to the ground, which was rolling to stop at the feet of Jackson. The impression was such that his heart took a final turn and squeezed under his chest. Jackson, however, before seeing the blackness, screamed and shouted. Until his voice gave way to silence and his body collapsed on the head of that child.

  On the walls and curled up to Christ, some elongated shadows were watching the show.

  39

  Carlos heard the screams echoing in the middle of the night and under an increasingly low moon. His finger trembled on the trigger, and he lowered his head. The eye that was hanging like a testicle brushed his knee now. Curiously, it did not hurt. But he did not see a shit about it. He did not even need it. He was thinking about the possibility of pulling it out. And meanwhile, it was decided, he waited and waited. He knew there were less left.

  I had not told them.

  40

  Violet was the one who had gone farther than any. One floor below the entrance. She had run down all the stairs that extended before her and had gone to the basement of the Sanatorium.

  Also, with the flashlight, something that did not escape any of them, casual or not, was lighting up all the things that were down there. It was like catacombs, through the various ditches she had discovered on the basement floor. There were shovels and picks lying on the ground and leaning against the wall. Those on the wall held in place by a spider's web in which, from the center, an spider was looking at him.

  He tried not to touch anything, since he was disgusted immobilized by it all. A sour smell accompanied the landscape. There were wooden tables and sheets stacked on shelves. All of them folded and yellowed. Some spiders were walking through them, and Violet thought, there was life down there. Her heart still rumbled in her chest every time she remembered Gianna with the arrow in her temples. And that it had already been more than three hours. All that time she had spent sitting in the corner of the basement, with her wet back, resting on the dirty wall. Although it was disgusting. She was terrified, but inside she felt sure that this place was a right hiding place.

  The madman was loose and had fired two arrows. It was the only thing she could think of now, and she did not suspect what was about to happen to her. The holiday's vacations had started badly, and that was all for her.

  Her calm attitude dramatically changed when they appeared. Those faded shadows without a face or some of it. They began to glide across the ground illuminated by the lantern, and some of them came out of the forgotten graves. Like them. Her mind immediately became confused, and she thought she was seeing the shadows of the tables and the wooden boards that were there, leaning against the wall that threatened to fall to the ground. But the fucking shadows moved, and in the background, like a bad soundtrack of a movie, you could hear some laments, as if someone was suffering from deep pain.

  The focus of the flashlight illuminated on those shadows that seemed to crawl across the floor, but the black spots did not fade with light. This aroused a deep concern to Violet, who put her hands to her breasts as if that was of some use to her.

  If she knew the fate of her companions already stiff-necked like tuna jerky, she would think that everything was too repetitive and predictable. Always some shadows are showing, in an aggressive way and not like in other rooms where ghosts lived, that you had to run after them to see them, for the end, to take a good scare.

  That was trivial now, but that, she did not know. None of them knew what the Sanatorium of Murcia hid, and they discovered it separately, but it was boring to the satiety and at the same time, terrible.

  Fear can kill you, a voice said in her head bewildered, because those shadows did not disappear in the light of her lantern.

  But several of his traveling companions had thought that very thing. Fatef
ul excursion. Faded shadows and the abandoned ones arguing like aliens. Predictable. Very predictable, and the cold; also, foresaw. If you thought a bit, you had already seen all that on television and in the movies, even in the novels. Anticipated, but really tormented.

  It was as much as the heart accelerated.

  Also, predictable.

  And she will begin to sweat copiously, and her eyes will open obscenely. Who could bring some new essence? It's like the killer who squeezes a big knife in one of his hands. Always plunge the knife into the heart, in the side, in the back. But each time, it does the same. Nobody marked an exception, and this time nothing was an exception.

  In this case either.

  And why did you think so much about these things even though recently someone had killed your best friend in front of your nose and the crazy man who did it go on loose?

  They are the defense mechanisms of one's mind.

  Everything was in the head.

  Until death, for a scare.

  There were people who died after learning that the primitive had touched him.

  The elongated shadows took positions.

  Suddenly she thought how the basement would be in the years that the Sanatorium was open. She remembered that Riley had said that, it had closed its doors in the sixties, that there were lepers and other less critical patients. Then she imagined that the entire building would be full of lepers. Including the basement or perhaps more than the rest of the Sanatorium. She even visualized that the dead would be piled up in the basement, while a low light from a forty-watt bulb was thrown over them. She imagines everything. It was the mental perception that everyone had before seeing them. To the forgotten ones that were so much in their mouths in the last hours of the night.

  - "This is absurd," -Violet shouted.

  Her voice broken by the shaking bounced on the walls, and these responded with her voice but delayed in time. The light of the flashlight could not capture the moment since the sound is not visible. Neither should they be, but they showed themselves the way they were.

  They showed themselves as they were abandoned by their relatives and locked there in the hope of agony. To the only thing that they could accommodate.

  Then Violet began to sweat copiously until her top with braces was wet. Her breasts, tiny, could be seen through the sides of the armholes.

  One of the shadows showed what it looked like a hand. Elongated and with five shabby fingers, which were taking shape in a few seconds.

  The impression of seeing that caused an intense pain in the chest.

  Now the hand was purple and skeletal, with the skin irritated.

  A forearm followed.

  Violet's eyes reached their maximum amplitude, in the face of astonishment.

  Her eyes closed momentarily in the sweat that stings her and felt its taste on the tip of his tongue. The sweat was salty, but she could not stop looking.

  What if something else happened?

  The other hand materialized on the upper edge of the pit that moments before was empty.

  Something or someone seemed to be climbing a cliff. But it was just a goddamn half-meter hole.

  She figured that there would be a mass grave underneath, while her heart injected blood under pressure inside her brain.

  Leaning out there was a crown that had been planted with a bunch of long white hairs, which the air folded towards the back.

  It was the skull, and it was full of lumps.

  Violet aware of everything, but terrified, knew what was coming next.

  Under the intense look with the lantern, the forgotten materialized, and half body crawled on the floor. His legs were missing.

  It was like watching a zombie in a cheap movie.

  But it was there, surrounded by more shadows and that impressed.

  Violet's heart hit the shell of her chest as if it were a shield.

  She felt nauseous, and her face cooled, keeping her eyes burning. And then she noticed that she could not stand because she was trembling like a leaf in autumn.

  She looked up at the ceiling and saw more shapes surrounding the dim bulb still hanging from the ceiling. But no shine now.

  The roof was red brick, and the plaster had fallen to the ground God knows when and the long shadows became hands.

  Violet leaned forward and opened her mouth.

  She threw up everything she had inside, on those putrefied hands that were trying to catch her. And she felt a tingling all over her head like a trail of blood.

  Fear was taking over her.

  She was not moaning, but was breathing tired out.

  Her vision became blurred although the light of the lantern continued to illuminate all of them that were materializing at every moment.

  She felt a voice as if it came from far away. A buzz, something dull that made you go into a coma. Now without being aware of it. Her heart was beating now in her temples, but her head was already tilted to the side, while they had reached her and were trying to drag her into the underworld.

  The last thing she saw was a silhouette in front of the door.

  The silhouette of a woman.

  And she closed her eyes forever.

  In a coma produced by the impression.

  Seeing, in the beginning, something non-existent for her.

  But what really existed.

  41

  There was a note written on the wall; written with a spray of those that come out spurting of a boat with a ball panting inside. Alaina while reading was touching her curly hair. Her fingers tangled in her like a fish trapped in a net. The story, because it was an excellent piece written on one of the walls that were next to the aqueduct of the Sanatorium, which entered on the west side, where the air whistled, said the following;

  A few years ago, while a group of soldiers spent the night in the sanatorium, something happened. Abandoned definitively since 1995, because before it was occupied for a limited time as a children's shelter after the regional government proceeded to its reopening in the eighties. One of them, who stood guard, woke the others with a flurry of a rifle. It destined to an entity, of green color, that froze the blood of those who witnessed it. And they saw the lady in white.

  Alaina's eyes widened. She had just discovered more things about the Sanatorium. Riley would not have soaked well at all because their dates and history were distorted concerning this writing, although they were going in the same direction. Riley lacked explaining the legend that covered the sanatorium of Espuña Mountains.

  At the end of the long sentence it said;

  I saw a black lady walking on the first floor, it was not white, moron ...

  A grimace was drawn to her lips under the charismatic light of the moon. Below was another phrase;

  And they treated the tuberculous as well as leprosy ...

  Alaina raised her right eyebrow. She already knew that from Riley's mouth, but there was something else. Much more mysterious. It was written a few meters ahead, always next to the aqueduct. The stone pavement corridor was outdoors, just above the second floor. In it said;

  A door has been built between the two floors so as not to have access to the older level.

  - "That's impossible," -murmured Alaina. - "We went up to the second floor. And in fact I'm on top of it. In the aqueduct. She spoke as if in front of her she had Riley letting go of her verbiage.

  And below said the following;

  Only in 1932, 28,000 Spaniards died. Almost all of them lived at home without ventilation, overcrowded and very cold during the day and night.

  - "Well, I'm learning a lot of things that Riley has not said or does not know." -Alaina's voice sounded sharp, almost like a scream. - "When I see him, I will explain these interesting things to him. - But she did not know he was stiffer than a mummy in the attic.

  Alaina saw in these descriptions a true historical treasure, while the elongated shadows were approaching her. Blind but with deformed hands and lamenting of her stay there.

  Alaina
turned abruptly, toward the tallest structure in the Sanatorium. The attic, which was just above that giant Christ. Naturally, she saw nothing. Alaina was holding her flashlight in a trembling hand. It illuminated the floor, the walls and finally, the aqueduct, which looked like a Roman bridge. Now it was dry. Shee turned back to the wall and continued reading, returning to enthusiasm again.

  Once a week the gravedigger of the Sanatorium went up in a car and drove up from the Alhama de Murcia Cemetery, to collect the corpses, which were accumulated, with the sole purpose of giving them burial. In winter, with the snowy roads, it became the only link between the hospital and civilization.

  - "Wow. This is scary." -Alaina's heart began to pump more blood into her veins. And the voice rang with a bell. But she kept reading, now passing her fingertips over the letters. They were disturbing.

  The dead were taken out the back door, according to several witnesses, believing that they were dead. And when they were taken to the morgue, to put them in the coffins, once closed and ready to take them to the cemetery, sometimes the corpses revived and began to hit hard on the lid of the coffin.

  - "Fuck! What is this? Where are we?" -Alaina's voice rose in the air like a siren rising in volume. All that, if it was true, gave her chills and she felt her heart beat wildly. She was in doubt. If that was true, it was to think twice and not about that crazy arrow, she thought and closed her eyes for what seemed like an eternity.

  She saw them when she opened her eyes.

  They were like drawings on the letters she had just read. A few elongated shadows that could well produce the trees around, but these were too far and, also had a very peculiar. They looked like human silhouettes.

  Her breathing began to get nervous.