The Warden of the Castle

by Claudio Hernández

  “The story that I'm going to tell you now might well be a zombie, but no, nothing further from reality. It is a love story, something terrifying, yes." The warden returned to his place at the table and sat down in his chair, this time quietly. “All the stories have some terror whether they are romantic or not. He could be talking about human madness for love, but neither is it, simply the man had died and his wife lay prostrate in bed. The rest, if you pay attention, you will know very soon...”

  And the deep voice of the warden calmed down and ended in a soft whisper...

  1

  Normally, when I write the stories, I should make a small sketch of it before I start, so that everything is fine and something pretty. In this case I just repeat an old classic story in Boad Hill that goes from generation to generation and word of mouth. This is the case of Mr. Carl Farmer. As fast as I said his title so will be short his story.

  Intensely in love, Carl and Emma swore that love would be until after death, and so it was. One summer afternoon, with its respective heat, Carl Farmer, who suffered from the heart, died instantly. He fell to the ground in a flash and, in a cataract almost thunderous, his plump body was stretched on the ground. Emma, ​​who was bedridden, invalid, could only shake her head a little and cry. I could not talk like that, let alone ask for help. Her husband was the only help for her in the last ten years. Her husband's lifeless body was about two meters from the bed and the Farmer's door was seven meters away.

  So poor Emma was doomed to die in the dead of starvation that fateful summer if no one noticed the absence of Mr. Farmer in any of the places in the town where he used to do the week's shopping. But the Farmer used to spend long periods at home without leaving. So nobody missed them during the days of the tragicomedy.

  A day later, the sight of Emma could see that the inert body of her husband was a meter from the bed. Much closer to when he fell struck to the ground. That startled and eased him at the same time. Two days later, Farmer's hideous body was almost at the side of the bed, toward the exit door. Emma could only cry and cry, but she thought she died too, because she was like a dream. His warden angel, in this case Mr. Farmer was with her. But it was not an awakening and that's it, everything was really happening. By the third day, the fetid body was already perched toward the door, it was five meters away. So it took five more days before the rotting corpse came to the door and another day until his bony fingers now, after the swelling, could open the crank of it to get outside. The next day, half-arm in the inter-gate gave the alarm.

  And so it was about a week after the death of Mr. Carl Farmer that Mrs. Emma was found dehydrated on her bed. I know, sounds absurd, but so the old people tell the town and even got to the city. I add it here because sometimes love is so intense that it goes beyond life itself.

  And yes, I believe the story.

  Sometimes They Sleep

  The warden was touching the long hair on the back of his head. It was a loose mane and it was wet, as if it were bathed in oil. His plump fingers made their way through the strands and gently pulled down. Then he shaved his beard. Outside the wind was revealed against the world and screamed in the windows and the corners of the castle. The snow, white as the skin of someone who suffers a panic attack, crashed against the windows and accumulated on the shelves forming small mountains.

  "This story is also for you Lovecraft. His plump finger pointed it out again that night and added. I hope you see yourself reflected in it. It's about a thing you already know that sleeps during the day and wakes up at night. Sometimes they sleep would not be the most original or appropriate title for the story that follows, but it is an unsettling, daring title. History once again shows the existence of the bogeyman, at first, but this is not history. This begins later. I just wanted to give myself a treat in the middle of all this mess. Richard is a frustrated writer who suffers from writer's block. Its leaves were whitened while the alcohol makes presence and there is something more. It is on the top floor and out of curiosity rises to see that it is...

  The warden's voice trailed off and his eyes widened. Sinking now in his chair and crossing his fingers began the story without looking away from Lovecraft.

  1

  Denny was lying down, almost asleep, when, suddenly, he was struck by the window. Through the sheets he saw that it was raining, and that the branch of the tree had hit the windowpane, fortunately without breaking it. But the noise had seemed enormously deafening to him, and it was almost believed that the whole window had fallen down. He went under the sheets while the wind howled and struggled with the branches of the trees out of the room. Inside, it was lit from time to time, when a lightning made an appearance, then you could see Denny as an x-ray under the sheets. The storm did not subside all night, and the next day Denny's eyes were wide and red. He went to school.

  The second night, more accustomed to the cry of the wind, he relaxed a little more and slept almost miserably that night, but he rested a little more. Still with his eyes almost swollen, he went to school.

  The third night was the win. There was no longer a storm, there was no rain or wind. So he was going to feel even more relaxed than the night before, but he did not. A crash at the back of the room woke him up suddenly. Under the sheets, creating a horizontal frame between his fists and his eyes, to be able to see from an imaginary slit outside the bed, he watched as something from the closet was still struggling, making noise, moving. Denny covered himself with the sheets as if this were the lifeguard to be resorted to in a storm in the middle of the sea.

  The closet moved. It was one of those DIY cabinets mounted by Dad on a hot summer afternoon. Denny knew now that the closet came alive for moments, that there was something there, that it was not the storm that frightened him. He shrank lower under the sheets and closed his eyes. Suddenly the silence. Ominous silence. After spending several minutes hiding under the sheets, he created the frame of vision again between his fists and eyes. And it was when suddenly the doors of the wardrobe opened and from inside came an abominable being with the appearance of being very pissed, with its long and sharp fangs and claws like spatulas, with a sack in one of them.

  The next day, Denny did not go to school, he had simply taken the bogeyman or the man from the sack, which is how he is known to this abominable being who lives in the closet and sometimes under the bed.

  But this is not the story.

  2

  The body found in the room was literally twisted and shattered by the difficult positions taken by the upper and lower limbs. There was blood everywhere, especially on the bed and splashed on the opposite wall, the one behind the body on the bed. The eyes like empty basins showed nothing but horror, but you had to look at them, since they almost seemed to have been sucked, like when you eat a snail. That was the right definition. The subject was called Alan Poole and was a small-time writer, but he could eat what he wrote. Often the bills arrived at the wrong time, but could go ahead in its daily work. The cleaning woman was the one who found the Dantesque panorama. The head twisted back and a span of tongue pulled out, like a long slug of excellent proportions. Well, leaving the details to one side, the guy had to be in that area in search of material for his next work. On the floor was an unbranded laptop smeared with blood. Some writers move to a specific city to study their streets and people to write. But this one would have liked to be able to write about what happened, surely it would be something bright, but could no longer do it. Evidently, it was not gun-toting murder. His body, dismembered and twisted, made him think that a giant octopus had been made with him. They found no trace or DNA to study. Nor did they find answers. Only someone had been brutally ravaged with insanity, but not with human force. It was a summary secret for a long time. And, even after reopening the case, they never found anything explainable for that situation.

  Now the story begins.

  3

  Richard was a tall guy with a pretty beard and a pair of bone-rimmed glasses, with a glass-bottom graduation. He was a prol
ific writer so far. Until the muse had left him for some time. So he moved to live in the new Victorian house, with six bedrooms and three bathrooms, and other parts of the house itself. In short, the perfect place for a writer who is empty of ideas and who needs space to be inspired.

  At the time he rented the house, for about two thousand five hundred a month, the rain was present every other day. It was a cold winter that had given way to stoves and boilers throughout the village. Richard, oblivious to all that, covered himself with a blanket as he pounded the typewriter. Even today, when everything is already computerized, Richard prefers the old typewriter that so many successes had allowed him to reap. But now, evidently, the red machine had stopped spitting words on the blank sheets.

  Richard's psychiatric treatment was not an absolute joke, he took more than three types of pills a day to concentrate all the anxiety on nothing. But that required effort and was difficult to control. If we join that he was a great beer drinker, we had to, the next morning, he barely remembered what a damn thing he had thought the night before. Luckily, he was not married, since that kind of life would not be compatible with the idea of ​​forming a family and writing every day as part of daily work. Although he was a successful writer, he did not have more books on the bookshelves, because he was always drunk or sleepwalking with the pills, and he did not always fulfill his duties as a writer.

  It was rather sloppy. He did not worry about anything right now, except he had to deliver a couple more books to the publisher as part of an agreement between the two sides and he had no fucking idea what he was going to write this time. That's why he chose a big house away from the noise of the neighborhood and the world. He would stock up on food and beers and soon the muse would rise. I was sure of that.

  "Come on Richard, you can. All writers have a slip, but, in the end, everything is arranged and published a new best seller "

  Of course, and shit, he thought inside with a bottle of beer in one hand and the pill in the other.

  4

  The next day, Richard woke up at about ten-thirty in the morning, his eyes swollen from sleep. Outside, the picture was the same as the day he said yes to the rent of the house. A pasty rain that became endless. He had been there for only three days and had not yet come down to the village for food, since he came with good supplies of it on the first day of his stay. So I would go down to the village in at least three weeks. I had beers and the damn colored pills. He hardly remembered what color he had to drink in the morning, noon, or at night.

  He had left the typewriter on a large old wooden table with a blank sheet of paper drowned in the cylinder of the machine, the ink ribbon ready to print any character, but Richard the muse had yet to appear for any side. It was as if he had suddenly ceased to be a writer. He walked all over the house making faint visits in all the rooms, but he had chosen to sleep on the sofa, at least for now. Up there, on the second floor, the cold was much more intense. At least, on the sofa would be next to the typewriter and would run up to pound the keys if something occurred to him suddenly. Like every hour or two, he went to the bathroom, one that was right next to the space he was occupying right now, and as he walked in the gloom he looked at the shadow of the typewriter and wondered if he had finally written something that night . But drunkenness prevented him from thinking clearly.

  "Too many beers, Richard, and mixed with pills, so you're not going anywhere. But it's part of the plan, is not it? "

  Throughout the day, the muse left Richard's mind in oblivion. The next morning he woke up at eleven o'clock, and silence reigned within the great mansion, except for the clatter of raindrops outside. Sometimes he peered out the main window of the room to see the drops make curious and thick rows disproportionate on the glass, waiting for the muse of the golden eggs to appear. Those drops could be toxic and burn the world, bah! He thought, that had already written others. Nor was it worth living there a ghost, was to repeat his first novel or perhaps was the third of them. Nor did he remember.

  "Come on Richard, you have wood, get ready to write, cannot you see the blank sheet on the typewriter? Or are you fucking scared of running out of ideas? "

  He was partially right.

  5

  One of those nights, the rattling of the rain was more intense, stronger, as if it were some blows caused by hail. Neither did they follow a beat, they were loose, but strong beatings at the same time. And that made him wake up from his hangover. It would be seven in the morning. And for a moment, thinking that it would be hail, he worried about the roof of the old house. But as he leaned out the window of the main hall, he saw nothing in the gloom but water slipping on the glass. Now the blows were clearer, they were not rhythmic. Absolutely true that it was not a hailstorm, but a few knocks, but who could give those blows in an empty house?

  The noise came from upstairs in one of the rooms, and by the time he was about to climb the main stairs, not without a moment's hesitation, the blows ceased. Now he had been able to guess what kind of punches they would be, like those of a knuckle crashing into the wood.

  "Rats! They'll be the damn rats or some big bird up there. "

  He returned to the sofa and fell asleep almost instantly.

  6

  The next day he remembered nothing and the muse still did not appear. The typewriter was still there, intact, with the paper folded over it, blank, of course. Nor had I even written the most absurd of the world, his name plus a stick indicating that it is the first chapter. He could not do it because, quite simply, the title was before, and he did not have it yet. For breakfast he took a beer and another of those pills that he could not stop taking lightly, because the remedy was worse than the disease.

  "No, I'm not crazy, I just have stress, a damn stress."

  Somewhere the sun had to shine on the earth, but there it was raining all week and the clatter of drops was already unbearable. Sometimes the silence makes any click sound like an explosive in your ears and annoys you enormously.

  That night the noise was repeated in one of the upstairs rooms. He did not dare to climb, to tell the truth, he had come in the middle of the drunkenness. They were too precise blows, maybe a hammer. Now they sounded louder, and would no longer be a damn bird or a rat. He decided to fall asleep again, oblivious to all that. The silence reigned again at night, except for the clatter of unnecessarily audible drops now from the window as well.

  7

  At last, the next day, the rain gave a respite, but not the clouds, which continued to cloud the sky. Richard, as usual, took the pill with a sip of beer. A lethal combination at high doses, but for him, now, it was nothing, except that it made him go from side to side as he walked through the living room and from there to the first bathroom, the lower one. Today he remembered the clatter and he said he was going up to sniff up there. So, beer in hand and with his skirts out, he set out to climb the wooden stairs, which seemed to crackle beneath his feet, he only seemed. One by one she ran through the six rooms and through the two more bathrooms. Everything was dismal in Richard's eyes, as empty as his ideas at that moment. And it was that, in fact, was not furnished any of the rooms, all were empty, except one, which was at the end of the corridor, which had a closet, one of those of the year of the year. With crystals and two really rusty cranks. He did not dare to approach. Why? He thought. There would be nothing there, so he went back down into the living room. And he kept drinking more beer. Everywhere, empty cans of it formed strange mounds of garbage.

  8

  That night, still without his muse, Richard still conscious heard the noise again, but this time it was as if something extremely heavy was twisting on the wood of the floor of the upstairs. He listened for a moment and there was silence. Everything was too dark and decided it was bedtime already.

  9

  The next morning, when he woke up among empty beer cans, the first thing that came to mind was the strange noise he heard the night before, so different from the others. Sometimes big and old houses make noises at
night, he thought jokingly. But that did not say anything to him, in fact it did not leave him alone at all. So that tonight would be lucid and would go up to see where the noise came from.

  10

  So it was. While it was raining outside again and the clatter of rain was heard, the noise made an appearance again. This time Richard was lucid. He decided to climb the stairs slowly and, as he did so, the noise was more prominent. It was as if something up there was creeping up. When he reached the main hall, he saw nothing. His lights were on. He looked in the rooms and everything seemed normal. The closet was also there, but he sensed something, that the noise that had now disappeared could have come from that strange closet. What if it was a cat caught in him? He thought with a smile on his lips.

  She walked slowly toward the closet. One of the doors was half ajar. It is fixed in the interior from this opening. The closet was empty. He touched the handle of the door, and a squeak of hinges accompanied the full opening of the door. Sure enough, there was nothing inside, now I was going to try the other door, but then suddenly the light went out. Richard turned his head, hoping for an answer. The light was gone, and now it was dim.

  "Come on Richard, get down to the basement and have two or three beers with a couple of pills and you forget everything."

  But he did not, because, at the back of the room, behind the door, there was a viscous shadow perfectly visible. It was brownish and of a considerable size, taller than a man and much stronger. Like two fingers, the thumb and forefinger of a human hand rested right there. He could smell it, a foul smell, and Richard was beginning to wonder if this was already the effect of the continuous blends of alcohol and pills.