Title

The Sanatorium

of Murcia

Claudio Hernández

First edition eBook: October 2017.

Title: The Sanatorium of Murcia.

No part of this publication, including the cover design, may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, either electronic, chemical, mechanical, optical, recording, in internet or photocopy without the previous permission of the editor or the author. All rights reserved

I dedicate this book to my wife, Mary, to whom, if not to her? One more time, she is the first before everything. I love you, and I hope my madness do not separate us.

Introduction

Carlos López was already seventy years old, but that did not prevent him having a shotgun in hand and with the crossbow hanging from one shoulder, all the corners of Espuña Mountains, in Murcia, where his emaciated physique pierced the grove. However, his eyes, although almost lunatic, did not seem with certain fatigue, but tension. He had a height of one meter seventy and had the skin more wrinkled than a lizard taking the sun in a quarry. He weighed seventy-three kilograms, and even so, his knuckles were real sharp bones, almost splitting his skin. His gray hair shaved. He wore brown corduroy trousers and a red plaid shirt. And no, he did not carry any animal or bird on one side. He was not hunting. He was in pursuit. His lips were sealed now, and they looked like a long zipper across his face. Perfectly straight. His index finger did not shake in the trigger at the time of the shooting, and he had already done it three times that same morning in late September.

The fallen of the branches as if they were waves dying in the sand, let a glimpse of that dark figure, while they moved. His eyes opened instantly, one more time, and his finger pressed against the trigger. His forehead was sweaty, and a few beads of sweat impregnate his sparse and grey-haired beard too.

It was certainly that.

Carlos was born in the district of Berro, very near the Espuña Mountains Sanatorium. He remembered very well the urban legend that had created about to this center, which the Murciano government had outlined to open nine years ago with two hundred new beds. Now, in 2017 was not a priority. Nevertheless, for Carlos, it was because of that, the dark figure had got out of the location.

The legend recognized of the existence of the black lady. Something sinister that had seemed the neighbors in several occasions.

A roar that made echo in the tree top and the walls of the rocky mountains filled up the silence that warm morning. The cartridge literally had exploded inside the hunting shotgun, and its heady smell of gunpowder made him wake up the desire to have reached it fully. But it was not like that. That dark figure continued among the branches and leaving a trail as a dense and sticky fog behind.

- “Shit!” –muttered Carlos now that spat on the dead leaves on the ground.

He advanced with his body crouched on a path, and as he moved slowly, he was carrying the shotgun again, barely making any noise. Penetrating the green forest, as if swimming in a murky river, little by little it was reaching ground zero.

The Sanatorium of Murcia.

Its brittle, pale walls were visible as the branches moved away from Carlos's eyes. The whole building had been embraced with passion by a climbing grass that now began to dry the leaves. The multiple windows looked at Carlos like empty eyes, scrutinizing and chasing him somehow. His heart thudded now under his chest, for the first time that morning, but he did not take his hand there, just where the skin was moving. His eyes remained motionless as if his glance anxiously lost, between the windows of that old, and abandoned building built in 1917.

The dark silhouette climbed up the wall like a black salamander, stopped, looked at him with watery, whitish eyes and then continued to climb to the ceiling. The sound of the stones on the wall as they collapsed made the birds' flight, while the dark, empty barrel of the shotgun aimed them for a moment, then returned to the entity.

Another deafening noise covered the air of such a splendid place, which now was withering away with the passage of days. A hare crossed the road from side to side with such speed that Carlos only saw a gray spot. The hole was drawn in the wall like another eye, while the dark figure avoided it.

The sun's rays were barely visible under those branches, but the heat was suffocating, yet a stream of cold air covered like a cloak, the area near the Sanatorium. And for a moment it seemed to Carlos that the growing darkness had entirely hidden the sun. After a few seconds, with a heart in a fist, the vague light as if it were the moon, it intoxicated the road and the facade of that building.

The figure was no longer there.

But Carlos waited outside, sitting on the floor.

And he was chasing something he did not know if it existed. In fact, he did not remember whether he had taken the medication for his delusional disorder.