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Riley had climbed the twelve steps of the stairs stealthily, with his mind on Gianna. It was as if he were wandering among the most absorbed thoughts. He grabbed the doorknob, which he found weird because the construction was before the appearance of the rotating knobs and opened the door without deepening, why that door had a knob. The Sanatorium had been restored several times over the years, he recalled. That would be a good reason to understand the knob, but that did not matter. The door closed with a metallic noise as if two metals brushed against each other while he turned his back on it. And what he saw after panting the door in the frame, did not surprise him at all.
- "I imagined it," -he said loudly, surrounded by furniture, lamps, and chairs with wheels abandoned under a huge spider's web or under yellowed sheets. Although his heart was beating fast, it seemed that now he was beginning to relax, but his gaze remained sad after seeing his beloved with his eyes closed. He wanted to remember her that way and he wanted everything to be a story, of the many he wrote in Florida. However, he had to settle for the current situation. With a sore heart and watery eyes, he tried to find shelter under one of those old sheets or some abandoned furniture. Abandoned, "he continued in the silence." That was the word he had heard most that night. He walked slowly to the center of the attic, in the direction of the large window through which the rays of the full moon penetrated if he could call it that. His shadow, long and grey, followed him.
He noticed that the window had its two large crystals that were almost opaque, covered with dirt and dust and saw for a moment a slight glow in the glass under the influence of the moon. Even so, the attic was probably the room that had the lightest. But it was deadly dense, like a layer of fog, that you see, but it does not let you see through it.
Just below the window was a wheelchair accusing a larger size than the others. Several cobwebs covered it and the wheels, strong but deflated, looked like two dark eyes on either side of the seat and the armrest. In the center of the seat, which was lined with something he did not know because he did not see it at a distance, he had a massive hole through which the moustache of a young rat peeped out. His little eyes, red as two cigarettes lit in the dark, shone with unsettling force. That was what caught his attention and something else he saw.
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.