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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 terror 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.