The Sierra de Baza Horror

2966 words.

Mari Carmen slammed the front door shut behind her and turned the key in the lock, quite unaware that she had been followed home again.

“Well Luna, my friend, I think that’s quite enough snow for one day. What do you say?”

Luna, her best friend’s two year old Alsatian, quizzically but happily wagged her tail in response then made her way over to the metal water bowl, leaving a trail of wet paw prints behind her on the floor tiles.

“How can you be thirsty girl? It must be minus ten out there. You couldn’t break a sweat if you tried!” she said, shivering and hurrying over to the large, open fireplace on the far wall. She stood in front of the crackling flames, rubbing her gloved hands together to get some heat back into her bones before removing the outer layer of fleecy clothing. Reaching into the wide alcove to the right of the fireplace, which doubled as a log store during Spain’s normally-short, but nonetheless chilly winter months, she chose two fat chunks of olive tree and threw them into the fire to keep it blazing. In her twenty-four years, Mari Carmen had never experienced weather like this: four days earlier an eerie, unexpected storm of ice and snow had descended upon Andalucia, bringing the entire province to a frozen standstill.

Mari Carmen had arrived at her friends’ cottage, high in the Sierra de Baza mountain range, six days ago. She had immediately offered to house-sit and take care of Luna as a favour to Maria and Paco when they told her they would soon be flying over to Argentina to attend the wedding of one of Paco’s numerous cousins. They had been concerned that she would be scared up there, all alone in the mountains, but she assured them she would be absolutely fine and would actually welcome the opportunity to spend some ‘me’ time, catching up on her reading and watching DVD’s from Maria’s substantial collection. With a dozen Enrique Garcia films to watch, a girl could never feel alone, she had joked.

Of course, this was before the blizzard, which had rendered the narrow, mountain road to the cottage completely impassable. Now, she found herself stranded and feeling somewhat vulnerable, experiencing intermittent power cuts due to the snowfall that lay heavily on the lines. Thankfully she had enough firewood to last an entire month – not that the whiteout would last that long, she prayed – and, as well as keeping the cottage cosy twenty-four hours a day, the blaze provided her with some comforting light when the power flitted on and off throughout the dark, seemingly moonless nights.

**********

Staring at the cottage from the end of the snow covered path, it watched Mari Carmen approach the window and peer over to the Hernández house a mere two hundred metres away. It saw a flicker of relief pass over her slender face as it had done on previous evenings and knew that, despite not being acquainted with the couple who lived there, it gave her a great sense of comfort to know that they were there: the only neighbours within a twenty kilometre radius.

Or so she thought.

Without warning, the Christmas card scene it surveyed disappeared as the power supply was lost, dragging Mari Carmen into darkness.

Time’s up, sweetheart, it thought, beginning to move forwards.

**********

“Every night this happens!” Mari Carmen shrieked, throwing her hands up in angry frustration. “Just as it gets dark, the fucking electricity goes!”

Turning a hundred and eighty degrees, she slowly began to shuffle towards the fireplace, her eyes adjusting to the dancing light show cast by the flames. No sooner had she put her hands on the box of candles she kept on the shelf above the logs, but the lights exploded back to life. Blinking rapidly and relaxing her tense shoulders, she felt her heartbeat begin to slow slightly.

“I need a drink. My nerves can’t handle this again, Luna!” she half joked, eyeing the dog who had padded over towards the front door and now crouched, sniffing the snake-shaped draught excluder.

Luna ignored her, finding the fork-tongued serpent far more worthy of her attention.

Shrugging, Mari Carmen smiled and made her way through the rainbow beads hanging from the doorframe in front to the large kitchen-cum-dining room, where she headed straight for the cupboard beneath the double sink, flipping the lights on as she went. She opened the white cupboard door and squatted down to grab hold of a three-quarters-empty bottle of Calcique rum.

“This is bound to do the trick.”

She grabbed a short glass from the drying rack and opened the freezer door, extracting a little plastic bag that she’d filled with ice cubes. Realising the irony given the current weather conditions, she giggled to herself as she popped a couple of cubes into the glass. A rum cocktail just wasn’t a rum cocktail without ice, she thought.

As quickly as it had done so a few minutes earlier, the electricity died once more, plunging the kitchen into blackness.

“Shit!” she cursed, awkwardly placing the little bag of ice she had been about to put back in the freezer onto the worktop beside the sink instead. Clumsily feeling her way towards the living room by means of sliding her hands along the edges of the worktop as a guide, she squinted in the darkness and made out a faint glow in front of her. She could hear a gentle click clack sound, which could only be the beads gently bouncing together about a metre or so in front of her. Reaching out, she clasped a few lengths of beads and began to part them from their neighbours.

**********

Luna yelped loudly the second the lights came back on and bolted across the room from the front door to the three seater sofa, which she hid behind, trembling. She wasn’t the type of dog to scare easily, but whatever that had been, she didn’t like it one bit.

Mari Carmen’s heart jumped a beat with the shock of hearing Luna’s cry and, shielding her eyes with one hand on her brow, she ran through the beads to see what had happened to the poor animal. A second or two after entering the living room, she began to feel her nostrils fill with the pungent, unmistakeable odour of singed hair and saw a small puff of white smoke rise and slowly dissipate by the front door.

“Luna?” she croaked, her voice shaky.

Silence.

“Luna, sweetheart, where are you? What happened?”

An almost inaudible shuffling noise came from behind the sofa.

Mari Carmen approached nervously and saw the dog’s wet, black nose poking out the left hand side. She bent down to inspect the panting Luna more closely and saw to her shock that the tip of her tail had been burnt, exposing a small patch of pink skin.

“Oh my God, you poor little thing! But what a silly girl you are, getting that close to the fire. You could have really hurt yourself!” Mari Carmen told the cowering Alsatian, who slowly edged her way even further behind the sofa and began to growl.

That Luna was even capable of growling came as a huge surprise to Mari Carmen: she had never come across such a good-natured, gentle dog who, despite her threatening appearance would spend hours playing outside with Maria and Paco’s young nephews when they visited at weekends.

“Please don’t growl at me, sweetheart.” Mari Carmen pleaded softly, “I want to help you, not hurt you.”

You’re not the one I’m growling at. Luna tried to tell her.

**********

It was standing directly behind Mari Carmen, close enough to reach out and touch her as she knelt down to comfort the whimpering animal. Although the temptation was there, it wouldn’t pounce just yet. Like a cat revelling in the delightful game of torture it inflicts upon its victims, it would draw this out for as long as there was amusement to be had. It was gleeful, almost ecstatic as it breathed in the scent of her fear.


**********

“Okay, let me get you a nice chew-bone and we’ll see if that makes you feel better!” Mari Carmen told the dog a little too jovially, in an exaggerated attempt to conceal the tremor in her voice.

Luna raised her head suddenly and her large ears stood to attention. Taking in deep sniffs of the air, the panic seemed to disappear from her eyes and she raised herself from the crouched, cowering position she had adopted after her scare. Sitting upright now, she began to tentatively wag her tail whilst cautiously surveying her surroundings.

Mari Carmen threw her hand to her chest and slumped forward in relief, “Oh thank God… Thank God! You really spooked me there, you silly girl!” she said, the smile and colour beginning to return to her face.

As though nothing had happened, Luna stood upright and padded towards the grey rug in front of the fireplace, the little pink tip of her singed tail to-ing and fro-ing contentedly as she went. She picked up her tattered, multicoloured rope toy and lay down with it, gently chewing at the frayed edges. It was okay now. The bad thing had disappeared.

“Right then,” said Mari Carmen, moving over to pat Luna’s head, “a chew bone for Luna and a stiff drink for Mari Carmen, I say!”

The living room was warm now and, feeling the heat, Mari Carmen slipped off her wool jumper to reveal a plain white, long-sleeved T-shirt. She tossed the jumper onto the back of the sofa and made her way back to the kitchen, where her drink awaited.

As she was about to reach out for her glass and fill it with the rum, something stopped her dead. A quiet drumming noise played as the melted ice from the little bag pooled on the work surface and slowly dribbled off the edge onto the floor.

“How can it have melted?” she accidentally said out loud, flinching at the sound of her own voice. Just as she had been attempting to convince herself that there was nothing out of the ordinary about that puff of smoke she had witnessed in the living room - which, had it been caused by Luna burning her tail on the fire, should surely have materialized on the opposite side of the room - she began to tell herself firmly that these eight or nine cubes that had, five minutes earlier been solid ice, had obviously melted due to the amount of heat given out by the fire. Of course that’s what has happened, for goodness sake! I’ve just taken off my jumper, that’s how hot it is in here!

Nonetheless, she was eager to get back into the living room. She picked up the glass and tipped the two melted cubes down the sink, replacing them with a generous measure of rum. Fancy cocktails could wait until another evening. Quickly grabbing an unopened bottle of Pepsi from the worktop she unscrewed the cap, letting a hiss of compressed gas escape and the little crown of bubbles burst. She topped up her glass and placed the Pepsi bottle back in its spot, never noticing the fleeting glimpse of a face reflected in the black liquid as she did so.

**********

“Catch!” she shouted, throwing Luna’s chew bone in the air for her.

The dog snapped alert and leapt up, deftly retrieving the falling treat before it hit the rug. Her tail wagged a delighted thank-you.

“Why, you’re welcome, m’lady!” winked Mari Carmen as she bent down and picked up the television remote control from the arm of the sofa, hitting the red button to turn it on. She hoped that the electricity would sort itself out long enough for her to watch something all the way through tonight. She was determined to take her mind off the strange events of the past half hour and losing herself in a film seemed the ideal way to do so.

The tall, metal DVD rack had been, for reasons unknown, formed into the shape of a fish carcass. The spaces between its ‘ribs’ each held a film and Mari Carmen began to extract and survey them one by one.

“’Volver:’ Seen it. ‘Yo Soy La Juani:’ Not seen it.” She muttered to herself, placing the second option on the ‘not seen’ pile on the floor beside her to consider afterwards. She extracted the next case from the fish and shuddered, “’Las Colinas Tienen Ojos.’ ‘The Hills Have Eyes’… I don’t think so!” Glancing quickly towards the beaded curtain to the kitchen and feeling a strange chill, she decided to go with ‘Yo Soy La Juani’ and leave it at that. As far as she could tell from the sleeve, there was nothing even slightly creepy about this one.

Slipping the disc into the machine, she jumped onto the sofa and wrapped the fleecy, cow print blanket she’d picked up at Baza market around her. She hit the ‘play’ button on the DVD remote and took a sip of her rum, trying desperately to relax.

**********

It had been standing in the kitchen behind her as she poured the drink and had even given her a chance to see it. But, like most of her kind, she had been too busy thinking about other things, too self-absorbed to see what was really going on around her. It watched her try to work out what had happened to the ice cubes and laughed to itself. You’ll find out very soon. My hunger won’t wait forever, but first, let’s see what it takes to really scare you. Moving slowly, it made its way to the living room once more.

**********

Mari Carmen jumped as she heard the beaded curtain swing into motion and watched on in horror as, one by one, each row exploded into flames as though set alight by some supernatural wind.

Luna, who had been merrily chewing her way through her bone treat, sprang up from the rug, snarling viciously at something invisible.

It was the bad thing. The bad thing was back.

Panicked by the dog’s unnatural behaviour and unable to process what she had just witnessed, Mari Carmen pulled the blanket from around her shoulders and dashed towards the fiery, melting mess of beads and began batting them with her blanket in a desperate attempt to suffocate the flames. Turning around for a split second she watched, open-mouthed, as Luna, still snarling rabidly, leapt from her spot by the fireplace to the front door and began frantically scraping to escape. In her terror, the Alsatian slit open the serpent draught excluder with her claws, throwing pieces of yellow foam across the tiles behind her.

Suddenly the cottage was plunged into darkness, only this time it was not caused by snow on the lines.

Mari Carmen screamed a heart-breaking scream from the depths of her soul as, before her eyes could fully adjust to the darkness, she saw the hazy outline of a figure emerge from the dancing shadows by the fireplace.

She sprinted towards the front door, where Luna was still desperately trying to dig her way through and, shaking uncontrollably, tried to turn the key in the lock. “Get away from me!” she begged through tears, sensing the figure draw closer.

**********

Aside from the obvious pleasure of the final kill, this was its favourite part: when its victim, having laid eyes on it for the first time, hurriedly and futilely made a frantic bid for escape. It watched in twisted amusement as the skinny girl with the long black hair fumbled with the lock, all the while thinking that if she could only force her hands to stop shaking for long enough, it could be the key to her salvation.

**********

Mari Carmen felt a ‘click’ and finally managed to pull the front door open. She was in such a state of terror that she hardly noticed Luna bolt past her and disappear into the distance.

Not wasting a second and without feeling the icy cold that had started to penetrate her thin t-shirt, she began to run as fast as her legs and the knee-deep snow would allow. It was just like that dream she used to have so often: of dragging her aching legs through streets of glue, pursued by some malicious, unseen force.

As she half-waded, half-ran towards the Hernández house, she glanced back frequently towards the cottage, which was still shrouded in darkness. There was no sign of the… thing behind her, but she could feel the pressure of its presence crushing the air from her lungs nonetheless.

A brief sound of whistling air to her right, like hot storm-winds through cracks in a window, made her shriek and momentarily lose her footing. She slipped over but broke her fall with an outstretched arm. “What are you?” she screamed, sobbing and scrambling against the condensed snow to stand up, “What do you want from me?”

There was no reply.

She could see the silhouette of the Hernández house emerging from the darkness now and knew that she had to keep pushing the fiery muscles of her legs onwards. Half a minute and she knew she would be in the warm safety of the house. Thirty little seconds. Don’t stop! She warned herself.

**********

A bright, welcoming glow shone from the open doorway, beckoning Mari Carmen the final few metres along the covered pathway. She knew then that they had seen her coming. She was safe. “Thank you, God!” she rejoiced as she jumped across the threshold, deeply breathing in the inviting aroma of meat cooking on the open fire.

Mari Carmen slammed the front door shut behind her, quite unaware that she had just followed it home.