2023-06-14 00:16:58
Despite the years and the nights that I have spent, there is one that I cannot forget. This is the night in which absolute terror invaded my being and made even the finest strand of my body tremble, managing to break my voice and my soul. It was the night I first noticed Frannie.
I was preparing myself for a normal night, like one of many that I had lived since I had stopped experiencing the vivid dreams of my childhood and part of my adolescence that led me to a deep psychosis. A darkness had always inhabited and nested in my mind and how could I not do it after so many nights of feeling my legs burn and snakes coiling around my body trying to suffocate me while I ran through a cemetery until my feet stopped? on the grave of a woman, whose inscription and name I could never recognize.
In my childhood, the efforts of my parents and doctors were in vain, as well as my grandmother’s advice when she brought the village priest to cleanse the house of evil spirits and use protective amulets. At that time everything was tried, including drinking holy water, placing sacred bouquets under the bed, burning candles and many other things that were unsuccessful. My childhood passed like this between loneliness, despair and fear. All the portraits and mirrors in the house were forbidden for me and even years later I still fear this latest invention for which the evil that stalks me persecuted me.
After all my suffering, adolescence would bring me the calm that I always sought, because one night the dreams finally stopped and with them the fear and the stalking that the beings I dreamed of subjected me to, the unknown faces that showed me their suffering. at death. However, in my thoughts I did not imagine that those visions would return because I still had to live the most fearsome night in which I would hear Frannie’s silent and desperate scream that would return me to a primal state of true terror and would bring with it the memory of the sleepless nights.
It had not been long since I had moved away from my parents and the maternal home. I was working and had rented a small room in which I spent my agonizing life in almost absolute solitude. It was the night of September 14 and I had gone to bed early as I usually did because of the cold that permeated the environment. I had no trouble sleeping due to the medications I had been taking since I was thirteen years old, even so, that night, that disastrous night, would be decisive and would mark a new milestone in my life. On the night table, always messy, there was no shortage of my glasses, water, and a small flashlight that I had never used, but that I had because it was rumored that sometimes the light went out.
That night I felt that I would sleep peacefully, that is to say, without whispers, without voices, without unknown faces, without dreams to remember and in a state of complete stillness. All until my mind took me to a new turning point. Once again I lived in my dreams and remembered with total clarity what was happening in them, but without being able to control the events around me. I thus existed in dreams as a mere conscious spectator and yet lacked the power to modify the reality that manifested itself to my ethereal senses. I found myself in new and unknown spaces, I saw myself in the park where I currently lived, but the landscape was totally different, an environment from an ancient era colored the landscape ocher. Inside the dream I went home and in it I lived with other people whose faces I can’t remember clearly now. The house I was in had a very large patio and looked completely old with its mud walls and uncovered floors, so mist and dust enveloped it.
One of the young women who appeared in the dream told me that they had continued to scare people in the house and at that precise moment from the kitchen they threw one of the plates on the floor making a loud noise that increased the tension in the atmosphere of terror. The kitchen without major arrangements, the lack of a door and the reddish-yellow clay floor made me think of the conditions of abandonment and scarcity of the house, in addition, the dust covered most of the place and diminished most of my vision.
In my childhood nightmares I learned that if I lived in fear I would be completely lost, that’s why I had to be brave and save myself, because in them I was alone and only I could help myself. In addition, the darkness that lurked in the corners of my mind seemed to be waiting for moments of weakness to emerge with its greatest strength, it was how I always decided to move forward even if I trembled with fear and felt that my last breath was lost.
Perhaps that is why in the nightmare I did not go back when I heard the hit of the plate falling on the floor, and instead I advanced to the kitchen despite feeling a great heaviness in my body and difficulty breathing, after all I had inherited the character of my father and knew that you could also act with fear. I went closer to inspect and my body began to tremble, I felt each of the follicles on my right arm stand on end, I felt the cold of the spirits when they approach you and I couldn’t breathe as well as I wanted, but I kept getting closer every time more to the place where that feeling of terror that gave me goosebumps came from. It was then when I saw it through the mist, it was a mirror located in the lower part of the kitchen, it looked a bit old and it was covered with dust so no reflection was visible in it. Just as I stood in front of the mirror, a deadly breeze was felt that brought back the memories of a young woman murdered and buried on the floor of that old house. At that point I clearly felt how my body trembled and how each one of my hairs curled, I wanted to run away and not feel their pain, but my tongue seemed disconnected from me, my legs didn’t move either and I couldn’t help but stand in front of the mirror. , because deep down that was what he had been looking for when he got there. In such a state of agitation I saw that a name was written on the dust-covered mirror, that name that stays with me to this day and I even seem to hear in whispers, her name, the name of that woman murdered and buried under that floor was: “Frannie ”.
Photo: Danny G
I could not bear it, the fear I felt in the dream was such that it made me wake up terrified, I had sweated a lot, I did not want to or could not move because I remembered that in the bathroom of my room I had a mirror that I had not been able to remove because it belonged to the homemade and that mirror was very similar in size to the one that had appeared written the name: Frannie. I made an effort and took my arm out of the blanket to reach the clock that I illuminated with the flashlight, it was three thirty in the morning, one of the hours of the spirits. At that point I got even more terrified, my dream was no longer just a simple dream. His name echoed in my mind, and his face? Even though I know I saw him for only a second before waking up, despite my many efforts years later I still can’t remember him, it’s still a blurry and deformed vision that I dare not look at. remembering, I only know that her name remained with me, the vision of her copper hair and the certainty that in the world of dreams there is absolute terror that can accompany you even after waking up.
That morning, being in my lonely room, I wanted to go out, run, find company because I always thought that shared fear was not so terrifying, but it was useless, I was alone, I had nowhere or who to turn to and my escape implied going through such a fearsome mirror. that although it will pass without seeing, I knew that Frannie’s spirit was possibly waiting for me there.
That night and early morning were those of my greatest torture, because in no nightmare did I feel as afraid as the one that Frannie’s vision inspired me. In those moments, fear seized me, a fear that I did not know and at the same time a fear from the past that now seemed to haunt me in the reality of my new home, in the bathroom mirror and with the whispers of the wind. Although I don’t remember her face, Frannie revived in me the murmurs of an earlier time that she believed to be forgotten and her name written on the mirror reflected a strangled cry of a forgotten death that cries out for her release.
After that night of dark agony in which I did not stop thinking, fearing and crying out, dawn finally arrived and the light of dawn appeased that night vision. I went out to work as usual, I told no one about my nightmare or about Frannie. She remained with me in silence and solitude as in a kind of complicity pact that kept me safe from the judging gaze of society and from the malicious gossip of people.
A long time passed without much news, but even so, on nights like these I do not forget that in the depth of the mind that keeps nightmares without counting, behind each mirror, after each unfinished shadow, dust and mist, Frannie awaits us, always in silence filled with of fury being for me the essence of fear that makes me a mimulus destined to live forever among Bach flowers.
Nita is the pseudonym of Tatiana Villamizar Perez –Bucaramanga, Colombia.
I have always felt great interest in the field of letters, which led me to study a degree in Spanish and Literature at the Industrial University of Santander.
I believe that art is a manifestation of the spirit in its maximum splendor.
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