Free Padre Salas by Enrique Laso

I. On the outskirts of the city of Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico
    The girl had spent the entire night howling. It was a visceral noise, more commonly associated with a wild animal, than the gaunt, virtually emaciated body of a little girl, who was barely ten years old.
    She lay curled up on a rough bed, which had been thrown together out of lumpy sacks of hay. Her parents, more out of desperation than resentment or fear, had confined her to a shed, which they used mainly for keeping the rain off the farming tools, and for storing a few low-value belongings that they had inherited over the years from different family members.
    The doctor approached the child with apprehension; she seemed to be sleeping, although her breathing was broken by a constant shaking that was not of human origin.
    “How many days has she been lying in this state?”
    “A... a week...” the mother dared to say, certain that she was about to receive an immediate reprimand from the doctor.
    The doctor heaved a sigh of resignation and, picking up the girl’s hand, he tried to measure her pulse. He felt a shiver run down his spine as he noticed that her heart was hardly beating at all... little more than 20 beats per minute! It was completely impossible. The parents were keeping to one corner of the darkened shack, gripping on to one another, worried, and a little ashamed. Their eyes remained glued to the physician, hanging onto the hope that, in the end, even if it came at the expense of a significant amount of their scarce savings, this seemingly good and wise man would pull Magdalena back out from the catatonic state into which she had so suddenly been plunged.
    The doctor took the little girl’s temperature, and once more he felt a shiver run through his entire body: 31°C; again, another indicator completely incompatible with life. But the girl... she was breathing!
    “I can’t quite get my head around this...” muttered the physician, almost to himself.
    All of a sudden, the girl turned, as if recovering her strength. The doctor approached her a little, waiting. She opened her eyes, and he was then able to see, to his horror, that her pupils were completely black, and in the shape of an inverted cross; a sinister contrast to her irises, which were an intense purple, as if all of the blood in her emaciated body had been compacted within them, and putrefied.
    “My God!” exclaimed the doctor, terrified, as he backed away from her.
    Then the child suddenly sat up, as if propelled by a spring, and opened her mouth disproportionately wide to emit a cutting, and unintelligible roar. Then, she collapsed, as if she had breathed her final breath.
    II. Mexico City, the editorial office of the newspaper, ‘Las Noticias’
    José Antonio Sancho walked slowly between the tables in the newspaper editorial office where he had been working for the last five years. After a long time of drifting around, he had finally found some stability, and yet... Now his job was in danger. Las Noticias had gone months without a single scoop to put in print: the newspaper was selling fewer and fewer printed copies, and there was not a great readership for the digital version, either. The result: advertising funds had fallen dramatically, and that was going to mean a reduction in the workforce. Everybody knew it. But for José Antonio, it was even worse. He had come over from his native Spain with the hope of leaving behind a chequered past that was marred by two unmitigated disasters: one professional, the other an affair of the heart. If they kicked him out of Las Noticias , he would find himself unemployed, and in a country that was not his own. It didn’t even bear thinking about, although now it was almost impossible not to.
    He reached his desk, and turned on his computer with despondency. He looked through his contacts list, to see whom he could call that morning. Perhaps there would be a new murder to follow up on, a kidnapping, or some dispute