By the time we returned to Cerro Alto in December 2022, the curse of those lands had escalated to apocalyptic proportions. The town was in utter chaos as we spotted it in the distance. Adults roamed the streets with blank minds. We tried talking to some, but they only reacted violently when we interrupted their wandering. We walked through the entire town until we found someone sane. The warehouse, the first place we wanted to check, was empty. Most houses were uninhabited, and almost all the adults we encountered behaved as if they had lost their minds, crawling on the ground, trying to break down walls with their chests, or even burning their eyes by staring directly at the sun. We had tried to help everyone in our path, but we stopped intervening when they began greeting us with aggression. We limited ourselves to preventing them from harming themselves and then continued on our way.
In the church, we found a small group of normal adults, though very disturbed by the situation, along with all the children and teenagers in the community. It was Mrs. Dolores, a peasant, who revealed what had happened. Days earlier, Mr. Arnulfo began to experience visions where it was revealed to him what he must do to save his people. At first, he shared this fearfully, afraid they would take him for crazy, but he forgot his reservations when worries began to consume him, and his gaze constantly wandered into some corner of the horizon. Later on, many people began to have similar delusions, although their condition worsened terribly as the days went by. They first whispered things about the mountain range, then screamed in terror about an entity being born from the bowels of the earth. Later, their minds degenerated until they could barely murmur incoherencies, and rarely remembered to eat, drink, or sleep. Some people had walked until they got lost in the depths of the surrounding forest, and others had taken their lives by plunging their heads into buckets of water in the middle of the night. The patriarch had regained enough of his sanity to help a little in that situation, but that morning, the day we arrived, he woke up shouting about his duty on the mountain, then sneaked away while a bunch of townspeople suffered a sudden attack of hysteria.
We helped Dolores and Juan, her husband, control the situation. We took people to the church, where with prayers and infusions whose aroma hit us like adrenaline, we managed to restore some clarity to some individuals. That's when we heard firsthand about the delusions afflicting the inhabitants of Cerro Alto, where humanoid figures shrouded in shadows and black threads devouring distant worlds were constantly repeating.
When we asked about the visions of the patriarch, Dolores and Juan refrained from clarifying the details. I suppose they already sensed our skepticism, finding it offensive to their beliefs, but after our insistence, they confessed some of what the patriarch had shared with them when he still retained some of his sanity. At first, they spoke of random fragments of distant memories where voices, landscapes, and familiar scents abounded. Later, when they were sure of our willingness to listen, they proceeded to reveal the most incredible of all those delusions, one in which Mr. Lazaro Arriaga—ancestor of Mr. Arnulfo and the former patriarch of Cerro Alto—repeatedly emphasized to his great-grandson about the importance of stopping the witch. The fragments of the delusions in which Mr. Lazaro appeared were full of overwhelming sensations and a sidereal landscape very different from what could be seen from Earth. He spoke an unknown language, but the thunderous voice that resonated in the patriarch's head somehow made him understand his message, as if his words traveled through pure vibrations.
The mere idea of being trapped for hours in that imaginary space already seemed unsettling to me, but the explanation of what was happening in Cerro Alto surpassed the impact of any delusion. The witch was feeding on everything within her reach, according to Mr. Lazaro. She wanted to drain the elemental energy that composed matter until its structure collapsed, turning everything into dust. It was clear that these words and concepts were alien to the understanding of people as humble as those of Cerro Alto, but they repeated them with such certainty that I could no longer doubt the message of the ancient patriarch.
After confessing the vision he had had, the state of Mr. Arnulfo improved almost to the point of regaining his complete sanity. However, that morning, he woke up with a heartbreaking scream, grabbed a machete, and ran towards the mountain. They wanted to go after him, but the chaotic situation of the town forced them to focus on providing as much help as possible to their crazed neighbors.
Our team continued to help control the situation, but soon we agreed that someone should take advantage of one of our caravans to look for Mr. Arnulfo. It was Mr. Antonio, the peasant Juan, and I who followed the trail of the patriarch, whose location we could only guess was near the mysterious cave that had started it all.
Mr. Juan's guidance helped us advance as fast as possible in our caravan. We saw Mr. Arnulfo climbing the mountain in desperation, severely hindered by some motor condition I had never seen before, as if he had forgotten how to control each of his limbs coordinately and was struggling to remember. We jumped to help him as soon as possible, thinking he was suffering from a stroke, but he surprised us with a lucidity that contrasted with his motor skills. He denied being unwell and even pushed us when we tried to lift him, showing that characteristic pride of a ranch man who does not allow his weaknesses to be recognized. He continued to refuse help while taking full responsibility for helping his people until another vision made him fix his eyes on the sky.
"He mumbled words that none of us could recognize. Mr. Juan suggested that maybe he was having a conversation, but both Mr. Antonio and I agreed that his phrases—brief and composed of short words—resembled more the responses of an interrogation than a chat. "Yes, it's okay," were the last and clearest words we heard him say before his eyes refocused on reality. What he told us next is hard for me to accept even today, after having seen what I saw, as the content of his words challenges our understanding of the world and raises questions that I Mr.'t want to think about, much less discover their answers. Mr. Arnulfo's lucidity, moreover, was so indisputable that none of the three witnesses dared to question him, and we followed his instructions as if they had been orders. His speech faded at the end, before a sudden stiffness and a face of agony completely invaded him, paralyzing him. Both Mr. Juan and Antonio headed towards the cave of disaster with some wood they collected on the way with a machete and the lighter that Mr. Antonio always carried in his back pocket to light his cigarettes.
I stayed behind to try to save Mr. Arnulfo, but my efforts were in vain, as the ailment that plagued him was beyond any medical solution. His mind and body seemed to sink further as time passed, but during his last breath, he gathered enough strength to say his final words.
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"Intense fire... purify... from the mountain." That was all I was able to hear initially with pure auditory sense. Mr. Arnulfo was so weak that he could barely make any sound, but seeing his lips and remembering that his delirious speech circled around certain key words allowed me to recognize what he meant. By then, shouts of alarm outside marked Mr. Arnulfo's last heartbeat and completely stole my attention. Upon going out to see what it was, I saw Mr. Juan and Antonio running towards the caravan. They told me, worried, that the fire had not worked. The cave had dry vegetation whose nature none dared to describe to me, but the fire did not spread through it, even though it seemed highly flammable both to the touch and sight. Moreover, they were horrified by whatever dwelled in that deep corner of the earth, that abominable creature referred to by the people of Cerro Alto as the witch.
I then recalled Mr. Arnulfo's last words, or the best reconstruction I could make of them:
"Only the fury of an intense fire can purify the evil from the mountain."
I regretted that we lacked the essential combustible metals to invoke the most intense fires known to man, but a fleeting moment of adrenaline made me think of the best possible solution for our limited situation. My companions agreed with my idea when I shared it with them. We brought the caravan as close as possible to the cave and began to empty its key elements needed to carry out our plan, including isopropyl alcohol and the gasoline from the tank, as well as any other substance that could serve as fuel.
My initial determination upon entering the cave was motivated by my ignorance of what dwelled there. The mere sight of the bulbs and roots of the place was enough to shatter my will, as their appearance, color, and aroma deviated from anything earthly with which they could be compared. My best description of them is that they resembled twisted snakes with a horrifying texture that triggered trypophobia in anyone who saw them, composed of pulsating clusters of a phosphorescent blue color whose metallic essence embedded itself in the back of one's nose. But those horrible sensations were overshadowed by the discovery of what was at the bottom of that infernal cave, whose sight would have broken my spirit had I been alone.
It was at that moment that Mr. Arnulfo's words, which initially seemed like nonsense, finally penetrated my head because of the magnitude of what they hinted at. Mr. Lazaro Arriaga and Mr.a Pilar, the former leaders of Cerro Alto, were the ones who had been appearing in visions to the current patriarch, surely sent by God to prevent a disaster in which he could not intervene directly. They had told him the truth about the evil that had befallen not only his community, Cerro Alto but the entire planet. That creature, the witch, was nothing more than the corporeal manifestation of an entity whose dealings with evil had stripped it of any resemblance to the human it once was. This, they said, went beyond tales of flying witches stealing children to rejuvenate with their blood and empower themselves with their innocent souls. The creature buried in the mountain was going to branch out across the world until it consumed the life force of all living beings, devouring everything in its path until it gained enough power to return to life. The mental instability of the creatures in the vicinity, human or not, was only a consequence of its resurgence. That any of us, or any army, could face a semi-deity with such power seemed impossible, but there was hope to put an end to that threat. While the entity materialized in our world, it was weaker than ever, as it would completely lack the power it would have in another plane, and its corporeal form would be almost as weak as any of us.
That day we encountered the incarnation of evil, or one of them at least, materialized as a horrifying humanoid figure lying on the ground, face up, without a face or developed limbs, spasming as the life force of the earth ascended through what I suppose were its veins until it gradually materialized into fleshy tissues. It lacked eyes, ears, a mouth, or even a face, so it was easy to think that no sense connected it to our world, but that mass writhed violently as soon as we found ourselves in its dwelling, as if some supernatural sense had signaled our presence. If the veins giving it life had not been chaining it, who knows what that entity would have been capable of, even without its complete transformation, as it was evident in the sheer movement of its limbs that it possessed superhuman strength.
We proceeded to finish what we had set out to do, trying to ignore as best we could what lurked among us, writhing desperately as we spread all kinds of fuels over its demonic roots. I was sure that we would unleash a true hell in that place, but we had the fortunate intuition that we had to do everything possible against that beast. We returned to the truck to get clothes, blankets, rugs, and absolutely anything else that could serve as fuel to keep the flames alive for as long as possible. We even took off the tires to place them under that humanoid, a moment when I could firsthand experience its strength, as with a push from what was its hip, it induced such intense pain that I almost thought I had broken an arm. That contact terrified me, but at the same time, it infuriated me so much that I gathered the courage to wrap its limbs with fabric and cover its head with the coat I was wearing.
We left the cave. We kept a tire that Mr. Antonio set on fire and pushed it to roll towards the lair of that monster. The accumulation of gases from the chemicals we poured caused a blaze that we could see from the entrance, followed by the intense crackling of the subsequent flames. We would have felt relieved after that if it weren't for the horrifying scream we heard in the depths, born from vocal cords that had not managed to develop. We were able to relate it to agonizing pain, but we also noticed a trace of demonic fury with which it seemed to be casting a curse upon us. Although I have no reason to think that it was really a curse, the idea of some looming danger has kept me awake for the past few months.
That agonizing scream of the entity brought about the last evils upon Cerro Alto, as many of its inhabitants fell victim to a mental degeneration that had neurological consequences such as memory loss or lack of motor coordination. The most severe case was that of an elderly woman who was almost entirely reduced to a vegetative state for several weeks before reacting for the first time to stimuli such as light or sound. Most of the locals, however, managed to recover both physically and mentally from that episode, and together they were able to rebuild their beloved home.
Upon revisiting the cave in that mountain range, we only found charred matter, confirming that the evil at the earth's core had been completely eradicated. Needless to say, the droughts ended, and the renewed fertility of the lands allowed the locals to recover easily.
I didn't plan to share this story with anyone, as I know how difficult it is to believe. In fact, I would have liked to ignore it for the rest of my days. I had already begun to resume my life as happily as it was when ignorance allowed me, but I jumped on my laptop to write this testimony as soon as I heard some rumors that chilled my blood. Cerro Alto had never experienced such happy and prosperous times as it does now, as I mentioned earlier, but our contact with neighboring towns has allowed us to hear terrifying whispers. People have started talking about crazed creatures that roam the fields at night, fireballs crossing the horizon frequently, and lands whose fertility decreases at an unprecedented rate. But what terrified me the most of all was the testimony of a couple of farmers from a town east of Cerro Alto, somewhere near the state of Hidalgo, who claimed to have seen roots of a strange color sprouting from cracks in the ground and winding around plant stems that woke up dry. I haven't wanted to inquire about it, as I would be terrified to verify the truth of their words; but if anything of that mountain entity remained alive in the bowels of the earth, it is only a matter of time before it begins to devour our planet. I write this with the hope of having gone mad and that my concerns are only paranoid delusions, but if I am right, and the witch ever reincarnates in our lands in the decades to come, I hope this warning serves so that the next one to face it can invoke fires more intense than the ones we could achieve, because otherwise, all of humanity could be doomed.