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I staggered, losing my footing in the swaying motions, but managed to thrust a leg forward to catch myself before falling. I turned and retraced the trail back through the passageway between the beeches, wading through the blackness toward the house. My consciousness floated above the pain like a squirrel perched atop a pine tree that towered over an ocean of flames and columns of smoke. The black, taut skin of my right hand’s fingers tightened, and the stain spread across the palm and the back.

My mind went blank. I pitched forward and would have slammed into an oak, but I thrust my right hand out to brace against the trunk, wrinkled like an elephant’s hide. Starlight silhouetted the low-hanging branches, which draped in clusters of leaves. Though I’d pressed my fingers and palm firmly to the bark, the pressure in that arm dulled as if the limb had fallen asleep. In the darkness, beneath my blackened fingers, the bark shrank and withered. When I tore my hand away, the wood crumbled into gray sawdust.

I hunched over the trunk, blinking. I had carved a hole in the shape of my fingers, and the depression spread, rotting the bark until it crackled and broke into fragments and dust.

I reeled through the blackness. In flickers of awareness, slopes tilted up or down, the gray outlines of trees obstructed my path. Branches scraped me and struck my head—featherlight touches amid the waves of pain that my boiling blood radiated through me.

I emerged from the forest. Fifty meters away, a cone of white light swept over a grassy pasture. In sways, the beam tilted skyward, dissolving into the night.

I opened the pasture gate and climbed the slope. The beam spotlighted me suddenly, blinding me before sliding down to the chest of my sweater. At the crest of the pasture stood two figures: a bearded man in a corduroy shirt and denim jeans, accompanied by a gaunt woman whose wild, ashen mane framed a pallid face. A terrycloth robe hung from her shoulders as if draped on a coat hanger. The man gripped a flashlight in his left hand, and in his right, the long handle of a headless tool.

I froze. Did I know them? A ring of pain burned around the palm of my right hand.

The man strode toward me. Hatred twisted his weasel-like face, where the sparse hair atop his head merged with a thick, wiry beard. As the man and woman approached, they split apart to flank me. The man jabbed the tool handle in my direction.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, because this was the last time you’ll leave the house.”

I advanced toward him and raised my right hand.

The man halted, freezing the tool handle mid-air, and stared at the taut, burnished skin—black leather—that sheathed my hand up to the midpoint of my palm, which I held aloft like a greeting.

I locked eyes with him.

“I see you.”

I pressed my open hand against the man’s face. A surprised gasp escaped him as he stumbled back two steps. The curve of his upper lip, the tip and bridge of his nose, and the imprint of my four fingers on his forehead, rooster-crest-like, had all turned ashen gray. His mouth fell open, features swelling with panic. Then, parts of his forehead, nose, and upper lip crumbled into a spray of ash.

The man shrieked. He dropped the flashlight and the tool’s handle to slap his palms against his face. Borders of ash expanded across his forehead—eaten down to the bone—along the cartilaginous ducts of his nose, and over his bare teeth as though he’d been born with a cleft lip. With each smack, between screams, his skin and flesh crumbled into puffs of ash.

He crumpled to his knees. His eyeballs blackened and dried like raisins. The hollows of his nose and mouth merged, revealing bloody cavities like the ventricles of a heart. His thick tongue quivered as rotting gums released their teeth. His screams sputtered out, replaced by those of the woman beside him, hunched and shuddering. She clawed at her face, fingers sinking into flesh, shrieking through a gaping, twisted mouth.

I stepped forward. The woman, startled, tried to run, but I seized the collar of her bathrobe with my left hand. When I yanked her toward the ground beside the man, momentum sent us both crashing down—her sprawled on the grass, me kneeling.

The man had collapsed onto his side atop ash-sprinkled grass. Within the hollow shell of his skull, borders of rot spread, swallowing the ruined bone toward the nape of his neck.

The woman screamed, soles of her slippers slipping on the damp grass as she struggled to rise, but I straddled her back and shoved her face against the man’s skull, which shattered on impact into a cloud of ash. She whimpered and thrashed. I clasped her nape with my left hand, pressing her face into the ashen ring at the man’s neck—a smoldering cigarette tip. Her muffled scream choked the air. In a spasm, she wrenched her face upward to the sky. It was now coated in a layer of ash like fleece, gray and greasy, the hole of her mouth contracting and expanding as it sucked in clumps of rot.

I leaned my full weight against the nape of her neck, driving her face into the corpse’s ashen, sludgy mass between its shoulders. The woman groaned, shook, thrashed her legs. Her nails clawed at the sleeves of my sweater as the muscles in my arms quivered. I squeezed my eyelids shut; my teeth grated together.

Her body convulsed for a few seconds, then fell still. I released her head, letting it slump onto the man’s torso—a lump of thick, greasy ash—as if resting on a bed of crumbled incense stick half-charred to nothing.

I stood. My left arm flashed white with a cramp. The woman lay facedown in a frothy sludge, while the man’s corduroy shirt sagged where the flesh beneath had crumbled.

The flashlight lying to my right cast sharp outlines on blades of grass in the dark. Insects swarmed in its luminous pool. I grabbed the flashlight and swept its beam across the field as I staggered downhill toward the house.

The black stain had gloved my right hand and crept up several centimeters past my wrist. My heart pumped darkness. Half-hobbling, half-tumbling down the grassy slope, I forgot I’d ever known anything but this pain.

I entered the stable. The cows craned from their stalls, chains clinking, and fixed me with wide, glassy eyes. One stretched its neck and loosed a low, drawn-out moan.

When I halted, I swayed. My vision blurred, but I lurched toward the first stall. The cow grew frantic, stomping the stone floor, and retreated into the wooden partition as it stared with dread at the stain on my right hand. I crouched over the chains, which swept up wisps of straw as they dragged. With my left hand, I fumbled open the shackle clamped around the cow’s leg, and when I tossed the iron aside, it clanged against grimy stone. I freed the other three cows, but they lingered in their stalls. Two dipped their heads to chew hay.

My flesh seethed with pain. I hobbled to the stool by the entrance, flanked by tools propped against walls or dangling from hooks: an axe, a hoe, a saw. I grabbed the saw. Set it on the stool. Traced my fingers over its jagged teeth. Kneeling, I gripped the saw with my left hand and laid my right arm across the stool. I aligned the blade’s teeth a handspan below my elbow, close to the encroaching stain.

I swallowed, locked my jaw. With a single left-armed thrust, in a flare of agony, the teeth bit into muscle, then scraped bone.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s collected in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Out of the Black” by Royal Blood.