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we’re continuously tying up loose ends.”
    “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying at all.”
    “Remember how you didn’t want to go and identify the bodies, so I had to go? Do you remember they performed a post mortem on both of them?”
    “Yes, I do,” said Carlos, his voice broken.
    “Alicia died of severe trauma to the skull; but Laura, my granddaughter, died of a heart attack. It’s a strange fact, although it can happen in certain circumstances. She could have withstood a shock before the car crashed.”
    “But then...”
    “She had not suffered any serious injuries, and none of the injuries she did have would have caused her death.”
    Carlos saw himself walking through a dense wood as if in a dream. The leaves and branches from the trees preventing him from hardly seeing any light, although he sensed its presence. Little by little, as he went forward, the light became increasingly brighter, more evident, stronger.
    “And you’re linking this now with...”
    “Wait. It’s just that, that isn’t all, and it’s by no means the most important thing. Like I just told you, you didn’t see Laura’s body, and I was the one who had to go and identify her. The forensic scientists were more than a little bit puzzled by the cause of death. There were two other facts that are difficult to explain. And now they make sense, and shed light on what’s happening to you, as unbelievable as it may seem to both of us.”
    “What two facts...”
    “Laura’s eyes were popping out of her skull, and completely full of blood. When they explained it to me, I lifted her eyelids myself, and they were far too swollen. It was a horrible image. They were so full of blood, they were practically red: a dark and brilliant red, like in your dream.”
    “Dad!”
    “And then secondly, there was something that in the beginning was not important; something that the medics gave little relevance to, but which now takes on extraordinary dimensions. Laura had heavy bruising on her arms; marks from adult fingers that could have been throwing her around with force.”
    XXIII
    The time passed by with a slowness that was both tiring and exasperating. Carlos wanted the hours to speed up, and arrive at a moment in which everything that was happening would dissolve into memory along with everything else, and end up almost unreal.
    ‘I’ll end up thinking that nothing happened.’
    On many occasions, he felt like a caged animal, pacing ceaselessly through the lounge. He had decided to diminish his own living space within his house, leaving some rooms closed up forever: his daughter’s, and a small living room that had become transformed into a storage room for everything that reminded him of his wife.
    ‘Otherwise I’ll end up locked away in some psychiatric hospital, tormented by the same terror as Laura,’ he thought.
    All of his old friends (of which there were few) had gradually stopped calling. He was always a shy man, turned in on himself, and this personality trait had become exaggerated since the accident. And nobody, with the exception of his father and perhaps Marta, would be bothering with him.
    ‘The important thing now is to count the hours, count the days, let the years pass, and wait for everything to return to normal.’
    He was getting into the habit of reading and watching programmes about parapsychology, about inexplicable topics and situations close to the unreal. He was nurturing the idea of writing to some magazine, or sharing his case directly with some radio station. But in the end, he always held back at the last minute, in the belief that the rest of humanity would take him as a madman.
    ‘My father believes me. My father knows that I’m telling him the truth, that I haven’t lost my mind.’
    It was awful, but the recent developments, regarding the information that Marta and Esteban had given him, confirmed his theory: his daughter really was being tormented in Hell. Laura, for some reason,