The Headless Man
by Grandmother Hilda
Prologue
In the northern mountains, where copper veins gleam beneath the earth and the wind whistles through the hills, there existed a town that lived through a legend it would never forget. It was a place of hardworking people, brave miners, and families united by common effort. But it was also a place where rumors flew faster than seagulls over the nearby sea.
This is the story of a mystery that held an entire town in suspense, of a nocturnal encounter that changed lives forever, and of a lesson that resonated in the hearts of young and old alike. It’s the story of how appearances can deceive, of how words can hurt more than fists, and of how sometimes, the most terrifying figures hide the most valuable lessons.
Because in that mining town, among the stairs that climbed and descended through the hills, among the wooden houses and humble taverns, walked a figure that sowed terror with its mere appearance. A faceless figure, headless, without identity. A figure that would teach the entire town that the true monster isn’t always who it appears to be.
Chapter 1: The Town of Sauce
Sauce was a mining town nestled in the mountains of northern Chile, where copper sprouted from the earth like golden blood and the sweat of workers mixed with the red dust of the high desert. It wasn’t a large town—barely three thousand souls lived on its steep slopes—but it was a place with character, with history carved into every stone and every wooden beam.
The town naturally divided into two sectors: Sauce Bajo (Lower Sauce), where the businesses, taverns, police station, and market were located; and Sauce Alto (Upper Sauce), where the miners’ houses clung to the mountainside like eagles’ nests. Connecting both sectors was a long avenue that was half street, half staircase, flanked by ancient trees whose twisted trunks told stories of decades of winds and storms.
Everyone had to pass through this avenue: children on their way to school with their patched backpacks, miners heading to their shifts at La Esperanza mine, women carrying their baskets to market, elderly people descending to the plaza to play dominoes under the shade of the poplars. There was no other route, no shortcut. The stairs were the obligatory path, the stone steps worn by thousands of feet over the years.
During the day, the avenue bustled with life. Neighbors greeted each other from their windows, stray dogs dozed in the sun, children played ball on the landings between stair sections. But when night fell, when the street lamps flickered with their yellowish light and shadows stretched like dark fingers, the avenue transformed into something completely different.
Then he appeared. The headless man.
Nobody knew when it had all begun. Some elders swore the legend came from their grandparents’ time, from the early days of the town when miners sought fortune in barely explored veins. Others said it was a more recent phenomenon, from just a few years back. But everyone agreed on one thing: when the sun set behind the hills and stars began to shine in the desert sky, one had to be careful when going up or down those stairs.
Because then, among the shadows of the century-old trees, among the flickering of rusted lampposts, appeared a figure dressed in black. A tall figure, with broad shoulders, that walked with a firm but silent step. A figure that, when you got close enough, revealed its terrible secret: where there should have been a head, where there should have been eyes, nose, mouth… there was nothing. Only darkness. Only emptiness.
The rumor spread from mouth to mouth, from house to house, from generation to generation. Mothers warned their children not to linger when returning from friends’ houses. Fathers quickened their pace when descending from the mine after the night shift. Young people dared each other to cross the stairs at midnight, but few actually dared to do it.
“It’s just a legend,” some skeptics said in the taverns of Sauce Bajo, raising their wine glasses with a mocking smile. “Pure stories to scare children.”
“Then you go and cross the stairs at midnight,” others replied. “Let’s see if you dare.”
And the brave ones fell silent, because deep down, everyone was afraid. Because everyone, even the most rational and pragmatic, had heard the stories. Stories of nocturnal encounters, of voices without mouths, of presences without faces. And although nobody could prove that the headless man really existed, nobody could prove otherwise either.
The truth was that, according to the tales, the headless man had never harmed anyone. There were no aggressions, no violence, no attacks. Only apparitions. Only scares. Only the terrible vision of that impossible figure, of that being that defied all logic, that walked and spoke without having a head.
“He asks for cigarettes,” some said. “He greets you as if nothing and asks for a cigarette.”
“No, no, he asks for coins,” others corrected. “He extends his hand and asks for some coins for the bus.”
“I heard he just looks at you,” said a third. “Well, he doesn’t look because he has no eyes, but… you know he’s there. You can feel it.”
The stories varied, but the fear was the same. And so, the headless man became part of Sauce’s identity, a local legend as deeply rooted as the mine itself, as present as the copper dust that covered the streets. Outsiders laughed when they heard the story, but locals knew there was something more. Something inexplicable. Something real.
And on new moon nights, when the darkness was deepest and the shadows densest, you could hear people quickening their pace on the stairs, whispering prayers, clutching keys in their pockets like talismans. Because nobody wanted to encounter him. Nobody wanted to be the next to have a story to tell.
Nobody, except perhaps those who hadn’t yet learned that there are things in this world better left alone. Those who believed that courage was measured in mockery and challenges. Those who were about to learn a lesson they would never forget.
Chapter 2: Don Juan and the Encounter
Don Juan Sepúlveda was a middle-aged man, corpulent and jovial, with a thick mustache that twisted upward at the tips and a laugh that could be heard three blocks away. He had worked at La Esperanza mine for twenty years, operating one of the mechanical shovels that extracted mineral from the depths of the earth. He was a good worker, good colleague, good family man. But he had a defect that his wife, doña Mercedes, had warned him about a thousand times: he liked staying in taverns too much after work.
“Juan, please,” she would tell him every time he arrived late, with bright eyes and a staggering step. “The children wait for you for dinner. I wait for you. Why do you have to stay drinking with your friends until these hours?”
“It was just a little drink, my love,” he always replied, with that smile that had made Mercedes fall in love thirty years ago. “To wash down the dust from my throat. Tomorrow I’ll come home early, I promise.”
But the promise was rarely kept. And that Tuesday night, cold and clear, wasn’t going to be the exception.
Don Juan had finished his shift at six in the evening. He had showered in the mine’s changing rooms, removing the red dust that got even into his ears, and had met with his crew mates at the tavern “El Minero Feliz,” a small, dark establishment in Sauce Bajo where they served cheap red wine and cheese empanadas that were always either too hot or too cold, never just right.
“Cheers, comrades!” toasted Don Juan, raising his glass. “To another day without accidents and paychecks in our pockets.”
“Cheers!” responded the other miners, clinking their glasses against his.
The hours passed among mine stories, old jokes that everyone knew but still provoked laughter, and passionate discussions about football. Don Juan felt happy, relaxed, free from the weight of responsibilities. Just a little longer, he told himself. Just one more round. Mercedes would understand.
But when he looked at the wall clock above the bar, he saw it was eleven thirty at night. He stood up with a start, almost knocking over his chair.
“Good grief!” he exclaimed. “Mercedes is going to kill me. I have to go, guys.”
“Coward!” his friends teased. “Are you afraid of your wife?”
“More than the devil himself,” Don Juan admitted with a laugh. “See you tomorrow.”
He left the tavern stumbling, not because he was very drunk, but because the cheap wine and the day’s fatigue had combined in that way that makes the world seem slightly tilted. The cold night air hit his face like a refreshing slap, and he breathed deeply, trying to clear his mind.
The streets of Sauce Bajo were empty at that hour. Only some stray dogs rummaged through garbage bins, and from some distant window came the murmur of a radio. Don Juan began climbing the stairs that led to Sauce Alto, humming a tune he had heard in the tavern.
“When I left my land, nobody accompanied me, only a sorrow so great that it tore out my heart…”
The lampposts projected circles of yellowish light onto the stone steps. The trees creaked with the night breeze, their bare branches scratching the starry sky. Don Juan wasn’t thinking about legends or headless men. He only thought about getting home, getting into the warm bed next to Mercedes, sleeping until the alarm sounded at five in the morning.
He had climbed about thirty steps, perhaps forty, when he heard footsteps behind him. At first he paid them no attention. Someone else was climbing the stairs, nothing unusual about that. But the footsteps sounded strange. They didn’t have the regular rhythm of someone walking normally. They were… slow. Deliberate. As if whoever was walking wasn’t in a hurry, but never stopped either.
Don Juan stopped for a moment, listening. The footsteps continued. They were getting closer.
“Good evening,” Don Juan called backward, trying to sound cheerful despite a small chill that had begun to climb his spine. “Good night for walking, eh?”
There was no response. Only the footsteps, getting closer and closer.
Don Juan resumed his ascent, a little faster now. His heart had begun to beat a little harder, although he told himself it was ridiculous. It was just another person climbing the stairs. Maybe a miner from the night shift. Maybe a neighbor returning late. It was nothing.
But then he heard a voice. A voice that came from right behind him, so close he felt the speaker’s breath on his neck.
“Hello, friend.”
Don Juan stopped dead, his heart racing. He turned slowly, preparing to apologize for not having heard before, to make some cheerful comment about the cold night.
And then he saw it.
The figure dressed in black was less than two meters from him, on the stair landing. It was tall, taller than Don Juan, with a long coat that reached its ankles and a high turtleneck scarf that covered… where the neck should be.
But above the neck there was nothing.
Where there should have been a head, where there should have been eyes looking at him, where there should have been the mouth that had just spoken, there was absolutely nothing. Only the collar of the black coat, rising toward nothingness. Only darkness. Only emptiness.
Don Juan felt his blood turn to ice. His mind, still clouded by wine, struggled to process what he was seeing. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be happening. But there it was, in front of him, as real as the stone beneath his feet.
“Do you have a cigarette you can spare?” asked the headless figure, and the voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once, an impossible sound that defied all logic.
Don Juan, operating on pure instinct, put his trembling hand into his pocket and pulled out his pack of Belmont cigarettes. He held it with trembling fingers, extending his hand toward the figure.
But when the figure’s fingers brushed the pack, Don Juan saw. He saw where there was no head. He saw where there were no eyes. And the reality of the impossible struck his mind like a hammer.
He screamed. A high-pitched, heart-wrenching scream that broke the silence of the night and scared stray dogs three blocks away. He threw the pack in the air and began running up the stairs with an energy he didn’t know he possessed. His legs, which moments before could barely support him, now flew over the stone steps.
He didn’t look back. He didn’t stop. He didn’t think. He just ran, with his heart pounding in his chest like a war drum, with pure fear running through his veins like electricity.
He ran the two hundred steps that remained to his house in what seemed like a second and an eternity at the same time. He arrived at his door panting, with hands shaking so much he could barely put the key in the lock. When he finally managed to open it, he practically fell inside his house, closing the door behind him with a slam that woke half the neighborhood.
Mercedes was on the sofa, sewing one of the children’s school uniforms. Seeing her husband fall to his knees in the hallway, pale as a ghost and trembling like a leaf, she dropped her work and ran toward him.
“Juan! What happened? Are you hurt? Were you attacked?”
Don Juan looked up at her, with eyes wide open and full of a terror that Mercedes had never seen in the twenty years they had been married.
“Forgive me,” he whispered in a broken voice. “Forgive me, Mercedes. Never again. I swear by our children, by the Holy Virgin. I’ll never be late again. I’ll never stay at the tavern again. From work straight home. Always. Always.”
Mercedes knelt beside him, taking his face in her hands. She could feel how he trembled, she could see the sweat running down his forehead despite the cold of the night.
“Juan, what happened to you? Tell me. What did you see?”
But Don Juan just shook his head, trembling, unable to form the words. It took him an hour to calm down enough to speak. And when he finally did, when he finally told what he had seen on the stairs, Mercedes felt a chill run down her spine.
Because she too had heard the stories. She too knew about the legend. And now, looking at the genuine terror in her husband’s eyes, she understood that it was no longer just a legend.
The headless man was real.
Chapter 3: Fear Spreads
News of Don Juan’s encounter spread through Sauce like wildfire. By noon the next day, there wasn’t a single corner of the town that didn’t know the story. And as happens with all rumors, the story grew and transformed with each telling.
“Don Juan says the figure chased him to his house,” doña Margarita recounted at the market. “That it scratched his back with invisible claws.”
“No, no, I heard that Don Juan could see through where the head should be,” don Roberto corrected in the plaza. “That he saw the starry sky on the other side, as if the figure were smoke.”
“My comadre Mercedes, Juan’s wife, told me he hasn’t slept at all,” doña Elisa whispered at the bakery. “That he stays awake all night, watching the windows, jumping at any noise.”
And it was true. Don Juan, the cheerful and jovial Don Juan who always had a joke and a smile, had changed. He would come home from work and lock himself in his house. He didn’t return to the tavern. He didn’t joke with his colleagues. He barely spoke. And when someone mentioned the stairs, he turned pale and changed the subject.
“It traumatized him,” his friends said. “Poor Juan. I wish he had never seen what he saw.”
But Don Juan wasn’t the only one with a story to tell. As the days passed, more people dared to share their own experiences.
There was don Alfredo, the baker, who swore he had seen the black figure one dawn when he was going down to open his bakery at four in the morning. He hadn’t gotten close, only seen it from afar, an impossible silhouette outlined against the lightening sky. He had run back to his house and waited until there was more light to go down.
There was señora Lucía, elementary school teacher, who told how one night, returning from a teachers’ meeting, she had felt a presence following her. She hadn’t looked back. She hadn’t stopped. She had just run, with her heart in her throat, until reaching the safety of her home.
There was young Tomás, a high school student, who had accepted a bet from his friends to go down the stairs alone at midnight. He had reached the middle when he heard a voice asking if he had matches. He didn’t wait to see who was asking. He abandoned the bet and never approached the stairs at night again.
Stories and more stories. Some probably exaggerated. Some perhaps invented. But enough, consistent enough, for even the most skeptical to begin to doubt.
The local police, led by Sergeant Ramírez, a pragmatic fifty-year-old man with more common sense than imagination, decided to investigate. Not because he really believed in headless men, but because the fear was affecting the town’s normal life. People avoided going out at night. Businesses in Sauce Bajo complained that nobody came down after sunset. Parents didn’t let their teenage children go to parties or nighttime events.
“This is ridiculous,” Sergeant Ramírez told his officers. “We’re the laughingstock of neighboring towns. ‘The town that’s afraid of a ghost.’ We’re going to patrol those damned stairs every night until we catch the prankster who’s causing all this. Because that’s what it is: a prankster. Someone with too much free time and a bad sense of humor.”
For a week, the police patrolled the stairs from dusk to dawn. They carried powerful flashlights, radios, even a camera borrowed from the local newspaper. They walked up and down, up and down, looking for any sign of the supposed headless man.
And they found nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only empty stairs, trees creaking with the wind, and the occasional rat running among the shadows.
“See?” Sergeant Ramírez said triumphantly. “Pure stories. Collective panic. Suggestion. When there’s light and police, the ghost vanishes. Like all ghosts.”
But the night the police decided it was no longer necessary to patrol, the night the sergeant officially declared there was no threat on the stairs, that very night, the headless man appeared again. This time before a group of students returning from a birthday party. And this time, the consequences would be much more serious.
Chapter 4: The Disappearance
There were five friends: Roberto, Miguel, Carlos, Daniel, and Fernando. All were seventeen years old, all were in their last year of high school, and all considered themselves too intelligent, too modern, too rational to believe in superstitions of backward towns.
“The headless man,” Roberto mocked as they descended the stairs that Saturday night. “Please. It’s the twenty-first century. Do people really still believe in this nonsense?”
“My grandmother is terrified,” Miguel commented. “She makes me promise every time I go out that I’ll return before eleven. As if at eleven and one minute the boogeyman appears.”
“It’s collective psychology,” Carlos pontificated, who planned to study medicine. “One person has a hallucination, probably from alcohol or drugs, and everyone else gets infected. Mass hysteria. It’s well documented.”
“Still, you have to admit it’s a little scary,” Daniel admitted, looking at the shadows among the trees. “It’s dark. It’s cold. You hear strange noises.”
“They’re dogs, brother,” Fernando laughed. “Just dogs and cats. And the wind. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
They were dressed in their best clothes, still with the smell of cheap perfume and the taste of beer they had drunk at Claudia Morales’s party, the prettiest girl in their class. It had been a good night. Music, dancing, laughter. They felt invincible, immortal, as only seventeen-year-olds who haven’t yet known life’s true tragedies can feel.
They had descended approximately half the stairs when Fernando stopped.
“Guys, wait,” he said. “I need to pee. Urgently.”
“Here?” Roberto asked. “Brother, your house is ten minutes away.”
“I can’t wait,” Fernando insisted. “It was too many beers. Keep going down, I’ll catch up in a minute.”
The other four shrugged and continued descending while Fernando stepped aside toward the bushes beside the stairs. It was a clear night, with a full moon that illuminated everything with a silver glow. Fernando hummed a song while relieving himself, already thinking about his warm bed, about Monday’s math exam he still hadn’t studied for, about whether Claudia had noticed how he looked at her during the party.
He finished, adjusted his clothes, and turned to rejoin his friends.
And then he felt a hand on his shoulder.
A firm hand, with long, cold fingers that closed over his jean jacket. Fernando turned, expecting to see one of his friends playing a prank.
But it wasn’t any of his friends.
It was a figure dressed in black. A tall figure, with a coat that seemed to absorb the moonlight. A figure that, when Fernando looked up to where the face should be, to where there should be eyes and mouth and nose, found only…
Nothing.
Fernando opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. His throat had closed, his voice had disappeared, paralyzed by a terror so pure, so absolute, that every muscle in his body froze.
The headless figure leaned toward him, and a voice without origin, a voice that seemed to come from the air itself, whispered:
“Come with me.”
And then everything went dark.
Further down the stairs, Roberto was the first to notice that Fernando was taking too long.
“How long is the guy taking?” he asked, stopping. “We should have heard him come down by now.”
“Maybe he found a girl,” Miguel joked.
“Or maybe the headless man took him,” Carlos said in a mocking tone, making a spooky voice.
But when five minutes passed, and then ten, and Fernando didn’t appear, the joke stopped being funny.
“Fernando!” Roberto called. “Fernando, stop playing!”
Silence.
“FERNANDO!”
They ran back up the stairs, their hearts beginning to beat faster. They reached the place where they had separated, where the bushes darkened under the shadow of the trees.
“Fernando?” Daniel called, with a note of panic in his voice. “It’s not funny, brother. Come out now.”
They searched among the bushes. Behind the trees. Further up the stairs. Further down. They called his name until they were hoarse. But Fernando had disappeared. Simply… disappeared. As if the earth had swallowed him. As if he had never been there.
With trembling hands, Roberto took out his cell phone and dialed the emergency number. His voice shook when he spoke with the operator.
“My friend… disappeared. We were on the stairs and… we need help. Please.”
In less than fifteen minutes, the stairs were full of police, neighbors with flashlights, Fernando’s parents screaming their son’s name. They searched all night, all the next morning, all day. They brought search dogs. They checked every house, every yard, every corner of the town.
Nothing. Fernando Martínez, seventeen-year-old student, had disappeared without a trace. And in the place where he was last seen, in the place where his friends left him to urinate in the bushes, there was nothing. No signs of struggle. No footprints. No clues.
Only silence. And the terrified murmur of an entire town that now knew, with chilling certainty, that the headless man wasn’t just a legend.
He was real. And now, for the first time in the town’s history, he had done something more than scare.
He had taken someone.
Chapter 5: The Desperate Search
Fernando’s parents, don Julio and doña Teresa, were humble, hardworking people. Don Julio worked as a mechanic at the municipal workshop, repairing the old buses that connected Sauce with neighboring towns. Doña Teresa cleaned houses during the day and made cakes to order during the nights. Fernando was their only child, born after years of trying, the miracle they never thought would come, the light of their lives.
And now that light had disappeared.
“My boy,” doña Teresa sobbed, clutching Fernando’s school photograph, the one where he smiled in his new uniform. “My boy, where are you?”
Don Julio didn’t cry. He couldn’t. He had spent all his tears on that first night of fruitless searching. Now only a steely determination remained, an absolute refusal to accept the unacceptable.
“We’re going to find him,” he said again and again, to his wife, to the police, to the neighbors, to himself. “My son is alive. He’s somewhere, and we’re going to find him.”
They printed posters with Fernando’s photo. Hundreds of posters. Thousands. They stuck them on every post, in every window, on every available wall. “MISSING,” they said in large letters. “Fernando Martínez, 17 years old. If you have seen him, call immediately.”
The response was overwhelming. People from all over town, even from neighboring towns, volunteered to help in the search. They organized brigades that combed the mountains around Sauce. They checked caves, ravines, old abandoned mining tunnels. They called his name until they lost their voices.
Sergeant Ramírez, the skeptic who had declared there was nothing supernatural on the stairs, now looked devastated. He felt responsible. If he had continued patrolling, if he hadn’t been so arrogant, so sure that it was all nonsense…
“This was a kidnapping,” he told his officers, trying to maintain logic, to cling to rational explanations. “Someone took advantage of these stupid ghost stories to take the boy. We have to think: who benefits? Is there any enemy of the family? Any old grudge?”
But all investigations led to dead ends. The Martínez family had no enemies. They were loved by everyone. There were no ransom demands. No clues. Fernando had simply vanished, as if he had never existed.
Fernando’s friends—Roberto, Miguel, Carlos, and Daniel—were devastated. Guilt consumed them.
“We should have waited for him,” Roberto said again and again. “Why did we keep walking? Why did we leave him alone?”
“There were five of us,” Miguel cried. “If we had all stayed together, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Carlos, who always had scientific answers for everything, now had answers for nothing. His rationalism, his skepticism, had crashed against something he couldn’t explain. He had seen the place. He had seen that there were no exits, no places to hide. Fernando couldn’t simply disappear. But he had.
“The headless man,” Carlos whispered one night, sitting with his friends in the empty plaza. “He was real. We all saw him before, remember? We mocked. We said it was ridiculous. And now…”
“Don’t say that,” Daniel interrupted. “Fernando is alive. He has to be. Someone took him, but he’s alive.”
A week passed. Two weeks. A month. The search continued, but with fewer people each day. Hope began to fade, replaced by bitter resignation. The posters on the walls faded with sun and rain. Fernando’s smiling photo looked out from every corner, a constant reminder of the tragedy that had struck the town.
Doña Teresa no longer slept. She spent nights sitting by the window, watching the stairs, waiting to see her son’s silhouette climbing home. Don Julio had taken leave from work. He dedicated every waking moment to searching, to asking, to investigating every clue no matter how absurd it seemed.
“Someone knows something,” he insisted. “In a town of three thousand people, someone has to have seen something. It’s not possible for a seventeen-year-old boy to simply disappear.”
But the town had no answers. Only fear. A fear that had transformed Sauce into a different place. Nobody went out at night anymore. The stairs were completely empty after sunset. Businesses closed early. It was as if the entire town had collectively decided to hide from the darkness.
And the headless man, the figure that had terrified the town for years without doing real harm, had now become something much more sinister. He was no longer just a legend. He was a kidnapper. Maybe a murderer.
“Why Fernando?” people wondered. “He was a good boy. Studious. Respectful. What did he do to deserve this?”
Nobody had answers. Only questions remained, pain, and the terrible void left by a young man who had disappeared into the night.
And then, when it seemed there would never be answers, when it seemed Fernando was lost forever, two months after his disappearance, something happened that nobody expected.
On the coldest night of winter, under a sky full of stars, the headless man returned. But this time, he wasn’t coming to take anyone.
He was coming to return him.
Chapter 6: The Miraculous Return
It was a new moon night, the darkest of the month. Don Julio and doña Teresa were in their living room, as every night since the disappearance, unable to sleep, unable to do anything but wait without knowing what they were waiting for. The radio played softly, filling the silence with gentle music that neither of them really heard.
Then they heard the noise. A loud, metallic crash, as if something heavy had fallen. It came from outside, from the place where they had left a large metal garbage bin near the beginning of the stairs. They had put it there with a desperate, almost irrational hope: the hope that if their son returned, if he somehow found his way home, he would make noise to alert them.
Don Julio and doña Teresa looked at each other, their hearts beating with a mixture of fear and hope so intense it hurt.
“The wind,” doña Teresa murmured, but without conviction.
“No,” don Julio said, standing up. “There’s no wind tonight.”
He ran to the door, with doña Teresa on his heels. He opened it abruptly and went out into the dark street. The garbage bin had been knocked over and was slowly rolling down the stone steps. And beside it, under the dim light of the nearest post, there was something.
No, someone.
“FERNANDO!” doña Teresa screamed, and her voice broke the night’s silence like a shot.
Don Julio ran to the garbage bin, with trembling hands. He righted it, opened the lid, and there, curled up inside, was his son. Fernando was completely naked, with his feet and hands tied with ropes, but he was breathing. He was asleep, or unconscious, but alive. Gloriously, miraculously alive.
“Teresa, call the police! Call an ambulance!” don Julio shouted as he carefully pulled his son from the bin.
Next to Fernando, inside the bin, was a plastic bag with his clothes carefully folded. And in Fernando’s hands, tied but visible, was a letter. A white envelope, sealed, with a single word written on the front: “FORGIVENESS.”
Neighbors began coming out of their houses, alerted by the screams. Lights turned on all along the street. In minutes, there was a crowd surrounding the Martínez family. The news spread like fire: Fernando had returned! The missing boy had come back!
The ambulance arrived in ten minutes. The paramedics examined Fernando carefully while don Julio and doña Teresa clung to each other, crying with relief and joy. The doctor quickly reassured them.
“He’s fine. He’s just sleeping deeply. There are no injuries, no signs of physical trauma. It seems he’s…”
“He’s drugged,” Sergeant Ramírez interrupted, who had arrived in the patrol car. “They gave him something to make him sleep. But he’s healthy. Thank God, he’s healthy.”
“The letter,” don Julio said, pointing to the envelope still in Fernando’s hands. “There’s a letter.”
Sergeant Ramírez took the envelope with gloved hands, treating it as evidence. He opened it carefully and pulled out several sheets of paper written by hand in clear, firm handwriting. He cleared his throat and, under the attentive gaze of everyone present, began to read aloud:
“You know that I am the headless man. For years I have walked these stairs, hidden in the shadows, appearing in the darkness. I never wanted to cause harm. I only sought to entertain myself in a harmless way, playing with the legend that preceded me, scaring as an innocent joke.”
“My secret is simple: I am not a ghost or a monster. I am just a lonely man who found that if I put on a high-collared coat and hid my head inside it, I appeared to have no head in the darkness. The illusion worked so well that it became my form of entertainment. Asking for cigarettes, asking for coins, appearing and disappearing. It was just a game.”
“But what I did with Fernando was not a game. It was a lesson. A lesson that he, and his friends, desperately needed to learn.”
The sergeant paused, looking at the faces in the crowd. Everyone listened in absolute silence, almost without breathing.
“Fernando and his friends knew me well, though not as the headless man. For months, while I begged for alms in the streets during the day—a dirty, disheveled old man that people avoided—they would pass by and mock me. They laughed at me. They threw garbage at me. They called me ‘stinking old man’ and ‘useless vagrant’.”
“When I asked them for a coin to buy bread, they humiliated me. When I asked them for a cigarette to calm my nerves, they spat at me. Once, Fernando poured his soda on me while his friends laughed. Another time, they took my hat and threw it into a mud puddle.”
“They were young. They were cruel as only the young can be when they haven’t learned empathy. And I decided that someone had to teach them. So when I had the opportunity, when Fernando separated from his friends that night, I took him.”
The sergeant looked up. He saw the faces of Fernando’s four friends in the crowd—Roberto, Miguel, Carlos, and Daniel—standing together, pale as ghosts, with tears running down their cheeks. He continued reading:
“I took him to my house. I fed him. I gave him water. I provided him a clean mattress to sleep on. I never hurt him, never yelled at him, never raised a finger against him. I treated him with the respect and dignity that he never showed me.”
“We spent two months talking. I told him my life. I explained that before being a beggar, I had been an engineer at the mine. That I had lost my job in the layoffs. That I had lost my house when I couldn’t pay the mortgage. That I had lost my family when my shame was too great to face them.”
“I explained that every person he sees on the street has a story. That the beggar he ignores was someone. That the woman asking for coins has children. That the old man collecting bottles once had dreams.”
“Fernando listened. At first with anger, then with resistance, finally with understanding. He told me about the pressure of being popular, about the need to seem strong in front of his friends, about how cruelty had become so normal that he no longer recognized it as such. He cried. He apologized. And he learned.”
“Today I return him to his parents, safe and sound, with only one request: that he share what he learned. That he teach others what he now knows. That never again, ever, does he treat another human being like garbage.”
“To his parents, to his family, to the entire town, I ask forgiveness from the bottom of my heart. The fright I caused, the pain I inflicted, was never my true intention. I only wanted this boy to learn before it was too late. Before his casual cruelty became permanent cruelty.”
“I will not appear again. The headless man is gone forever. I will leave this town and seek a new beginning elsewhere. I don’t deserve forgiveness, but I hope that someday, perhaps, you can understand why I did what I did.”
“I never intended to harm anyone. I only wanted someone, even just one person, to learn to see others with compassion.”
“May God bless you all.”
The letter wasn’t signed. There was no name, no address. Only those words, written in a trembling but clear handwriting.
The silence that followed the reading was so profound you could hear the wind whispering among the trees. Then, slowly, people began to talk, to murmur, to process what they had just heard.
In the ambulance, Fernando began to wake. His eyes opened slowly, confused at first, then focusing on the faces of his parents leaning over him.
“Mom,” he whispered. “Dad. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
And then he cried. He cried as he hadn’t cried since he was a small child. He cried for the pain he had caused, for the lesson he had to learn the hard way, for the lonely man who had shown him his own cruelty reflected.
His friends—Roberto, Miguel, Carlos, and Daniel—approached the ambulance, with faces haggard from guilt and shame.
“Fernando, brother,” Roberto said in a broken voice. “Forgive me. Forgive us. We never… we never knew…”
Fernando looked at them, with eyes that seemed to have aged decades in two months.
“I didn’t know either,” he replied. “But now I do.”
Chapter 7: The Consequences
The days following Fernando’s appearance were strange and transformative for all of Sauce. The entire town seemed to be processing not only the relief of having the boy back, but also the moral complexity of the situation. Had what the headless man did been right? Was it justified to kidnap a young man, no matter how noble the intention?
The police, naturally, wanted to find him and arrest him. Kidnapping was a serious crime, regardless of the circumstances. Sergeant Ramírez led an exhaustive investigation, interviewing all the beggars and homeless people in town, looking for someone who matched the description.
But they found no one. It was as if the headless man had truly disappeared, turned to smoke, to legend, to nothing.
Fernando, meanwhile, was recovering physically but had changed profoundly. He returned to school after two weeks, but he was no longer the same cheerful, carefree boy. Now he was quiet, reflective. He spent his free time not with his friends at parties, but helping at the town’s soup kitchen, serving food to those in need.
“It’s my way of paying back,” he explained to his mother when she asked. “Of compensating. Of doing something good with what I learned.”
His friends also changed. Roberto began volunteering at a homeless shelter in the neighboring city. Miguel organized a collection of clothes and food for those most in need. Carlos, the scientific skeptic, now talked about studying social work in addition to medicine. Daniel started a program at his school to combat bullying.
“We were monsters,” Daniel said at a school assembly where he told his story. “We didn’t know it. We didn’t see ourselves that way. But we were. Because being cruel to someone vulnerable, someone who can’t defend themselves, that’s being a monster. It doesn’t matter if you’re seventeen or seventy. Cruelty is cruelty.”
His testimony went viral on social media. Students from all over the country began sharing it. The story of the town of Sauce and the headless man became a national phenomenon, but with a different twist than one might expect. It wasn’t a horror story. It was a story about empathy, about consequences, about growth.
Fernando’s parents, after the initial shock, also had to deal with complex feelings. On one hand, they were furious that someone had dared to take their son. On the other, they couldn’t deny that Fernando had changed for the better. The boy who returned was more mature, more aware, more human than the one who had left.
“I don’t justify what he did,” don Julio said in an interview with a regional newspaper. “It was wrong. It was illegal. We spent two months in hell. But… he also saved my son from becoming someone I wouldn’t have wanted to know. And for that, although I’ll never completely forgive him, I can’t completely hate him either.”
The search for the headless man continued for months, but without results. Some said he had died. Others that he had left the country. Some romantics insisted he had really been a ghost, a spirit that came to teach a lesson and then vanished.
The truth was never known. And perhaps, some thought, that was appropriate. Perhaps some stories need to remain unresolved, need to stay in that nebulous space between the real and the mythical.
What did change, measurably and permanently, was Sauce itself. The stairs that once inspired fear now inspired reflection. They became a place of pilgrimage in a way, where people went to think, to remember their town’s strange story.
Someone—nobody knew who—placed a small bronze plaque on the middle landing of the stairs. It said:
“Here where shadows played, where fear lived, where cruelty was confronted, we learned that true monstrosity doesn’t come from appearances, but from lack of compassion. May we never forget: treat every person you meet with dignity, because you don’t know what battles they’re fighting.”
The plaque remains there to this day, they say. And although nobody in Sauce Bajo or Sauce Alto fears walking the stairs at night anymore, almost everyone stops for a moment when they pass the plaque. They stop and remember. And that memory makes them, even if momentarily, kinder.
Epilogue: Five Years Later
Fernando Martínez graduated from high school with honors. He studied social work at university, specializing in helping homeless people and those in vulnerable situations. Now, at twenty-two years old, he runs a successful program that connects young volunteers with communities in need.
In his office, in a simple frame, he keeps the letter the headless man left. He reads it sometimes, especially on difficult days, when the work seems impossible, when the world seems too cruel. The words remind him why he does what he does.
His high school friends stay in touch. Once a year, on the anniversary of his disappearance, they meet in Sauce. They walk together on the stairs that changed them forever. They talk about their lives, their jobs, how that terrible night and that impossible lesson molded them into who they are now.
“Do you think he’s somewhere watching this?” Roberto asks every year, looking toward the shadows among the trees.
“I think wherever he is,” Fernando responds, “I hope he knows that his lesson wasn’t wasted. That five lives changed. And through our work, maybe hundreds more. Maybe thousands.”
Don Julio and doña Teresa, now with some more gray hairs and deeper wrinkles around their eyes, look at their son with a pride that is almost painful in its intensity. They lost their boy for two months, but gained a man in whom the words compassion and justice aren’t just concepts, but ways of life.
The town of Sauce changed too. Bullying rates in schools fell dramatically. Community aid programs flourished. The story of the headless man became part of the school curriculum, not as a horror story, but as a lesson in ethics and morality.
And although nobody saw the headless man ever again, his presence is felt in every act of kindness, in every moment of empathy, in every time someone stops to help a stranger in need.
Because sometimes, life’s most important lessons come from the most unexpected places. And sometimes, the most memorable teachers are those whose faces we never get to see.
The legend of the headless man lives on in Sauce, but no longer as a story of fear. It lives as a reminder that humanity isn’t measured by what we have or how we look, but by how we treat those who can give us nothing in return.
And that, perhaps, is the most valuable lesson of all.
Lesson
True monstrosity doesn’t reside in terrifying appearances or figures lurking in the darkness. The real horror lies in casual cruelty, in the dehumanization of others, in the inability to see the suffering we cause with our words and actions.
Every person we encounter on our path—the beggar on the corner, the elderly person collecting bottles, the homeless person sleeping in a doorway—has a story. They have dreams, hopes, losses, and pains. They have human dignity that deserves to be respected, regardless of their current situation.
Empathy isn’t just feeling pity; it’s recognizing our shared humanity. It’s understanding that life’s circumstances can change in an instant, that any of us could be in that position of vulnerability.
Before we mock, before we despise, before we humiliate, we must remember: life’s hardest lessons often come when we least expect them, taught by teachers we never chose. And by then, the damage is already done.
Better to learn now, by choice, than to be forced to learn later, by consequence.
Compassion isn’t weakness. Kindness isn’t naivety. Treating others with dignity doesn’t make you less strong; it makes you truly human.
And always remember: in the darkness of night, the true monsters aren’t the faceless figures that scare us. They’re the cruel versions of ourselves we can become if we’re not careful.
Choose kindness. Choose empathy. Choose to see humanity in everyone.
Because in the end, that’s the only choice that truly matters.