Selección Terror: Ada Coretti

About this issue

This issue of Selección Terror (issue 359, January 1980) contains "Vencida por el Espanto" by Ada Coretti, a psychological horror story set in London. Wealthy Vanessa McQueen, suffering severe headaches, visits Dr. Russell expecting a grave diagnosis. Though the doctor assures her the condition is merely nerve-related, she discovers his diagnosis hidden in his file revealing the truth: she has an inoperable malignant brain tumor with months to live, accompanied by terrifying hallucinations and nightmares indistinguishable from reality. Driving to the countryside in distress and intoxicated, Vanessa encounters a gruesome roadside scene—a dismembered woman's body parts scattered across the road, her severed head impaled on a stake. She stops to tell a stranded motorist, Stanley Harrison, an airline pilot. When they return to the location, all evidence vanishes. Harrison, smelling whisky on her breath and noting her unsteady gait, dismisses her account as drunken delusion, unaware that Vanessa's symptoms may have begun.