The story
The Bogotá night was settling in with a subtle chill that wrapped around the old colonial-style mansion, a property where time seemed to have stopped decades ago. There, amid the silence that took over the early morning hours, Esteban would stay late in the service booths doing the math and reviewing pending tasks. The environment was usually quiet, but the monotony of his night work was frequently broken by the strange atmosphere that inhabited the place.
From his position, Esteban watched over the establishment through the monitors of the closed-circuit security system. The cameras, with their wide-angle lenses and greenish vision, captured every deserted corner. However, he frequently noticed how hazy shadows slipped down the empty hallways and strange reflections crossed the screens when there was physically no one in those spaces. He wasn't the only one who perceived those oddities; another daytime coworker had also mentioned feeling presences and strange drafts of air in the spot.
When he looked up from the accounting books and glanced toward the kitchen, whose window looked out over the inner courtyard wrapped in shadows, the tension increased. On the dark windowpanes, silhouettes of deeply distorted faces would often form, grotesque features that recalled monstrous figures and that disappeared as soon as the young man tried to focus his vision directly on them.
The mystery took on a more personal tone on one particular night, when among the shadows of that very same hallway he caught a fleeting glimpse of the unmistakable silhouette of a good friend who had died suddenly a short time before. The physical build and upright posture were exactly the same, leaving him motionless from surprise before the figure vanished.
There was also a specific area at the back of the property, a secluded room that seemed to ignore the general climate of the building. Regardless of how mild the afternoon was or how many blankets were used, that space always maintained an unusually low temperature, a dry and penetrating cold that seemed to exhale from the very foundations of the construction.
The activity reached its peak when, in the middle of the absolute solitude of the early morning, one of the interior doors swung wide open with a dry squeak, without a single breeze blowing. Far from fleeing in terror, a mix of strange curiosity and resignation took hold of Esteban. Determined to understand what was happening, he raised his voice toward the dark hallway and asked directly what it was they wanted from him.
The answer was not long in coming. A few meters away, on a wooden table, a glass resting upside down was shaken by an invisible force; it began to spin violently on its own base until it slid off the edge and crashed against the floor with a metallic din. Esteban remained silent, accepting with a mix of vertigo and calm that he would share the rest of his nights with those invisible tenants.
