The story
Nights in that house in Bogotá usually started with a thick silence, the kind that smells of dampness and cold asphalt. For a little over a year, Mateo, his esposa Elena, and little Samuel, who was six years old, learned to live alongside an impertinent guest who needed no invitation. Mateo, forced by his job as a truck driver to devour dark highways, left his family at the mercy of something none of the three could fully understand, but which all of them felt with a terrified certainty.
It was a figure impossible to ignore: a lanky, completely bald man who walked the hallways with a ghostly naturalness. When Mateo was away on a trip, the atmosphere became unbreathable. Elena knew it well. While alone in the bedroom, she would experience the mattress sinking heavily at the foot of the bed, as if someone heavy were getting comfortable to watch her sleep. The sound of curtains shaking with no breeze and a sudden cold that gave her goosebumps were the prelude to terror. A tobacco reading done in secret by a neighborhood wise woman suggested that this came from way back, an old spell of witchcraft cast against Elena that had opened a cursed door.
The breaking point happened on a random madrugada, the early morning hours, around two in the morning. Mateo, trying to protect his son, had moved to sleep in the boy's bedroom. Suddenly, his body froze. Infamous sleep paralysis bound him to the bed, mute and sweaty, while he felt an ice-cold breath right behind the back of his neck. At that exact moment, in the master bedroom, Elena saw the tall man cross the doorway and start throwing the clothes out of the closets with a silent fury, scattering garments across the floor in a chaotic frenzy.
But the worst part wasn't the moved objects or the drafts of freezing air. Days earlier, with the intact innocence only children have, Samuel had walked up to his parents at nine o'clock at night, right before turning off the light. With a trembling voice, he had asked Mateo to please tell the tall man, standing right in the corner of his room, to leave once and for all. That faceless puppet was no childhood invention; it was a real presence, a nightmare tenant who waited patiently for the head of the household to start the truck's engine so he could claim, without any rush, dominion over the house.
