The story
Camilo was barely fifteen when the apartment complex where he lived—a cluster of massive concrete blocks and damp brick in Bogotá—became the backdrop for his deepest obsessions. That place wasn't like anywhere else. Over the years, a string of violent and self-inflicted deaths had been seared into the neighbors' memory. Far from frightening them, that history of suicides sparked a feverish, almost morbid curiosity in Camilo and the kids from his block, driving them to hang around the complex's darkest corners once night began to fall.
Their rounds almost always started on the first floor. Right as they walked past the door where, some time back, a young guy had taken his own life with a gunshot to the head, the atmosphere would suddenly shift. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees, breathing grew heavy, and a cold chill crawled down the back of the boys' necks. It was a strange, heavy presence that defied all logic, an uneasy feeling of being watched through invisible fissures in the concrete.
Yet the most chilling story lay up above, on the fifth floor of his own building. Years earlier, a close-knit, quiet couple had lived there, until tragedy came knocking. The woman fell ill with a terminal disease that wasted her away in a matter of months, plunging her husband into an agonizing, lonely grief. Unable to cope with the mourning and the silence of an empty home, the man grabbed a rope and hanged himself right in the middle of the living room just days after the funeral.
From then on, that apartment carried an insurmountable stigma. Even though management put it up for rent time and again, no one could bear living there for more than a month. Tenants would pack up their corotos, their belongings, in the middle of the night, pale and offering little explanation, swearing that it was impossible to rest in peace within those walls. The apartment ended up locked, vacant, and gathering dust, isolated at the end of the top-floor hallway.
One chilly, overcast afternoon, driven by the youthful urge to test the paranormal rumors, Camilo and his friends climbed the flights of stairs to the fifth floor. With their hearts in their throats, trying not to squeak their sneakers against the tile, they edged toward the locked-up door. Egged on by dares, they knelt on the icy floor and pressed their cheeks to the ground to peer through the crack beneath the door.
Inside, everything was plunged in gloom, barely illuminated by the faint reflection off a back window. After a few seconds of dead silence, the boys held their breath. A dense, sharply outlined shadow crossed their field of vision, moving from one side of the living room to the other with steady, measured steps. They stayed frozen for a few moments, hoping it was just a trick of the light, but the silhouette passed back in the opposite direction, again and again, pacing the abandoned apartment in an eternal, solitary patrol.
