The story
Camilo learned the meaning of terror on a finca, a small country farm, in Cundinamarca, where night fell thick among guaduales, a type of forest, and the distant murmur of the river. It wasn’t the wind that made the house’s timbers shiver, but an insistent knocking on the roof, identical to the clink of a handful of coins being tossed over and over against baked mud. One early morning, fed up with that invisible siege, his uncle grabbed the shotgun and fired into the shadow of the eave. At sunrise, an unknown woman, not from the neighboring villages, crossed the horse‑shoe path dragging her steps, holding a bloodied arm with bitterness. From then on, the boy adopted a habit he would never drop: he put his underwear inside‑out before bed, because the elders swore that the flames dancing over the water were witches stalking the unwary.
Years passed and the urban hustle seemed a solid armor against those old shadows. Camilo settled with his wife, Elena, in a cold, high‑ceilinged house. In one of the secondary rooms, trying to gain space, they placed a heavy wooden wardrobe that completely covered the only window, sealing out the breeze and condemning the corner to perpetual dimness. It was there that the watchfulness broke again.
At first it was whistling—thin, high, mocking tunes that slithered from the back of the wardrobe when night reached its deadest hour. Then the light came: a white flash, sudden as a camera flash, that lit the bedroom for a fraction of a second before plunging it into a choking darkness. Camilo instantly recognized the sticky cold of his childhood, that visceral certainty that something foreign was breathing in his own roof.
The line was crossed one night when Elena, consumed by anxiety, pulled out a little prayer book of novenas and began to pray in a trembling voice beside the bed. As she uttered the first pleas for protection, the wardrobe shook from its foundations. From inside, where only lifeless coats hung, a dry thump struck the panels, followed immediately by a barrage of furious, deafening slaps. That wasn’t a natural creak; it was invisible knuckles battering the wood with frantic violence, as if an enraged creature were fighting to tear the doors down.
The racket shook the walls so hard the prayer was cut off in a mute scream. Terrified, they fled the room without looking back. Neither ever crossed that threshold in the dark again. Three months later, unable to bear the constant feeling of being stalked that seeped from the wood, they packed their lives and left the house, knowing that some presences don’t dissolve with time nor stay confined to the countryside.
