The story
The drowsiness of Maundy Thursday wrapped the streets of Girón in an almost liturgical heaviness. Outside, the afternoon sun baked the white facades while the church bells called people to prayer. On the third floor of a high-walled building, Mateo was enjoying an unusual moment of solitude. His family, devout and strict, had gone out to attend the religious services; he, hiding behind a convenient excuse of feeling unwell, had hoarded the computer screen, absorbed in the hypnotic glow of a video game.
The house breathed a profound stillness. Only the steady hum of the fan and the clicking of the keyboard broke the isolation. With his headphones resting partly off one ear to keep tabs on the sounds around him, Mateo suddenly felt a subtle shift in the density of the air, an invisible weight warning of a close presence. It wasn't a sudden jolt, but rather that cold, animal certainty of being watched intensely.
He lazily turned his torso on the chair.
Scarcely two meters away from him, on the cold tile floor of the hallway connecting the bedrooms, was his sister Juliana. She was fourteen years old, but her posture defied all everyday logic: she was crawling forward, very slowly, with her palms and knees planted with an unnatural rigidity. She was wearing the exact same light-colored blouse and dark pants she had left in to go to church. Her straight hair fell over her cheeks, almost completely hiding her features.
"Did you get bored at mass? Did your friends show up already?" Mateo blurted out with a nervous chuckle at how bizarre the scene was.
The figure didn't answer. She didn't even lift her head. She stayed motionless on all fours, breathing with a ghostly discretion, fixing an oblique, expressionless gaze on some indeterminate spot on the floor. Believing it was a silly joke to scare him or some childish tantrum, the boy shook his head and turned his eyes back to the monitor. *How goofy,* he muttered to himself, jumping back into his game without giving it another thought.
About fifteen minutes passed until the urge for a glass of water forced him to stand up. As he got up and stretched, he noticed that the hallway was completely deserted. No footsteps or creaking doors could be heard. He walked calmly toward the front of the house and, right as he passed the balcony, an echo of familiar laughter and voices came filtering up from the cobblestone street.
Mateo leaned out. The afternoon glare hit him in the face. Down on the sidewalk, he saw Juliana. She was laughing brightly alongside a couple of school acquaintances while sharing an ice cream.
A sudden chill ran down the back of his neck.
"Juliana!" Mateo shouted, leaning over the railing. "What time did you come back down?"
The girl looked up, squinting against the street glare.
"What are you talking about, jerk?" she replied, clearly bewildered. "I left the church and stayed right here on the corner waiting for them. I've been down here for over half an hour, I never went back up to the apartment."
Silence fell over Mateo once again, but this time with the violence of a blunt blow. He thought about answering back, about chewing her out for the strange pose he had witnessed in the hallway, but his sister's genuinely puzzled expression stopped him dead in his tracks. Turning his head back toward the shadowy interior of the apartment, Mateo stared at the empty tile floor. Something identical to his sister had been crawling right behind his back, waiting patiently on the floor while he played.
