The story
The Bogotá fog used to wrap the city streets in a cold and silent mantle, but inside that family home, silence was not synonymous with peace. Esteban knew this well. For a few weeks now, the atmosphere in his bedroom had grown heavy, charged with a subtle static that gave him goosebumps before sleep. That early morning, the clock read exactly three-thirty when the phenomenon decided to manifest harshly.
Doña Carmen, Esteban’s mother, woke up with a start. The sound had yanked her from her sleep with startling clarity: firm, hurried footsteps, as if several people were walking back and forth anxiously inside her son's bedroom. Convinced that Esteban was roaming the house looking for a glass of water or dealing with insomnia, she half-sat up to scold him.
"Esteban? What are you doing up at this hour?" the woman asked in a husky voice, peeking out from the doorway.
From the gloom of the blankets, the young man, still half-asleep, shook his head. He hadn't moved all night. The air in the room suddenly turned freezing, and a chill ran down both their backs. They were not alone. Those footsteps, which had stopped abruptly after her question, left behind an unsettling emptiness.
It wasn't the first time it had happened. Weeks earlier, that same rhythmic trample of invisible steps had echoed over the wooden floor. But the worst was yet to come. Minutes after Carmen went back to her bed, an invisible draft pushed the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar, slamming it shut with a dry thud that echoed down the hallway.
Esteban jumped out of bed driven by a mix of anger and bewilderment. He opened the door immediately to check if his younger brother was playing a cruel joke, but the hallway was completely dark, deserted, and in absolute silence. Right at the moment when the boy confirmed the absence of anyone at all, the door slammed shut in front of his nose again with violence, moved by an invisible force that seemed to mock his disbelief.
The doors in the house grew capricious: open ones slammed shut and closed ones swung on their hinges without anyone touching them. For Esteban, that was no simple coincidence or the product of old pipes. Years before, a specialist had diagnosed him with an unusual spiritual hypersensitivity, a sort of silent antenna that drew presences from the beyond. Now, sitting in the gloom of his room, he understood that his body was a beacon for those night wanderers who roamed aimlessly, looking for a space where they could let their lost footsteps be heard.
