The story
That large old house in the municipality of Florida kept a heavy silence when night fell. The valley air would suddenly grow cold, sneaking through the cracks of the wooden windows and causing creaks that usually didn't bother anyone. However, for Lucía, barely sixteen years old, the atmosphere became unbearable starting the week her father and her young husband had to pack their bags and leave on a work trip. The house was left under the sole custody of three people: doña Carmen, the devoted mother; Lucía, a newcomer to motherhood; and her little son of just a few months old, whose crib rested at the foot of the matrimonial bed.
Everything began with a tiny, almost imperceptible annoyance. At first, Lucía thought it was moths or some woodworm falling from the tile roof. But night after night, right when she turned off the lightbulb and prepared to rest alongside her baby, the harassment would begin. They were tiny projectiles. Small balls, hard and cold, that bounced against the wood of the headboard, clattered over the sheets, or brushed against her arms with a disturbing aim. When she turned on the light with a racing heart, the blankets were intact and the floor completely clean. There was no trace of pits, seeds, or marbles. The scene repeated for seven consecutive nights, wearing down the nerves and robbing the sleep of a girl who was barely learning to deal with the exhaustion of raising a child.
At the end of that first week, the invisible game changed form and increased its siege. The pebbles ceased, but in their place they began to knock on the bedroom door. They weren't timid taps caused by the breeze, but firm knuckles striking the polished wood three times from the hallway. One of those nights, fed up with the anxiety and convinced that it was her mother trying to play a cruel trick on her to calm her nerves, Lucía decided to set a trap. She waited in the gloom. As soon as the dry impacts sounded, she leaped from the bed with feline agility and threw the door open in a single pull, expecting to find doña Carmen with a guilty smile on her face. Outside, only the pitch-black darkness of the lonely corridor reigned. The cold emanating from the darkness froze her blood.
Invaded by an unbearable panic, Lucía ran to the back bedroom and begged her mother not to leave her alone. Doña Carmen, seeing her trembling daughter and her grandson in her arms, immediately agreed to move into her room. That very night, they arranged the pillows, bolted the door with the safety lock, and wrapped themselves under the blankets trying to fall asleep. Not even five minutes had passed since they closed their eyes when the crash shook the entrance with a brazen brutality: three thunderous blows made the frame reverberate. Lucía and her mother hugged each other in bed, covering the baby and praying in whispers, while the entire house seemed to tremble before a presence that did not tolerate the bolt.
Another week of endless anguish passed, in which the nighttime noises gave no truce. The young woman, consumed between insomnia and desperation, devised a final strategy to unmask the mystery. She decided that, during the early hours of the night, she would keep the bedroom door wide open. The wooden panel was pressed completely flat inward, leaving in plain view a corner where there was only an old built-in closet and the brick wall. There was no crack whatsoever where a human body could hide; the visual field from the bed was total toward the doorway and toward the back of the closet.
With bated breath and her gaze fixed on the open door, Lucía's frustration overcame her fear for a fatal instant. Tired of the torment, she clenched her fists, raised her voice toward the gloom of the room, and challenged whatever inhabited there. She shouted at it to come out, to show its face if it truly existed, to demonstrate its strength to her once and for all instead of hiding like a coward in the darkness.
The response was devastating. As soon as her last words left her lips, an invisible and monstrous force lashed out at the door. The wooden panel was shaken and battered with superhuman violence, vibrating on its hinges with a deafening creak, as if a furious beast were trying to rip it off the wall to knock it down on top of them. There was no one behind it, no one in front of her; only the air agitating violently before the terrified eyes of Lucía, who watched the shaking from the front row, petrified by a shock so profound that the air escaped her lungs.
The silence that followed the racket lasted barely a second. Lucía let out a heartbreaking scream, leaped over the bed, and ran in search of doña Carmen, with her crying overflowing and her legs shaking like gelatin. She stammered incoherencies about the door and the shadow stalking her. Impotence, mixed with a rage born of the purest terror, dragged her back to the threshold of the room. With her eyes swimming in tears, she lashed out with kicks at the very same wood that had just shaken, striking it over and over with desperation while crying out to the heavens why such a misfortune was happening to her and her baby.
The trauma of that night left no room for doubt: that surpassed natural understanding. With the first light of dawn, the young woman went to the parish church to unburden her soul with the priest. The clergyman listened with serene attention to every detail of the account, without judging her desperation or making light of the matter. With a grave tone, he warned her that an impure entity had fixed its sights on her peace of mind to torment her through fear, and that the only way to cut off that influence was to armor her faith. He handed her a flask of holy water, entrusting her with a precise mission: to sprinkle every corner of the house, anoint frames and thresholds, and maintain a firm and constant prayer, warning her that she must spiritually close her mind so as not to feed that entity any further with her anguish.
Lucía returned to the house resolved to recover her peace. She scattered the holy water through the corridors, the corners, and, very specially, over the door and the wall where the nightmare was hatched. She prayed with sincere fervor, learning to ignore the echo of her own fears and blocking any thought that could give entry to suggestion. The remedy was certain. As days passed, the shadows became simple shadows again, the silence recovered its habitual tranquility, and the knocks on the wood never again disturbed the stillness of her nights.
