Then all hesitation disappears.
You throw the blanket off, let your feet drop to the floor and nearly fall, your legs not limp from adrenaline, but unreal. The room tilts, not from the daze, but simply from the fact that your life has been torn into a ‘before’ and an ‘after’.
You walk to the cupboard.
Up close, the hidden door panel is better concealed than it appears from the bed. The seams are finished with cut edges. Behind a hanging winter coat, a brass lock is recessed into the wall. If you hadn’t known exactly where to press, you would never have found it. Night after night, your brother came in and out of your room through a secret passage in the wall, while you lay unconscious.
The lock unlocks under your thumb.
Cold, damp air rises from the darkness.
You pick up the lamp from the table, turn down the flame, and go inside.
The hallway is so narrow that your shoulders almost brush against the sides. Old stones, no plaster. The house is completely empty inside. The air smells of mold, dust, and something deeper, animalistic, and musty. A steep staircase leads down. Your heart pounds in your chest and you press your hand against your chest as if that might calm you down.
My mother once warned me about the waiter.
Not directly. Never in a single, clear sentence. It was a month before his death, on one of his last lucid afternoons before the morphine affected his mind. It was still raining. You were helping him change the sheets when he grasped your wrist with surprising force and said: “If Alejandro ever says that the house will protect you, do not trust the floor.”
You thought the pain made him speak in riddles.
Now the memory returns like a knife being pulled from the material.
The stairs curve and then continue downwards.
You move slowly, one hand against the wall and the other holding a vibrating lamp. Downstairs, the hallway opens into a corridor beneath a house. This is no typical cellar like those in a wine and jam cellar, but something older. Rough stone arches. Thick buttresses. Perhaps the remains of colonial foundations, sealed off by generations of renovations. A place wealthy families pretend no longer exists, because old sins lie hidden in the bricks of old houses.
Sounds reach you.
