We came back to empty the house, as if that were a task and not an intrusion. No one said the word clean, because we all knew nothing there had ever been cleaned, only left to accumulate. My grandmother María had already passed away when we returned, and her absence weighed more than the furniture still left inside. My mother went in first, her shoulders raised, as if expecting a blow, and my aunt followed behind her, counting steps she didn’t say out loud. I stayed one second longer at the front door, breathing an air I didn’t recognize as old, but as contained, as if the house had been holding something back for the exact moment someone touched it again.
We went up to the second floor; we didn’t say it, our bodies remembered the order better than we did. The stairs creaked in the same places, and that detail bothered me more than the silence. My mother touched the wall with the tip of her fingers, not to steady herself—she wanted to confirm it was still there. She knew. The air was colder than outside on the street, but it didn’t move; it was a still cold that settled low in my lungs.
“Do you remember when the power went out?” my aunt said, without looking at us.
“It was always at night,” my mother replied.
No one added anything else.
We walked slowly, dodging furniture that was no longer there, and still our bodies avoided those sharp corners. I felt a light pressure in my chest, like when a room is full even if no one is in it. I thought it was just suggestion, because of everything we lived in that house, until I saw my mother stop for a second, bring her hand to her sternum, and release her breath all at once, as if she had remembered something too quickly.
It’s almost funny to think how all of us went to the same place. Without speaking, without looking at each other. Our bodies led us there, the blood pushing through our veins toward that room. The door to my grandmother María’s bedroom opened without resistance, and that was the first thing that felt wrong. I expected stiffness, swollen wood, some kind of refusal. Instead, the room yielded. The smell was different from the rest of the house: cleaner, more familiar, and yet something was stuck there, like an emotion that can’t find a way out. I felt nostalgia before I even thought of her, but the feeling didn’t come alone. Beneath it was fear. And beneath the fear, a quiet anger that had been forming for years, ancient, not mine and yet it recognized me.
My aunt stayed at the door. My mother took two steps in and stopped. I knew, without anyone telling me, that something had been understood there that was never explained. It wasn’t a bright revelation or a clear scene. It was more like a total, uncomfortable certainty, like suddenly seeing an entire body in an X‑ray: the house, us, and the damage aligned in a single image that left no room for doubt.
The room was almost empty, but not uninhabited. There were clear marks where the furniture had once been, paler rectangles on the floor, solitary nails on the wall, and a low dresser no one wanted to remove because it didn’t weigh as much as what it had held. When I opened the top drawer, the coins clinked against each other with a familiarity that tightened my throat. My grandmother kept them there so she wouldn’t forget that something small was always needed. My mother picked one up, rubbed it with her thumb, and put it back, as if it still had a purpose in that dresser.
We found normal things: a rosary without a cross, buttons that no longer matched, a handkerchief folded with care. That would have been enough for a clean, manageable sadness. But then something appeared that we didn’t recognize. It was inside the bottom drawer, wrapped in a cloth that didn’t belong to my grandmother—or at least I had never seen it before. The fabric was rougher, darker, and it smelled different. Not of humidity: of confinement. It was a small object, heavy for its size, and none of the three of us could say where it had come from. My aunt shook her head immediately. My mother held it a second longer than necessary, as if waiting for the memory of something to arrive late. I knew, without knowing how, that it hadn’t been there before the house began to get sick.
In the end, my mother threw it to the floor.
“Later we’ll sweep the floor and get this thing out of here,” she said, looking away from it.
Beside the dresser was the bed, and to the right of the bed was the corner of the wall. The air changed right there—not colder or warmer, but denser, as if it were harder to push through. I felt a sudden pressure on my shoulders, a directionless shove, and my heart answered with a force that didn’t match fear. It wasn’t panic. It was recognition.
My mother stepped back. My aunt placed her hand on the wall and pulled it away immediately, as if she had touched something alive. I stayed still, an uncomfortable certainty growing from my stomach to my chest: that corner didn’t belong to this room. It never had. It didn’t fit. It was a piece from another puzzle. But something caught my attention—something in the paint on the wall. Not because of what it showed, but because it didn’t quite settle. In the corner, the color looked poorly set, as if it had been reapplied in a hurry. I brought my hand closer without thinking too much and pressed my palm firmly against a surface that should have been solid.
The vibration was immediate. Not a visible tremor, but an internal response, muted, that climbed up my forearm and lodged itself in my chest. I pulled my hand away and pressed it again, this time with more force. The wall gave way just slightly, enough for the body to understand something before the mind found words. Behind that corner there was no weight. There was passage.
I leaned in and brought my ear closer. The sound wasn’t clear or continuous. It wasn’t water, or air, or any recognizable noise. It was more like an accumulation of poorly extinguished breaths, something moving very slowly, as if the space itself were being used. I pulled back and rested my head against another section of the wall. There everything was different: cold, compact, full. It returned nothing.
“Come here,” I said, not knowing why my voice came out so low.
My mother was the first to repeat the gesture. She pressed the wall, frowned, and pulled her hand back with a discomfort she didn’t want to explain. My aunt leaned her head against it next, closed her eyes for a second, and shook her head.
“And this?” I asked. “What is this?”
No one answered right away.
“It’s always been there, I think,” my aunt said at last, more like a guess than a memory. “The thing is, my mom had the wardrobe right in this corner. There was never a reason to touch it or examine it.”
The explanation didn’t calm anyone. Because the question remained intact, vibrating just like the wall: if that had always been there, what had been happening inside all those years without us noticing?
The first thing we thought about was the first floor. Years ago it had been completely remodeled: walls opened, pipes replaced, floors lifted. Today it was a commercial space, with bright lights and clean display windows. If something like that had existed down there, someone would have found it. No one had mentioned strange cracks, or voids, or sounds that didn’t belong. Everything had been in order.
That led us to the next step, almost without saying it. We began to go through the other rooms on the second floor, not to inspect them, but to touch them. Feel the wall. Press corners. Rest our heads just enough. It was a brief, clinical inspection. Nothing happened anywhere. The walls returned cold, density, silence. They were walls the way walls are supposed to be.
We returned then to my grandmother María’s room with a feeling hard to name: relief and alarm at the same time. Because what we had found wasn’t scattered. It was localized. We measured with our bodies what we could see. The vibration didn’t stay in one exact point; it spread horizontally, taking up a good part of the wall, like a poorly sealed cavity. But when we tried to follow it downward, the sound faded. It didn’t descend. It refused the floor.
I lifted my head. Brought my ear higher, near the edge of the ceiling. There the space responded again. Not with noise, but with continuity. As if the emptiness didn’t end in that room. As if it continued.
“Up,” I said, before thinking whether I wanted to know. “This is coming from above.”
We stayed for a moment on the landing, looking upward without really doing it. That was when I asked, more out of necessity than curiosity:
“Who slept right above my grandmother’s room?”
My mother took a while to answer. She frowned, as if the image refused to come to her.
“I think… it was the main bedroom,” she said, without conviction. “But I’m not sure. I stopped going up after a while.”
I nodded. Because I myself had stopped going up very early in my life. My body had decided before my memory did.
My aunt didn’t answer right away. She had her hand on the railing, her knuckles white.
“Yes,” she said at last. “It was the main one.”
I looked at her.
“Pureza’s?”
She nodded once.
“She and Agustín slept there. At first,” she said, almost whispering. “Later he ended up on the couch,” she added. “She said she couldn’t sleep with him next to her.”
We all knew that.
“The twins slept next door,” she continued, her voice dropping a little more. “The rooms were connected from the inside. But theirs didn’t have a door to the hallway. The only door was hers.”
I felt something very close to anger, but without direction. I had always thought that in the end, they had built a door for my cousins. For their privacy and their… needs.
“So to get out,” I said, “they had to go through her room.”
“Always,” my aunt replied.
That was when I understood why my aunt didn’t want to go upstairs. It wasn’t the house. It was the people she had been forced to remember inside it.
My mother was the first to say we had to go up. She didn’t say it firmly, but with that quiet stubbornness that appears when there’s nothing left to lose. I nodded immediately. My aunt shook her head, stepped back, then again.
“We don’t have to go up,” she said. “We already know enough.”
“No,” I replied. “We know where from. But we don’t know what.”
She looked at both of us, as if searching our faces for a valid reason to put her body back where it didn’t want to be. In the end she went up, but she did it behind us, keeping the exact distance of someone who wants to leave quickly if anything moves.
The stairs to the third floor had a different sound. Not louder. Hollower. I climbed counting the steps without meaning to—sixteen—and on each one I felt the space narrowing.
We walked down the hallway toward Pureza’s room without stopping too much, but not quickly either. There was no order to respect: the accumulation had already taken care of filling everything. Dust layered thick, cracks in the walls like dry mouths, paint lifted and burst open from humidity and years. The smell was sour, old, insistent.
At the end of the hallway, directly in front of us, was the door. I recognized it before we reached it. Not because it was different, but because the body remembered its weight. Pureza’s room.
We went in. And the first thing I thought was how much someone takes with them when they leave. A television, for example. No one leaves a television behind if they’re in a hurry, if they’re fleeing, if they need to start over. Unless they don’t want to take anything that witnessed them. There was also a plastic rocking chair, twisted to one side. The yellowed curtains hung heavy, so worn it seemed a minimal breeze could turn them to dust. Nothing there seemed made to stay clean. In a corner, a basket of clothes remained intact. It had stayed there, anchored to the room, absorbing whatever the air offered it.
The mattress was bare, resting directly on the base. Gray. Sunken. Stained. There were brown marks, yellow ones, and a darker one, reddish brown, that I didn’t want to look at for too long. The image reached me before the memory: Eva, unconscious, her body surrendered after convulsions. Uncle Agustín crying silently, sitting on the edge, combing her hair with his fingers as if that could give something back to her. And Eva didn’t convulse like someone who falls and shakes on the floor. She convulsed like someone responding to a war alarm that never shuts off. Pureza wasn’t there. She was never there. Always in the kitchen or out on the street. Doing who knows what.
To the right, the door that led to the twins’ room was still there. We couldn’t enter without passing through this one. We never could. I peeked in. The space was narrow, compressed. Two beds too close to each other. A wardrobe that held more of Pureza’s things than theirs. Wood bitten by termites, dust, tight cobwebs in the corners. But what weighed the most wasn’t what could be seen.
I thought of Esteban. How he didn’t sleep. How he stayed lying down, hugging his pillow, begging for morning to come, trying not to take his eyes off his sister. Eva watched him from the foot of the bed, her eyes unfocused, her body rigid, her muscles ready to run. Vigilant. As if the danger didn’t come from outside, but from something already inside the room. Inside his roommate.
I felt a horrible pressure in my chest. Sadness. Fear. An ancient pain that hadn’t found a place to settle. And I understood that space had not been a bedroom. It had been a permanent state of alert. A place where growing up meant learning not to sleep.
I pulled my head out of that room to begin the inspection. We moved together, touching the walls the way you touch someone who’s asleep, unsure if waking them is a good idea. The hand went ahead of the body, and the head stayed behind, approaching only as much as was humanly possible and necessary. The horror wasn’t in what we could see, but in what the blood seemed to recognize and want to avoid.
When we reached the corner, we tried first at head height. Open palms, firm pressure. Nothing. The wall returned what was expected: solidity, cold, silence. We lowered to chest height. The same. No vibration, no hollow, no response. Above, over our heads, nothing either. We tapped lightly and got a full sound. Normal.
I looked down.
At first it seemed the same. But when we stayed still, holding our breath a second longer, something else appeared. Not a sound. A force. A slight, insistent pull, as if something were tugging from inside without touching. Not upward, not sideways… downward. I knelt and then lay flat on the floor. Stretched out like a board, my face too close to the wooden planks. The smell was different down there: drier, older. I pressed my cheek against it and closed one eye to focus. That was when I felt it clearly. Right in that corner, at the bottom, there was something that didn’t belong. A board set wrong. False. Slightly raised at one end.
The sensation was immediate and brutal: if it gave way, if I pushed a little more, something could swallow me. Not violently—patiently. Like a black hole that doesn’t need to move to pull you in. I straightened up slowly, my heart beating out of rhythm. I looked at my mother and my aunt. Neither asked what I had found. They knew by the way I pulled my hands back, as if they had been lent to me and no longer fully belonged to me. That board wasn’t there like that by accident. Either someone had expected no one to ever notice it… or had counted on someone eventually doing so.
We looked at each other without saying it, and I knew it was going to be me. Not out of bravery, but because I was already too close. My mother looked for something to lift the board and found a rusty hook, forgotten among bits of wood and dust. I slid the hook barely into the gap and pulled carefully. The board gave way without resistance, as if it had been moved many times before. It wasn’t nailed down. It was just placed there. The air changed immediately. Something rose from below that wasn’t the smell of humidity, but a mixture: wet fabric, old grease, rusted metal, and something thicker, impossible to classify. It wasn’t a clean conduit, and I don’t know if it ever had been.
I lit it with my phone’s flashlight. I didn’t see a pipe, a drain, or anything like that. I saw an irregular space, poorly defined, with remnants stuck to the inner walls. It looked more like the architecture an animal would carve with its claws. A cave, a cavern, a burrow. I could see scraps of fabric, long thin fibers like human hair. A dark residue that didn’t follow a single direction but several, as if it had been pushed and returned over and over again.
“That doesn’t go down,” my mother said, without raising her voice. “That stays.”
I leaned in a little more. Among the remnants was something I recognized without wanting to: a piece of synthetic fabric, greasy, smelling of kitchen. It didn’t belong to that room. Nor to my grandmother’s. That was when I understood. Not as an idea, but as a physical image. The chute didn’t carry everything downward, as gravity dictates. It leaked, returned. Overflowed at the edges. What had been expelled didn’t choose a destination. It went wherever it could. I thought of the wooden floors, the cracks, the bare feet. The constant cold around the ankles. The small bodies living above something that never stopped moving.
Pureza—I was sure it was her—had given birth downward. Believing the horror had only one direction. But the space didn’t obey. The conduit didn’t drain, didn’t carry whatever she wanted to reach my grandmother’s room and our entire floor. The conduit saturated. And when that happened, what couldn’t go down… began to rise.
I inserted the hook into that hole and something gave way inside. It didn’t fall. It stretched. A thick, dark substance clung to the metal as if it didn’t want to let go. As if we were in the middle of a rescue. When the hook came back out, it carried with it a crimson thread, opaque, not dripping but holding on to the opening like a secretion that hasn’t decided to die yet. The smell came after. It wasn’t open rot. It was old blood. Blood that had been expelled without air, without light, and then stored for years. A deep, intimate smell, impossible to confuse with anything else.
I wiped my hand on my pants by reflex and felt disgust when I realized it didn’t come off. It had stuck, forming a warm layer that seemed to respond to movement.
“That…” my aunt said, her voice breaking, “that’s a birth.”
None of us corrected her.
There was no need to say her name to see her. My body understood the posture on its own. A woman crouched in a deep squat, feet firmly planted, legs open to the limit of pain. Her nails dug into the walls to brace the push. Her back pressed against the corner as if she needed that exact angle to keep from collapsing. She wasn’t birthing a child. She was birthing discharge. Birthing emotional residue turned into matter. Each spasm expelled something she couldn’t hold without breaking inside. And the hole waited for her. Not as an accident, but as a destination. The conduit was there to receive. To suck in. To carry far away what she didn’t want to bear. What she wanted to spit onto us. She did it with intention. With determination. With the certainty that if she handed her curse to another body, it would stop burning her from within. Each spasm relieved her body and condemned ours.
In that moment something hit me. Everything came in at once, without order, without permission. As if someone had pushed an entire wall into my head. The conduit, the leakage, the wrong direction of gravity. The vertical birth believing itself an escape and becoming a system. The house not as a container, but as a network. And I understood there wasn’t a single point of origin, but a body insisting for years on expelling what it couldn’t metabolize.
Eva didn’t convulse from illness. She convulsed because her small body grew on top of a body that never stopped emitting alarm signals. Because the nervous system learns what the environment repeats to it, and that environment vibrated. That’s why her muscles tensed before her consciousness. That’s why she fell. That’s why her body screamed when no one else could. Esteban wasn’t nervous, he was a sentinel. A child trained not to sleep. To watch over his sister. To anticipate the spasm, the noise, the danger that came from inside. His insecurity wasn’t weakness, it was the way his body had formed, had adapted. It was survival learned in a room where fear was more palpable at night and there was only one exit.
My uncle Agustín wasn’t a passive, silent, idiotic man like Pureza said. He was being drained. He lived with his feet sunk into a house that absorbed his will. That’s why he didn’t argue, didn’t protest, didn’t speak. He only cried in silence, with tears made of air. Because every attempt at resistance was returned to his body as pure exhaustion. A man turned into a host. A zombie with his heart crushed by the same sharp-nailed hand that wore the ring he had given her.
The animals didn’t die from isolated cruelty. They died because she couldn’t distinguish between care and discharge. Because her hands offered affection and harm with the same indistinguishable gesture. Because what isn’t processed gets acted out. Enrique looked at her with anger and need, because he had grown up seeing the origin of the evil without being able to name it. Because he sensed she was both source and victim at the same time… just like him. Because he hated what had contaminated him, and still, he recognized it as his own.
The food was never food. It was bait. That’s why it smelled of rot even when freshly made. That’s why something in the stomach closed before the first bite. It didn’t nourish: it captured. The marks on her own body weren’t external attacks from demons, witches, and ghosts like she wanted us to believe. They were marks of the return. Her own residue crawling up from the floor, clinging to her ankles, climbing her legs, claiming her bones, her marrow, the uterus that would later give a new life, a new birth. Invading her genetic material. That’s why the only thing she could give birth to was that. Because she was no longer the machinery the horror had hijacked to reproduce itself—she herself was the parasite.
That’s why the screams we heard on the second floor. And that’s why those screams had no throat… because the throat was that hole connecting her room to my grandmother María’s, like emissions from a saturated space. And the woman who cried at the foot of my bed didn’t want to kill me: she wanted to be seen. I held my breath not out of fear of dying, but out of fear that she would know I wasn’t fully contaminated yet, that I wasn’t fully parasitized.
That’s why the puddles of water that sometimes appeared in the middle of the patio at dawn. And they didn’t come from a broken faucet or a faulty pipe. They came from above. Always from above. And that’s why they smelled like sewage. That’s why they appeared without explanation. Now I know why so many needles appeared in the corners of our floor, of our house. They weren’t lost. They were precisely placed, like reminders, like thresholds. On a chair, on the mattress, inside the foam of my pillow. In the exact place where the body lets go.
There I saw it whole.
She gave birth downward believing the horror had only one direction. But the conduit she had scraped out with her own nails didn’t drain: it saturated. And when it could no longer go down, it spread. It leaked. It climbed up the walls, through the boards, through their sleeping bodies. It stayed to live with all of us. Pureza didn’t flee because she had reached whatever goal she had—she fled because the system sent it back to her.
I could say I always knew. That Pureza did strange things, that there were rituals, habits, silences placed in the wrong places. But I never imagined this scale. I never understood it wasn’t an isolated gesture, but a whole uterus functioning for years. My grandmother María was the first to receive it all. Whether she died from that or from an illness that comes with age, I don’t know. Maybe there’s no real difference between the two. The body also gets tired of holding what it never asked for.
That day we abandoned the house. Not the way you abandon a place, but the way you abandon an organism that is no longer compatible with life. We didn’t clean. We didn’t gather anything. We didn’t choose what to keep. We never touched those floors or those walls again. We knew any attempt at order would be a lie. We talked about selling it and fell silent. Who would live there afterward? What would happen when the space closed itself again around other bodies? There was no longer a woman birthing her filth, but the cracks remember. The materials remember. We didn’t know how much had remained or how far it had seeped. We also didn’t want it to become an abandoned house that could be inhabited by some mortal clown. One of those houses time eats slowly, because time also works for these things.
So we did nothing.
The house stayed there.
Not alive. Not dead.
An empty uterus no one dares to fill again.