Chapter 1
“Puta vida… ” whispered Juan Juarés, as if trying not to disturb the surroundings too much, and, contradicting himself, he threw his cigarette on the ground and stomped on it, crushing it into the dirt. He felt a slight tremor, and the house shook, sending roof tiles tumbling down just a few feet from where he stood.
He opened his leather bag and took out his Nikon F2. He snapped a few photos of what lay before his eyes.
The scene was dantesque. The building that had seen moments of glory in the nineteenth century lay in ruins. The veranda where the estate owner used to drink his mate from a silver cup while surveying the expanse of his properties no longer existed. The columns were leaning, on the verge of collapsing; the roof was about to fall. It was the saltpeter. But not only that.
The trees that once provided shade were now black, twisted skeletons. The eucalyptus trees, their bark peeling off in long strips, like a skinned animal. The calden tree, seeking to reclaim its rightful place in its natural habitat. Dead palm trees out of their natural habitat, brought from Europe by the property’s first owner in a fit of grandeur that defied the natural order of things. Modernity believing itself capable of rearranging the world at will. Every civilization that forgot its place in the Chain of Being ended this way. Ruin. Dust. A house collapsing onto trees that should never have existed here.
The air shimmered with heat, even in those early hours of the night. Absolute silence, broken only by the creaking of wood and dry leaves. It sounded like a rhythmic beat, like a heartbeat.
The ground around him was nothing but cracked dust. But there was something else: human bones, animal bones, and perhaps the bones of other creatures. At first glance, they looked like something out of the ordinary, and he wished he didn’t have to confirm it. Although he knew perfectly well he had to do it, because not doing so would mean not investigating, not doing his job. That’s what the Buenos Aires police officers had decided. Nor did the Federal Police delve deeper into the investigation. Their administrative bureaucracy allowed law enforcement to close cases with some general justification, without further explanation. “Natural causes,” “wild animal.” No one wanted the truth when it didn’t fit on the forms.
The current owner of the land and what remained of the building, Julián Rodríguez, had hired him to find answers. The assignment was to investigate—urgently—what had happened and offer a logical and natural explanation that would allow him to maintain the property’s value so he could continue benefiting from it or sell it again. He suspected there was much more the client hadn’t told him, limiting himself to emphasizing the urgency of the matter. He hadn’t had time to interview him in depth: a call while in Rosario 48 hours ago, a quick visit in Buenos Aires 24 hours ago.
There was little literature to consult on the journey to Bahía Blanca; before leaving the Federal Capital, he quickly scanned the bookshelf in his Buenos Aires office and grabbed copies of Martínez Estrada’s Radiografía de La Pampa and Alfredo Colombres’ Seres Mitológicos Argentinos (with illustrations by Luis Scafati to add a bit of visual appeal). And just to round things out, a brief and mostly unhelpful conversation with the driver who dropped him off past Medanos, on the road to Estancia Las Escobas.
He managed to understand that an extraordinary drought had ravaged the area, similar to one from the early 20th century. The locals desperately sought water from a well they knew existed on this ranch, which they assumed was abandoned. But they encountered something unexpected, and fled. All of them.
He was missing a lot of information. And there was only one way to get it: do his job. The task wouldn’t be easy, but they paid him well. The case wasn’t one of his favorites, but it was the kind that kept his offices (which most of the time were also his homes) and the life he’d chosen to lead. No set hours. Owing nothing to anyone. Or so he wanted to believe. At least he tried.
He approached with short but steady steps, treading carefully so as not to disturb whatever inhabited this lot again. Looking more closely at the bones, he had no doubt that they belonged to something other than humans or animals.
Vertebrae that were too long, skulls with asymmetrical eye sockets. Shapes that didn’t fit into any bestiary he knew or could recall. After photographing them up close, he collected several different samples with his gloved hands and stored them in airtight plastic bags. He would stop to analyze them later; for now, he needed to explore the interior before the destruction was complete. The house creaked again, and a column tilted another five degrees. There was no time, just as Rodríguez had insisted.
He continued on to the building. The hall greeted him with high ceilings and a space several meters wide. He could glimpse its former grandeur, even though today it was on the verge of collapse. The few pieces of furniture that remained were covered by sheets that had once been white.
Juarés walked down the central hallway, where the air felt denser, as if it had a weight of its own. He raised his right hand and, almost without meaning to, brushed against the wallpaper, which was peeling off in long strips, like shreds of dry skin. Upon contact, an electric vibration ran through his fingers. It wasn’t a cramp; it was a tactile whisper. The walls radiated a feverish heat, a constant pulse that matched the rhythm he had heard outside. It wasn’t a haunted house. That would be a naive cliché. It was worse. The house remembered. The wallpaper resembled an ancient palimpsest: scraped, erased, but with the original ink still bleeding through the layers. Something—or someone—refused to be forgotten.
He stopped in front of a double door, ajar. He pushed it open with the tip of his black Topper shoes. The creak of the rusty hinges tore through the silence like a scream. It was the main dining room. In the center, a long oak table survived the dust. Juan approached and lifted the sheet covering it from one end. Beneath the cloth, he found more than just wood.
The table was set, with porcelain plates bearing traces of food charred by time, as if time had suddenly stopped in the middle of a dinner decades ago. But what made his blood run cold was the centerpiece: a silver bowl filled with tiny teeth. Human baby teeth. Hundreds of them. CLICK-CLACK! More photos for the case file. He knew the symbolism: baby teeth in various traditions—Greek, Hermetic, Guaraní—represented a threshold, a transition, the passing of innocence. All authentic cultures understood that certain objects were bridges between worlds. But this... this wasn’t ritual. It was something else. This was perversion. An inverted liturgy. As if someone had taken primordial knowledge and twisted it into something obscene.
“Logical and natural…” muttered Juarés, recalling Julián Rodríguez’s words, speaking to himself. “Good luck with that, Juancito.”
He left the dining room, avoiding a lingering glance at that altar of calcium, and made his way to the back of the house. He crossed the kitchen, where the smell of sulfur and musty dampness was almost unbearable. As he stepped out through the back door, the heat from the southwest hit him again. The sky was clear, but the moon seemed to cast a filthy light over the dirt courtyard.
Fifty meters away he saw it: the old well.
The stone structure twas supposed to be sealed with concrete and chains, according to Rodríguez. It looked like an open mouth after brutal surgery. Whoever had opened it hadn’t used precision tools, but desperation. The chains lay severed by what looked like sledgehammer blows, and the slab was split into three pieces, scattered like desecrated tombstones.
Juarés walked toward it, feeling the ground beneath his feet grow softer despite the drought evident to the eye, which Rodríguez had also pointed out as a detail to keep in mind during the investigation. Each step felt like an organic texture, as if he were walking on a carpet of dry moss hiding something slimy beneath. As he approached, the rhythmic breathing that had previously been an echo became a physical, deep sound that made the diaphragm of his own chest vibrate.
He stopped at the edge of the ledge. He turned on his pocket flashlight, and the beam of light descended faintly down the stone tunnel. The first glimpse revealed familiar bone shapes: broken femurs, yellowed skulls, ribs that looked like shattered cages. The well had no water, but the walls were covered in a black, shiny substance that pulsed. And then, the flashlight’s beam reached the bottom, about thirty feet down.
Given the suspicions beginning to take shape, Juarés thought of the treatises on chthonic entities: from pre-Columbian traditions to the hermetic texts of the Renaissance. He hoped—almost wished—to encounter something classifiable, something that fit within the framework of ancestral knowledge. A demon from Christian nomenclature had its place in the celestial hierarchy. A creature from the Islamic bestiary obeyed the laws of the Quran. Even the Great Old Ones that Lovecraft had stolen from Abdul Alhazred—his own ancestor, according to the family legend he never confirmed or denied—had their primordial logic. But what he saw defied every classification he could recall having studied in all that his decades-old book collection had to offer. It wasn’t that logic failed. It was that the object itself refused to be named. And what cannot be named cannot be controlled.
It looked like a man, but it wasn’t human. The translucent skin clinging to its ribs, its limbs too long, with joints that bent at angles that would imply fractures in a normal skeleton. The man—no, the thing, that being—had its eyes sewn shut with fishing line, but its mouth was open, sucking in and expelling air with supernatural force.
Juan Juarés took a step back, looking for a better angle for his camera, but the flashlight caught a final detail that left him paralyzed. On the creature’s forearm, beneath the grime and stretched skin, was an old tattoo, almost erased by time but still legible.
It was a coat of arms. And beneath it, a number, a date. The creature stopped breathing for a second. The entire house, behind Juarés, seemed to hold its breath with it. Then, from the bottom of the well, a voice that used no vocal cords but vibrated directly let out a scream that made him recoil quickly in a reflexive act, falling backward onto the floor. The moss wrapped itself around his arms as if consciously trapping him. Out of pure survival instinct, he pulled hard and managed to get to his feet.
“Rodríguez, you son of a bitch… Logical and natural… my f—” he gasped breathlessly as he searched the pockets of his raincoat for his handheld recorder.
It was clear the client hadn’t told him everything. They never did. The screams continued to rise from the bottom of the well. He found the small device in time to record the final gasps of the inhuman scream as it drew back toward the well. Having recorded that howl, he picked up his Nikon and walked toward the road, fixing his gaze on the dim lights of the town.
The driver was gone. It would be a long walk—it would do him good to clear his head, ponder what he had seen, and think through what he had and what he lacked. He would prepare himself better in town before returning. He should have come prepared, should have insisted on the details. But the urgency of the assignment, the tremor when mentioning that the townspeople had opened the well… Now he was beginning to understand why.
He needed more answers. To know what the hell the neighbors had awakened when they opened that well.
