A descent into the cellar of fear, where certainties crack and truth throbs beneath the damp wood.
By Nuria Ruiz Fdez
HoyLunes – The house breathed in silence. The wind from the Strait scratched the shutters with a long howl. Margarita had gone to bed a while ago, although Youssef sensed she would not sleep. He wouldn’t either.
He waited until dawn. He approached Margarita’s bedroom door and listened to her steady breathing, “she’s asleep now, I can go down.”
He walked past the kitchen table, the old china of the soup tureen creaked in the silence of the night and Youssef froze. The tureen creaked again and the young man began to sweat, “where is that noise coming from?” He grabbed a knife from the drawer under the counter and waited, hidden behind the kitchen door, to see who was walking around the house. When the creaking returned, he identified it, “the tureen? This can’t be happening to me!” He stepped out from behind the door cautiously. Lit only by the moonlight coming through the window, he approached the table. He sharpened his hearing again and heard it. The creak was like a child’s whimper, short and intense, “but what…?”
He dropped the knife and grabbed the tureen with both hands, as if trying to silence it with the gesture.
“Ahh!” Youssef held back a scream.
The tureen burned as if it had just been filled with hot soup. He lifted the lid and “it’s empty…! How can this be?” Youssef rubbed his hands; he couldn’t feel his fingertips, “maybe Margarita got up earlier and had the leftover soup… I don’t know…” A drop of cold sweat slid down his forehead and into his eye. He rubbed his eyelid, filled his lungs with air and exhaled forcefully, as if trying to chase away the ghosts in his head, and then slowly headed for the bedroom door. The snores convinced him she was still asleep. He relaxed with a short sigh.
He returned to the kitchen, the moon cast bluish tones over the tureen, “it looks like it’s watching me… like it’s breathing… impossible… it’s my imagination…” He tried to shake the thought away with a tilt of his head, and without looking back, tiptoed toward the trapdoor.
Youssef swallowed hard and opened the hatch. Another drop of sweat reached the corner of his lip. He wiped it with his sleeve. He went down the stairs with his phone’s flashlight between his fingers. The light trembled like his pulse.
The tureen, from the shelf, seemed to watch him. Its faint enamel glow… like a heartbeat.
As if it knew too.
Every step demands a truth no one is ready to hear.
The smell hit his nostrils: old dampness, swollen wood, disturbed earth. Thick, heavy air. He descended slowly, feeling under his feet the weight of every decision that had brought him to that point.
The cellar was a rectangular room with peeling walls. Two of them were covered by huge wooden crates, draped in thick bay-colored cloths, from which a sweet, dizzying smell emanated. The phone’s light cast long, monstrous shadows over them. He dismissed the idea of checking the contents. He knew; Moreno had told him, and he wasn’t interested in the slightest. Youssef then searched for the “brass tube, a hidden cylinder,” repeating Moreno’s words in his mind.
He began checking behind the crates, then under a wobbly table stained with old paint, then feeling along the floor. Nothing. He moved toward the back, where some boards leaned against the wall. He lifted them, and a burst of air made his skin prickle. There, behind them, he saw a dark hollow in the wall and two loose bricks.
His heart exploded.
“Allah help me…” he whispered.
He reached into the hollow, feeling around. “If this tube isn’t here, Lucía’s life will be in danger…” Moreno’s words drowned out every other thought. A shiver crawled up his neck. At first he touched only dust and cobwebs. Then something hard. Round. Cold. He grabbed it and pulled slowly. A metal tube emerged from the shadows, thickly coated with rust, its screw cap warped by time. It weighed more than he expected.
Youssef stood still for a second, listening to the silence. Even though he knew that silence could shatter with any step on the stairs, any gust of wind, any wrong choice.
Youssef swallowed. His heart stopped for an instant.
“The papers,” he murmured. “They’re here.”
The flashlight flickered and the cellar’s shadows tightened, as if they breathed. Suddenly, a loud thump upstairs. A creak. Youssef froze with the tube in his hand. His heart pounded as if trying to break out of his chest.
Another step.
Another. Closer.
“Margarita? Or someone who came for the same thing as I did? Or someone worse?”
He switched off the flashlight. The cellar plunged into total darkness. He pressed himself against the wall, holding his breath. The cellar door let out a faint, nearly imperceptible squeak… but enough to freeze the sweat on his cheeks.
A voice whispered from above.
It was Margarita’s tired, hoarse voice.
“Yus…? I know you’re there.”
The air sharpened. Youssef clutched the tube to his chest.
The voice returned, this time closer to the stair’s edge.
“What is this? I’m coming down.” Youssef inhaled deeply and closed his mouth. His lungs filled.
When she reached the bottom, she shone the light over the crates, the cloths covering them, the wobbly table, and Youssef with something hidden in his hands and wide-open eyes. He looked like a newly unearthed mummy; he was pale.
“Yus, what are you hiding? How long has this been here? And that smell?…” The questions tumbled from her mouth while she kept the light aimed at him.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said, exhaling the air he had held in. “I’ll explain everything.”
They went up together to the kitchen, where the tureen vibrated softly on the table. Margarita looked at it without surprise, as if the old container were transmitting something only she could understand. They sat before it, leaning over the table.
The past doesn’t weigh by its shape, but by what opening it can unleash.
Youssef began speaking, nervous, fast:
“That Moreno guy, the llanito, and…” —and everything that had happened— “my brother is being held in Tangier, I had no choice but to lie to you to protect Lucía… and I think your daughter has been kidnapped in Gibraltar.”
As he spoke, Youssef covered his face with his hands, lowered his head, ran his fingers through his hair, but he didn’t dare look her in the eyes.
Margarita listened in silence. A strange warmth rose in her chest, a warning, an impulse that seemed to be telling her something. Suddenly, Lucía’s phrase over the phone made sense: “I’m strong like a rock, you’re my lighthouse and the tide is high.”
She knew, in a moment of clarity, that she could find her. That she could go to Gibraltar the next day and get her daughter back.
“Give me those papers. I’ll hand them to whoever needs them.” She held out a firm hand.
“I can’t, Margarita, Moreno is waiting for me to give him a missed call on his phone, to confirm I have it and he’ll come to pick it up.”
“You give him that missed call, but tell him you can’t hand it over until tomorrow afternoon, that it’s safe with you, that you had to take me to Punta Europa because I got really sick.”
“But…”
“No buts, give me that cylinder right now and do what I say, without talking back. I’m the one deciding now.”
The tureen crackled faintly, and Margarita looked at it with reverence, as if receiving a sign.
“Tomorrow… we will go find Lucía,” she said firmly.
To be continued…
#hoylunes, #nuria_ruiz_fdez,
