The Observer

 

It’s been just three weeks since it all began, though time has become elastic since then. I remember leaving for work that first morning, my routine untouched as always: coffee, shower, tie, and car keys. I saw it there. Sitting in the garage of the abandoned house next to mine, the one that’s been rotting in the courts for two years while the couple who lived there tear each other apart through lawyers. The night before, the neighborhood dogs had gone wild. Howls that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, as if the air itself were a threat.

It had enormous eyes, but not in the way you’d describe someone attractive. They were orbits that seemed to have seen too much, like those photographs of soldiers returning from wars that officially never happened. Its face reminded me of the primates at the metropolitan zoo, the ones that stare at you through the glass with a terrible understanding, as if they know exactly what kind of animal you are. Its clothes hung off it like dead skin. I didn’t approach. The reptilian instinct we all carry inside screamed at me to run, so I got in the car and left. When I returned that night, it was still there. In the exact same position, like a statue someone had placed for a cruel prank.

The neighbors had already organized. Mrs. Martínez had tried to give it a sandwich; Mr. Pérez, a bottle of water. Nothing. It didn’t reject or accept them. It simply existed around those gestures as if they were irrelevant. “It’s like it’s melting there,” Pérez told me, and he was right. With every passing hour, the man seemed to merge more with the concrete, becoming part of that urban landscape in an obscene way. The police had come and gone with that bureaucratic indifference characteristic of those who’ve seen too much misery to keep pretending they care. “It’s not hurting anyone,” they said, not understanding that there are forms of harm that don’t appear in manuals.

That night, sitting in my living room, only a brick wall separated me from it. That’s when the impossible happened. I began to hear it. Not with my ears, but with something far more intimate and invasive. Its thoughts seeped into mine like black ink in clear water. I saw what it saw: streets stretching endlessly in the early hours, shadows moving with their own purpose, voices whispering instructions from the sewers and telephone lines. Sometimes the voices sounded like its dead mother, other times like the news anchor on the TV in the lobby of the psychiatric hospital where it spent three years. But most of the time, the voices demanded things. Specific things involving knives and strangers walking alone at night.

I shot up from the couch as if I’d been electrocuted. On the wall facing the garage, its face had materialized like a damp stain taking form. It wasn’t a hallucination. It was something worse: it was real in the way nightmares are real when you wake up screaming. I went up to my room, trying to convince myself that exhaustion was playing tricks on me, but I knew it was out there, processing a constant stream of horror that would make slasher films seem like family comedies. Living inside that head, even for a few minutes, had been like diving into an ocean of broken glass. Now I understood why it breathed like that, why its eyes had that glassy quality. It wasn’t a vagrant. It was a human container overflowing with madness.

The next day, I left the house, and it was still there, but something had changed. Its body was starting to lose definition, as if it were made of sand and the rain was slowly dissolving it. Each day that passed, it became more two-dimensional, flatter against the wall. Its limbs blurred until they were mere suggestions of limbs. The only thing that remained sharp were those eyes, tracking me with the precision of a military targeting system. It no longer seemed human. It looked like a living graffiti, a horror illustration someone had drawn directly onto reality.

The images in my head intensified. Every time I sat on the couch, its madness spilled into my skull like acid. I saw it not just from outside but from inside my own house, as if it had found a way to exist simultaneously on both sides of the wall. Physics no longer applied. I grabbed a sledgehammer from the garage, determined to smash the wall, to destroy its face that had now become a permanent feature of my home. But then I stopped. What if breaking the wall set it free completely? What if it awakened it from its metamorphosis into something even worse? I pounded the wall with my fists until my knuckles bled, yelling at it to leave, to let me be. Its response came straight to my cerebral cortex, bypassing my ears: “I’m not leaving anymore.”

This morning, I went down to the kitchen, and there it was, sitting in my chair as if it had paid rent and was just another tenant in my house. The transformation was complete. It was no longer the vagrant that had appeared in the garage. It was something entirely different, something that had used its madness as a vehicle to materialize in my reality. It watched me with those wise primate eyes and breathed with the agitation of someone drowning in air. I asked what it was doing there, knowing it was a stupid question. It stood with movements that defied human anatomy and walked to my living room, sitting on my couch as if claiming ancestral territory. I called the police, but as I dialed, I saw it climb the stairs with that sleepwalker’s gait from ‘70s horror movies.

Now it’s in my bedroom, standing in front of my bed like a piece of furniture I don’t remember buying. Its eyes are fixed on something I can’t see but suspect is right behind me, breathing faster and faster, as if reaching the climax of an experience only it understands. Its voice resonates in my head again, but this time it comes with images: me, sleeping in that bed, night after night, while it watches. While it learns. While it decides what to do with me now that it doesn’t have to leave. Ever.