Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 14
Map of the Void
Alex Moonn
A door with no handle isn't locked. It's waiting.
Rio de Janeiro, 2022. Architect Rafael Duarte Sousa is hired to survey Warehouse 7, an 1891 building in the port district about to become a cultural center. The facade has eight floors. The interior staircase has twelve flights. On the twelfth, a floor that matches no level of the facade, he finds an iron door with no handle and, engraved into it, the plan of a room that cannot fit inside the building. On October 3 he disappears. His notebook is found wet in the twelfth-floor corridor.
English edition, available on Amazon.
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Eight floors on the outside. Twelve on the inside. I spent the whole afternoon trying to find the mistake. My profession is the art of making the numbers add up. I didn’t find it.
I measured every step with the digital gauge: 144 steps, twelve flights of twelve. Too clean a number to be some accident of nineteenth-century construction, back when nobody measured anything with this kind of obsession. I photographed the facade from across the street, late in the day, in the low light that exposes any patch in the plaster: eight rows of windows, correct proportions, a symmetrical pediment, nothing between the rows that could hide four extra floors. None of the tricks a builder would use to stack floors behind a cornice.
I went back up. I counted again, step by step, my hand running along the iron railing that stays cold even in this September heat.
Twelve.
English edition, available on Amazon.
