Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 7
The Dance of Shadows
Alex Moonn
It gave back exactly what you wanted most. And it charged exactly what you could not afford to lose.
Garanhuns, northeastern Brazil. Six months after losing his wife and daughter in a crash on the BR-232 highway, Martin Carvalho, an accountant who trusts only what fits in a column of numbers, rents a house from a yellowed flyer no one remembers posting. It stands on Willow Street, where the odometer reads seventeen kilometers on a road of two and a half. Inside the house, an old hunger waits for what the living carry.
English edition, available on Amazon.
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The willows that gave the street its name had trunks six feet across, twisted into spirals that suggested growth in spasms—trees that had suffered while they grew, the suffering written into the wood. The hanging branches didn't sway with the wind. They moved with a deliberateness I refused to look at directly.
The branches scraped the roof of the car with a sound wood shouldn't make. I sped up—twenty-five, thirty, almost forty miles an hour on a road that could barely handle twelve. The scenery didn't change. The odometer read seventeen kilometers since the turnoff; the map said it was two and a half to the house. The numbers didn't add up. For the first time in my professional life, the discrepancy didn't bother me. I'd learned, over the last six months, that there are situations where the numbers stop adding up and you have to keep going anyway.
Then, between one blink and the next, the house appeared.
English edition, available on Amazon.
