Chapter 17 — The Door

It was there when Hugo got up from the chair.

No sound before it. No crack, no visible process. It was simply there: the frame, the old wood, the brass handle that did not match anything else in the apartment, that belonged to a different time and a different kind of construction. As if it had always been there and Hugo had not been looking at the right part of the wall.

He opened it.

A narrow corridor. Eighty centimetres wide at most. The ceiling lower than the rest of the apartment. The walls a different material, rougher, the kind of construction you do not see since the sixties. The floor in hydraulic tile, blue and white, worn through at the centre.

No light switch visible.

There was light anyway. Not electric. The kind of diffuse clarity with no identifiable source. As if the light came from the walls themselves.

Hugo moved forward.

The corridor bent right after four metres. At the end, a door. Smaller than the building’s other doors, the frame painted a green that no longer existed anywhere else.

He pushed it.

A room.

Small. No windows. In the centre, a chair. Dark wood, thin legs, the back tilted slightly. Identical to the one he had been hearing drag across the floor above him for months.

On the seat of the chair, a form.

He picked it up.

Same layout. Same questions. Same header from the Department of Integral Management. But the paper was different: heavier, yellowed, the kind that has not been manufactured for decades.

And the name at the top was not his.

Hugo Fernández.

Date: March 14, 1987.

Answers filled in with dark blue ink, the handwriting of another era. Yes, yes, partially, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Question ten.

Do you consider that you fit the whole?

The answer space was blank.

In the bottom margin, a stamp. Green ink, almost faded: File closed. Resolution pending successor.

Hugo looked at the blank space for a time he could not measure.

Then he heard something behind him.

The green door.

Closed.

He went to it. The handle would not give. Not locked: just would not give, the way something is not meant to open from this side.

Hugo sat on the floor with his back against the green door.

Waited.

Time passed. He did not know how much.

The door opened inward.

Damián was in the frame, holding it with one hand, looking at him with the expression of someone who already knew what they would find on the other side.

“I have been waiting for you to find this,” he said.