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My bedroom window framed the cork oak, beyond whose cracked stone bark, the color of capers, stretched the broad sash of the Milky Way. Its clusters of azure light, its masses of rosy nebulae. Through the bare branches slid the glimmering of hundreds of thick luminous orbs and flickering points—blue, white, and red—studding the night. Millions of glowing spiders dangling from the ceiling of a cavern.

I shrank beneath the blankets, clutching the coverlet as though I were sliding into an abyss. I’d woken in the dead of night. Why?

Everything that had inflamed my brain now hung like paintings: the two beech trees flanking the circle of blackish grass, the reverberating voice of the invisible stranger. I pressed my eyelids shut. I gasped into the pillow, dizzy. I counted from one to four, inhaling deeply with each number, but my heart raced, pounding against my left lung. How would I fall asleep again?

I curled into a ball and poked my head from the blankets into the cool air. The wind whistled. A cow’s chain jingled as the beast grazed.

When Father arrived, he’d find me awake.

I whimpered. Hugging myself, I wished to vanish. How could I let Father enter if I remained awake?

I sat on the bed’s edge, springs squeaking. My vision wavered. Standing might make me vomit. I pressed the soles of my feet to the cold floorboards and hunched toward the door.

Footsteps prowled the house—an earthquake whose tremors would reach me. They’d crescendo like palms slapping wood, then the door would creak open. He’d find me standing on the opposite side of the threshold.

I knelt. Clamped my palms over my ears, squeezed my eyes shut. My breath thickened. Maybe hyperventilating would make me faint, but it’d take minutes. The dresser, the wardrobe, the desk. Would they suffice? Could I shove them?

My forehead and neck dripped with cold sweat. I crouched beside the dresser flanking the door. Shuddering, I inched it forward, legs trembling as its feet screeched like chalk on slate. I barricaded the door. Circled the dresser, then shoved it from the side of the drawers toward the door until wood jammed against wood.

Footsteps merged with the drumroll of my heart.

My legs quaked. I gripped the desk’s edge and jerked it toward the dresser. A stubborn pain clawed my throat, as if I’d swallowed a nail.

The footsteps advanced along the hallway toward my bedroom. Drumbeats.

I crouched behind the desk, bracing it firmly against the dresser as the wood groaned.

In the gloom, the doorknob turned. The door nudged inward a few millimeters and struck the dresser.

I slumped at the foot of the desk and leaned back against its drawers, their handles stabbing my spine. I’d fallen into a pit I’d never climb out of.

The door thrust against the dresser, crushing it into the desk, the desk into my back.

A shudder coursed through me refusing to break. The sight of my bed and the still-life paintings blurred with black spots. My heart would burst like a peach hurled at a wall.

In the hallway, a voice like a flaming furnace snarled and cursed as its owner stomped back and forth.

Had I heard him leave? I inhaled sharply.

The door slammed into the dresser with a crack of wood that jolted my spine, embedding drawer handles beside my vertebrae. The knob squealed as it twisted. The door shoved the furniture as though the next thrust would hurl the dresser, the desk, and me onto the bed, burying me beneath a blast of splinters.

Cobwebs swayed on the blackened ceiling beams. Books trembled on the shelf, and crashed down. Damp stains on the walls shed flakes of paint. The bedroom had grown hot while in the hallway flames from a stove roared.

I clenched my thighs to hold my bladder, tears spattering my cheeks like scalding drops.

Growls reverberated, curses in extinct languages. Footsteps retreated down the hallway, vibrating the floorboards and rattling my bones.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen.

I’m fully aware that you can only see the center of the Milky Way from the southern hemisphere except in some conditions near the equator. This story is set somewhere in the Basque Country, but it felt like that bit of irreality was fitting.