Versos Sussurrados

“Did you remember everything I told you?”

Finally coming to his senses in a daze, Shade looked around with some confusion. The last thing he recalled was helping a friend with funeral arrangements; the next moment, he found himself here.

This was a bedroom—definitely not one from the twenty-first century. The interior was bathed in a soft yellow light, not too bright. The slightly darkened wooden floor was fairly clean, but the walls had begun to yellow with age. In one corner, a pile of books leaned precariously as if about to topple. Nearby, a bookshelf held metal kettles and framed photographs.

All the pictures were black and white.

Besides the oil paintings on the walls, there were two metal pipes. The clamps connecting the pipes showed rust. One thinner pipe branched off at the desk. The brown wooden desk was covered with papers, its drawers half-open, revealing documents inside.

A brass desk lamp connected to the pipes was still lit. The lamp’s bell-shaped shade was uniquely designed—

“Hm? Not electric? A gas lamp?”

It was hard to tell if it was a gas lamp just by looking, but the pipes clinging to the wall and the lamp attached to them didn’t look electric at all. The warm yellow glow wasn’t bright, only illuminating the desk area, yet it gave Shade an oddly comforting feeling.

In this light, he could see the decorative oil paintings on the wall, the black-and-white individual photos on the desk, and newspapers spread out in the shadows on the floor. The text was not made up of block characters but letters.

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