The Borrower’s Toll

In the arid highlands of northern Peru, where the Andes cast long shadows over terraced fields and crumbling adobe churches, the villagers of San Jerónimo spoke of the duendes—not the harmless tricksters of old tales, but something more sinister that had crept into their stories over generations. My great-aunt, Doña Elvira, told me the story one night as we sat by a fire of eucalyptus branches, the smoke curling like restless fingers toward a moonless sky. She said it happened to her when she was a girl of twelve, in the year the rains failed and the crops turned to dust.

Elvira’s family lived at the edge of the village, in a house with walls of mud and straw, and a corrugated tin roof that rattled in the wind. Her mother, a stern woman with hands calloused from grinding maize, had warned her endlessly about the duendes. ‘They are not the little people of your grandmother’s tales,’ she would say, her voice low and urgent. ‘They are not content with stealing a thimble or a button. They take what is precious, what is needed, and they leave a toll—a lock of hair, a bitten tongue, or worse.’ But Elvira, being young and headstrong, dismissed these warnings as superstition, the ramblings of old women who feared the dark.

Then the disappearances began. First, it was small things: a silver locket that had belonged to Elvira’s grandmother, a favorite clay whistle her father had carved, a spool of thread. Her mother would sigh and mutter about the duendes, but Elvira noticed that the objects always reappeared a few days later, placed neatly on the windowsill or the doorstep, as if returned by an unseen hand. But something was always different about them—the locket was tarnished, the whistle had a new crack, the thread was knotted and frayed. Elvira began to suspect that these were not the same objects at all, but clever replicas, made by something that did not understand the originals.

One afternoon, as the sun bled orange over the mountains, Elvira’s little brother, Mateo, vanished. He had been playing in the courtyard, chasing a lizard, and when Elvira called him for supper, there was only the dust and the silence. Her mother screamed, and the whole village searched until the stars came out. They found him at dawn, asleep in the dry riverbed, a thin scratch on his arm and a strange, hollow look in his eyes. He would not speak of what had happened, but that night, Elvira heard him whispering in his sleep, in a voice that was not his own, saying, ‘They are waiting. They are always waiting.’

After that, the duendes grew bolder. They began to steal things that mattered more: her father’s machete, her mother’s only mirror, the Bible with the pressed flowers. Each time, they were returned, but always mangled—the blade chipped, the mirror cracked, the pages torn and spotted with what looked like old blood. Elvira’s mother grew thin and nervous, her eyes darting to corners, and she started leaving offerings of honey and cornmeal on the windowsill. ‘To appease them,’ she said. But the duendes did not seem appeased. They seemed to feed on the fear, to grow stronger.

One night, Elvira woke to a scraping sound, like tiny claws on the roof. She lit a candle and saw, in the flickering light, a shape—no bigger than a rat—scuttling across the ceiling beams. It had a face like a wrinkled apple, with eyes that were too large and black, and its hands were like tiny, gnarled twigs. It dropped onto her bed and scurried toward her face. She screamed, and the thing hissed, disappearing into a crack in the wall. But it left something behind: a small, clay figurine of a child, its features blurred, as if not yet finished. Elvira recognized it instantly—it was a crude likeness of Mateo, and its eyes were not painted but were two dark holes, as if something had dug them out.

That was when Elvira understood. The duendes were not stealing objects; they were stealing pieces of people’s souls, leaving behind hollow shells. And they were building something with those stolen pieces—something in the hills, something that waited for the day when it would be complete. The villagers whispered that the duendes were not native to the region, but had come from a place where the old gods had been forgotten, and where the earth itself hungered. They said the only way to stop them was to give them something they could not replicate, something truly unique, and to make sure it was never returned.

Desperate, Elvira’s mother decided to offer the duendes her own voice. For three days, she did not speak, and on the third night, she placed a small clay pot filled with her breath on the windowsill. The next morning, the pot was gone, and her mother was silent forever. She could not speak, could not sing, could not even cry out in fear. The duendes had taken her voice, and in return, they left a single, perfect ear of corn, its kernels like teeth.

But the disappearances did not stop. They became a steady trickle: a girl’s braid, a man’s shadow, a child’s laughter. Each theft was followed by the return of a grotesque substitute—a braid of straw, a shadow that moved on its own, a laughter that echoed from empty rooms. And soon, the people of San Jerónimo began to realize that they were not just losing things; they were losing themselves. The duendes were rebuilding the village in their own image, a dark mirror where nothing was real, and everything was a copy of something that had been stolen.

Elvira, now a woman, fled the village, carrying with her the clay figurine of Mateo. She believed that if she kept it close, she could protect his soul, but the figurine seemed to grow heavier each day, and she often found it in her bag even when she had hidden it away. One night, in a foreign city, she took it out and saw that its eyes had changed—they were no longer holes, but tiny, wet, human eyes, blinking with a terrible life. The figurine opened its mouth and spoke in Mateo’s voice, saying, ‘Elvira, why did you leave me?’ She threw it into a river, but she heard it laughing as it floated away.

Now, she says, the duendes live in the spaces between things—between the ticks of a clock, between one heartbeat and the next. They wait for the careless, for the inattentive, for those who lose sight of what is real. They do not need to steal your soul; they only need you to forget where you put it. And if you listen closely, in the quiet moments before sleep, you can hear them scuttling in the walls, counting their gains, and whispering to each other in a language that sounds like the click of stones. They are patient, they are hungry, and they are always, always taking notes.

Doña Elvira stopped speaking then, and stared into the fire. I noticed that her hands were trembling, and that around her neck she wore a small pouch. I asked her what was inside, but she only shook her head and said, ‘A toll I have not yet paid.’ I never saw her again after that night. They say she vanished from her home, leaving only a single strand of gray hair on her pillow. And in the corner of the room, on the floor, lay a tiny, clay figure—a figure of an old woman, its face blank, its eyes two dark holes. I did not touch it. I ran. And to this day, I still feel something watching me, waiting for me to forget where I placed my own soul.