The Concrete Teeth of Cerro Mudo

I was eleven when my mother packed me off to my grandmother’s finca on Cerro Mudo, a mountain that rose out of the Puerto Rican rainforest like a clenched fist. It was 1998, and she had to sort out some legal mess in Tampa before she could follow. My older brother, Luis, got to stay with our godmother in the city, but I was sent to the jungle because Grandma didn’t think it was right for a boy my age to be surrounded by female cousins. Whatever. I’d rather have been anywhere else, too.

Grandma’s house was a concrete box with a tin roof, perched on a clearing hacked out of the green. The air was thick, always damp, and smelled of wet earth and rotting leaves. My grandmother was a thin, severe woman with eyes like dark river stones, and she ran the house like a ship. Her youngest daughter, Tía Marisol, was seventeen and treated me more like a brother than an aunt. She had a radio and a stash of forbidden magazines, and she’d sneak me sips of coffee when Grandma wasn’t looking.

The only other resident was my great-grandfather, Papá Lázaro, who lay in a back room, bedridden, his breathing a constant rasp. Grandma cared for him with a quiet devotion. I was told not to bother him, but sometimes I’d peek through the door. He was a husk of a man, skin like old leather, eyes sometimes open, staring at the ceiling, but he never spoke. I thought he was just senile.

One night, a storm rolled in hard, hammering the roof with rain louder than any lullaby. I couldn’t sleep. I crept out of my room and stood in the dark hallway, listening to the wind and the creak of the house. That’s when I heard it: a rhythm, a thumping, like a heartbeat, but slower and deeper. It seemed to come from the walls. I pressed my ear to the cold concrete, and the sound pulsed through my skull, steady as a drum.

I followed the sound to Papá Lázaro’s door. I pushed it open. The room was lit by a flickering oil lamp. Papá Lázaro was sitting up, which should have been impossible. His mouth was open, and from it came a low, guttural hum, a drone that vibrated the floor. His eyes were rolled back, showing only white. And in the corner of the room, the concrete wall was bulging, like a tumor growing from the inside.

I stumbled back, but my foot caught a loose floorboard, and I fell. The noise brought Grandma running. She saw me, saw Papá Lázaro, and her face went ashen. She crossed herself, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me to my room. ‘You didn’t see anything,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t you speak of it.’ She locked me in.

Through the wall, the heartbeat thrummed all night. I lay under my thin sheet, shaking, listening to Grandma’s low voice praying in the next room. In the morning, everything was quiet. But the concrete in my room had changed: a patch near the ceiling was slightly darker, and when I touched it, it was warm.

Days passed. I tried to avoid Papá Lázaro’s room, but the heartbeat was always there, a faint pulse in the floorboards. Then, one evening, as I walked past the room, the door was ajar. I looked in. Papá Lázaro was gone. The bed was empty, the sheets rumpled. In the corner, the bulge had grown into a rough, humanoid shape, like a statue made of wet cement, and its face was pressed against the wall, as if trying to push through.

I screamed. Grandma came, but she didn’t seem surprised. She just sighed, as if this was an old chore. ‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘Papá Lázaro’s gone. He’s been talking to the earth.’ I didn’t understand. She led me outside, to the back of the house, where the jungle had started to encroach on the yard. There, a patch of ground was bubbling, the mud churning. In the center, a smooth, gray stone protruded, round as a skull.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. The heartbeat was louder now, pounding through the house like a second pulse. My door was locked, but I felt something in the wall behind my headboard. I pressed my ear to it. A voice, muffled, came through—not Papá Lázaro’s, but a young girl’s. ‘Let me out,’ it said. ‘The cement is thirsty.’

I ran to the window, but the glass was painted shut. The jungle outside was black, and the trees seemed to lean closer. Then, the floor trembled. A crack split the concrete floor, snaking from under my bed to the door. A thin, gray mist seeped from it, carrying the smell of wet ash. The mist coalesced into a shape, a child-like figure, its features eroded like a sand castle in rain. It opened a mouth that was just a hole, and it whispered, ‘You’ll be next to speak to the earth.’

I banged on the door, screaming. Tía Marisol came, unlocked it, and pulled me out. She was pale, shaking. She said, ‘It’s Papá Lázaro’s doing. He made a deal with the mountain to keep the family alive, but now the mountain wants more.’ She grabbed my hand and we ran down the muddy path toward the road, but the jungle was wrong—the trees had shifted, the path was new. We were lost.

As dawn broke, we stumbled onto a clearing I didn’t recognize. In the center was a concrete well, its mouth gaping. The heartbeat was all around us now, coming from the ground. I looked at Tía Marisol. Her eyes were glassy, and she was walking toward the well as if in a trance. I grabbed her shoulder, but she turned, and her mouth opened, and out came not her voice, but a deep rumble: ‘The cement needs to be fed.’

I backed away, tripping over roots. The well began to bulge, its rim peeling like lips. I saw something inside—a mass of gray tentacles, smooth as polished stone, reaching out. I screamed and ran, crashing through the undergrowth until I broke out onto the asphalt road, scratched and bleeding. I hitched a ride to town, to my godmother’s house, my brother there. He said I looked like I’d seen a ghost.

I never went back. My mother came, and we moved to Florida. But sometimes, in the deepest silence of night, when the house settles, I hear it—a slow, rhythmic thump, like a heartbeat in my own chest. And I feel a warmth spreading in my skull, and a whisper, faint as a wind through jungle leaves: ‘Come back. The earth has teeth, and they are made of concrete. They are hungry.’