Stairs That Lead to the Yesterday of the Past. Carlos del Puente Stories

Stairs That Lead to the Yesterday of the Past.

The house stood crooked, as if the architect had been drunk on sorrow when he drew the blueprints, and the builders—a group of retired circus acrobats with balance issues—had assembled it while wobbling on unsteady unicycles. Inside, the walls whispered in a language made of creaks and owl-like hoots, a dialect only the twin brothers, Hannibal and Norman, understood. They had invented it in the womb, a secret code of kicks and hums, and now, at thirty-seven, they still spoke it fluently, much to the despair of their parents, Gomez and Morticia Addams, who had long given up trying to decipher whether their sons were debating philosophy or plotting arson like determined pyromaniacs.  

The stairs, the central obsession of the household, spiraled upward in a way that defied Euclidean geometry. It was said they didn’t just lead to the second floor but to the yesterday of the past—a concept Uncle Fester, a self-proclaimed time travel enthusiast, insisted was scientifically plausible if one considered the elasticity of memory and the malleability of regret. Once, he tried to prove it by climbing them backward while reciting the periodic table in reverse, only to emerge three days earlier with a nosebleed and a sudden aversion to the eyes of clocks.  

The neighbors, a collection of characters seemingly borrowed from noir films and gothic novels, had mixed opinions. Mrs. Bates from across the street claimed the stairs were a portal to purgatory, while Dr. Lecter suggested they were merely a metaphor for the human spine collapsing under the weight of nostalgia. Neither theory stopped the twins from conducting nightly experiments, dragging antique typewriters and taxidermied squirrels up and down the steps, documenting each journey in a ledger hidden beneath a floorboard gnawed by what might have been an overly ambitious termite or a miniature demon.  

Family gatherings were, as expected, a carnival of dysfunction. Grandmother Desdemona, who believed herself the reincarnation of Lizzie Borden, spent afternoons sharpening cutlery while muttering about the virtues of a well-honed axe. Cousin Dracula, a vegetarian with a sun allergy, endlessly complained about the lack of good tofu in Transylvania. Meanwhile, the in-laws—a pair of retired detectives who had solved crimes that technically didn’t exist—argued over whether time moved forward or just wobbled in place like a drunk trying to remember where he’d parked his car.  

The central conflict erupted when Uncle Muda, a man fond of compressed-pill cauldrons for seasoning soups and dramatic exits, declared the stairs an abomination against nature that ought to be displayed in public squares under cover of night. This outraged the twins, who saw the stairs as their life’s work, and Uncle Fester, who had just managed to mail a letter to his past self warning against investing in artificially overvalued Dutch tulips. The ensuing debate devolved into chaos—flung cutlery, spontaneous séances, and at least one poorly executed escape attempt through the prison-style windows.  

Outside, the entire town seemed to exhale in exasperated anticipation, immobile in the hope that nothing would worsen. The local bar, run by a man who called himself Rick (definitely not *the* Rick from Casablanca), served drinks whose ice cubes sometimes bore prophecies in their frosty etchings. The police chief, a weary man named Harry Callahan who’d seen too much and solved too little, was summoned when neighbors reported screams, laughter, and the occasional inexplicable burst of harp music. His investigation went nowhere, largely because every family member answered in riddles, limericks, or—in the twins’ case—elaborate hand gestures that could’ve been either a confession or a pancake recipe.  

The stairs, meanwhile, waged their silent rebellion against physics. Those who climbed them sometimes returned younger, sometimes older, sometimes with memories not their own. One man descended convinced he’d been Napoleon’s tailor; another ascended and returned with an irrational fear of oranges he couldn’t explain. The twins documented it all, their private language evolving into something even they no longer fully understood—a lexicon of hums and clicks that sounded like a scratched record of a moth’s lament.  

By the end, the house was less a home and more a living collage of fractured timelines. The bodies inside did, indeed, spin like the wheel in a hamster’s cage—trapped in a loop of arguments, experiments, and the occasional spontaneous combustion. The stairs remained, unconquered and unfathomed, a monument to the absurdity of trying to relive what was already gone. And the neighbors, having long abandoned reason, simply nodded and said, *Well, that’s the Addamses for you*, as if that explained everything.  

Which, of course, it did.