"Alfama runs on sardines, pimba, and a 1760s oak cage somebody sawed through"
Jonah Weiss is twenty-nine, an architecture-school dropout from Philadelphia who became Jonah Goes Places He Shouldn't: 1.2 million followers, abandoned hospitals, drowned villages. He has come to Lisbon to shoot a pilot about the Moorish tunnels under Alfama. He can't look at a building without reading where its weight goes, and he can't forget the night five years ago, in a Kensington textile mill, when he didn't check a floor before telling his best friend to walk across it. Casa Saudade is the pink birthday cake at the top of the Beco da Saudade. It is also leaning. The quarter he stands on its edge rolls all the way across his dorm. Downstairs, every internal wall has been removed, and a column wrapped in fake ivy holds up nothing at all.
Inês, the receptionist, is an architecture student who reads about gaiola frames at the front desk and insists there are no tunnels, only drains. Her grandfather Rui, a retired stonemason, tells Jonah the building has always groaned, and that if it ever stops, he should run. Hamid, a structural engineer from Stuttgart, has promised his wife he is on holiday and snaps a rubber band every time he notices something. Dale from Dayton came for a week four years ago. A set of Dutch triplets swap name tags for fun. Chloe Park-Whitaker, the vibe architect who designed the rooftop, took the walls out because she thinks walls are the opposite of connection. Across the alley, a claims adjuster called Odalys Ferreira has hung a plumb line from her window. The pink wall has come two centimetres closer since March.
The warnings arrive in order. A chunk of ceiling lands in Chloe's matcha during a game of the floor is lava. The pendant lights swing in two different directions at once. Under the new rooftop decking, Jonah and Hamid find a steel beam resting on shims the size of a Kit Kat, and the owner threatens them with his lawyers. On the twelfth of June the whole neighbourhood is grilling sardines. Up on the roof there are eight hundred fish, six grills, a DJ and a man in a foam mascot costume soaking up hot-tub water like a sponge, with a hundred and eighty people jumping in time. Jonah has a livestream and a warning to give. The party thinks it's the funniest thing it has ever heard.
Age: 29
Type: Urbex creator and architecture-school dropout
Fatal Flaw: Reads every building's load path except his own
Role: Protagonist
Age: 26
Type: Influencer and self-styled vibe architect
Fatal Flaw: Took out all the walls for better flow
Role: Guest
Age: 23
Type: Receptionist and architecture student
Fatal Flaw: Case-sensitive, like the Wi-Fi password
Role: Ally
Age: 35
Type: Structural engineer from Stuttgart on a strictly non-working holiday
Fatal Flaw: Snaps a rubber band every time he notices something
Role: Reluctant hero
Age: 44
Type: Claims adjuster who lives across the alley
Fatal Flaw: Seven espressos before midnight, and counting
Role: Witness
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Hairline"
He went for the breaker.
It was on the fourth floor, in a cupboard by the stairs, because the electrician who had wired the rooftop had apparently been paid by the metre. Bruno took the stairs two at a time. He liked the stairs, actually. They were the only part of the building that still felt old. Everything else had been sanded, whitewashed, fitted with Edison bulbs and signs that said things like good vibes only and you are exactly where you need to be. But the stairwell was the real thing: stone steps worn into shallow dips by two and a half centuries of feet, a heavy wooden handrail polished black by hands, thick walls that stayed cool even in June.
He reached the fourth-floor landing and stopped.
There was a noise coming from the walls.
A creak. A long, slow, groaning creak, the sound of a wooden ship leaning into a wave. It came from the left, from the dormitories, and then from the right, from the bathrooms, and then from above and below at once, as if the whole building was stretching after a long sleep.
He opened the cupboard. Pulled the breaker marked, in someone's Sharpie, ROOF — DO NOT TOUCH (TRISTAN).
Upstairs, faintly, the roar of the jets continued.
He pushed the breaker back. Pulled it again. Nothing changed. On the wall above the fuse board, a smaller white puck, one he hadn't noticed, glowed amber at him like a patient cat.
"Okay," he whispered. "Okay, okay, okay."
He should go home. That was the answer. Leave the hose, leave the tub, text Augusto, go home to Amadora, get into bed with his phone and watch football highlights until the sun came up. He turned to go.
And that was when he saw the wall.
There was a hole in it. A neat, square hole in the plaster beside the fuse board, where the electrician had gone in to run the rooftop cables. Bruno had seen it before and not thought about it. Now, with his phone torch, he looked through.
Inside the wall was the skeleton of the building.
He had heard about this. Everyone who did building work in Lisbon had heard about it, the way sailors hear about sea serpents. After the great earthquake, when the whole lower city had fallen and burned and been swallowed by the sea, the king's minister had ordered the new buildings built with a secret inside: a cage of wood. A lattice of timber posts and beams, braced with diagonal crosses, packed in with rubble and plaster so you never saw it. When the ground shook, the cage would flex. Sway. Hold. A gaiola, they called it. The cage. They said the minister had tested it by making soldiers march around a model until the ground shook, and the model had stood.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Casa Saudade, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Best hostel in Europe!!! The slide!!!" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐ "Bread was nice. Floor felt a bit bouncy?" — FreeToWander guest, Hamburg
☠ "bounce is a feature. thank you for wandering." — @HostelReaper