Eerie Varela and the Astronomer’s Calculation Den Where His Vector Strayed

A dense hush fills Varela House, deepest in the abandoned calculation den where Mateus Augusto Varela, born 1879 in Bahia, once charted planetary motions for local universities and maritime patrons. The broken vector on his final trajectory sheet hangs like an admission he never completed, a solitary gesture paused mid-thought. His instruments remain as arranged—precise, patient, and eerily expectant.

A Vector Running Through the Astronomer’s Measured Hours

Mateus learned celestial plotting from his cousin Beatriz Varela, a mathematics tutor whose cracked abacus rests beside a sheaf of faded lecture notes. His evenings followed quiet, steady ritual: candles trimmed to control dripping, chalk warmed between his palms to steady the first fine line, degrees marked in neat arcs along the aged table edge. His presence lingers—compasses sorted by radius, notebooks stacked in disciplined columns, a globe turned to the longitudes he favored for calculating retrograde paths. Even the indentations across the leather-bound chair show where he leaned forward nightly, breath held as he aligned each vector with unhurried precision.

When Burden Pulled His Calculations Off Their Course

Quiet rumor whispered that Mateus’s most recent commission—a complex ephemeris intended for an expeditionary ship—revealed small but troubling deviations from earlier observations. In the interior corridor, Beatriz’s abacus pouch lies torn along the stitching. A slide rule rests against the wall, its central runner misaligned. A sheet of recalculated angles sits beneath a narrow console, its numbers overwritten in increasingly uncertain loops. A faint trail of chalk dust marks a single stair, scattered as if dropped while he paused mid-thought. None of these fragments confirm an error, yet each leans toward a tightening pressure Mateus bore with growing, silent dread.

Only the fading vector on his last trajectory endures—an interrupted reasoning settled into stillness. Whatever pulled Mateus from his computation remains unresolved.

Varela House remains abandoned still.