The stairwell in the Praga tenement smelled of boiled cabbage, damp, and something sweetish that could have been cheap cologne or decay. I ran up to the third floor, ignoring the burning pain in my lungs. Every shadow on the landing seemed to have the shape of a person, every creaking step sounded like a footfall behind me. I didn't look back. It was the first rule I had learned in the archive, though it applied to dead documents rather than living people: never look at what you're leaving behind, because it will start looking at you.
The door marked number fourteen had no peephole. Only peeling brown paint and a brass number four hanging from a single nail, flipped upside down like some occult symbol. I knocked. Once, briefly. Then a second time, harder. The wood was cold and rough under my knuckles.
The lock clicked almost immediately. Tomasz must have been standing right behind the threshold. He opened the door, and warmth surged out from inside, saturated with tobacco smoke and the smell of old paper. He looked worse than this morning. His shirt was creased, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, dark hairs on his forearms bristling from cold or tension. His eyes were bloodshot, the grey irises seeming washed out, as if someone had bleached them.
"Did they get in?" he asked instead of a greeting. His voice was low, hoarse.
"I don't know." I squeezed past him into the hallway. "I heard something in the wall. Maybe it's just pipes. Maybe not."
He closed the door and turned all three locks. The metallic clicks sounded in the silence like a weapon being cocked. Only then did I allow myself to release the air I had been holding in my chest since leaving my own apartment. I leaned back against the wall. My legs felt like cotton wool. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind trembling hands and nausea.
Tomasz's apartment was exactly what I had expected, and at the same time entirely different. I knew there would be chaos. What I hadn't anticipated was that this chaos would have its own structure. This wasn't the mess of someone who doesn't clean out of laziness. This was a barricade.
The floor in the living room barely existed. It was covered with stacks of newspapers, microfilm printouts, photocopies of court documents, and yellow sticky notes that formed elaborate maps across the carpet. The walls looked like the inside of a madman's mind — press cuttings stuck up with painter's tape, connected by red threads that hung limply like severed nerves. At the center of all of it stood the desk. A massive oak piece of furniture, the only solid thing in this crumbling world. On its surface sat a bottle of whisky, two glasses, and an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
"You'll have a drink," he stated, not asking. He walked to the desk and poured the amber liquid into both glasses. No ice. I knew that in this household, ice was a scarce commodity, much like peace.
"I don't drink on weekdays," I said automatically, lifting the headphones from around my neck. I set them on the only free corner of the sideboard. Without them, I felt naked.
"Today is a Tuesday that tastes like Friday the thirteenth." He pressed a glass into my hand. "Drink. It'll disinfect your thoughts."
I took a sip. The alcohol was terrible, cheap, burning my throat like acid, but the warmth that spread through my stomach was a blessing. I walked to the window. The pane was dirty, coated with a layer of urban grease. Beyond it, in the small concrete courtyard below, stood a tree.
A pear tree. It was dead. Its branches, black and twisted like arthritic fingers, scraped against the wall of the opposite building. It had not a single leaf; the bark was peeling away in strips, exposing grey, lifeless wood. In the light of the streetlamp it looked like a skeleton trying to pull itself out of the ground.
"Father planted it," said Tomasz, coming to stand beside me. He looked at the tree with hatred and something that resembled tenderness. "When we moved here after... after his return. He said pear trees are tough. That they survive everything. It died in the week he did. As if they were connected by some sick root system."
"My father never planted anything," I said quietly. "He said that getting attached to things that grow is asking for trouble. Because everything that grows either dies or goes wild in the end."
Tomasz gave a short laugh, devoid of any humor. He took a solid sip from his glass.
"Wise men. Shame they were so screwed up. Sit down."
He pointed me to an armchair from which he cleared a pile of Wprost magazines from the nineties. I sat. The springs groaned in protest. Tomasz leaned his hip against the desk, towering over me. In this light, falling from a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, he looked old. The shadows under his eyes were as deep as drainage ditches.
"Show me," I said. "The notes."
He reached for a cardboard box standing beneath the window. It was ordinary, grey, a shoebox. But the way he lifted it — carefully, as if it contained a bomb or a venomous snake — said everything. He set it on his knees and lifted the lid.
The smell of mustiness hit my nostrils. The smell of time that refuses to pass.
He pulled out a notebook. An ordinary one, squared paper, with a oilcloth cover of the kind used in schools during the communist era. He handed it to me.
My fingers trembled as I touched the paper. It was rough, yellowed at the edges. I opened it to the marked page. The handwriting was small, slanted, agitated. The letters overlapped one another, as if the writer feared running out of space, or time.
14 November 1981. Session four. Group B.
My eyes skipped along the lines, searching for familiar shapes. And found them.
ANNA SOLAK. Reacts most strongly. During the REM phase displays verbal activity that is not gibberish. She does not dream. She transmits. Rawski is delighted. He calls her "the antenna." I call it something else. She is an open door. And the draft that blows through her freezes all of us.
I clenched my hands around the edges of the notebook so tightly that the paper cracked. Anna. My mother. An antenna.
"Keep reading," said Tomasz. His voice was drained of emotion, dry as ash.
Henryk C. is trying to transcribe her words, but his hands are shaking. He says it's poetry. It isn't poetry. It's an instruction. Anna speaks of frequencies. Of noise that lies beneath the noise. I'm afraid to fall asleep in the same room. When she sleeps, the shadows in the corner of the ward grow longer. This is not a metaphor. I measured them.
I looked up at Tomasz. He was staring at the dead pear tree beyond the window.
"My father," he began, without turning his head, "after coming back from Górowo, stopped sleeping in bed. I thought it was his back. But he slept in a chair. In the kitchen. With his back to the wall, facing the door. Always with the light on. When I was small, I would get up at night for a glass of water and I'd see him. Sitting rigid, eyes open, staring into the darkness of the corridor. Like a sentry."
"What was he afraid of?" I asked, though I knew the answer. I felt it in my bones, cold and sharp.
"That if he closed his eyes, he'd go back there," Tomasz turned sharply. "That his mind was still connected to that... thing. To that frequency. He told me once, when he was very ill and morphine had loosened his tongue, that dreams are not safe. That dreams are a public place, if you know the access code."
A chill ran through me. I remembered my own dreams from the past few weeks. Corridors. The sound of dripping water. And that voice. The voice of a little girl that sounded like mine, but said things I didn't understand.
"My mother died in a car accident," I said, trying to make my voice sound matter-of-fact, archival. "Officially. She skidded on a straight road. No signs of braking. My father said she fell asleep at the wheel."
Tomasz came over and took the notebook from me. His fingers brushed my hand. They were cold.
"What if she didn't fall asleep?" he asked quietly. "What if she had just woken up? And seen something that made her prefer to hit a tree than drive on?"
I stood up. I had to stand. The room had suddenly become too small, the ceiling too low. The air was thickening; I felt as though I was breathing through cotton.
"Stop," I hissed. "These are speculations. We have no evidence. We have the notes of a madman and old tapes."
"We have your mother's name written in my father's hand!" Tomasz raised his voice. In his eyes that same spark ignited that I had seen in the newsroom. Anger. His fuel. "We have dates that align. We have Halina Mróz, who's silent as the grave, and Kutera, who rambles, but is consistent within his rambling. This is not coincidence, Marta. Why do you think you found that tape? Why now? Why is Walczak blocking your access?"
I walked to the desk and poured myself more whisky. My hand wasn't trembling. Not anymore. Fear had turned into something else. A coldness. Precise, surgical coldness.
"Because the system is closing in," I said. "Because whatever they started in '81 is still ongoing. And I am..." I hesitated.
"The key," Tomasz finished. "That's what Father wrote. 'She is the key.' Not your mother. You. 'She hears.' Present tense."
I looked at him. He stood in the half-shadow, hunched, with that perpetual grievance against the world written across his face. But beneath that cynical mask I could see a frightened child watching its father sleep in a chair with a knife in hand.
"We need to go there," I said. The words hung in the air, heavy as stones.
Tomasz went still.
"To Górowo?" he asked. "There's nothing there. Ruins. Rubble and rubbish."
"Buildings remember," I replied, feeling the archivist inside me switch on. "Walls absorb sounds. If Rawski was conducting experiments there with sound, with resonance... the place might still be... playing. I need to see it. I need to stand in that room."
"It's suicide," he muttered, but I could see he was already calculating. He reached for a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, but didn't light it. He turned it in his fingers, breaking the paper. "If we go there, there's no turning back. You know that? If we lift that stone, everything underneath will crawl out."
"It already has," I nodded toward the door. "It's standing outside my building in a dark sedan. It's scratching inside my walls. I have no choice, Tomasz. Neither do you."
He looked at the shoebox. At his father's legacy. Fear and silence. For ten years he had pretended it didn't concern him. That he could simply be a journalist who wrote about potholes in roads and scandals at city council.
"I have a car," he said finally. "Old, but it'll get us there. I know the route. I've checked it." He admitted this reluctantly, as though it were a confession of a crime.
"When?" I asked.
"Three years ago. I drove out there. Stopped at the gate. Stood there for an hour. And turned back. A cowardly bastard, that's what I am."
"Not cowardly," I corrected him. "Cautious."
He crushed the cigarette in his fist. Tobacco scattered across the floor, joining the rest of the debris.
"Tomorrow morning," he decided. "We leave at four, before the city wakes up. If someone's following you, we'll lose them on the way out. I know shortcuts."
"I'm staying here," I stated. It wasn't a question. I had no intention of going back to my own place.
Tomasz nodded. He made no issue of it. Didn't bother with politeness or ambiguous suggestions. We were too tired for that, too frightened. We were like two soldiers in a trench, waiting for the shelling to begin.
"Take the bed," he pointed toward the door of the other room. "I'll take the couch. I'm not sleeping anyway."
"Are you afraid to fall asleep too?" I asked, point-blank.
He met my eyes. A silence settled for a moment, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator and the distant wail of a police siren.
"I'm afraid I'll wake up as the same man as my father," he said quietly. "Empty inside. Filled with nothing but echo."
I walked toward him. I don't know why. My body acted faster than my mind. I placed my hand on his shoulder. It was hard, taut as a bowstring. He didn't pull away.
"You're not him," I said. "You opened the box."
Something stirred in his eyes. A kind of relief, or perhaps gratitude, which he immediately buried beneath a layer of irony.
"Go to sleep, Marta. Tomorrow we have a sightseeing trip to hell."
I went to the bedroom. It was small, even more cluttered than the living room. The bed was unmade, the sheets grey. I lay down fully dressed. I didn't take off my shoes. The dictaphone dug into my back through the material of the backpack, which I placed beside my head like a pillow.
Through the open door I could see Tomasz in the living room. He sat at the desk, staring at the dead pear tree beyond the window. He was smoking. The smoke curled around his head in a blue halo. He didn't move. He looked like a statue sculpted from grief and cheap whisky.
I closed my eyes. I thought I wouldn't sleep, that fear would hold me by the throat until morning. But exhaustion was stronger. I plunged into darkness suddenly, as if I had fallen down a flight of stairs.
And I dreamed of Górowo. I had never been there, but in the dream I knew every corner. I saw a long corridor with peeling oil-painted wainscoting the color of rotten green. I heard the shuffling of slippers. I smelled boiled cabbage and lysol. And I heard the sound.
A low, rhythmic hum. Like a transformer. Or like a gigantic heart beating beneath the floor.
In the dream I walked down the corridor toward a door at the far end. I knew I shouldn't open it. I knew that behind it was something that would change me forever. But my legs moved on their own. I reached out my hand toward the handle.
The handle was warm. It pulsed.
I woke with a jolt, gasping for air. The room was grey. Dawn. From the living room came the smell of fresh coffee.
Tomasz stood in the doorway. Already in his coat. His face was set, ready for battle.
"Get up," he said. "Time to visit the ghosts."
Outside the window, the dead pear tree stood motionless — a black stroke against the brightening sky, pointing with its twisted branch in the direction we were heading. West. Where the sun dies the fastest.