Chapter 8: The Ruins
The road to Górowo was not an escape. It was an autopsy performed on a landscape.
I sat in the passenger seat, driving my nails into the upholstery of the old Opel, which smelled of dust and something sweet — a drink spilled there years ago, perhaps. Tomasz drove in silence. His hands on the steering wheel were white at the knuckles, gripping with a force that suggested he was trying to strangle the car rather than steer it. The wipers squeaked rhythmically, sweeping dirty drizzle from the windscreen — drizzle that wasn't even rain, just thick, wet air settling on everything in a sticky film.
We passed through villages that looked as though they had died a decade ago but forgotten to fall down. Grey concrete houses, corrugated iron fences, chained dogs barking soundlessly behind the glass. Poland B, C — or whichever letter of the alphabet one uses to label radioactive waste.
"Ten more kilometres," said Tomasz. His voice was rough, as though he hadn't used it in days rather than an hour. He didn't look at me.
"I know," I answered. I didn't need to glance at the map on my phone. I could feel it. The closer we got, the more the pressure in my chest shifted from a dull ache to a sharp, vibrating sting. As though someone were tuning an instrument, and I were the string being wound one turn too tight.
He turned off the asphalt onto a road of concrete slabs. The car lurched, the suspension groaning metallically. We entered the forest. The pines stood dense here, dark and straight as prison bars. A peculiar half-light held sway — the kind that makes everything look two-dimensional and drained of depth.
The hospital emerged from behind the trees without warning. It was not a ruin in any romantic sense. There was no ivy picturesquely winding around gothic turrets. It was a brutal concrete block. A three-storey rectangular slab of grey panelling, streaked with moisture stains that looked like black tears. The ground-floor windows had been bricked up with hollow blocks; those above gaped with the blackness of smashed panes. It looked like a ship run aground in a sea of nettles and giant hogweed.
Tomasz cut the engine. The silence that fell was a physical weight. I could hear only the ticking of cooling metal and my own blood humming in my ears. Not the sound of the sea. The sound of an old tape reaching its end.
"Are you ready?" he asked, still staring straight ahead.
"No," I said, opening the door. Cold air struck my face with the smell of wet earth and mould.
We got out. Our boots sank into mud mixed with pine needles. Tomasz went to the boot and pulled out a large, heavy torch and a crowbar. He handed me the torch. It was cold and solid — a proper lump of metal that could double as a weapon.
"The main entrance is bricked up," he said, gesturing with the crowbar toward the concrete barricade. "But on the eastern side, where the boiler room was, the grille is bent. I checked on urbex forums."
We walked along the building's wall. The concrete was rough, covered in moss that looked black in this light. I felt the weight of the place pressing on me. It wasn't the sensation of being watched. It was something worse. The sensation of complete, absolute indifference. This building didn't want to hurt us. It simply existed, and our presence was as irrelevant to it as a fly on the body of an elephant.
We reached the boiler room. A rusted door hung on a single hinge, and the grille over the window beside it had been bent back, leaving a narrow gap. Tomasz squeezed through first. I heard the scrape of his jacket against metal, a muffled curse, then the sound of his boots hitting the concrete floor inside.
"Clear," came his voice, distorted by echoes. It sounded as though he were speaking from the bottom of a well.
I pushed through after him. Rust stained my sleeve; a sharp edge of metal snagged my rucksack. I tumbled inside, landing on my knees on something hard and damp.
Inside, there was a cold. Different from outside. This was a standing cold, dead, preserved in the walls for thirty years. It smelled of lime, old grease, and something else — the faintly sweet odour of rotting paper.
Tomasz switched on his torch. The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating a tangle of pipes overhead from which strips of insulation hung like the viscera of a gutted animal.
"Ward C was on the second floor," he said quietly. The torchlight trembled in his hand. Only slightly, but I noticed.
We moved toward the stairwell. Our footsteps echoed back to us with a delay, as though the building needed a moment to digest the sound. The floor was covered with a layer of rubble, broken glass, and old syringes that crunched underfoot like dry bones.
The stairwell was wide — typically institutional. The terrazzo on the steps was worn smooth down the centre, polished by thousands of feet that had once passed this way. The handrail had long since been torn out; only metal stumps jutted from the wall.
We climbed. First floor. Open doorways to the wards. In the torchlight I glimpsed bed frames stripped of their mattresses, rusting skeletons. On the wall, a spray-painted inscription: GOD DOESN'T LOOK IN HERE. Banal. Pretentious. And yet I felt a chill run down my spine.
"Second floor," Tomasz announced, stopping on the half-landing. His breath was misting in the air.
Before us stretched the corridor. It was long, drowning in a darkness our torches couldn't entirely dispel. The walls were painted halfway up in oil-based panelling that must once have been pistachio-coloured and now resembled the colour of rotten meat. The paint was peeling in great flakes, hanging like skin from a burn.
This wasn't the set of a horror film. It was the set of a tax office in hell. The banality of the destruction was what was frightening. Abandoned lockers, an overturned chair, a heap of documents reduced to pulp by the damp. There were no ghosts here. There was only the bureaucracy of death.
"We're looking for the therapy room," I whispered. My voice was too loud. Too alive.
"According to the plans it should be at the end of the corridor, on the left," Tomasz said, moving ahead. He walked stiffly, as though expecting an attack.
I followed, sweeping my light over the doors. Number 201. 202. 203. The nurses' station. The glazed partition wall was smashed; phials and temperature charts were scattered across the floor. I picked one up. The paper was damp, the ink blurred, but the name was still legible: Kowalski J. No date. Only a temperature: 39.8.
The deeper we went into the corridor, the more the air changed. It thickened. It became sticky. I felt pressure at my temples, a rising whine in my ears that wasn't a sound from outside. It was my own frequency, resonating with this place.
Tomasz stopped before a set of double doors at the end of the corridor. They were padded in leatherette that had cracked and split, exposing the foam beneath. On the one surviving door-leaf hung a small sign — plastic, with engraved lettering: GROUP THERAPY ROOM.
"This is it," he said. He looked at me. His face in the torchlight was grey, his eyes shadowed. "You don't have to go in, Marta."
"I do," I answered. And that was the truth. I had no choice. The place drew me the way a magnet draws iron filings. I felt a physical need to cross that threshold — so strong it was almost painful.
I pushed the door open. It shrieked, the sound of metal grinding against metal, boring straight into the teeth.
We went in.
The room was large. The windows, facing the forest, were boarded up; only thin strips of grey light filtered through the gaps, in which dust danced. In the centre stood several chairs, overturned, scattered haphazardly. Along the wall, a desk. Empty. The floor was herringbone parquet, buckled in many places by the damp.
Nothing remarkable. An abandoned room in an abandoned hospital.
I took a step forward. The floor creaked.
And then it happened.
There was no flash of light, no thunderclap. Reality simply shifted a millimetre to the left. Like a slide in a projector that hasn't clicked into place.
First came the smell. The mustiness and damp were gone. In their place, a sharp chemical scent of floor polish. And cigarette smoke. And cologne — heavy, citrusy, with an undertone of musk. Przemysławka. A smell so intense it caught in the throat.
I dropped the torch. I heard the crack of breaking glass, but it sounded distant, as though coming from another room.
"Marta?" Tomasz's voice was distant too. Distorted.
I blinked. And when I opened my eyes, the room was no longer a ruin.
The parquet gleamed. The windows were not boarded; heavy beige curtains hung in them, muffling the daylight. The chairs weren't overturned. They stood in a perfect circle — six of them, upholstered in coarse brown fabric.
I was sitting in one. I could feel that rough fabric under my fingers. I could feel it pressing into the skin of my thighs through thin trousers.
My hands. I looked at them. They were not my hands. They were larger. A man's hands. With long, slender fingers, sparsely haired. On my wrist, a watch. An old Sława on a leather strap. I could hear it ticking. Loud. Rhythmic. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
I knew this wasn't me. I knew I was Marta Solak, standing in a ruin in 2024. But that knowledge was only a faint whisper somewhere at the back of the skull. What was real was what was happening now. Here and now. The year was 1989.
Across from me sat a man. He sat in shadow, but I could see the glint of his glasses. And the smoke from the cigarette in his hand, its thread rising perfectly straight, disturbed by no draught.
"Focus, Henryk," the man said. The voice was velvet, calm, but beneath it vibrated something of steel. It was the voice of Dr. Rawski. I knew that voice from the tapes. But now I was hearing it live, without the noise of the medium, without distortion. It was right beside me.
"I'm trying," I answered. But it was not my voice. It was the voice of a young man. Henryk Czajka's voice. I felt the vibration in a larynx whose shape was foreign to me.
"Don't try. Be." Rawski leaned forward. The smell of the cologne became unbearable. "Tell me what you see."
"I see..." I gripped the armrests of the chair. Sweat ran down my back, cold and sticky. "I see a corridor. Long. Dark."
"Good. Walk down it. What is at the end?"
"A door. A black door."
"Open it."
"I can't. I'm afraid."
"Fear is only information. Open it."
I stood. I stood up inside that memory, and simultaneously I felt my real body — Marta's body — sway. But I couldn't stop it. I was inside it. I was Henryk. I could feel his terror, his fascination, his desperate need to please the man in the shadow.
I walked toward the door that had appeared in the centre of the therapy room. In reality it wasn't there, but to Henryk it was more real than the walls. I reached out my hand. The handle was ice-cold.
"Open it," Rawski commanded.
I pressed the handle down.
And then a wave broke over me. Not of light. Of sound. A shriek. Thousands of voices screaming at once, compressed into a single vibrating tone. Pain drove through my head like a white-hot rod. I felt the vessels in my nose burst, warm blood running onto my lips.
I saw things I should not have seen. Faces. Hundreds of faces. Halina. Zbigniew. My father. And myself. A small girl with a ribbon in her hair, standing in the corner of the room, watching all of it with dead eyes.
"Let her go!" someone screamed. Not Rawski. Not Henryk.
A jerk. A brutal, physical jerk by the arm.
The vision shattered like glass.
The room was a ruin again. The curtains were gone. The smell of cologne had given way to the odour of mould. But the headache remained. And the blood. I could taste its saltiness in my mouth.
Tomasz had me by both shoulders and was shaking me hard enough to rattle my teeth.
"Marta! Christ, Marta, breathe!"
His face was inches from mine, contorted with panic. The torch lay on the floor, casting long, trembling shadows on the walls.
I sank to my knees. My legs had given out. They were cotton wool. Tomasz caught me before I hit the floor.
"He's still here," I babbled, choking on blood from my nose. "He's still here."
"There's no one here. We're alone." Tomasz hauled me up, nearly pulling me onto himself. He wasn't gentle. He was in evacuation mode. "We're leaving. Now."
"You don't understand—" I tried to pull free, but I had no strength. My body still remembered being Henryk. My hands were searching for the armrest of a chair that no longer existed. "It's not a recording. It's happening now."
"Shut up and move!" he shouted, dragging me toward the doors.
He pulled me out into the corridor. My boots scraped through the rubble. I felt as though I weighed a ton. Every step was a struggle against gravity that operated differently in this place. The corridor seemed longer than before. The darkness behind us appeared to thicken, stretching out tendrils in our direction.
I heard a sound behind me. A quiet, rhythmic tapping. Or footsteps. The calm, elegant footsteps of someone in expensive shoes.
"Faster," Tomasz hissed, nearly running.
We half-ran, half-stumbled down the stairs. Once I nearly fell, but Tomasz wrenched me upright without slowing. His fingers were digging into my arm hard enough that I knew there would be bruises. The pain was good. Pain was an anchor.
We reached the exit through the boiler room. We squeezed through the gap in the grille, tearing our clothes and skin. We burst out into the cool, damp air of the forest.
I dropped onto the grass. Wet, dirty grass. Nothing had ever seemed so beautiful to me. I grabbed a fistful of soil and squeezed it in my palm, just to feel something real. Something that was not the memory of a dead man.
Tomasz stood over me, breathing hard. He had his hands braced on his knees, head hanging down. His coat was smeared with lime; a bloody scratch from the wire ran across his cheek.
"What was that?" he asked hoarsely, not lifting his head. "What the hell happened to you in there?"
I wiped the blood from my nose with the back of my hand. A red smear on pale skin.
"I didn't happen," I said quietly, looking at the dark mass of the hospital looming behind us like a headstone. "I was invited."
Tomasz straightened slowly. He looked at me. The cynicism was gone from his eyes. There was only clean, naked fear.
"We're going," he said. "And we are never, ever coming back."
But we both knew that was a lie. Because even if we never returned to Górowo, Górowo had just come back with us. I could feel it under my skin. I could smell Przemysławka on my own hands, even though I had touched nothing but mud.