The motorway to Łódź was a scar across the landscape. Grey asphalt cut through fields that in the November light looked like rotting canvas. Marta sat in the passenger seat, staring at the wipers fighting their losing battle against the drizzle. The rhythmic swish-thwack, swish-thwack was the only sound that cut through the hum inside her head. The hum hadn't stopped. It had only changed pitch. Earlier it had been a high-pitched whine; now it resembled the buzz of a transformer — low, vibrating at the base of her skull.
Tomasz drove in silence. His hands on the wheel were large and steady, but his knuckles had gone white, betraying a tension he didn't want to put into words. Since leaving Warsaw they hadn't turned on the radio. The silence between them was dense, viscous, full of unasked questions about what had happened at the archive and what Marta had really heard inside her head.
"Turn off here," she said suddenly, though she wasn't looking at the map on her phone.
Tomasz flinched, as if roused from a trance. He glanced at her briefly, searchingly.
"The GPS shows another three kilometres to the Bałuty exit," he noted, but his voice was rough, unused for an hour.
"Turn off here," she repeated. She didn't know why she'd said it. The words had simply fallen from her mouth, hard and alien. She felt a pressure in her stomach — a physical certainty that the road ahead led somewhere wrong and the side road was a necessity. This wasn't intuition. It was an instruction.
Tomasz swore quietly but turned the wheel. The tyres squealed on the wet surface of the slip road. They entered a labyrinth of streets where tenements with hollow, broken windows gave way to concrete giants assembled from prefabricated slabs.
Łódź greeted them with the smell of wet coal and exhaust fumes. The block on Włókiennicza Street rose from the pavement like a concrete tombstone stood upright. Eleven storeys of anonymity. Balconies hung with laundry that would never dry; satellite dishes aimed at the sky like empty plates begging for a signal.
Marta got out first. The cold struck her face — sobering, brutal. She adjusted the headphones around her neck. They weren't plugged into anything, but their weight gave her the illusion of safety. Like a collar that reminded her who she belonged to.
"Fourth floor, no lift," said Tomasz, standing beside her. He lit a cigarette, drew deeply, squinting through the smoke. "Kasia said the intercom's broken. Code 2580."
"How do you know there's no lift?"
"Because in blocks like this the lifts broke down in the nineties and nobody ever fixed them. Besides, look at those windows on the stairwell. Dirty from the inside. Nobody goes that way unless they have to."
Marta looked at Tomasz. In his cynicism there was a desperate attempt to keep his grip on reality. He described the world in order to tame it. She no longer needed to describe anything. She could feel this block. She felt its walls pulsing.
They entered the stairwell. A smell hit them — boiled cabbage, chlorine, and old urine. The classic bouquet of the Polish housing estate. The stairs had been worn smooth by millions of footsteps; the terrazzo was cracked like the skin on an old man's heel. They climbed. The echo of their steps carried unnaturally loudly.
On the second floor they passed a woman with a pushchair who looked at them with an expression of weary hostility. On the third, someone was playing piano — a simple, mechanical exercise, the same four bars repeated over and over, going flat on the F-sharp. Marta stopped for a moment. That sound. The flat F-sharp. She felt as though someone had dragged a fingernail down her spine.
"Come on," Tomasz said, placing his hand on her back. His palm was warm — too real.
Fourth floor. The door marked number 4 was upholstered in brown imitation leather, slashed in several places where yellow foam was pushing through. There was no bell. Tomasz knocked. The sound was dull, like striking a coffin.
They waited. A minute. Two. The silence behind the door was absolute, but Marta knew someone was standing there. She felt a presence on the other side of the fibreboard panel. She felt a heavy, wheezing breath.
"We know you're there, Mr Kutera," said Tomasz loudly, aiming his voice at the gap between the door and the frame. "My name is Tomasz Wiśnicki. I'm a journalist. This is Marta Solak. We want to talk about Górów."
The click of the lock was as loud as a gunshot. The door opened to the length of a chain. In the darkness of the hallway, a single eye gleamed. Blue, watery, surrounded by a web of red veins. It was looking not at Tomasz but at Marta.
"Solak?" The voice was gravelly, as if rising from a throat full of grit. "Which Solak?"
"An archivist," Marta replied. Her voice didn't waver. "I'm looking for documents."
"Documents lie," the man growled. "Paper accepts anything. Even the claim that we were human."
"I'm not looking for official files," she said quickly, before he could slam the door. She stepped forward — a risky move, breaching his space. "I'm looking for the truth about Halina Mróz."
The eye behind the gap narrowed. For a moment there was only the man's heavy breathing and the distant barking of a dog in the yard. Then the chain rattled. The door swung wide open.
Zbigniew Kutera was shorter than Marta had imagined. Stocky, with a broad chest that had with age dropped into a stomach. He wore a sleeveless undershirt and grey suit trousers held up by braces. His arms were covered in thick grey hair. But it was his face that commanded attention. It was the face of a man who had for years been waging a furious argument with himself and losing every point.
"Come in," he said, without stepping aside from the doorway, forcing them to squeeze past his massive body. He smelled of old sweat, "Mocne" cigarettes, and something metallic — like blood from a bitten lip.
The flat was surprisingly clean. Sterile, even. Not a speck of dust on the wall unit from the eighties. The floor gleamed. The table covered with a checked oilcloth was free of even a single crumb. This order was not a sign of peace. It was a form of terror imposed on the surroundings. Every object lay precisely where it belonged, as if moving it a millimetre might invite catastrophe.
In the central point of the room, on a small table by the window, stood a chessboard. The pieces were set up mid-game. White had the advantage, but the black king was shielded by a wall of pawns.
"Who's winning?" asked Tomasz, pointing at the chess set, trying to ease the tension.
Zbigniew snorted. It was an ugly, wet sound.
"Nobody. I play against myself. And I always cheat."
He walked to the window and drew a heavy brown curtain, cutting off what remained of the daylight. A half-darkness settled over the room, lit only by the blinking LED of an old television set.
"Sit," he said, gesturing toward the sofa. It was hard and uncomfortable. Tomasz sat on the edge, producing a dictaphone. Marta remained standing, leaning her back against the bookshelf. She felt the spines of the volumes pressing into her shoulder blades. Encyclopaedias. Dictionaries. Books on engineering. Facts. Zbigniew surrounded himself with facts.
"So. Halina," began Kutera, without offering them tea. He sat on the chair beside the chessboard, his back to them, studying the pieces. "Saintly Halina of Modrzewie. Our Lady of Sorrows of the Herbs."
"You claim she's lying?" asked Tomasz.
Zbigniew spun around sharply. The chair scraped across the parquet like a shriek.
"Lying?" He laughed. "She doesn't lie, son. She creates mythology. She tells you about spirits, about the transfer of souls, about some great metaphysical suffering. Because it sounds beautiful. It sells. Suffering ennobles, doesn't it? Rubbish."
He stood and approached Tomasz. He leaned over him. Tomasz didn't move back, but Marta could see the muscles of his neck tighten.
"Rawski was not a mystic," hissed Zbigniew. Spittle landed on Tomasz's jacket. "Rawski was an engineer. And we were batteries. It wasn't about any kind of treatment. It was about output."
Marta felt cold. The word "output" sounded worse in that stuffy room than "murder" would have.
"What do you mean?" she asked quietly.
Zbigniew looked at her. His gaze softened — but only for a fraction of a second. Then the hostility returned.
"What do you think was happening there during the sessions? Hypnosis? Pendulums?" He snorted. "Didn't Halina tell you about the helmets? Didn't she mention the wires?"
He raised his hand to his head. In one brutal movement he pushed aside what remained of his grey hair, combed over to one side. Marta drew a sharp breath. Tomasz froze.
On Zbigniew's temple, just above his ear, there was a scar. Not an ordinary cut. It was a depression in the skull — circular, the diameter of a coin, the skin there pearlescent, dead, fused. It looked as though someone had pressed a heated rod against it and held it there until they felt the resistance of bone.
"'Stimulation of memory regions,'" Zbigniew recited in a tone that mimicked Rawski's detached, academic voice. "'Low voltage. Safe. Only a slight tingling.'"
He let his hair fall back, concealing the evidence.
"Halina has one too," he said, returning to his chair. "But she won't show you. She prefers to say it's a stigma. That it's the touch of infinity. Nonsense. That is the mark left by a Siemens electrode, model year eighty-four."
"Why do you say she was an accomplice?" asked Marta. She had to know. The image of Halina — an elderly lady brewing tea — had begun to crack in her mind like a mirror.
Zbigniew picked up a black pawn from the chessboard and squeezed it in his fist.
"Because she didn't only receive the current," he said quietly. "She helped with calibration. She was the favourite. The 'reference subject.' When the others were screaming, she was taking notes. She sat at Rawski's desk when Henryk—" He broke off. His face was contorted by a grimace of pain so sudden and so deep it looked like a heart attack.
"What about Henryk?" pressed Tomasz, moving the dictaphone closer.
"Henryk was too soft," Zbigniew muttered, staring at the floor. "He broke. And she... she told Rawski what Henryk whispered at night. She sold us out. For peace. So they wouldn't turn up the voltage on her."
Marta felt nauseous. This didn't fit with Henryk's diary. Or perhaps it fit perfectly. Perhaps Henryk hadn't known. Perhaps his fascination with Rawski had been engineered.
Zbigniew suddenly stood and went to the bookshelf. He pushed aside a row of encyclopaedias, revealing a small cavity behind them. From it he pulled a notebook. It was an ordinary school exercise book with squared paper — a grey paper cover stained with grease and time.
He threw the notebook onto Marta's lap. It struck her thighs with a weight that seemed out of proportion to the number of pages.
"There," he growled. "You want the truth? That is the truth. Not Halina's poetry."
Marta touched the cover. The paper was cool and slightly slick. She opened it at random. The pages were filled with small, technical handwriting. Dates. Times. Parameters. And names.
12 November 1984. Subject: Czajka. Voltage: 12V. Exposure time: 4 minutes. Response: vomiting, loss of orientation, incoherent speech. Notes: Halina recommends increasing frequency.
The letters swam before Marta's eyes. Halina recommends.
"You kept a diary?" asked Tomasz, craning his neck.
"It's not mine," Zbigniew snorted. "I stole it. From the nurses' station on the day they closed the ward. Everyone was running around like rats, burning files in the boiler room. And I took this. It's a technical log. A register of equipment usage and... material."
Marta turned the pages. Names she didn't recognise. Names she had seen in the archive. And then, on a page dated January 1985, her gaze stopped at a set of initials.
Subject: M.S. (external). Non-standard session. Presence of child confirmed.
Marta's heart struck her ribcage like a hammer. M.S. That could be Maria Solak. Her mother. But presence of child?
She looked up at Zbigniew. He was standing over her, breathing heavily, as if the mere act of handing over the notebook had cost him the last of his vital strength.
"Mr Zbigniew," she began, and her voice was thin as paper. "Do you remember a woman by the name of Solak? Maria Solak?"
The reaction was immediate. Zbigniew's face went rigid. The red veins in his eyes seemed to swell. He stepped back as if Marta had struck him across the face.
"Get out," he said quietly.
"Please — it's important. My mother—"
"GET OUT!" he roared. The sound was so powerful in that small room that the glasses in the wall unit rattled. Zbigniew lunged for the door and flung it wide open.
Tomasz leapt from the sofa, placing himself between Zbigniew and Marta.
"Easy — we're leaving," he said, raising his hands in a calming gesture.
"You have no right to ask about her!" Zbigniew was screaming, spittle flying from his lips. His face had turned purple. "You have no right to say that name in my home! She wasn't one of us! She was... she was the reason!"
"The reason for what?" Marta cried, trying to look past Tomasz's shoulder. She was gripping the notebook so hard that her fingernails had pierced the cover.
Zbigniew grabbed Tomasz by the arm with the force of a vice and shoved him toward the corridor. Tomasz staggered but kept his footing. He pulled Marta after him.
"Take that filth and go to hell!" Kutera was screaming, pointing at the notebook in Marta's hands. "Go to Halina! Ask her what she did with the child! Ask her why Maria had to cease to exist!"
They stumbled out onto the stairwell. Zbigniew slammed the door with such force that plaster rained down from the frame. They heard the click of the lock turning. Once. Twice. Three times.
They stood in the half-darkness of the corridor, breathing hard. The smell of cabbage and urine had returned, but now it mingled with the smell of fear.
Marta leaned against the wall. Her legs were like cotton wool. She pressed the exercise book to her chest.
"What did he say?" she whispered. "'Why Maria had to cease to exist'?"
Tomasz straightened his coat. His face was pale, his jaw set. He looked at door number 4, then at Marta.
"He said she was the reason," he replied, and there was no longer any cynicism in his voice. Only coldness. "Marta... he wasn't talking about a patient. The way he screamed it... that was hatred, but a different kind. That was the hatred of someone who ruined everything."
From below came the sound of the piano. That same off-key chord again. The F-sharp that didn't belong. Marta looked down at the notebook in her hands. She felt as though she was holding a bomb whose clock had just started ticking faster.
"We're going to Modrzewie," she said, pushing herself off the wall. "Now."
"It's night, Marta."
"I don't care. He gave us a map—" she struck the notebook with her palm. "But Halina has the key. And if that old madman is right... Halina has been holding that key in her clenched fist for thirty years."
She started down the stairs without waiting for Tomasz. Each step carried her further from the rational world of archives and closer to something viscous, dark, and terrifyingly familiar. The erosion was over. Only bare rock remained.