The headache was not the dull throbbing he had grown used to. It was something precise, as though someone were driving a rusty nail into his temple — slowly, turn by turn, savoring the resistance of bone. Tomasz Wiśnicki opened one eye. The fluorescent tube above his desk buzzed spitefully, vibrating at the same frequency as the pain. He closed the eye. It did not help. The sound was on the inside.
The editorial office of Głos Lokalny reeked of stale coffee, cheap printer toner, and something considerably worse — the smell of slow, inevitable death. Not the violent, bloody kind that makes front pages. This was death by neglect, by lack of budget, by the gradual extinguishing of vital functions. Seventy percent of the desks stood empty. The monitor screens, black and dusty, looked like headstones in a cemetery of unfulfilled ambitions.
Tomasz reached for his mug. It was empty. At the bottom, a brown crust had dried into what resembled a map of some scorched continent. He set it down with a clunk that rang out in the empty open-plan space like a gunshot.
"Damn it," he whispered, testing his voice. It was rough, as though his throat had been lined with sandpaper.
Last night had been a mistake. Every night for the past ten years had been a mistake in some sense, but this one — spent in the company of a bottle of cheap whisky and a folder on a corruption case at the district council that no one would care about — had been a tactical mistake. He had woken up fully clothed, on the editorial office sofa, with a taste of ash in his mouth despite not having smoked for two years. At least in theory.
He got up with difficulty. His spine protested with a series of cracks. He went to the window. The glass was dirty, coated with a layer of urban grease through which Warsaw looked like a film shot through a grimy stocking. Below, on Ząbkowska Street, life moved at its usual rhythm. People walked to jobs they probably hated, to earn money for lives they did not understand. Tomasz envied them. Their ignorance seemed like a blessing.
He returned to his desk. For a moment he stared at the blinking cursor on the screen. An article about potholes on Targówek. Riveting. He could have written it in his sleep. He probably had written it in his sleep. He began to type, striking the keys with a force that threatened to break them. Anger was his fuel. Anger at the editor-in-chief, who was a coward. Anger at the city that devoured people. Anger at his father, who had died without uttering a single word of truth.
The sound of the entrance door opening made him freeze. No one came here at this hour. The editor-in-chief appeared around noon, if he sobered up at all. The interns had long since fled to PR agencies.
Tomasz did not turn his head. He listened. The footsteps were quiet, careful. Uncertain. This was not a bailiff. Bailiffs walked loudly, with the confidence of people who had a right to your space. This was someone else. Someone who did not want to be here but had to be.
"Excuse me?"
The voice was a woman's, flat, free of that irritating manner possessed by people trying to sell something. Tomasz slowly swiveled in his chair. The mechanism scraped against the worn carpet.
She stood in the doorway, holding her bag pressed to her chest like a shield. Short, in a dark jacket that looked too big for her. Headphones around her neck. Hair cut unevenly, as though she had done it herself in the dark. She looked at him with a gaze that was simultaneously timid and unsettlingly intense. Like an animal that has walked into a trap but, instead of struggling, is analyzing the mechanism of the catch.
"I don't buy insurance, I don't believe in God, and I don't have change," Tomasz said, turning back to his monitor. "The exit is where the entrance is."
He expected her to leave. Most people left. His aura was more effective than barbed wire. But he did not hear footsteps retreating toward the door. He heard her approaching.
"I'm not selling anything," she said. Her voice was harder now. "Mr. Tomasz Wiśnicki?"
Tomasz sighed, long and loudly. He wiped his face with his hand, feeling rough stubble beneath his fingers. He turned again, this time looking at her with undisguised hostility.
"What difference does it make? The office is closed to outsiders. Please leave before I call security." That was a bluff. Security consisted of a Mr. Mietek who slept in a booth on the ground floor and was seventy years old.
The woman did not flinch. She walked to the desk across from him — empty, buried under a pile of old newspapers — and leaned her hand on it. He noticed that her fingers were pale and her nails bitten to the quick.
"My name is Marta Solak. I work at the State Archive. I found your name in the files."
The word files made something in Tomasz's stomach clench violently. Acid rose in his throat. He ignored it.
"Fascinating. Congratulations. And now goodbye."
"In files from the hospital in Górowo," she finished, paying no attention to his tone. "From the nineteen-eighties. Ward C."
The silence that descended on the editorial office was thick and sticky. The buzzing of the fluorescent tube suddenly became deafening. Tomasz felt the blood drain from his face, then return with double force, pulsing in his temples with a hot rhythm. His hands, resting on the armrests of his chair, clenched so hard the knuckles went white.
Górowo. That word had not been spoken in his presence for ten years. It was forbidden. Cursed. Buried along with the box that stood in the wardrobe.
He stood up slowly. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and he knew how to use his physicality to intimidate. He leaned across the desk, entering her personal space.
"What are you talking about, girl?" His voice was quiet, but a threat vibrated within it. "You've got the wrong address. This office writes about potholes and supermarket openings. We don't deal in history."
Marta stepped back half a pace, but she did not flee. Her eyes, grey and tired, fixed on his face. She was looking for something. A trace.
"Roman Wiśnicki," she said. "Your father. He was a patient there in eighty-four. I have his admission form. I have..." she hesitated, and her hand moved involuntarily toward her bag. "I have reason to believe that what they were doing there did not end then."
Tomasz felt something burst inside his head like a dam. It was not only anger. It was fear — old and cold, which he had spent years stuffing into the darkest corner of his subconscious. The fear of a small boy watching his father sit in an armchair and seeing a stranger. A man who looked through walls.
"Get out," he growled. "Now."
"Mr. Tomasz, please listen. I found recordings. Voices. My voice, though I was never there. I need to know whether your father—"
"I don't care about your voice!" Tomasz slammed his fist on the desk. A stack of papers jumped, and the mug with the dried coffee teetered dangerously. "I don't care about Górowo. My father is dead. He died of a heart attack, do you understand? A heart attack. Because people like you gave him no peace. Because his entire life someone was rummaging around inside him."
He came around the desk and stood before her, towering over her slight frame. He caught her scent — old paper and something metallic, like ozone before a storm.
"I don't know what game you're playing, Miss Solak," he said through clenched teeth. "But you're playing it alone. This is a newsroom, not a conspiracy theory club. If you have evidence of a crime, go to the police. If you're having delusions, go to a doctor. But don't come to me."
Marta looked at him for a long moment. There was no fear in her expression, which surprised him. There was something worse. Pity. And recognition.
"You feel it too, don't you?" she asked quietly. "That hum. You know this isn't the past."
"Get out!" he roared, pointing at the door.
Marta nodded, slowly, as though confirming a diagnosis. She adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder.
"I'll leave you my number," she said, pulling a crumpled business card from her pocket. She placed it on the corner of the desk. "For when you change your mind. And you will."
"Take it back." Tomasz flicked the card to the floor with his hand, as though it were an insect.
Marta did not pick it up. She turned and left, closing the door quietly behind her. He was alone.
The silence returned, but it was different. Contaminated. The air in the editorial office seemed too thick now, too difficult to breathe. Tomasz stood in the middle of the room, breathing heavily, as though he had run a marathon. His heart was pounding against his ribs in an uneven rhythm. He looked at the business card lying on the dirty carpet. A white rectangle in a sea of grey.
"Damn it," he hissed.
He did not pick it up. Not yet. He went back to his desk, sat down, and tried to write. Potholes. Potholes in the asphalt. Potholes in memory.
Five minutes later he left the editorial office, slamming the door. He left the computer switched on. He did not care.
His flat on Praga Północ was on the third floor of a tenement that remembered the days when people wore hats and had hope. Now the stairwell smelled of damp, boiled cabbage, and cheap tobacco. Plaster was falling from the walls in chunks, exposing bricks that looked like bleeding wounds.
Tomasz went inside and locked the door with all three locks. It was a ritual. Turning the key, the click of the bolt, a tug on the handle to be sure. His fortress. His sanctuary.
He dropped his coat on the floor. The flat was small, cluttered with books he had not read and notes he had not organized. On the walls hung newspaper cuttings — his own articles from years ago, when he had still believed that words had the power to change reality. Now they were yellowing, curling at the edges.
He went to the window. In the courtyard, at the center of a concrete well, stood that damned pear tree. Dead for years, black, twisted, like a charred hand reaching out of the earth. Tomasz looked at it every day. It was the only constant thing in his life.
Roman Wiśnicki.
His father's name echoed in the empty flat, though no one had spoken it. That woman, Solak. She had nerve. She had the nerve to come and dig up graves.
But she was also right.
Tomasz went to the drinks cabinet. He took out a bottle, poured himself a glass, but did not drink. He set the glass on the windowsill. His hands were shaking. Not from the hunger for alcohol. From the other hunger. The hunger for truth, which he had been trying to starve for a decade.
He turned and looked at the wardrobe in the hallway. An old, oak wardrobe, as large as a coffin. It stood there, massive and silent. He knew what was inside. At the bottom, under a pile of old shoes and winter jackets.
"Don't do this," he said aloud to the empty room. "Just have a drink and go to sleep."
His body did not obey. His legs carried him there of their own accord. He felt like a puppet whose strings were being pulled by someone else. Someone from the past.
He opened the wardrobe doors. The hinges groaned at length. The smell of mothballs and old leather struck him in the face. He crouched down. He moved a pair of worn hiking boots. He shifted a box containing a broken toaster.
And there it was.
An ordinary, grey, cardboard box. Sealed with packing tape that had yellowed and cracked with age. On the side, in faded marker, someone had written a single word: Things. His father's handwriting. Angular, nervous letters, made with a force that had pushed through the paper.
Tomasz pulled the box out into the middle of the hallway. It was heavy. Heavier than he remembered. He sat down on the floor, crossing his legs. He stared at it for a minute, two, five. Dust swirled in the shaft of light falling from the room behind him.
His father had come back from Górowo changed. Tomasz had been six years old at the time, but he remembered it clearly. He remembered his father sitting in the kitchen, staring at the ticking clock as though trying to decode some message in its rhythm. He remembered him closing all the windows, even in the heat of summer, because he claimed that "sound gets in through the cracks." He remembered the nocturnal screams, which his mother explained as bad dreams — but Tomasz had known they were not dreams. They were memories.
When his father died, Tomasz had packed everything from his desk into this box. And sealed it. He had closed the lid over the madness.
Now he took a penknife from his pocket. The blade flashed. He drove it into the tape. The sound of the plastic being cut was loud and brutal.
He opened the flaps.
The smell. The smell of old pipe tobacco — his father had smoked a pipe before the hospital, never after — and something sweet, cloying. The smell of medication.
On top lay some receipts, old newspapers. Tomasz pushed them aside. His hands were searching for something specific, though he did not know what. Beneath the layer of papers he found a notebook. An ordinary school exercise book with a ruled grid, its cover the color of faded blue.
He took it out. His hands were trembling so badly he could barely hold the notebook. He opened it at random.
The pages were covered in dense, cramped writing. There were no margins. The words jostled against one another, overlapping, forming a labyrinth of ink. Some sentences were underlined multiple times, until the paper had torn.
Tomasz strained his eyes, trying to read a passage dated November 14, 1984.
"They do not use words. Words are too slow. Rawski says it is hypnosis, but he is lying. This is not sleep. This is tuning. We are antennas. If you tune yourself to the wrong station, you can never switch it off. I hear them now. I hear her. The little girl. She is always crying, but she has no mouth."
Tomasz felt cold sweat run down his back. He snapped the notebook shut. He flung it away from him as though it were burning. The notebook landed against the wall, falling open to a different page. A drawing. A chaotic pencil sketch.
It showed a room. An empty chair. And a figure standing in the corner. The figure had no face — only a swirl of lines where the head should have been.
Tomasz leaned his back against the wardrobe and closed his eyes. His breath had lodged in his throat. For ten years he had convinced himself that his father had simply been mentally ill. Schizophrenia, paranoia, post-traumatic stress. Everything that has a name in a medical textbook is safe. You can catalogue it, prescribe medication, lock it inside a definition.
But what he had just read... "The little girl. She is always crying."
He thought of Marta Solak. Her eyes. Her voice. "My voice, though I was never there."
He reached into the box again. His fingers found something hard at the very bottom. He pulled it out. It was a small metal casket. Locked. He shook it. Something rattled inside. There was no key.
Tomasz stood up. He went to the window, holding the casket in his hand. He looked at the dead pear tree. Was he imagining it, or were the branches moving, even though there was no wind?
His cynicism — his armor, the shell he had worn with pride — had just cracked. A hairline fracture had appeared. Thin, barely visible, but enough to let the cold in.
He took out his phone. He dialed a number from his call history. He had not called her, but he had memorized the digits from the business card before knocking it to the floor. A journalist's memory. A curse.
Ringing. Long, monotonous.
"Hello?" Her voice was quiet, as though she had been expecting the call.
Tomasz swallowed. His throat was so dry it hurt.
"Solak," he said, and his own voice sounded strange in the empty flat. "Don't throw away that business card. I have something you need to see."
He looked at the metal casket in his hand. In the light of the afternoon sun, the metal gleamed dully, like the eye of a dead fish.
"And bring something to open locks," he added. "Because I think we've just opened Pandora's box, and I've lost the key."
He hung up before she could answer. He sat down at his desk and placed the casket in front of him. He waited. And the silence in the flat thickened, filling with a hum that — he was now certain — was not coming from the street.