The November breeze blew into the streets of the Birches like someone who knows every castle and every creaking hinge. Sand sifted through the cracks in the cattails, salt spray drifted off the cliffs and the lighthouse at Cape Bright stuck dark, as if it had been offended at the world for years. Martha got off the bus, readjusted her scarf and looked for a moment at the distant light outlined in the clouds, which did not shine. In Brzyny something rarely shone as it should. Her grandfather's old house smelled of dust, saffron and old wood. In the kitchen stood a mug with an unwashed rim, as if someone had only gone out for some fresh air and never returned. Martha put her bag down on a chair, still without taking off her coat, and then looked up at the attic where she used to play at organised chaos. The cardboard boxes still stood there: her grandfather's notebooks, tea tins full of buttons, a recorder she hadn't touched since high school. Quiet, dreamy dust circled in the streak of light oozing through the small window. On the threshold lay a bubbling envelope with no sender. It was damp, as if it had been lying in the rain for a long time, but the paper inside remained dry. Martha opened it with her fingernail, feeling nervousness as subtle as a wrinkle in a sheet of water. Out came a cassette tape, transparent, with a thin strip of tape wrapped evenly like the hair of an exemplarily combed child. The label read in thin, precise writing: "For Marta - Bright 00:30". And underneath, the date. Tomorrow. It squeezed her stomach. For a second, she thought that one of her friends was playing a perverse joke, but no one from the Breeds wrote in such careful, almost calligraphic handwriting. Besides, who signs tapes with a date from the future? She switched on the old tape recorder, the one with the heavy rubber rewind and the 'play' button, which always had to be pressed with her thumb because it liked to give up. She pressed the metal tooth menacingly and the tape started. There was a crackle from the speaker, then the sound of the sea, as if someone was holding a microphone just above the waves. And then a voice rang out. It was her voice. "If you play this back, it means you're back. Don't ask how. Just listen. At half past one the light will turn, although it shouldn't. The stairs will sway like never before and you'll come across a step with salt. Don't stop at the thirteenth. And don't look left." Martha held her breath. He knew the rapid rhythm of her speech when she managed to tell something without tripping over her own thoughts. He knew the slight hesitation at 'don't ask'. She knew what her own nervous rush sounded like. The tape was silent for a long second, in which she hesitated to turn everything off and push the strange object back out the door. Then the voice came back, quieter, as if speaking through a sleeve. "Take a torch. Take someone who knows the installations. Igor will do. Remember the keys from Bertha. If you hear someone say your name, don't turn around immediately. Count to five. You'll want to look. Trust yourself from before... trust." At the word "trust", the sound cracked slightly, the tape clattered, as if sand had scratched it. Martha pressed "stop" and looked at the tape recorder for a moment, as if it could explain something to her. Then she reached for the phone. Igor answered after the third beep. "Marta? After all, you... a, in the picture on the web I saw that you came. What's up?" "I need your torch, your tools and your readiness for stupid ideas." He laughed briefly, but something in her tone caused him to grunt and concentrate. "Where?" "Bright. Tonight." "The lighthouse is closed and the electricity is cut off. Besides, Mrs Berta has padlocks on." "I know how to convince her." Mrs Berta lived opposite the bakery, in a house with two cupboards full of jumpers and photo albums of her husband, a former lighthouse keeper. She had hair like candyfloss and a look that, with a single clench of her eyelids, could evoke childlike guilt even in adults. She listened to Marta on the doorstep, leaning against the doorframe and lazily stirring the sugar in her tea with a spoon. "Why are you there at night?" she asked, without condemnation but with decorative caution. "Grandfather wrote about the place. He left notes. I want to understand. And... if something happens, you know it's us, not some tourists." Mrs Berta sighed, twisted a bunch of keys on her finger so that they rang as if the lighthouse itself had been pulled through. "Don't go alone. And don't touch the lens. When it was still ours, I was always afraid they'd scratch it." She slipped the keys into Martha's hand and smiled crookedly. "Don't hide them under the doormat when you get back. Under the fig in the pot. Less obvious." The evening in Brzyny was thick at times. The smell of fish from the harbour mingled with the smoke from the neighbours' cooker, and the streetlights blinked sluggishly, as if with a smile that doesn't reach the eyes. Igor was waiting by the car, with a bag of tools and thermoses, his cap pulled over his ears. "Just tell me one thing," he began as they started down the dirt road to the cliff. "Do you know what we're doing?" "I know we shouldn't," Martha replied and laughed at that sentence herself. "And besides... I got something. Something that shouldn't exist." She told him about the tape, and he first shook his head, then fell silent, and finally said: "I got something from you too early once. A birthday two days early. Maybe life is just badly synchronised." The cliff loomed up suddenly before them, dark and jagged. A lighthouse, as tall as the silhouette of someone wearing an oversized coat, stood with its head in a cloud. As they came closer, something vibrated. For a split second, a faint glow flashed through the glass, like the streak of a match drawn into a crack. "Did you see?" hissed Martha. "Maybe the moon," muttered Igor, but he lifted the torch and sped off. The big door was cold. The key clattered, as if no one had turned it in the lock for years, and then the lock gave way softly, too easily. The wet floor smelled of metal and moss, and the spiral staircase climbed upwards like a snake coiled for a leap. Martha touched the handrail. It was cold and sticky with salt. "If someone turned on the electricity, we'll find out soon enough," Igor said and leaned into the switchboard. "But everything's dead in here. Nothing is humming." Marta slipped the cassette into her jacket pocket so that she could feel the angular casing under her fingers. "At half past one," she said in her mind. It was twenty to one. They climbed slowly, as each step seemed louder than the previous one. The stairs groaned, but not the way rust should groan. More like the muffled dragging of a piece of furniture on the parquet floor behind the wall. White dust lay on the fifth step, settled in circles. Salt. She wiped it with her shoe and a phrase from the tape suddenly came to mind: "you come across a step with salt". "Someone's been here," muttered Igor. "But for what? Nothing of value." "Maybe something we can't call valuable," she replied, more to herself than to him. At the thirteenth step she stopped. Not because she couldn't go any further, but because her ears told her to stand. From above came a soft, metallic rustle, like the rolling of a small ball down a gutter. Her heart hammered in her throat. The tape trembled under her fingers, though she couldn't. She felt it. "Go," she said aloud to herself, and only then did she recall the words: "Don't stop at the thirteenth. And don't look left." The left side of the stairs wasn't much - just a narrow gap between the platform and the wall, the darkness as thick as a blanket. She straightened up and put her foot on the fourteenth step, ignoring the reflex to glance into the darkness, which probably hid nothing but illuminated dust. With each floor, the air grew colder and the silence thickened, as if glass walls had been erected around her. Igor followed her, time and again touching the railing with his knuckles, as if making sure he was dancing with the right partner. At last they reached the platform under the very heart of the lighthouse, a door with barred glass. They stopped evenly, as if choreographed. Behind the glass was blackness. Martha put her hands to it and saw her own face, stretched and alien, not of this angle, not of this hour. From the pocket next to the cassette she took out a key. The sticker from the cake still clung to the metal. Someone once celebrated a birthday here, she thought, and smiled a skeleton of a smile. "Shall we try?" asked Igor, in that tone that is both question and consent. He turned his head and then, from below, someone called out quietly: "Marta". The voice did not echo down the stairs. It simply existed between one heartbeat and the next, like a drop that does not fall, but appears on the palm of the hand. Don't turn away immediately. Count to five. One. The feeling that something had just touched the air next to her ear tickled the back of her neck. Two. Igor squinted as he heard it too, and the air between them thickened, sticky as syrup. Three. Something beyond audibility rustled between the door and their faces - so subtle as to be more certain than sound. Four. Something clicked in the lantern, inside their bodies, not a mechanism, yet like a mechanism. Five. She turned around slowly. The empty staircase spiraled deep down, with only the metal edges of the steps glinting in the darkness. The wind wheezed, but impossibly so, as all the windows were closed. Martha raised her torch, the beam cut through the twilight like a blade, but didn't touch anything that should have taken the reflection. Instead, she saw that on one of the lower landings someone had drawn a circle with chalk, even and calm, and written in it two short words: "Don't look." Martha's hand trembled. "It's stupid," she whispered to Igor to tame the space, but the word, instead of settling, resounded in her like a badly fixed instrument. The lock on the door moved something. Not their key. From inside. Metal quiet and old, but obedient today. Someone had been in there. Or something. Sweat beaded on Marta's forehead, though it was chilly. Igor reflexively put his finger to his lips and raised the torch with his other hand, pointing it not at the glass but at the ceiling, as if he didn't want to blind anyone. Somewhere in the lens itself, high up, the glass groaned - the way an alarm clock groans when it tries to wake up after many years of sleeping. Then a cassette tape vibrated in Martha's pocket. She had no right to. And yet, through the material of her jacket, she heard a dry, crunching rustle, as if the tape had rewound itself by a few teeth. And a voice, her own, muffled but clear: "You're not alone." It took no more than a breath to look for the light in that one sentence, and yet before they could do anything, before Martha could press the key, everything in the lantern went out and flared up at the same time - the heavy glare of the lens bounced off the glass and cut across the black horizon, and instead of circling calmly as it used to, it stopped abruptly and pointed motionlessly one narrow, perfectly drawn streak, straight out to sea. On the line of this light, where the waves should be blinding, something moved slowly, too evenly, as if it had no shape, only intent. The lock vibrated again, faster, insistently. And from inside it came a short, sharp knocking, three times, too close, too human to think about the wind.