In Luskov, the sea can change its voice. Sometimes it growls like the engine of an old cutter, other times it chats with the stones beneath the pier, and sometimes - although supposedly impossible - it hums. The lighthouse on the Edge stands on a high elevated rock, white and cracked like great-grandmother's porcelain. From the window of my room, I can see its black lantern scouring the night with relentless light, as if checking to see if anything important has been lost in the darkness. My grandfather once told me: 'Not all directions lead to a map'. I am left with a brass compass with a wind rose on which someone once tried to carve an extra thin ray. Generally the pointer hugged politely to midnight, but there were nights when it trembled like an insect's wing. Mostly, when the lighthouse sang. On this evening of the equinox, the wind smelled of salt and wet rusty rope. The glass in the windows rang quietly under the onslaught of gusts, and the street below my balcony was empty as only a waiting room is at this hour. I held the compass in my hand, peering into the brass depths the way others look into phone screens. The pointer obediently pointed north - until the lantern sang. It was not the usual groan of the old metal stairs or the complaint of draughts. It was a melody, low and high by turns, coiling like a ribbon and suddenly unravelling so that the skin on my arms stood up. And then a second, thin, incongruously carved ray in the rose winds lit up faintly, like a skylight caught in a jar. The pointer not only deflected - it began to circle smoothly, pointing to the lantern again and again. I wrote to Oscar: "The lighthouse is singing. Are you coming?" He wrote back immediately, as if waiting with his finger over the screen: "In 10 mins on the path under the cliff. I'm taking Sparrow." Sparrow is his drone, which despite its name has more sharp angles than a real bird of a feather. Oskar knows how to make things out of nothing. He can put together something that flies, shines or counts faster than the old computer in the library from cables discarded by the waves, from clips, from a fragment of an old keyboard. I... I listen. And sometimes I hear more than I should. At least, that's what my mum says when she asks me not to get into adult matters. But this wasn't adult stuff. It was the lighthouse song. - Can you hear it? - I asked as we passed the last houses and a path opened up in front of us that ran like a crack along the edge of the cliff. Oskar put his hand to his ear. - Something like... a cello in the mist. Or a hoover pipe. - He smiled crookedly. - But yes, it is. And it's different than usual. She used to be. Once the lantern sang briefly, as if recalling broken words. Today, the melody had a beginning that I knew, and a new tail that turned in a direction where no street led. The compass warmed my hand. I could feel the brass alive, as if someone from inside, from a place that wasn't there, pressed his lips to the cold metal and whispered my name. - Lena - said the wind quite clearly. Not the way people say it, without teeth or tongue, but in such a way that a cold went down my back. - 'No kidding,' I muttered, although he didn't even open his mouth, 'how.... - I nothing - he replied, lifting the drone. - Let Sparrow listen for us. - The propellers hummed and a twitching recording line appeared on the phone screen. - Okay. The lower register has repetition. Every third bar someone... something... adds a short tone. A cipher or... a ritual. We arrived at the lighthouse. Its door was rusty and locked with a chain, as usual. But today, under the threshold, a shallow recess in the rock was revealed that I had never seen before. It looked as if the waves had plucked at the stone with their fingers for a thousand years until they had cut a perfect circle, the size of my compass. A shadow circled in the centre - not of darkness, rather of a cold light that refused to shine. - 'Look,' whispered Oskar, leaning over. - A sign. - He touched the edge carefully. - Runes? Or just old letters. Around the perimeter of the circle someone had carved a row of tiny marks. None of them looked like anything I'd seen in textbooks. Some looked like raindrops falling down, others like sails dreaming of the wind. They were beautiful and restless. At that moment the sea thundered, although the sky had not yet had a single flash of lightning. The waves took two steps back, as if they were pulling in their bellies in front of something they didn't want to touch. When they returned, they did so more carefully, more quietly. The lighthouse wailed a new note, longer, deeper. The compass in my hand did a sudden pirouette and stopped pointing downwards. I understood. The circle in the rock was not just an ornament. - It's a nest,' I said. - It fits. - If you put it in and something snaps, we won't get it back,' warned Oskar, but he didn't sound like he really wanted to stop me. The sky was beginning to turn the colour of old lead, and the wind was tucking chilly fingers under our jackets. I fitted the compass to the stone circle. It fitted perfectly, as if the stone remembered my metal better than I remembered my own dreams. As the brass touched the rock, the marks flared very quietly, like a mist that, instead of disappearing, decided to ignite from within. A sparrow hovered above us and beeped a warning, and the phone in Oskar's hand showed a map of the stars for a second, even though it was only nine o'clock and no star could be seen. - 'Lena,' repeated the wind, this time not from above, not from the lighthouse, but from under our feet, from the rock. - Lena, open up. My teeth squeezed together on their own. I looked at Oskar. In his eyes you could see all the films he had watched about things that shouldn't happen, but always happen to someone else. He shook his head very slightly. I nodded. I pushed the compass more until it surprised and stuck into the stone by a millimetre or two, like a key stuck in a lock that hadn't been used for a long time. The lantern struck the night with its light. Not as it usually does, in streaks, but in one long, heavy stream that momentarily suspended the seagulls in flight. Really - their wings obeyed the stillness, their eyes round as buttons in a tailor's tin. The shadows around us moved in the opposite direction to the wind, as if they suddenly remembered that they have the right to make their own movements. The stone under my hands twitched. Not like a boulder after an earthquake - more like a chest when someone takes in air after a long silence. I felt the trembling in my fingers, in my arms, in my teeth. The marks that had previously glowed shyly now danced out, merging into larger ribbons that formed a picture. I could not immediately decipher it. The waves whispered something about a road that was not on any map. - 'It registered a pulse,' whispered Oskar, staring at the screen. - Three long ones, one short one, a pause, three again. It doesn't match any alphabet I know. - And to this one? - I showed him the sky. The clouds were arranged in something that resembled a wind rose, but twisted, as if someone had once crumpled it in their hands and tried to straighten it out. Its longest ray pointed downwards, straight at my compass sunk in stone. - Either it's all too good to be true, or... - Oskar didn't finish. He didn't need to. A quiet crack came from the alcove. Then a second one. I felt the compass from underneath vibrate, as if something was knocking on it with its knuckles. In the silence between one knock and another, the lantern sent another strip of light into the darkness, and the wind rustled the dry grasses at the top of the cliff so that it sounded like the rustling of footsteps very far away. The smell of salt changed for a moment to that of wet earth, fresh as after a storm. - 'I don't like it,' Oskar said, but the words rang out faintly, as if someone had swallowed them before they fell into the night. I put my hand to the compass, then to the stone. It was warmer than before. A vision passed through my skin, like a flash, of a corridor that could not exist because it ran straight into the rock, and yet there it was - cool, damp, smelling like a waiting room for a storm. And then, just when all the pieces of the melody had come together in my head and I could finally sing it from beginning to end, the wall under the compass took a deeper breath. And someone knocked from the other side, this time so brightly and so loudly that the stone responded by trembling and the lantern light went out for a split second.