The bus dropped Sophie off on a road that ended with a leafy wall of wilderness. The smell of damp moss and smoke from cooking cookers mingled with the coolness of the river, flowing somewhere invisibly beyond the meadows. The sun was still clinging to the edge of the sky, as if it did not want to come down from its duty over this piece of Podlasie on its own. Żerdno was a short and old village: three streets, wooden houses with garlic braids under the eaves, a well with a crane and a shrine with a saint in blue paint peeling like gills. Sophie was carrying a rucksack heavier than her MA and more necessary than anything else: notebooks, a small dictaphone, a tattered ethnographic atlas, a thermos, and a tea box in which lay a letter yellowed at the edges. A letter from Halina - her grandmother - who had died in March, leaving her a wooden house and a few sentences that were inconvenient. The house stood off to the side, overgrown with raspberries, with a window where a lace runner hung - on the inside. Sophie turned the heavy key, the creak of the hinges received her like a confession. Inside, it smelled of soap, tar from the cooker and the sort of thing that only old kitchens have, where milk can spurt out without witnesses and there's no one to blame for it. On the table was a box with a bone handle; my grandmother always kept thread and buttons in it. Now it was empty. Empty except for one letter, which Sophie had already read many times, and yet she unfolded it again. "Sophie, if you're reading this, it means they've relapsed again in the summer and the water has exposed the stones. Don't be alone if you go to the old river bed. Listen to the moss, not the people. If you hear knocking from the reeds three times, the water is tuning up - don't turn around until it flows through. Don't extinguish a fire that lights up beside you. Nor greet it, for the child of fire is vindictive. Go into the night when the fire and the water are dancing, but return before the drinking - not the first, not the second, but the one that shouldn't happen. Halina" Sophie rested her forehead against the cool countertop. She couldn't tell if the letter was a joke, a cryptic request or an expression of something that escaped explanation. Halina was a whisperer - half the village came to her with strange pains and even stranger concerns. Doing her research, Sophie learned not to laugh at other people's certainties and not to believe everything she heard. But these sentences couldn't be put down like overly sweet tea. A dog barked in the courtyard. Sophie came out. Nikolai from the forestry stood there, tall, freckled, with a cap in his hand. The dog was spinning at his feet like a compass pointer. - Good morning. Sophie - she introduced herself. - Halina was my grandmother. - I know, in Żerdno everyone knows everything, they just pretend not to. - He smiled with one corner of his mouth - Nikolai. Forester. I brought the key to the shed and... - he hesitated - light the cooker for you? - I can do it myself. - I know you can. But I brought it anyway. - He pulled out a bunch of keys and hung them on a nail by the door. - I heard the lady from singing and talking. - Ethnography. Collecting songs, rituals, stories. - She looked around. - Today people will be making garlands? - They will - his gaze wandered to the river. - The water as low as a schoolboy's pocket. The old riverbed had drunk its fill and exposed the stones. Do not go there alone. You can see the thunder sign and such. Rocky as memory. - He fell silent, as if he expected that to be discouraged. - The thunder sign? - Sophie was tickled by a shiver of curiosity. - Perun? Nikolai nodded, still looking somewhere beyond her. - Mrs Halina had a habit of burning herbs with them when the solstice came. She used to say that not everything old liked to be left alone. When Nikolai left, she was still stopped by Vera, a neighbour from down the road, regarded in the village as the one who knows words for burns and for dreams that are too loud. Vera was petite and busy, like a sparrow in an apron. She pulled a red string out of her pocket and tied it around Sophie's wrist, without asking. - At the thought of what was going wrong. - She smiled toothlessly. - Don't whistle in the night, don't look at that third one and don't take anything from a girl with leaves in her hair. - She nodded her head towards the forest. - The wilderness hears names. That which remembers them does not forget easily. Evening drifted down on Żerdno like fresh cream. Bonfires were lit on the meadow, girls wove flowers into garlands, boys waited pretending not to wait. The smoke smelled of herbs; someone sang in a low voice an old song about an aquatic man who likes to prance, and about oxen who dance so that the ground beneath them drags like a cat. Sophie recorded, took notes, the words arranged in her notebook like caught fish - slippery, alive, twitching. And yet it was all just a vestibule. The letter burned in her pocket like embers. As the first garlands swam downstream and a star-shaped swallow fell from the darkening sky, Sophie stepped out of the circle of laughter and crept along the path towards the old river bed. She could hear distant shouts behind her - someone leaping across the fire, someone tuning a fiddle - but here, under the burlap veil of willows, it was different. The water whispered strangely familiar words to her. Mosquitoes buzzed, but suddenly, as if on cue, they fell silent. Sophie slid down the clay slope and stood on the black, engulfing bank. The fireflies - that's what the locals called them - showed themselves, as if the whole thing had been rehearsed: first one, a tiny flame above the water, followed by another, on the left, by the reeds. They were not yellow, but cold blue, like a wedge. Sophie stopped. Vera said: don't put out, don't say hello. She could have followed the path, but her legs led her behind the lights themselves, over the wet ground, between the water sticks, until the water began to reach her shoes, holding her with every step like someone's hand. The old riverbed revealed truly. Between clumps of sedges stood stones, bigger than a man. They were covered in soft moss and thin, silver threads of cobwebs, but beneath this quilt was locked rawness. On one of the boulders, the one that leaned towards the current, one could see engravings: zigzags of lightning, a cross with a circle, outspread hands. Someone, long ago, had asked for something or promised something. Sophie touched the cold stone carefully. A lingering breath of wilderness hovered between her and the water - that moment before the first drop of rain. Three distinct knocks sounded in the reeds - as if someone had tapped the dugout with their fingers. Sophie closed her eyelids. "It's the water tuning up," she reminded herself. "Don't turn around." The fire at her knee flicked, then squatted lower, like a bird preparing to leap. A thin laugh came from the distance - children or wrigglers? - and then everything seemed to recede, the sounds sinking into the bark of the trees. When she opened her eyes, she saw that the fireflies had parted and were signalling their way between the boulders, towards the middle, where the water was black and smooth like a mirror in which nothing is reflected. Sophie put her foot on a stone as flat as a table and felt a tremor under her sole. She couldn't tell herself it was just the waves. - Sophie. - The voice that came from behind her was not that of any of the participants in the meadow play. It carried dampness and the smell of raw wood, and sounded like a whirlwind crawling up a chimney and not knowing if it could. - Halina's child. Don't turn around - repeated the insistent whisper in her head. The water reached the edge of the stone and hovered, not draining, as if held by invisible fingers. With clenched hands, Sophie squeezed the corner of the letter, which she took without thinking. Her fingers were cold and foreign. Something that was not a leaf rustled in the willows. Between the trunks stood a figure a man and a half tall, slim as a whirlwind and thick as darkness. On its head were antlers - not deer antlers, however, but tangled roots that coated the air with a greenish tarnish. The skin - if it was skin - resembled bark: dark, cracked. Eyes - two deep wells in which swirled what should not be grasped in words. There was a wet, cool breath coming from the forest, as if from within the earth. - You were not supposed to come alone. - A voice flashed through her hair like fingers. - Who asked and who promised? - The figure bowed barely, and the fires twitched, as if out of respect or fright. The current of the old riverbed moved and trembled, like a cat before a leap. The stone under Sophie's feet groaned quietly, like a door that promised to still hold. A hand emerged from the darkness - not a human hand, but something that resembled a vine, separated into fingers - and touched the ritual of a thunderous sign. The sign glowed with an icy radiance that did not warm, but nevertheless evaporated memories, as if someone were scrolling back past summer, past night, past words. - Sophie! - somewhere from the shore came another voice, human, breathless. Nikolai? - Not allowed! The fireflies rose in one movement, as if someone had picked them up on invisible strands. The water rose with them, a thin, improbable sheet. The antlered figure turned his face - if it was a face - towards the river, then looked at it again. - Too late for a ban. - At that moment, something cold and wet touched Sophie's neck, like a drop that no one had invited. As she reflexively turned her head, she saw a shadow right beside her, in which the outline of a second silhouette was beginning to emerge from the black mirror without the slightest splash.