On September nights, the Blue Willow smelled of boat tar, salt and autumn leaves peeling off the poplar trees above the harbour. At the end of the pier, from where the boats departed, the outline of Vulture Rock could be seen, and on it, the lighthouse: a milky tower with a rust-dusted balcony, deactivated for twelve years. No one wrote anything in the duty log anymore, no one changed the oil or polished the lens. And yet, every night at 3:17 a.m., the Len y and Iwa radio caught the same rhythm: three short crackles, a pause, five short ones, one long one. And again. - Can you hear it? - Lena pressed the headphones to her ears. They were sitting on the roof of the garage behind her grandmother's house, wrapped in a blanket. Above their heads flicked the heaping basket that Iwo had converted into a makeshift loop antenna. - Here he goes again. - 'Come on,' Iwo moved the frequency knob with the skill of someone who'd eaten his teeth at Mrs Gajewska's Radio Club. - 'This isn't a normal sea band. Look at the notes. Lena flipped through the pages of her notebook. Apart from tea marks and a few drawings of seagulls, there were rows of dashes and dots, arrows, question marks. The record of the previous night: 3:17 - ... ... ... / ..... -. In the margin a note: "maybe the code? repeats every 43 s". - What if it's not a signal, just the tip of some old alarm? - she muttered, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, which was disturbed by the wind. - Some kind of machine that should have been switched off a long time ago. Iwo fidgeted the way someone would fidget if they found a burst cable in a new installation. - The lighthouse mechanism has been without power for a long time. The city cut the wires, remember? - He fell silent, tracing the bar of LEDs on his receiver. - That's what nothing that's dead can transmit. Someone with a dog walked along the pier. In the gloom only the clatter of heels could be heard, then nothing. It was slowly getting cold. Lena glanced at her phone: 3:14. - 'Mrs Gajewska said that our lighthouse used to have a lens of the first order,' Lena said, a little to occupy her thoughts. - Apparently they called it the Eye of Midnight. - Fresnel - muttered Iwo. - A simple optic. That doesn't explain the radio. The clock skipped. 3:17 a.m. The radio hissed, then a distinctive crackle sounded in the headphones: ... ... ... / ..... -. This time they were louder, as if someone had moved the source closer. Lena felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. - 'I'm recording,' Iwo said and pressed a button on the small recorder. The sound went through their bodies like a moving string. It was hard to tell whether it was the wind or something else that made the poplar leaves suddenly silent. Everything seemed to freeze for that one blink. When the signal rang out, Iwo played back the recording, slowing down. Their room on the roof was filled with the monotonous melody of dots and dashes. - This is not random,' he stated quietly. - Repetition every second, and the sequence... - He stopped the recording halfway through. - Lena, it's arranged in letters. See: ... it's an S, ..... it's a 5, and it's a -.... - OKO - Lena said, following his notes with her finger. - If the long one is O, then we have O-K-O...? But the K in Morse is -.-. That's not it. - Or it's not Morse Alphabet, but some variant. - Iwo squinted his eyes. - Or an abbreviation. - From what? - Lena unrolled her blanket, stood up and walked over to the railing of the roof. From where they stood, she could see the tin cover of the lantern, palely reflecting the moon. - The eye... - she smiled at her own thought. - The eye of midnight. In the morning they both didn't last long in the school routine. In geography, Lena was drawing cross-sections of lighthouses in her notebook; in physics, Iwo was putting the finishing touches on antenna diagrams. After lessons, they turned down a path along the harbour, passing a fishing shop, a quayside fry-up and a display case with a yellowed photograph of the lighthouse keeper who once lived in the tower. Underneath, someone of history had annotated in marker: "Felix Crane - the last keeper of the lights". - 'My grandfather used to say that Felix always had a little whistle in his pocket,' said Lena as they climbed Vulture Rock along the gravel-strewn path. - 'He used to call the seagulls with it and they actually flew over.' - She smiled briefly. - And then, after that great storm twelve years ago, the lighthouse closed. Felix left for his sister near Ripin. Or so they say. - Rumours,' burbled Iwo, but he glanced at the photograph in his head. - Or something more. The area around the tower looked forlorn. The 'No Trespassing' sign hung crookedly, and the padlock with the Guardians' Port sign was so rusty that it probably only held by habit. More strangely, the side service door was ajar. As if someone had left a few hours ago and forgotten to close it. - 'It's not allowed,' Lena said, although she pushed the door open with her finger at the same time. The hinge squeaked protractedly, and they both looked around reflexively to see if anyone had seen them. No one. Inside, it smelled of old lamp oil and dust. A narrow corridor led to a circular hallway, from where a spiral flight of stairs climbed upwards. Faded instructions could still be seen on the walls: "Do not touch the lens!"; "Caution! Mechanism!"; "Maintenance: Tuesday/Friday". - See - Iwo pointed to a metal panel by the stairs. The rusted panel had a row of indicator lights along its length, one of which - labelled "Rotation drive" - was slightly smoky, as if someone had touched it with dirty fingers. - Someone had been here not too long ago. - He touched the windowsill and showed Lena the trace of a deposited hand in a thin layer of dust. There was also a table in the hallway. Lying on it were things that hadn't managed to grow old: a fresh R20 battery in its packaging, a bunch of keys wrapped in leather, a cardboard box of screws. Lena picked up the notebook. On the first page were the even letters: "OKO-4. Review: 03:17. Do not turn on." Underneath, a graph, lines running like waves, points marked in thin pen. - Eye four? - She repeated, furrowing her brow. - What is Eye four? - The fourth lens setting? - muttered Iwo, but hesitation sounded in his voice. - Or the design. - He took the notebook and flipped through page after page. There were dates for the past months, short entries like telegrams: "no wind - measurement goes"; "current draw minimal"; "do not look at the source". The last entry: "I'm leaving a signal. Maybe someone will read it." - Someone is really coming back here - Lena felt herself getting hot and cold at the same time. - Just who? - Or "when" - said Iwo half-jokingly, but the joke didn't sound like a joke at all. They climbed the stairs. Each step sounded beneath them like a thin sheet of metal. Round windows let in a milky light that faded with each floor. On one of the landings you could see the marks of rubber boots and a piece of string used by fishermen. On another hung a calendar from the year the lighthouse closed - a picture of the side of a ship and a large sign: "August". - Do you remember Mrs Gajewska talking about gravity clocks? - Lena tried to speak, because the silence suddenly started to sound too thick. - The ones that work thanks to the rotation of the Earth? - Foucault. The pendulum,' replied Iwo. - But this was a room in a museum, not a lantern. Finally they reached the top. The door leading to the lens room was heavy. Lena pushed them open carefully. The interior was larger than she had imagined: the glass crown of the Fresnel lens surrounded the empty space like a casket, and beyond it - a panorama of the sea, the harbour and the distant lights of the settlements. The sun was breaking through the clouds, leaving silver streaks on the water. The revolving mechanism stood still, laced with a web as thin as a grandmother's hair. - 'Nothing is alive here,' said Iwo as if he wanted to convince himself above all. He put the radio they had brought and the recorder on the windowsill. - We'll leave as soon as... - he broke off. - Do you hear? Something sounded in one of the lower floors: a metallic sound, as if a lid had fallen off. Lena looked at Iwa. The man wordlessly switched off the torch on his phone and turned off their light, as if he wanted to become part of the shadows. For a moment, only their own breaths could be heard. - 'Maybe the wind,' Lena whispered, although inside she knew the wind sounded different. - We wait until 3:17 - Iwo pointed to his watch. It was 3:05 - we'll see what happens. They sat on the floor behind a toolbox from which a coiled cable was sticking out. Lena hugged her knees to her chin and kept her hand on the back of the radio, as if the touch of plastic might give her courage. Time dragged on at the unbearable pace of a drop falling from the roof. Somewhere below, something rustled. After a moment - nothing. - If someone comes in... - Lena started, but didn't finish because the indicator on the recorder pulsed. Iwo moved violently. The clock showed 3:17 a.m. No bells rang, no rooster crowed, no cars passed. Yet something trembled in the lantern, so softly that they felt it through their skin rather than their ears. She felt the boards beneath her tremble from the microscopic movement. The lens - the big one, set on a still bed - trembled, as if it had taken a breath. The radio on the windowsill hissed. The speakers sounded: ... ... ... / ..... - repeated, lower, clearer. At the same instant, a thin, almost invisible streak of light slid across the wall, as if someone from outside had pointed a torchlight at the window. Fresnel reflected the beam, which cut through their hiding place with a flash so sharp that they squinted. - 'That's impossible,' Iwo straightened up and his hands trembled. - After all, there's no power here. Instead of answering, Lena reached for the notebook they had taken from downstairs. On the last page, in small writing, she spotted a short arrow and two words: "If you read - listen for names". Her heart sped up. The radio hissed a second time. This time it wasn't just a crackling sound. Just below them, as if from within the metal floor, a distorted whisper rang out. First a single word, as if a test: "Hello...". Then - clearer, sharper: - Lena. Iwo. The round handle of the door at the bottom of the staircase moved, creaking. Someone began to enter, taking slow, heavy steps that carried upwards like the beats of a metronome. And a streak of light crossed the room once more, this time stopping at the curves of the lens like an unmoving eye. The radio crackled and added another word, as clearly as if the speaker was standing right next to it: - Don't turn around.