The village of Brzeziny clung to the edge of the wilderness like a boat to the shore: uncertainly but stubbornly. The smell of juniper smoke, dogs and freshly mown hay wafted over the roofs. To the south a bog rippled, to the north a forest darkened, so old that its trunk could remember someone's great-great-grandparents. When the wind came from the wetlands, it carried with it a barely audible sound, as if someone nearby was trembling on a thin string. Lena returned to Brzeziny every year, but this summer nothing was ordinary. The water in Bronka's grandmother's well had subsided, and the current in the Silent River had reversed for a while. That's what she saw at dawn, standing barefoot on the platform: the woolly currents receded, as if someone had pointed out a mistake to them, and then ran again, pretending nothing had ever happened. At the edge of the village, several rowan trees had disappeared. All that was left were fresh trunks, hung with grass with knots tied in three, as if someone had put on a harness... or a curse. - 'Don't say that word,' cut off Grandma Bronka when Lena started about it. - In the wilderness, words have legs. Before you know it, they're already running down someone's back. Jarek, fifteen years old and a perpetual red cap, scribbled with a pen across the margins of his notebook. Instead of lines he was growing a zigzag. - 'Then why don't we call it... a riddle? - he mumbled with a smile with which he usually masked that he was nevertheless a little afraid. Grandma tied her apron around her hips and took a small iron bell out of a drawer. It was old, tarnished from years, and had a circle and three dashes carved on the edge. - Let Lena carry it. By the river and in the woods, the sound keeps the curious at bay. Iron remembers agreements,' she said. - Leszy doesn't like iron. - Do you seriously believe in Leszy? - Jarek raised an eyebrow, but corrected his cap with his hand as if he had suddenly become cooler. - I seriously remember things you don't want to remember on your own,' his grandmother cut him off. Lena pulled the bell on the string over her head. She smiled as the iron felt heavy, as if it was actually plumping the air with its own will. She didn't believe in fairy tales, but this year everything seemed different: the bumblebees flew later than they should have; the trunk of the old oak by the chapel of Mokosza cracked into the shape of an eye; and at night, as she lay on the couch in the summer kitchen, she could hear the whisper of the river through the mosquito netting - as if it was repeating her name, stretching it to its limit: Le-na, Leee-na. Cupid's Night was a week away. In the village, someone was already blowing mint garlands, someone else was distributing old stumps to neighbours for the bonfire. Young people were preparing white shirts, Miss Karolina was hanging bundles of St. John's wort over the threshold. Yet instead of joy, tension walked through the village. Mrs Sołtysowa swore she saw a long headless shadow in the ditch after dark. Mr Tracz, who ran a sawmill across the river, brought cut beams from the forest in the morning. On one of them in a knot someone had carved the sign of a circle with a cross yesterday, and today the knot had cracked like dried bread. - 'No exaggeration,' said Mr Tracz. - A tree like a tree. Lena and Jarek went to the chapel that evening. The chapel was not like the others; it stood away from the road, hidden in a hollow between three oak trees that people called the Holy Grove. There was never a statue to be found here, just a stone with an edging like a knee and black ribbons that someone was always replenishing. Who? No one admitted it directly. It was just the way it was. - Do you hear? - Jarek stopped and tilted his head. From the grasses came the flutter of something light, maybe wings, maybe water. - The quiet sounded different. Like the bubbles of another language,' he said, because ever since he started recording sounds on an old dictaphone, he had been comparing everything to speech. Lena stopped. The iron bell rustled. Not the way bells ring, but as if someone had touched it from the other side of the string. - 'It's the wind after all,' she chuckled, though the wind stood, chained to the twigs. A dampness waited in the clearing by the chapel. The ground bowed gently and red streaks of ants crawled between clumps of moss. The stone-knees glistened, although the sun had already gone down. Someone had left a fresh garland of cornflower and yarrow on it. Someone else had stuck a small sprig of rowan beside it, uncovered and embarrassingly bare. - He took who shouldn't have. 'He'll give it back if he has to,' Jarek said in a half-hearted voice, as if quoting his grandmother. He took a sketchbook out of his pocket. - Look. See those lines? - There were shallow scratches on the stone by his knee, lined up three at a time. - They're everywhere. On the trunk, on the ground, on this twig. Someone is leaving messages. - He leaves footprints,' Lena corrected. - Like he's taking steps with the wrong side of his foot. Jarek looked at her cross-eyed. - This is not funny. - I know - she admitted with surprise to herself. - Nothing is funny today. Then they heard a snap. It was not the sound of a twig. It was the crack of a weight falling on something springy and not breaking. A striped mist crawled out of the wetland, thick and transparent at the same time. Lena squeezed the bell in her hand. The metal was cool, like water. She had the impression that from time to time someone from the side, outside her field of vision, was turning a page in an invisible book. - 'We're going back before it falls completely,' decided Jarek, but he stayed behind to mark the location of the footprints in his notebook. That same evening, his grandmother told them about an old custom. Men from Brzeziny and two neighbouring villages once had an unexpected visitor. He came on the darkest night of the year, placed an iron circle at their doorstep and then disappeared as quietly as if he had never been there. - Only the old songs remember it. The circle was supposed to be an oath. It was not to be moved, not to be melted. It held the balance between the wilderness and the people,' Bronka said, stirring cherry compote in the pot. - Who knows where the circle is now? - she added as if she was asking around the air. - Maybe... someone found it at the logging - it slipped out of Lena's mind. - And the wilderness had come for its own. The grandmother did not answer, but put a piece of canvas folded like a letter on Leni's lap. There were marks on the canvas: a circle and three lines, a circle and lines. - When you go, take it to the Holy Grove tomorrow. Let him see it. If he sees, he will ask. If he asks, you will listen,' she said slowly. - Just remember: never look into the water when something is calling your name. Look at the shore, at the grasses, at the shadows of the trees. Never straight into the reflection. - Because then you might see the wrong thing? - Jarek asked. - Because then something will see you - she replied and added nothing more. The next day the sky was the colour of shattered amber. Bees circled like beads and the air was so thick that every movement of your elbow felt like the unraveling of a shirt. Lena and Jarek set off into the forest before noon. The bell bounced against his collar bone; Jarek's recorder blinked a green LED. On the path leading to the swampy clearing they found more signs: ropes of grass tied in threes, thistles arranged in arrows, a trunk where someone had scraped away a lump of moss, revealing scales of bark. A woodpecker rumbled in the treetops. As they stood at the sedge-covered canal, Lena saw something else. An apple crate was floating on the water, with a bunch of old, rusty iron hoops sticking out of it. There was no way to reach it unless.... - Don't touch it! - Jarek instinctively grabbed her sleeve, but Lena only leaned over to see better. The rim was cracked, as if someone had once unravelled it and glued it back together carelessly. It had no decoration on the rusty rim, except for a tiny, slightly worn engraving: a circle and three dashes. The box bounced off a clump of grass and disappeared under its edge. Lena stepped back, feeling her heart pounding in her throat. - He's leading her,' Jarek whispered. - 'Someone... something... is driving this iron. The path continued between alders as low as blossoms. The air was heavy and the ground was soft and greasy. The clearing of the Holy Grove opened suddenly, like a chapter long awaited in a book. The oaks, three, conversational, each separate and yet together, stood on the edge. In the middle, a stone knee. The garland from yesterday had darkened, but someone had added a new one, of myrtle and fluttering fern. Small, quick shadows ran between the blades of grass, which no one's pupil could catch. Lena knelt down and placed a cloth with signs on the stone. The bell sounded softly, once, a second time. Jarek stood next to it, with a dictaphone ready to record. And then the air began to sound. Not the wind, not the bees, but something low and old that knew Lena before she was even born. It would say: I know you by the cut of your soul, if it could speak in words. - Return - it said something, not in a voice, but a vibration in the bones. Lena wasn't sure if she heard or remembered. Jarek cursed under his breath, which in his case only meant a quick: "oh dear". - Did you hear that? - He asked, even though he knew she had. - 'If we're going to return something, we need to know what,' Lena replied more calmly than she felt. - 'How about this circle? That hoop? And then the ground by one of the oak trees dropped slightly, as if it had swollen from the inside. A thin stream of water slid out from between the roots. There shouldn't be water here - not like this, not now - and yet a blue rivulet flashed in the sunlight and flowed along the groove, straight towards the canal where the box disappeared. - 'Look,' whispered Jarek. - 'He's showing us. Lena stood up and took a step, then another. The bell sounded again, this time like a warning. At the same moment something rustled in the grasses on the left. A frog hopping? The burrow of an animal? Glittering, upturned footprints they knew from scratches on stone appeared in the soft earth and trailed towards the water. There was no one there, yet the footprints were forming. One, a second, a third, as if some invisible being was making its way through the world from the other side. - Jarek... - Lena did not finish. Her whole body had managed to understand that something was about to happen that could not be put back into the box. A quiet, very clear sound came from the reeds: - Lena. The voice was soft, caring and sounded like her grandmother, like her mother, like herself when she spoke to herself disguised as a whisper. She remembered the warning and focused her gaze on the edge of the grasses. Not on the water. Not on her own reflection. Only on the swaying blades. The bell clung to her chest like a second bone. - Don't look - Jarek remembered it too. He stood close, so close that she could feel the warmth of his arm. The voice repeated: - Lena. Return. In what could have been a breath, the air thickened and the forest held its breath with them. Somewhere far away a dog wailed. The recorder beeped and fell silent again. Lena raised her hand as if to touch the air, and then, in a groove of water a dozen paces from them, something began to emerge from between the roots of an oak tree - something round and iron, soaked in earth, that flashed against the sun like a heart set aside.