Late summer held the Bieszczady Mountains in a warm, honey-like embrace, although the first, almost imperceptible taste of autumn was already in the air. The rasping sound of crickets mingled with the babbling of the brook, and the sun, setting slowly behind the ridges, streamed gently through the leaves of the beech trees. Over a folding pine plank table, in the shade of the chalet, Lena Gorska unfolded a map that remembered more than she and Kacper combined. - See? - she touched her finger to a pale green rectangle in which a thin, almost embarrassing line marked something like a tunnel connecting the two hags. - Here. This is not on any contemporary sheet. Not a trace of the erratics, nor of the bridge. It's as if someone had erased it all. Kacper Kudełka, with his inseparable baseball cap crooked at an odd angle, leaned over the map so close that for a split second only his even breathing could be heard. This alone was reassuring to Lena; in the field they trusted each other without words. She - a speleologist with a spine as stubborn as a Carpathian beechwood. He - an amateur cartographer, photographer and admirer of things that cannot be immediately explained. - Pre-war forestry division from Lutowiska, twenty-eighth edition - he muttered. - Did you notice the stamp? And here, see - he leaned in even further, squinting one eye. - Minor corrections scrawled in pencil. As if someone had come back here after years and added something. Not every pencil ages like this. Lena wrapped the map carefully, as if she were folding the skin of a very old animal, and slipped it into the tube. Before they set off, she checked her equipment: torches charged, helmet with headlamp, rope, gloves, first aid kit. Kacper added a thermos of tea to his rucksack and a metal cup that had more dents than he had scars from childhood falls. The trail they descended was not marked. At first it ran softly over needles, then curved into a dense thicket of ferns before finally turning where someone had tentatively outlined on the map the curve of a non-existent embankment. And indeed: an even, unnatural line could be felt between the birches and young larches. The ground was a little harder here, trampled by old boots that can no longer be counted. From time to time, brown traces of rusty nails glimmered in the moss, as if the ground still held the rhythm of footsteps that had long since fallen silent. - 'That's what I like,' said Kacper. - The lines that pretend they are not there. - Or they want us to think they're not there,' Lena added, because she liked to put doubts next to facts like a cup of tea next to a compass. Further down the gorge closed over them. The beech trees pushed their smooth trunks towards the sky so evenly that they felt like they were in a cathedral; the light filtering through the leaves was the colour of old green glass. The stream disappeared somewhere in the stones, leaving behind only dampness and a fresh smell. They came upon something that resembled a cast-iron anchor innate in the slope: a circular ring and two rusty catches, like the remains of a ski lift or winch. - And yet there was something here - Kacper touched the iron. In response, a splinter of rust cracked under his fingers and revealed a lighter streak of metal. - And it wasn't just anything. Lena crouched down and pushed away the damp leaves. Beneath them ran an even, still discernible gouge in the ground, like a trail of rails removed carefully and quietly. The smell of mud mingled with something else, something sharper, something incongruous with the forest - like old oil, like dust from dusty machinery, like the breath of an old, well-oiled routine. - 'Come on,' she said. - It must be there. Two turns later the gorge opened unexpectedly into a small stone bowl. The walls were smooth and cold, overgrown with moss, and in the middle - a little lower down - the ground transitioned into something that looked like a .... a door. Not a gate, not a gateway. A door made of iron, inserted as if someone had carefully placed it in the ground and had a forest growing over it. It had riveted edges and a circle, something like a steering wheel, mounted in the middle. At the edges they spotted a narrow gap - too even for the whim of nature. - 'I feel a draught,' Kacper raised his hand as if to gather air. - It's blowing from here. Lena took off her glove and pressed her skin to the metal. A chill, dry and firm, crept into her palm until she felt it at her elbow. The smell changed, took on that distinctive clean ozone note that accompanies old electrical appliances waking up years later. The dampness of the forest was milky in the air, but here, at the crack, it was like being drawn inside. - 'We could call out,' suggested Kacper half-jokingly, as he did when nerves marched down his spine with a fine stride. - So as not to come off as unimaginative. - Let's listen first," replied Lena. - Sometimes silence says more than echo. They sat down on the steps made of natural boulders, a few metres from the door, and switched off their torches. For a moment all they could hear was the forest: individual drops falling from leaf to leaf, the rustling of a mouse that was not hiding as well as she thought. Then they heard something else. A gentle, rhythmic tapping, so subtle that it could be taken for a fantasy of the heart. - Can you hear it? - Kacper tilted his head. - It's not water. Three short, three long, three short. A long pause. Again, three short, three long, three short. - I don't believe it - he whispered. - SOS. Inside, someone is playing iron. Before they had time to decide anything, a stronger gust blew, as if a quiet sigh had rolled from inside, gathering the fog and drawing it in through the gap. Kacper instantly took out his torch and swiped it across the metal. The light danced on the rivets, on the rusty scuffing, on the edge of the wheel.... And on something else. On thin, barely perceptible rivets that someone had scraped in the dirt like a nail on an old school board. - Look - Lena leaned back to let the light fall at a different angle. - Captions. Their eyes grew accustomed and they began to read. Dates, broken off words, obvious names that sounded like cold rain on the exposed neck: "Rusalka expedition, September 1981", "August - no contact", "Return by...". Further down, the lines were blurred. Still lower - a list: five names written neatly, one at a time, and underneath them a second, added by a different hand, years later, nervously. Lena moved her head away, as if she saw something she didn't want to see even in her dream. Where the light leapt from letter to letter, under her fingers she suddenly felt the weight of her own name, too familiar in this wilderness not to tremble. "Gorski." And next to it: "Jadwiga, Jan, W.". The first letter, then a dash, as if time had eaten the rest. - 'My grandfather had a brother who no one had seen since the eighty-first,' Lena said quietly, more to herself than to Kacper. - 'They said he'd left. Only... no one could say where. Kacper gripped the wheel on the door without turning it, as if to see if the iron would respond with heat. It was icy. For a moment, they both stood gazing at the rueful words as if they were looking at an old photograph found in a shoebox - one that suddenly fit a missing story in a family drawer. Finally, Kacper moved his hand away and clapped it with the other to shake off the chill. - 'We don't have to open anything today,' he said, though there was a trembling note in his voice that betrayed a curiosity that was almost painful. - We can come back with support. Equipment, a submission, maybe the Forestry Commission, maybe someone from the museum.... Lena, who nine times out of ten had chosen reason like a well-fitted harness, now felt the even and calm weight of the decision falling on her shoulders. Yes, they could go back. They could have laid it all out in plans and tables. But the rhythmic tapping settled into her like a metronome that had no intention of stopping. Before she could say anything, the metal under their fingers sighed again. The wheel vibrated, barely, almost imperceptibly - but enough to leave a fresh, bright crescent in the dirt. The air pulled at the side of the fissure, drawing a thin trickle of mist behind it, like a strand of smoke sucked through an invisible gap. - 'I'm not touching,' whispered Kacper, withdrawing his hands in an open gesture. - I swear, I'm not touching. Three short ones. Three long ones. Three short ones. And then something new: single strokes, slower, insistent. Like counting, like checking to see if anyone would answer. At the edge of the door a thin, bluish glow flared, so faint that perhaps only their pupils, dilated to the maximum, were able to catch it. And then the wheel moved a second time, more decisively, until a short, metallic clang could be heard inside, as if a long-rusted bolt had been unlocked. Lena and Kacper looked at each other, both with the same mixture of horror and anticipation, and the forest around them fell silent as suddenly as if someone had turned off the sound of the world. And then, from deep behind the iron, a whisper came to them - not a word, nothing that could be understood immediately, just a shred of a voice tangled with a gust that ran down their necks, like an invisible hand checking that they were ready. The wheel vibrated a third time. And this time it did not stop.