Maja never had a talent for running, but she was great at catching clues. For a month she had been picking up rumours about Room 207, where the blackboard was supposedly writing itself, after dark. The principal shrugged his shoulders, the teachers joked, and the doorman asked her to let it go. Only that the pictures of the students taken at the door always blurred together. To the editor-in-chief of the school's Comma, this sounded like solid cover material. On Friday after lessons, Maja, Kuba and Basia received a heavy bunch of keys from Mr Wojtek. "You have until nine o'clock to hand them in, because the alarm goes off on its own". - he muttered, tapping his watch. "If something snaps, I wasn't here," he - He added, raising his eyebrows cautiously. He smiled briefly and pushed back the bolt on the door heavy and scratched. The corridor in the B wing was cool, smelling of old paint and silent dust. Room 207 turned out to be larger than they remembered from the set, full of air and shade. Wooden cupboards creaked and a stack of yellowed class diaries lay on the windowsill. Maja opened one and stopped her gaze at the last entry: June 1999, E.S.'s signature, crossed out in a thick line. "Check this out!" - she whispered, sliding the journal under Kuba's lens, closer, still. Kuba set the camera on the tripod and Basia slid the microphone into the slot of the speaker grille. "Hypothesis one: someone turns on the intercom and lets the recording go," Maja noted carefully. "Hypothesis two: pure collective hallucination." - she added, tapping her pen on the board. Basia rolled her eyes and looked at the red recording light, blinking stubbornly. "And hypothesis three: someone is screwing us." - parsed Kuba, but he lowered his voice. They switched on the recorders, sat down under the window and waited, while the creaking floor calmed slowly. The minutes swelled, pigeons cradled their wings outside the windows, and the old clock ticked the second hand without conviction. At 6.19pm the pointer jerked and stood at a crooked twelve, as if hesitating in mid-motion. There was a crackling sound from the loudspeaker, as if someone had breathed very close, right next to their ears. "Do you hear?" - whispered Basia, ripping the headphones off her head with a nervous, sudden movement. A piece of chalk rolled across the blackboard and stopped in the middle, leaving a light dust. Kuba lifted his camera as the thin, uneven line began to drag itself, like a nib that won't let go. First the letter M, then A, and the scratch went higher, with hesitation. The door handle vibrated twice, slowly and decisively, and the speaker clicked again, letting out a short, unnaturally even breath. Maja took a step back and picked up her phone, although it had aeroplane mode. A new signature flashed in the list of Wi-Fi networks: ES_207_99 with an oddly strong signal. "Do not connect," Basia hissed, but the word ECHO spontaneously appeared on the DVR screen. Three short pulses and one longer one flowed from the speaker, like a school bell turned inside out. On the board, under the letters M and A, a dash twitched, trying to turn to J. Behind the door a quiet whisper murmured, without tone or colour, more like a thought: "Are you there?" The doorknob dropped; something millimetre by millimetre turned the metal in the lock, without haste. Cuba pressed the tripod to the floor and stopped breathing for a moment, literally. Maja tightened her fingers on the key of room 207 and counted to three in her head, when suddenly the fluorescent lights blinked simultaneously and someone started counting down in the loudspeaker.