The evening bus dropped Helena off on a road that ended among riparian woodland and reeds. The darkness did not fall at once; it glided over the ground like smoke from a bog, filling in pits and ditches, penetrating under fences, and finally sticking to the walls of the cottages like a sticky shadow. Above the floodplain, cranes shrieked, and a stork crouched on the oldest chimney, as if a resigned guardian of the transition between what is familiar and what the marshes remember. The grandmother's cottage stood sideways to the road, its windows looking out over the birch trees on the other side of the stream. The beams were the colour of honey, the roof waved with moss, and bundles of herbs hung under the eaves: mugwort, St. John's wort, mint. The door creaked, as if each knot had its own voice. Inside, it smelled of wax and ash; the tiled cooker bore the marks of daily fires, and above it was a faded painting with a woman pressing ears to her breast. Helena touched the charcoal blemishes on the tiles the way one touches scars on the skin of loved ones. Half the room was occupied by a heavy oak trunk. On the lid, among the swirling plants, were carved marks: a lightning bolt in a circle, a cross of four threads, a wavy line resembling a river. The lock was simple but resistant, as if used to protect more than the contents. When it let go, Helena heard the dryness of old fabrics inside and the soft tapping of something that might have been bone. She found a linen shirt with thick red embroidery, a bundle of beeswax candles, a ribbon with jay feathers, a cloth bag of salt, and at the bottom - a whistle. It was smooth, warm from the palms of my hands, dull and slipped with years. In the lamplight the bone was the colour of milk. Next to it lay a letter. The paper smelled of smoke and lime, and the grandmother's handwriting ran along the lines like a stream that knows the bank but prefers to go in the middle. Helena sat on the edge of the bench and read aloud, though no one was there: "If you're reading this, it means you've come back in no hurry. Don't whistle after dark. Leave honey by the cooker, salt by the threshold. Don't go into the bush when the frogs are silent. And if you do go - take the embers in your torch and don't tell anyone where you are going. Remember: take the ninth step backwards". The letter did not explain, it did not ask. It sounded like an old song where it is more important that someone remembers it. Helena put the card down and reflexively put a bowl of milk on the toast. When she was little, her grandmother used to say: "For the domestic - let him know that there is still his place". At the time she thought it was a game, now she felt it was more like talking to something she didn't need to name to acknowledge a presence. Outside, a mist was rising. It sat on her skin like a light dampness after a bath, salty to the taste, cold on her neck. A figure in a woollen shawl appeared in the road - Stanislawa, a neighbour who sold honey in summer and cured people of stinging sideburns in winter. - 'You're late, Helena,' she said, approaching. - This is where the night starts when it wants to, not when it needs to. - Her voice had a grainy warmth, like bread taken out of the oven. They exchanged a few words about the road, about the weather, about the cranes screaming early. Stanislawa looked at the birch trees that silvered behind the stream. - 'Don't go there today,' she added, seemingly in passing. - It will be quiet. And when it's so quiet, people get quieter too, and that's not always a good thing. - She nodded her head goodbye and disappeared like someone who knows every hollow of the earth and every whisper of the grasses. Helena stayed on the doorstep, holding an oil torch. The word 'no' stung her like a tiny fetter. She always returned to places where something had suddenly broken off: a story, a conversation, a path. The grandmother left quietly - no drama, no gestures. Not much had changed in the cottage, and yet everything stood on the edge of another order, as if the cottage were a footbridge over water. She put a match to the wick. The tongue of the fire licked the glass of the lamp, warmth spread over her hand. She tucked a cloth bag of salt behind her belt, put a small honeycomb in parchment in her pocket, and hung a bone whistle on a string like an amulet. She thought of the lines from the letter and moved the milk bowl a finger away, just as her grandmother used to do, correcting the invisible order. The stream murmured so quietly it could barely be heard. The frogs were suddenly silent as she set foot on the damp bank - and picked up the rhythm as she passed. She tied her skirt higher and walked over the stones hidden in the silt, feeling the water climb up her ankles. In the birch the lantern light clung to the trunks like an amber patch. The white bark glistened like the skin of a fish, and the black wounds from the branches resembled lips in a half-word. Young trees grew here - slender, swaying in a tact that the wind did not impose. The path was marked by imprinted horseshoes - not fresh, but clear, as if someone had sealed the ground with them. Helena stopped and counted her steps, carried along by the rhythm she had set for herself: the first towards the centre of the clearing, the second into the light, the third through the shadow, the fourth between two stones, the fifth over a snail, the sixth by a stump, the seventh into the softer turf, the eighth... a sigh, as if the earth itself were breathing. The ninth retreated, as if into leaves. In the middle of the clearing stood a circle of boulders, overgrown with moss and yellow lichen. In the centre - something that might have been an old well hole, covered with boards tied with wicker. From the boards came the smell of water, iron and honey. From the woods came a breeze of coolness and a fainter, pungent breeze, like freshly cut rowanberries. Helena sat down on one of the stone 'benches' and pressed her hands to the whistle. The whistle was not loud. It came out of the bone soft as steam over breakfast, but it traveled far, for in that sound was a request and a memory. The echo answered not in the usual way - bounced, pitched - but in the way one answers a name. The forest moved. The birch trees moved a hair closer, the clearances became narrower, and amber blinds began to flash between the trunks, not so much animal as vigilant. Helena tucked the whistle away, took a pinch of salt from her pouch and scattered it in a circle, as she had once seen her grandmother do on a holiday when the 'cool' thing was driven out of the house. Then she unrolled the parchment and pressed the honey to her lips. A drop ran down her lip, warm as the sun that had not set. She wanted to say, "Thank you" - she didn't know to whom - when an animal slid out of the darkness. A deer. Large, but not heavy. The antlers were covered in moss, as if it was carrying its own forest. From the forks dangled dried strands of grass and red balls of rowan where the night sat. His eyes were dark and transparent at once, the sky and earth visible in them. He slid his hooves into the circle of salt, stopped just short of the planks from the well, and bowed his head, not as one bowing, but as one listening. And his shadow, half a step late, twitched independently of the lamp. Helena did not cry out, did not twitch. She felt that there was someone else here, a step behind her shoulder, and that this 'someone' was not corporeal in the way that a deer is corporeal. She remembered her grandmother's words, whispered when, as a child, she had tried to escape into the birches at dawn: "To the Husband of the Forest go with the will, and to his court go with the truth. Do not speak to him by name." She never asked why. Now she understood that there are questions that don't like answers, only attention. The circle became quieter than silence. Even the lamp stopped whispering flame. The deer raised its head and looked at Helena the way someone who counts your breaths looks at you. Away, hen, all the way from the side of the floodplains, thunder rumbled once, a second, a third time, although the sky was clear. The thunder was followed by another sound - so low you could feel it in your bones: a murmur, as if an old cart were rolling over a wooden bridge. Suddenly the birch trees parted by a finger, and a chill that remembered the winters of many a people before entered the gap. Helena, without taking her eyes off the deer, felt a thin trickle of sweat run down behind her neck. She also felt someone standing right behind her, so close that they could put a hand on her shoulder for a moment. And then she heard a whisper. Not from the front, not from the side, but from the place where a person carries memories. The whisper was soft, like a tissue made of homemade heat and smoke from the cooker. He did not say her name the way strangers say it. He said it as no one had said it for years, as only one person in the world had put it together, from the first lullabies: - Lenka... don't look back.