Iga Boruta, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a postman, did not like legends, although in Sokolniki they were bubbling everywhere, from morning to night. When she was given a project at school about forgotten places, she chose without hesitation the abandoned observatory on Sokolska Pass. It was said to purr like a furnace at night and spit light, even though the electricity had been cut off long ago, after a flood years before. Her grandmother warned of the "Silence", a mysterious drop in pressure, after which clocks and conversations disappeared on the worst nights. Iga waved her hand, packed her torch and notebook, switched on the barometric app and set off uphill before dusk. The trail was empty, only the blackbirds rustled like paper, and somewhere further on a woodpecker called in a rhythm as even as a metronome. When she stood under the dome, she saw a rusty door handle and boot marks in the wet dust, one small, the other much larger. The window on the north side was ajar, as if someone had failed to slam it shut against the wind or was making a hasty escape. "Hello?" - she asked dumbly, feeling her own voice echo under the steel vault that trembled like a string. Silence didn't answer, but there was a whiff of dry dust and something like ozone from inside, like after a storm. She slipped through the window, knocking down a sheet of plaster, and landed on an old map of the sky, stretched across a creaking board. Brass telescopes slept in the display cases, and a paper barograph drum walked alone on the table, with the quiet scraping of a needle. Iga touched the needle; it was chalking a new line, although the mechanism's clock had stood at five to twelve for weeks, maybe months. Next to it lay a checked notebook, soggy, signed: "K. Chojnicki, observations - July 1987", in fine and assured handwriting. She flipped through it carefully until she came to a sketch of the valley, marked with red circles and the word 'Silence', underlined twice in several places. Next was a sentence that stood up in her throat: "If you're reading this, Igo, don't answer." Blood pounded in her ears; someone must have known her name thirty-eight years earlier or predicted it with incomprehensible accuracy. With a trembling hand she turned another page; the diagram resembled waves, and the addendum said: "Knocks three times at dusk". Then the wood crackled, as if the wall had moved, and the broken blind groaned quietly over the map shelf. "It's the wind," - she whispered, but a cold crept in that didn't belong to the weather or this time of year. She went below the platform, from where the tapping was coming, and found a trapdoor with a metal grille, caked with rusty rivets. Next to it, on the wall, was a fresh trail of chalk: three short dashes and one long one; someone had been practising the Morse alphabet. The phone vibrated; the app showed a sharp drop in pressure and the barograph needle accelerated like mad, for no reason in the weather data. Someone tapped three times, perfectly evenly, and the flap lifted by the width of two fingers, releasing a streak of cold. "Igo?" - asked a voice from downstairs, sounding familiar and unnaturally clear, like from the alarm clock radio she'd left on the windowsill at home.