When I arrived at Grandma Sophie's on the edge of the Black Forest, I thought the biggest attraction would be the mosquitoes and the range, which was disappearing faster than the fog over the marsh. Grandma's house stood like a boat on a green sea - wooden, smelling of tar and lime honey, crouched under old lime trees. Clay bells rang in the attic with the wind, and a dog with eyes like amber slept under the threshold. "The range is no use to you!" - muttered Grandma Sophie as I lifted the phone under the lamp for the third time, as if that would make a difference. "Here you listen, not look. In the borah, words do more than pictures." Sophie was a whisperer and it was said in the village that she knew words that could warm like fire and cool like water. People would come to her with an earache, a lump on their elbow or something that couldn't be named, and come back lighter. I was fifteen, wore black trainers and thought I knew how the world worked. Yet this house smelled like it was older than my clever arguments. In an attic box, between bundles of dried mint and last year's juniper twigs, Staszek and I found an herbarium. In it, fern leaves were so evenly pressed together, as if they remembered every night they had watched over. Stuck on the last page was an inserted dry, reddish maple leaf and a sheet of paper with careless, slanted writing: "Under the Root. Sign of Perun." Someone had drawn a simple symbol next to it with lines like rays: a circle with a cross. "See?" - whispered Staszek, my fourteen-year-old cousin with a face sprinkled with freckles. - "Mum said there was a barrow in the forest. And by it - an oak tree so big you can live in it. Maybe that's it?" "Grandma will kill us". - I replied out of habit. In this village it was almost an incantation. "Grandma won't kill us, Grandma knows. But she'll tell you things that will make you not want to go there yourself." - he said, raising his eyebrows. In the evening, as the sun lost its last spark in the rushes, more shadows than usual gathered in the house. Sophie took the bread out of the oven and drew the sign of the cross over the loaf. And when we sat down with our scones at the table, she said what everyone here has been saying for generations: "Don't whistle after dark or you'll call out what you don't need. Don't throw bread behind you, because you don't know who you'll give it to. And if you go to the Black Bor - and I know you will - don't say your name out loud. Leszy likes to take what sounds loud." "And if someone calls out?" - asked Staszek with feigned carelessness. "Don't turn around. Whoever loves you will stand next to you. Whoever wants you will stand behind." I laughed, but the laughter got stuck somewhere between my teeth. At night, when I could hear drops hitting the windowsill and the dog sighed in his sleep like an old man, it occurred to me once that someone was moving his hand along the wall. Maybe it was a mouse. Maybe the wind. The next day, instead of lying on the grass and pretending to look up at the sky, we went. Staszek crammed red wool into his pocket - "for luck" - and a torch, although the sun was still standing high. I took a herbalist with a piece of paper. The path under the pine trees smelled of resin, the needles creaked like fine glass, and particles of light danced in the air, as if the forest air had a dance of its own. The Black Forest was not black, but green to the point of pain. Trunk by trunk, moss as soft as Granny's voice, ferns like fans. Occasionally the sand gave way underfoot and something brown appeared - damp earth where the plants held their old stories. We passed a barn - bees had their home in the hollowed-out trunk; they hissed quietly, as if greeting us reluctantly. Further on, at the edge of the wetland, we stood by a stone bitten by lichen. On it someone had long ago forged a face - no eyes, just two empty cavities, and a nose like a scratch. "Prussian woman!" - Staszek said in a whisper. - "Mum said they've been standing here since the world pretended to be." "The sign of Perun" - I recalled, and the cross in a circle on a page in the herbarium looked suddenly too simple, too human to explain anything. The deeper we went, the quieter the forest became. Even the wind seemed to have no courage here. The birds flew higher, beyond our thoughts. When the path split in two like a fork, Staszek tied a young birch tree with red wool. "To go back," he muttered. The herbarium, in which the sheet of paper was still stuck, trembled in my hands. Not from the cold, but from that strange trepidation one sometimes feels in a library when all the books suddenly cease to be just books. We found the mound not because it was big, but because it was unnaturally level. Among the rolling hills suddenly lay something that resembled a breath stopped in midair. Three oak trees grew on it like sentinels. One was dead - white as bone, with the bark coming off in flakes. The second - hollow, with roots spread wide like fingers. The third - massive, overgrown with moss so thick it could serve as a blanket. "Under the roots!" - said Staszek, and his voice fell into the silence and stayed there, like a stone thrown in. We stepped off the path. The weeds reached our knees and the thorns of the blackberries caught our legs as if we were newcomers. By the oak tree with the thickest roots, the ground slumped slightly towards the trunk, as if someone had once picked soil from there by handfuls and left a cavity. Next to it lay something like a decaying wooden box, but when I touched it, it scattered like bread that had been lying under a shawl for too long. It was colder in the shade of the roots, though the sun was burning my neck. It smelled damp and something bitter, like wormwood. On the underside - where the ground ceases to be earth and begins to be just a shadow - a small object flashed by me. I picked it up and found I was holding an old spindle in my hand. Smooth as water, dark as night, with a tiny, shriveled rowan berry stuck near the end. "Really?" - I hissed. - "A spindle?" "This is where grannies like to weave!" - snorted Staszek, then grew serious as something rustled softly under his foot. He leaned over. - "Look." In a hollow between the roots someone had carved a sign. It was not perfect like the one in the herbarium, rather scratchy, as if carved with a knife from soft wood. A circle crossed by a cross. And all around, like rays, short lines. We didn't know if we were being mocked by the past, or if we were just lifting a finger. "Do you feel?" - asked Staszek suddenly. And only then did I feel. The earth was breathing. Not like a monster in a film, not theatrically. So ordinary - once warm, once cooler, once closer, once further away. As if, under all that moss, someone was listening, or whether we could listen. "Maybe there's a spring here," I whispered, although I didn't hear a splash. Just a whisper. One that seems first to be my own thought and then someone else's voice. "Don't say the name," Staszek reminded me, as if the air itself told him to. I hid the spindle in my pocket, although something inside me screamed that this was not a good idea. We pushed away the moss, revealing more grooves. Instead of letters - signs that resembled branches, rivers and lightning. The air raised the hairs on the back of my neck. And then we heard it for the first time. "Le..." - rang out from the depths, as quietly as if the oak had only learned to speak yesterday. I grabbed Staszek's sleeve and drove my nails in so hard that he hissed. "Did you hear?" - my lips moved, but I wasn't sure if it was me speaking. "I heard. But... it might be the wind." The wind didn't know my letter. This voice knew. "Le..." - he repeated, already clearer, like someone playing with the taste of words. Grandma had said: don't turn away. Except there was nothing to turn away from. The voice came from under the earth, from the roots, from the wood. From something that should have been dead, but was only very, very old. "Don't answer!" - muttered Staszek. - "Let him talk." "St..." - dragged, this time in a different direction. So he had heard us both after all. I felt my toes tighten in my shoes. For a second, ridiculous things seem sensible - like hiding under my jacket before the morning ticket check. I pressed my hands into my pockets and touched the spindle. It was warm. Not like wood warmed by the sun, but like something that gives off its own heat. "Let's go," I said. - "Let's leave it. We'll tell Grandma." "You're already thinking like an adult," Staszek croaked, but it didn't sound like mockery. More like fear dressed in irony. I took a step back. The moss collapsed softly, like a quilt. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something white, like a strip of bark that moved like a finger. My legs felt heavy, as if I too had taken root. Then a thin ringing sound came from far away, from the side of the village. Clay in the attic? Had the wind blown over Grandma Sophie? For a second I wanted to shout: "Granny?" and I swallowed the word, because inside I heard more clearly than I had ever heard anything: "Don't say the name." "Le-na," said someone already as clear as if they had waited years to put the two syllables together. Not the wind. Not the earth. Someone's voice, in which there was both the crackle of an icicle and the rustling of August grasses. "Sta-szek." "Who's there?" - broke out of Staszek's mouth, and he immediately covered his mouth with his hand, as if he could push the word back. A chill blew from the darkness beneath the roots, unpleasant in the August season. And something moved in the shadows. First I saw one line of light - perhaps the sun reflected in a drop? Then a second - like eyes. But it wasn't eyes. It was a resin, old and amber, that suddenly glowed from within. "Leno..." - sounded this time no longer from below, but from the side. From behind us. Don't turn around. My heart was beating so loudly in my ears that I forgot how to breathe. I could feel Staszek stiffening, the air thickening. The smell of moss was suddenly as sweet as an overripe apple. And then the leaves moved without a breeze, and the root on which I was resting my heel twitched, as if someone underneath had put his hand to it. "Leno" - the word now came from two sides at once, like an echo that was no longer an echo. And then a hand slid out of the shadows - not human, all bark and moss, slender and hard - and something that resembled antlers covered with green threads. The voice that knew our names took a step closer.