Adam and his friends catch a strange radio signal from the abandoned observatory in the woods and head out into the night before it vanishes.
Five minutes after midnight, while Roztoki lay folded under a lid of blackness, Adam’s computer flashed yellow text across the screen: "Signal received. Position: 51°35'N 21°01'E".
He stared at it, hardly breathing. For weeks he, Maja, Janek and Lenka had been tuning a battered shortwave radio into the static, hoping for anything unusual. They had expected noise, maybe a fragment of music, maybe a voice from somewhere far away. Not this. The signal had come in broken bursts, sharp and urgent, as if someone out there was fighting to be heard.
"That’s the observatory," Adam said, already pulling the headphones off.
Maja was beside him in an instant. She read the coordinates, then looked toward the window as if the answer might already be waiting in the dark. "In the woods. The old one."
No one laughed. The abandoned observatory had been a dare, a rumour, a place people pointed at from the edge of town and then stopped talking about. Years ago, someone had claimed to see lights under its dome after midnight. Since then, the stories had only grown stranger.
Janek swallowed. "Or it’s a prank."
"Then we find out who’s playing it," Lenka said. She was trying to sound casual, but her fingers were already clenched around the strap of her backpack.
Maja checked the time again. "If there’s another transmission, we need to be there for it."
Within minutes they had torches, a folded map, a half-empty pack of energy bars and the radio jammed into Adam’s bag. They slipped out through the sleeping courtyards and into the street, where every sound seemed louder than it should have been. A shutter rattled somewhere. A dog barked once, then went silent.
At the edge of the forest, they stopped.
The trees pressed together so tightly that the path ahead looked less like a road than a wound in the dark. The beams from their torches caught on wet leaves, broken branches, strips of mist drifting low over the ground.
"What if someone’s waiting for us?" Janek whispered.
Lenka gave a short, tense laugh. "Then we’ll see them first."
They moved on.
Deeper in the forest, the night changed. Sounds shifted and slipped around them: a snapping twig, the sigh of wind, something heavier moving where they couldn’t see it. After half an hour, the overgrown path opened and the observatory rose ahead of them, hulking between the trees. Its windows were boarded over, its walls stained and peeling, and the metal dome above it caught the moonlight like a dull scar.
Then Adam’s backpack crackled.
Not static this time. A whisper.
"You’re close... help..."
They all stopped.
A coldness ran down Adam’s spine. Maja took one step forward, then another, as if the voice had hooked into her and was pulling her toward the building. The others followed, drawn by the same terrible curiosity. They were only a few metres from the door when something inside struck the floor with a hard metallic bang.
The door burst open.
Golden light spilled out across the path, bright and pulsing, wrong for a place that should have been empty for years.
Adam’s throat tightened. Maja did not move. Janek took a shaky breath.
From the glow inside, a voice shouted, raw with panic: "Don’t let the door close. Please!"