Three friends find an impossible door on the seventh floor of a Warsaw tenement, and step into a place where the rules of the world begin to break.
On the seventh floor of an old Warsaw townhouse, silence had a weight to it. The stairs complained under every step, the paint flaked from the walls in tired curls, and the air carried the smell of damp plaster and old paper. Leon had been living here only a few weeks, yet each night felt as if the building were learning his routine.
That Thursday, he stood with Matilda and Patryk in the dim corridor outside his flat, staring at a door that had no right to be there.
It was set directly across from Leon's own door, between two stretches of wall that had been bare the night before. The wood was dark, almost iridescent, and covered in carved patterns that shifted when he looked at them too long. It did not match the building, the floor, or anything Leon could remember seeing anywhere in the tenement.
"It wasn't here yesterday," he said quietly.
Matilda folded her arms. "Someone would have noticed a new door on the seventh floor."
Patryk leaned closer, his brow tightening. "At this hour? In this building? I doubt it."
Leon reached for the handle before either of them could stop him. The metal was cold enough to sting. For one suspended second nothing happened. Then the handle moved under his fingers, as if someone on the other side had been waiting for him.
The door swung inward without a sound.
A thick, neon haze spilled into the corridor, carrying a light that was too bright and too many-coloured to belong to any ordinary room. Leon stared into it, and for a moment he thought he could see the outlines of the stairwell bending away behind him, as if the building itself were losing its shape.
Matilda took one cautious step forward. Her shadow stretched across the floorboards, broke apart, and began to move on its own.
A thin, metallic laugh drifted out of the fog.
Patryk grabbed for Leon's sleeve, but Leon had already crossed the threshold. The corridor vanished. The walls slid away. The three of them stood in a passage made of light, narrow and endless, with paper fragments spiralling through the air like restless snow.
At the far end, a tall figure waited with eyes as blue as a live wire. The scraps around it twisted together into a sentence, letter by letter, as though the dark itself were writing.
You came because you wanted answers. Are you sure you want them now?
The door behind them slammed shut.