On a June night, Julka and her friends slip into a ruined sanatorium on the edge of town, where fresh traces in the dust suggest they are not the first to arrive.
The forest beyond town had always seemed harmless in daylight, all pine needles, birdcalls and narrow paths crushed flat by bicycles. At night, though, it changed. The branches closed over the road, the shadows deepened, and the old sanatorium at the edge of the woods stopped looking like a ruin and started looking like a warning.
By the end of June, everyone in town had heard some version of the same story: lights in the upper windows, voices in the empty halls, footsteps on the staircase when no one had been inside for years. Julka had listened to all of it long enough. Curiosity gnawed at her until it became impossible to ignore.
So just after midnight, she met Kamil, Lena and Maks by the abandoned road and led them into the trees. None of them said they were scared, but they all moved quickly, torches clenched in their hands as if the thin circles of light could keep the dark from touching them.
The back of the building was half-collapsed, one window missing its frame. Julka climbed through first, breathing in dust, mildew and something colder underneath. The torchlight slid across peeling walls, broken chairs, a corridor lined with doors hanging crooked on their hinges. The place should have felt empty. It didn’t.
Their shoes scuffed over a floor coated in grey dust, and then Lena stopped so abruptly that Julka nearly collided with her.
There was a crushed drinks can beside the wall. Not rusted, not old. Fresh enough to glint in the beam of her torch. Beside it lay a packet of cigarettes, still neat, as if someone had dropped it only moments ago.
Kamil bent down and touched the can with the tip of his finger. "We’re not alone," he murmured.
Before anyone could answer, a sound rolled down from the floor above them. Slow. Heavy. A door dragging shut.
All four of them went still.
The silence after it was worse than the noise.
Then, from somewhere beyond the corridor, a whisper drifted through the dark, soft and close, as if someone had leaned in just out of sight and spoken Julka’s name.