The red diode on the recording console pulsed like the heartbeat of someone who had just run a marathon and was now dying of a heart attack. Rhythmic, hypnotic blinking. In the darkness of the thirty-five-square-meter studio flat in Praga, that small point of light was the only beacon. Everything else drowned in shadow and cigarette smoke that had long since cleared, leaving behind only a bitter, yellowish residue on the walls and in the throat.
Julia ran her tongue over her chapped lips. They tasted of cheap caffeine and sleeplessness. She leaned toward the microphone, feeling the foam of the pop filter brush her nose. The smell of dust and static electricity. This was her confessional. Her pulpit. Her weapon.
"They say time heals all wounds," she said quietly, and her voice, low and faintly hoarse, filled the headphones, cutting her off from the rumble of trams passing along Targowa Street. "That's a lie we repeat to ourselves so we can fall asleep. Time heals nothing. Time merely covers rotting tissue with successive layers of silence. And in Sierpc... in Sierpc, the silence is thicker than the fog over Silver Lake."
She paused. She knew that at this moment the listener would be holding their breath. She manipulated silence as deftly as a scalpel. She glanced at the waveform on the monitor. Green peaks and valleys. The landscape of someone's fear, captured in digital record.
"Nineteen ninety-three," she resumed, stressing every syllable. "Agnieszka Nowakowska leaves the house to buy milk. She is wearing a blue coat and white trainers. It is the last time anyone sees her alive. The official version? A runaway. Teenage rebellion. But we know better, don't we? We know that teenage rebellion doesn't end with the discovery of a jaw fragment three years later, in a forest where even the birds are afraid to sing."
She stopped the recording. She pressed the spacebar with such force that the key groaned in protest. She pulled off the headphones and dropped them onto the desk, between a stack of printouts from police archives and a mug of unfinished, cold coffee on whose surface an oily film had long since formed.
She stood up. The chair scraped across the worn parquet. Her body was stiff, the muscles of her neck taut as steel cables. She walked to the window but did not raise the blind. She did not want to see Warsaw. She did not want to see normality. People coming home from work, buying bread rolls, arguing over parking spaces. Their problems seemed to her absurdly trivial now, almost offensive.
She turned toward the wall she called the "Altar."
Cork, pins, red yarn. The classic of paranoia. But for Julia it was a road map to hell. Photographs of victims. Newspaper clippings from the nineties, yellowed, brittle as dried leaves. Pathologists' reports from which the most important conclusions had been redacted, leaving only safe platitudes about "the actions of third parties."
Her gaze drifted to the center of the web. Józef Sokołowski. His face in the photograph from the local paper was blurred, grainy, but those eyes... those eyes bored through her even across the decades. The dead, fish eyes of a fanatic. He had died of cancer before justice had time to knock at his door. Or perhaps justice in Sierpc simply gave certain houses a very wide berth.
"You got away, you bastard," she whispered at the photograph. "But your shadows stayed."
She felt a cold, hard knot tighten in her stomach. It was not hunger. It was that particular hollow ache that appeared whenever she drew close to the edge. When the facts stopped adding up and began arranging themselves into a pattern that no sane person would want to see.
She returned to the desk. She had to finish this episode. Voices from Beyond the Grave — that was her working title. But now it seemed pretentious. Perhaps Wolf Hunger? No, too literal. Sokołowski and his followers were not wolves. Wolves kill to survive. They killed for an idea. For some sick, forgotten god whose name sounded like the crunch of breaking bones.
She sat down heavily. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Then she heard it. A soft, system ping from the laptop speakers. A sound that in normal circumstances would herald spam offering penis enlargement or a newsletter from a drugstore.
But Julia did not receive normal emails at this address. Only five people knew this address. And none of them would write at this hour without reason.
She opened her inbox. The message had landed in the "Other" folder. Sender: Null. Subject: blank. Only an attachment. A .jpg file named return.jpg.
Her heart struck against her ribs — once, hard — as though trying to break free. She hesitated for a moment. The mouse cursor trembled faintly, betraying the trembling of her hand. She knew that if she clicked, there would be no going back. It was like opening the door to a cellar from which strange sounds were coming. You know you shouldn't go down there, but curiosity is stronger than the survival instinct. It is the same force that makes people slow down at car accidents.
She clicked.
The image loaded slowly, the progress bar crawling like a worm. And then the screen exploded into red.
The photograph was high quality, taken with a DSLR rather than a phone. Sharp, with depth of field set on the foreground. It showed a tree trunk. An old, moss-covered oak with bark cracked like the skin of a leper. But it was not the bark that drew the eye.
A symbol had been cut into the tree. No — not cut. Hacked into it with fury, with primal force. The wood was ragged, splinters jutting out like broken teeth. And inside the gouges glistened a liquid. Dark, dense, burgundy in the camera flash.
It was not paint.
Julia brought her face close to the monitor, her nose nearly touching the pixels. She knew that color. She had seen it in too many photographs from police files. Blood. Fresh, not yet clotted. It must have been warm when the picture was taken.
The symbol. A triangle inscribed in a circle, bisected by a wavy line. The mark of Veles. But modified. More aggressive, with sharp edges that recalled claws.
Julia felt the blood drain from her face. A high, shrill tone began to ring in her ears, like feedback. This was not an archive photograph. In the background, out of focus, she could make out a fragment of a newspaper pinned to a tree beside the symbol. The headline was illegible, but the date... the date was clear. 24 January 2024.
Today.
She shoved back from the desk sharply; the chair toppled with a crash. She paid it no attention. She stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard, as though the air in the flat had suddenly become too thin. Her mind was running at full speed, connecting facts, analyzing, processing. Fear was mixing with something else. With excitement. With that sick, addictive thrill that a hunter feels when they finally pick up a trail.
"They came back," she said aloud, and her words hung in the silence like a verdict. "Or they never left."
She walked to the Altar. She tore down the photograph of Józef Sokołowski. Crumpled it in her fist into a paper ball and threw it into the corner. This was no longer history. It was no longer crime archaeology. It was happening now.
Someone in Sierpc was feeding the forest again.
She went to the wardrobe. Her movements were mechanical, precise. She pulled out a large military bag. Into it she threw a dictaphone, spare batteries, power banks. Then clothing — nothing smart, function only. Black jeans, a hoodie, trekking boots that still remembered the mud from a crime scene near Szczecin. Into the side pocket she slid a pepper spray canister. Large, gel-based, five-meter range. She knew that against whatever lurked in Sierpc the spray might not be enough, but it gave her an illusory sense of security.
She stopped for a moment. Took out her phone. Dialed Mateo. The connection tone. One. Two. Three.
"Pick up, kid," she growled, gripping the phone so hard her knuckles went white.
"Hello?" Mateo's voice was drowsy, indistinct. In the background she could hear loud music — he was probably in headphones again, coding till morning.
"Pack your things," she said curtly, skipping any greeting. "We're leaving in an hour."
"What? Julia, it's four in the morning. What are you..." Mateo sounded disoriented.
"Sierpc. Someone just sent me an invitation. A bloody invitation."
The silence on the line lasted a fraction of a second, but to Julia it was eloquent. Mateo had understood. The boy was sharp, in spite of his demons. He knew Julia did not call at four in the morning to chat about the weather.
"I'll be at yours in forty minutes," he said, and his voice changed. The sleepiness vanished; tension took its place. "Is it in your email?"
"Yes. Don't open it on the main server. Run it through that secure setup of yours. I want to know where it came from. IP, metadata, anything."
"Got it. Julia... be careful."
She hung up. Dropped the phone into the bag.
She looked around the flat. It seemed alien. Like a film set for a movie she no longer wanted to appear in, but the contract had been signed in blood. She went to the computer. The recording file was still open. She hadn't saved it. For a moment she stared at the blinking cursor.
She leaned toward the microphone one last time. She pressed record.
"This is not the end of the story," she said, and her voice was now glacial, stripped of the radio manner she had used before. This was her real voice. The voice of a woman who had seen too much. "This is only the beginning. If you're listening to this, murderer... if you think the forest will hide you... you're wrong. I'm coming for you."
She stopped the recording. Saved the file. Closed the laptop.
She left the flat, locking the door with two turns of the key, though she knew that if anyone wanted to get in, they would. The stairwell smelled of boiled cabbage and damp. She ran down the stairs, feeling adrenaline begin to circulate in her veins, pushing out the fatigue. Every step brought her closer to the car. To the national road number ten. To Sierpc.
Outside, Warsaw was stirring to life. A grey sky hung low over the tenement buildings, promising sleet. Julia got into her old Volvo. The engine coughed before it caught. She placed her hands on the steering wheel. The leather was cold.
In the rearview mirror she saw her own eyes. They were shadowed, reddened, but burning with the same fire she had seen in predators at the zoo just before feeding time. She felt fear, yes. But beneath the fear, deeper, in her gut, she felt something worse.
Hunger.
She switched on the wipers, which squealed as they scraped a layer of city grime from the windscreen. She pulled away. The city slid past the windows like a blurred film. But she was not seeing the streets of Warsaw. She was seeing a dense, dark forest. She was hearing the hum of old trees. And she was smelling blood, which drew her on like a moth to flame.
Sierpc was waiting. And she did not intend to keep it waiting long.
She turned on the radio, searching for some station that might drown out her thoughts, but the airwaves were full of hiss and crackle. As though the voices she spoke of in the podcast were trying to break through the barrier of reality. She switched the receiver off. The silence inside the car was thick, viscous.
She thought of the photograph. That symbol. It looked like a wound in the fabric of the world. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make it look authentic. To make it look like a ritual. But what if it was not a staging? What if it was a warning? Stay away.
She smiled crookedly. If this was meant to frighten her off, then these people did not know her at all. Fear was fuel to her. A warning was an invitation.
She turned toward Śląsko-Dąbrowski Bridge. The Vistula beneath her was black and still, like the Styx. She was crossing the river, leaving behind her safe, ordered life, full of archive files and cold coffee. On the other side, chaos waited. Truth waited.
She knew this investigation would be unlike any other. That this time the stakes were higher. She felt it in her bones, in that old collarbone fracture that always ached with a change in the weather — or a change in fate. This time she was not looking for ghosts. This time she was looking for a monster of flesh and blood.
And monsters, as experience had taught her, do not like to be found.
She tightened her hands on the steering wheel. The image of the bloody symbol on the oak bark pulsed in her mind. Like a seal. Like a signature. Like a challenge.
"Accepted," she whispered to the empty car. She pressed the accelerator.