Chapter 39

The passage turned out to be far narrower than I'd expected.

Not a concrete tunnel out of spy films. An ordinary staircase — narrow, metal, with dim emergency lights that had long since stopped working. The handrails were cold and damp to the touch, as if the cold here were not a temperature but a property of the material.

We went down slowly. Me first, Helen right behind me, Harris last. Every step of his was accompanied by a short, dry cough he no longer tried to hide.

The staircase ended abruptly — it simply cut off in front of a heavy fire door with no plates or warnings. Only an old aluminium handle, spotted with oxidation.

I pushed.

It opened at once. No codes. No locks. As if five years ago it had simply been closed from the inside — and no one had come back since.

Inside it was dark.

I switched on the phone's torch. The beam slid slowly across the room — and I felt something inside me sink strangely, almost with disappointment.

An ordinary office.

Four desks arranged in two rows. A cabinet of folders. A whiteboard. A water cooler with an empty bottle. A plastic rubber plant in the corner — absurd, slightly faded, covered with a thin layer of dust so evenly that it seemed part of an installation.

Helen stopped beside me. She was silent for a long time.

"That's it?" she finally asked.

I nodded silently.

Yes. That was it.

It was the most terrifying room of all the ones I'd seen over the past weeks. Precisely because it was absolutely normal. Precisely because there was nothing in it your eye could catch on and say: there it is, there's the place where evil is born. All that was born here was a Thursday work meeting at two in the afternoon, with coffee and a whiteboard.

On the nearest desk stood a mug.

White, with a thin blue stripe around the rim. Standard-issue government crockery, the kind every ministry keeps several crates of. At the bottom — a dried coffee residue, so old it had lost both its colour and its smell. I carefully touched it with my fingers. The dust lay over it in an even layer, undisturbed.

No one had touched this mug in five years.

Beside it lay an open notebook. The last entry had been made in a neat, businesslike hand, without emotion:

"16 April."

No year. No continuation. As if the person had been about to write the next line, had just stepped out of the room for five minutes — and never come back.

I moved slowly on, going around the desks. Each one looked as if its owner would be back from lunch any moment. Pens. Paper clips. A stack of printouts face down. A charger wound around its own cable. Thin-framed glasses, neatly folded.

On one desk stood a small wooden frame with a family photograph. I picked it up. Strangers — a woman, two children, a man. An ordinary Sunday trip somewhere out of town, a bright summer sky, everyone laughing into the lens.

On the back was written in pencil:

"Remember to buy milk."

I looked at those four words for a long time.

They wounded harder than any of the documents we'd found. Because the person who wrote them didn't know that in a few days the world would stop remembering his name. That in some registry, next to his surname, an empty field would simply appear. And no one would look for where he'd gone — because the system would say he had never existed.

Harris lowered himself onto the nearest chair — not sat but lowered himself, the way something folds that has held itself upright too long. He looked as if the road here had taken the last of his strength, and now he sat there simply because there was nowhere else to go.

"We worked here every day," he said quietly, not addressing anyone in particular.

I went over to the whiteboard.

It was almost clean. Only in the very bottom corner someone had once not fully wiped away a marker — a barely distinguishable diagram remained. A few rectangles, arrows between them, and one word written a little larger than the rest:

Consistency.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I understood. And I smiled — sadly, almost against my will.

"That's my handwriting," I said.

Harris nodded:

"Yes."

Helen, meanwhile, was slowly circling the room. She touched almost nothing — only looked, methodically and quietly, the way a person looks who is used to reading a space like a document. It was her professional habit, which I had already learned to recognize: she wasn't searching for a specific thing — she was reading the whole thing, like a text, and waiting for something to stand out on its own.

She stopped at a tall archive cabinet by the far wall. The most ordinary kind — grey, metal, of the sort that stands in every government institution, in every corridor, and that no one pays attention to precisely because there are too many of them.

For a long time she didn't move.

"Michael," she called at last — quietly, without inflection.

I came over.

She wasn't looking at me. She was looking inside the cabinet. On the middle shelf stood a single archive box. No number. No barcode. No label. Completely white — as if it had been brought here after everything else had already stopped mattering.

"Is that..." I began.

"No." She cut me off very quietly. "Don't look at the box. Look at the shelf."

I aimed the torch.

The whole shelf was covered with an even layer of dust. Except for a small clean rectangle around the box. As if it had been lifted quite recently. Held in someone's hands. And then carefully put back.

I slowly looked at Harris.

He answered before I could ask:

"Not me."

Helen and I exchanged a glance.

So someone had come here after him. Quite recently.

I carefully took the box down. It turned out to be unexpectedly light — too light for an archive box of documents. I set it on the desk. Slowly I lifted the lid.

Inside there were no documents. No discs. No folders.

Only one object.

A small old cassette dictaphone — the kind journalists used before the digital age. Beside it lay an audio cassette. On the white label — one inscription, in my handwriting:

"For Michael."

I felt a cold run down my spine. Not because of the cassette. Because of the date stamped into the plastic of the dictaphone itself.

17 April.

One day later than that very last entry in the notebook.

"So..." I whispered. "After the sixteenth I was still here."

Harris closed his eyes. Very slowly he nodded.

"Yes."

I took the dictaphone in my hands. It was heavy — real, solid, with that material conviction of old things that were made to last. On the side a PLAY button stuck out. Small, worn down from many presses — other people's presses, in another life.

My thumb settled on it of its own accord.

I was already starting to press when Harris said quietly:

"Wait."

I raised my head.

"Why?"

He was silent for a long time. He was looking not at me but at the dictaphone in my hands — with the expression of someone looking at a thing they had guarded too long and that had finally ended up where it was supposed to be.

"Because this is the first time," he said at last, quietly and weightily, "that you'll hear yourself. Not someone else's handwriting. Not a graphite trace on paper. A voice."

He paused a little.

"And believe me, Michael. That's far more frightening than losing your memory."

The room was in absolute silence. Somewhere above, in the empty building, something creaked faintly — an old structure settling under its own weight.

I held the dictaphone in my hands and didn't press the button.

Not because I was afraid.

But because, for the first time in this whole investigation, I needed a second — just a second — to decide whether I was ready to meet the man I had once been.