- May 22, 2020
- 2,410
Jakub Piekarski stepped out of his apartment at 5:59 a.m., shoulders hunched, fingers curled deep into the sleeves of his coat. The autumn air hit him like a whisper from the grave, cold, wet, insistent. He didn’t mind. He liked the way the quiet made the city shrink. The cars weren’t awake yet. The dogs hadn’t started barking. The streets were his.
He crossed Żółkiewskiego Street with short, even steps, staying just inside the lines of the crosswalk. It wasn't a habit, it was a ritual. Jakub liked ritual. He was twelve, but he already knew the city better than most of the adults in his life. He didn’t need directions. He had the map inside him. His own private atlas of fences, alleys, overpasses, tramlines. He kept another map folded in his backpack, drawn in crayon, symbols only he understood. He’d marked the dangerous places in red. The depot. The underpass by the train yard. The garage with the broken window.
Places where the monsters lived.
His coat flapped softly behind him. Too long in the sleeves, navy blue and patched at the collar. His mother had bought it for five złoty at the weekend market. He wore it every day. It made him feel like no one could see inside him. He didn’t know he was being watched.
From the rusted fence line behind the Veolia depot, a man stood motionless in the dimness, breath slow, spine straight. His coat was gray. His hands were buried deep in the pockets. One wrapped tight around the handle of something cold and iron. For three days he had watched this boy. Same path. Same hour. Same shuffle of feet along the chain-link fence. The boy walked like a clock wound too tightly. No variation. No change. Even his gaze was predictable, tilted downward, half-focused. The killer understood that kind of gaze. It meant the child saw something wrong in the world. Or nothing at all. He waited until the boy passed the broken fence and stepped into the depot’s shadow. At 6:11 a.m., Jakub turned left, same as always, and the man stepped from the dark.
No warning.
The first strike was low, fast, rising through the arc of the boy’s turning body like a scythe catching wheat. The sound was wet. The body collapsed without ceremony, knees folding, arms spasming. The second strike caved the back of his head. Jakub’s paper map slipped from his hand and landed face-up in the gravel, red slashes bleeding through the folds. The killer crouched and picked it up. He studied the marks. So many red ones. The depot. The bridge. The garage. The boy had seen something. Or maybe he’d sensed it. Either way, he had known the places to fear.
“You were right to be afraid,” he said softly.
He laid the map gently across the boy’s chest, then turned and walked through the thinning fog.
By 7:00 a.m., the police had cordoned off the lot. A sanitation worker had found the body and staggered back in a daze. The man had cleaned vomit from his shoes before calling it in. He didn’t want to remember the smell. He would anyway. Detective Anna Hryszko arrived at 7:38. She was forty-two, with tired eyes and a scar across the bridge of her nose that never quite faded. She didn’t flinch at scenes like this anymore. But child cases cut deeper. She knew it wouldn’t go away this time either.
The boy had been killed with two blows. One to fell him. One to finish. No signs of robbery. No signs of assault. His backpack was untouched. Crayons still zipped inside. A sandwich wrapped in paper. The map, delicate, soaked, clutched like scripture.
She stared at it.
Red slashes drawn with hard, furious strokes. She recognized the Veolia depot immediately. The exact spot where he had died was marked. He’d seen something coming. She wrote the time down: 6:11 a.m. Then she went home and didn’t sleep.
The killer rode the rails east that night. He didn’t speak. He didn’t smile. He sat at the back of the nearly empty car, the weight in his duffel making the floor vibrate under his boots. The other passengers ignored him. They always did. They never saw it until it was too late.
He watched the landscape blur by. Factories. Woods. Rows of crooked homes tucked against the hills. They moved like they were alive. But they weren’t. The next one waited in Bydgoszcz. Another echo walking in the skin of a human being. Another mask that needed to be torn away…
The sun hadn’t yet broken over the freight yards of Glinki when the man was found beneath the trestle. A rail inspector was making his morning rounds, clipboard in hand, head down. He noticed the shape from a distance, a collapsed figure half-buried in weeds and gravel. At first, he thought it was a drunk. Or worse, a junkie who’d frozen during the night.
It was the shoes that stopped him. White trainers. One of them turned outward, like the man had been walking when his legs gave out.
The inspector took two steps closer before the smell hit him. Metallic. Sharp. Old copper coins in water. He backed away and called it in. The scene was already cordoned off by the time the first trains rolled through. Two officers stood at the edge of the site, pale and silent. They weren’t used to this kind of blood. The city had its share of overdoses, fights, drunks who didn’t get back up, but not this. Not a young man with half his face split apart, his jaw visibly dislocated, the blood seeping from a single, deliberate strike to the skull. The victim was identified within the hour:
Mateusz Wiśniewski, age nineteen. He had a mild developmental disability and still lived with his mother. Known in the neighborhood for riding the bus, sometimes all day. He kept a binder of used tickets, hundreds of them, stored in clear sleeves and organized by route number. He hadn’t come home the night before. When they found him, he was still clutching ticket stubs in one hand. Fist clenched so tight, they had to soak the fingers to ease them open. Thirty-six stubs, all stamped from the 91 line. There were defensive wounds, less than expected, but enough to show he had tried. A bruised forearm. A cracked wrist. His fingernails were chipped and bloodied. It was the head wound that killed him. One blow. Maybe two. The object hadn’t shattered the bone completely, it had been crushed it inward. The police noted the position of the body. Curled, like a child. Face turned toward the rail line. They marked it down as a suspected assault. No leads. No known enemies. The case didn’t make it past the second page of the local paper.
Detective Anna Hryszko heard about it the next day. She was at her desk in Toruń when her phone buzzed, a call from Marek, her old friend in Kuyavia, who still kept his ear to the ground.
“Anna, there’s another one,” he said.
Her stomach sank. “Where?”
“Bydgoszcz. Early yesterday. Nineteen-year-old kid. Developmental delay. Smashed in the head with something heavy. Body dumped by the tracks.”
Her hand tightened on the pen she was holding. “Details?”
“I’ll send you the report. But Anna, he was holding ticket stubs. Clutched them. Like he was afraid to let them go.”
Anna didn’t speak for a moment.
“You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Marek added.
She nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see her. “Same M.O. as Jakub. Same vulnerability. No robbery. No witnesses. No goddamn reason.”
“You going to make a move?”
“I don’t know yet.”
But she did. She was already pulling the files.
The killer walked the rail line three hours after the murder. His boots were clean. The blood was not on him. He never let it touch his skin. Not out of guilt, he felt none, but because it was part of the rite. The infected carried rot. You didn’t let rot into you. Mateusz had been a difficult one. He'd almost spoken. That made the man hesitate. Just a second. But it had been enough to see something human behind the boy’s wide eyes. Something not yet hollowed out. But it wasn’t about mercy. It was about necessity. They weren’t human, not anymore. They’d been taken. Or remade. The signs were there. How they moved. How they stared. The ticks and rituals, the desperate need for sameness. Their habits were not survival. They were masks. They had to be stopped before it spread. Mateusz had looked at him once, right before the hammer fell, and his mouth had twitched. The man didn’t forget that. It almost ruined the whole thing.
That night, Anna sat at her dining table, the lights off, a map spread before her and two Polaroids taped side by side.
Victim 1: Jakub Piekarski
Age: 12
Location: Veolia depot, Toruń
Date of death: September 4th
Time: ~6:11 a.m.
Cause: Blunt-force trauma
Notes: Autistic. Carried hand-drawn maps. Known to avoid specific city locations. Map marked with red slashes, found at body.
Victim 2: Mateusz Wiśniewski
Age: 19
Location: Glinki Junction, Bydgoszcz
Date of death: September 6th
Time: ~4:50 a.m.
Cause: Blunt-force trauma
Notes: Developmentally delayed. Obsessed with bus routes. Found with ticket stubs in hand.
Two deaths. Forty-eight hours apart. Different cities, same corridor. Same kind of victim. Same kind of strike. Same goddamn silence from the press.
Anna closed her eyes and listened to the ticking of her kitchen clock. It didn’t feel like the beginning of a case. It felt like the middle of something that had already been going for years. And somewhere out there, she knew, The killer was watching his next shadow move.
The aide had only stepped inside to answer the phone. Three minutes, maybe less. The playground was fenced. The students were all accounted for. Except one.
When she returned, Zofia was gone.
At first, they checked the corners of the yard. The benches. The line of birch trees along the fence. No one panicked, not yet. Zofia had a habit of hiding when the world got too loud. A gifted child, the teachers said. Eight years old. Nonverbal, but not unreachable. Obsessed with astronomy. She knew the names of all the planets, all the moons, all the constellations in both hemispheres. She rarely spoke, but when she did, she recited from memory. Long strings of facts. Prayers. Star charts. The names of Catholic saints in alphabetical order. That afternoon, her voice was absent. By nightfall, the local police were called in. Volunteers searched the alleys and green spaces. Flashlights swept through stairwells and courtyards. But Zofia wasn’t under a bench or inside a school closet. She was nowhere.
The next morning, at 6:42 a.m., a woman walking her dog along the river’s edge spotted something lying just inside the grove. At first, she thought it was a mannequin, too still, too pale. Then she saw the blood soaking into the moss. Zofia Marcinkiewicz had been placed gently on her side, her coat still zipped, her small hands curled near her chin like she was dreaming. Her backpack was untouched. Her laminated solar system drawing was pinned to the inside of her coat.
Neptune was smiling.
The medical examiner said the injury was consistent with a heavy cylindrical object, likely iron or steel. The angle of the wound suggested a downward strike, swift and clean. Her skull had fractured along the temple and split upward, causing catastrophic trauma. There were bruises along both forearms. Defensive wounds. She had raised her hands. It didn't matter. Detective Anna Hryszko arrived from Toruń that afternoon. She didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t even call ahead. She walked past the local officers with her badge out and her coat flaring behind her. Nobody stopped her. She stood among the birch trees and stared at the flattened grass, the dried blood, the rust-colored splotches near the base of the tree. The forest was quiet. The kind of quiet that sticks to your skin.
“Third one,” she said under her breath.
She spoke to Zofia’s teacher that evening.
“She liked planets,” the woman said, voice tight. “She didn’t like when people moved her things. She’d sit for hours with her drawings.”
“She ever wander?” Anna asked.
“Only when overwhelmed. She didn’t understand time, not really. If something changed, if someone raised their voice, she’d go somewhere soft. She liked soft things. Trees. Books.”
Anna jotted notes in the margin of her file. The teacher had been gone less than three minutes. And someone had taken her, moved her, and killed her without being seen by a single witness.
Not a robbery. Not sexual. Not random. Intentional.
The killer stood at the Vistula’s edge that night and stared into the black water.
He had watched her for days.
She walked like the others did, too still, eyes turned inward. She clutched her notebook like it held the last light of the world. When she looked at the sky, he could see something in her. Not fear. Not recognition. It was the stillness. The wrong kind. The kind that told him she was already too far gone.
He didn’t hate her. But he couldn’t leave her behind. Not once he saw the mark. It was always there, once you knew how to look. In the pupils. In the way they stood. The signal was always the same. She had turned when he approached her in the trees. Her mouth opened, as if she might speak, but no sound came. He struck before doubt could enter his hand. Now he stared at the place she had fallen.Another mask removed. Another infection ended.
Anna returned to Toruń that night and stared at the map on her table. The red pins now stretched down the Vistula like a rash. Toruń. Bydgoszcz. Włocławek. Three cities. Three deaths. Three patterns.
She tacked up the latest photo of Zofia.
‘Eight. Nonverbal. Gifted. Planets. Killed in under three minutes.’
Next to her, Jakub’s photo:
‘Twelve. Autistic. Mapmaker. Struck on a regular route.’
Beside them, Mateusz:
‘Nineteen. Developmental delay. Bus route obsessive. Tickets in hand.’
Each victim had been left with something of themselves. A map. A ticket. A chart. Clues, yes. But not for the police. They were messages. The killer wanted the world to see what he saw. Anna leaned against the back of her chair and closed her eyes. The rot was spreading. And someone was purging it, one life at a time.
Patryk Nowak was thirty-four, though he often looked younger from a distance. He had a baby face and moved like someone always on his way somewhere, even if the destination never changed. For the past six years, his destination had been the same: the laundry depot on Bracka Street. He walked there every morning at 7:06. Not a minute early. Never a minute late.
He lived in a group home in Płock’s east side. A modest building with clean floors and fading paint. Seven other residents lived there, some in silence, some in stutters, some in the kind of echo-chatter that filled rooms with soft nonsense. Patryk wasn’t like that. He spoke clearly. He smiled. He knew the time even with his eyes closed.
He loved clocks. He had three in his room. A digital one that blinked in blue. An old battery-powered wall clock with slow hands. And his favorite, a broken wristwatch, the glass cracked, the minute hand stuck between 7:30 and 7:31. He wore it every day, even though it hadn’t worked in years.
That morning, like every other, he packed his lunch, ham sandwich, peeled orange, folded napkin. He tied the top of the bag twice, just like always.
Then he left.
By 7:30, he was dead.
The staff didn’t worry at first. Maybe he’d been delayed. Maybe the bus had come late, or maybe he’d stopped to watch the traffic light cycle like he sometimes did. But by noon, they were worried. By sundown, they called the police. By midnight, it began to rain. The next morning, a groundskeeper found the body behind an old grain silo, half-buried in mud, curled behind a stack of rotting pallets. Patryk’s skull had been crushed. Two direct impacts. Likely a rounded metal tool. No wallet missing. No clothes disturbed. His plastic lunch bag was still beside him, unopened. Next to it was his wristwatch. Cracked glass. Still ticking.
7:31 frozen in place.
Anna drove to Płock herself.
The news reached her by radio dispatch around 6:00 a.m. She barely waited for clearance. By the time she arrived, the rain had turned the silo lot into a mud bowl. Her boots sank as she crossed the perimeter.
The forensics team worked in a kind of sacred quiet. No one cracked jokes. No one commented on the smell. They all knew what this was.
The pattern was complete now.
She knelt beside the tarp and pulled it back halfway. Patryk’s face was partially collapsed, the skin along the browline torn from impact. His lips were still parted. There was something pitiful about the way his shoulders had twisted when he fell, like he’d tried to protect his lunch with his whole body.
Anna noticed the watch immediately. She stood and turned to the technician nearby.
“He was known for clocks,” she said.
The tech didn’t respond.
Anna pressed her palms into her hips and turned to look out over the city.
‘Four deaths. Four cities. Each victim was developmentally disabled. Each killed without theft, without sexual motive, without hesitation. Each left with something sacred to them. Jakub, his map. Mateusz, his ticket stubs. Zofia, her planets. Patryk, his broken watch.’
She called it in and then she drove straight back to Toruń and cleared her dining table for good.
The killer had waited until Patryk passed the corner of the depot lot. He hadn’t followed closely, never did. But he had studied the man’s habits for two days prior. The walk. The lunch bag. The look he gave the wall clock above the laundry office before entering the building.
This one was harder.
Patryk’s face looked too trusting but the killer had learned to separate pity from purpose. He knew what he saw in these people. The glitch. The flicker. The missing thread between soul and skin. They moved through life like nothing was wrong. But he saw it. The unclean spark behind the eyes. The false loop they all repeated. He told himself the same thing each time:
The dead should stay dead.
The first blow came from the back, just under the crown.
The second, diagonal. Down and forward.
He knelt beside the body and laid the watch next to the man’s shoulder.
He didn’t check for a pulse. There was no need.
Patryk had been counted.
Back in Toruń, Anna began organizing what no one else wanted to see. She built her own case file. Labeled every page by hand. Spread the maps across her table and drew lines between cities, marking the time, the method, the silence.
‘No suspects.
No fingerprints.
No witnesses.
No press.’
She stared at the four photos pinned on her wall and wrote in ink beneath each one:
Jakub – 9/4 – 6:11 a.m.
Mateusz – 9/6 – 4:51 a.m.
Zofia – 9/7 – ~12:15 p.m. disappearance / 6:42 a.m. discovery (9/8)
Patryk – 9/9 – ~7:30 a.m.
All within five days.
She flipped open a fresh notepad and wrote one word:
Pattern.
Then she added another:
Purpose.
She called her contact at the Ministry that afternoon. He listened. He asked questions. He promised to elevate the concern. By nightfall, her file had been marked for “internal review.”
No follow-up. No task force. No press conference. Just a polite silence.
Anna stood by her apartment window with a cigarette burning between her fingers and looked out at the city. The sky was starting to rot at the edges again, deep gray and swollen.
The kind of sky that felt like a warning.
Detective Anna Hryszko stood in front of the whiteboard in her borrowed office at the Toruń precinct. The dry-erase marker trembled slightly in her hand, not from nerves, but from exhaustion. Four red pins dotted the map behind her, stretched across the Vistula corridor like a loose necklace of blood.
Toruń. Bydgoszcz. Włocławek. Płock.
Four cities. Four bodies. Five days.
She tapped the board once with the back of her hand.
“All different,” she muttered. “All the same.”
Jakub. Mateusz. Zofia. Patryk.
Each one killed without theft or violation. Each one developmentally disabled or neurologically impaired. Each one left with a piece of their life untouched beside them. She’d written it in bold across the top of the whiteboard. No motive. No message. Just meaning. Her partner, Tomasz Król, stood a few steps behind her, arms crossed. He hadn’t said much in the past half hour.
“I’ve seen spree killings,” he finally said. “Drug-fueled. Domestic breakdowns. But this, ”
“It’s not a spree,” Anna interrupted.
He waited for her to continue. She didn’t.
That same day, two more disappearances were logged, quietly, without coordination.
In Zielona Góra, a woman named Ewa Kwiatkowska, age thirty-six, failed to return home from the market. Mild cognitive delay. Lived independently. Her bag was later found under a canal bridge. Her body wouldn’t be discovered for four more days.
In Piła, Patryk Mielczarek, twenty-eight, didn’t show up for his volunteer shift at the local station. His caregiver called it in. Police took the report but didn’t escalate it. His body was already cooling behind the rail depot, hidden under a scrap of tarp and two loose pallets.
Both deaths would later be tied to the same signature.
But no one knew that yet.
Except for one man.
He walked the line between Piła and Gniezno that night, the rails hissing under his boots.
The duffel on his back swayed with his steps. Inside: the hammer, a cloth for the blood, a small Bible with most of its pages torn out, and a folded paper labeled only with a list of towns written in tight, printed letters. The map wasn’t real. It didn’t have roads. It had marks. Spots. Places of rot. He didn’t choose them at random. He didn’t hunt. He waited. And when the signs aligned, he moved.
He had added new markings just that morning. A woman with too-smooth hands who always looked down. A man who laughed without smiling. A boy who stared at birds like he wanted to join them mid-flight.
He saw them everywhere now, the unclean, the almost-dead. He believed, truly, that the work was righteous. That something inside these people had been replaced. Something sacred was stolen. What remained were shells, vessels, worn out by the illusion of routine. The ritual mattered. The angle of the blow. The moment of stillness afterward. And always, always, he left behind the relic. A watch. A drawing. A ticket.
A kind of mercy.
Or maybe a warning.
By September 11th, Anna had compiled enough overlap to put in a formal interdepartmental request. She needed to link the cases. She needed access to evidence from Bydgoszcz, Włocławek, and now Płock. The Ministry liaison declined to escalate the file. “Speculative connections,” he said. “Unrelated municipalities. Likely coincidence.” Anna bit her tongue until it nearly bled.
That night, she called Alicja Nowicka in Płock, a forensic analyst with a sharp mind and a reputation for connecting dots no one else bothered to see.
“They think it’s coincidence,” Anna said into the phone.
“It’s not,” Alicja replied without hesitation.
“You saw the wristwatch?”
“I measured the crack pattern. It wasn’t broken in the attack, it was placed there afterward. Almost reverently.”
“Four scenes. Four patterns. Four tokens.”
“Someone’s leaving messages,” Alicja said. “Not for us. For himself.”
Anna hung up and added a fifth column to her board.
Symbolism.
By September 12th, another call came. This time from a volunteer at the train museum in Toruń.
A girl, Anna Czerwińska, fifteen, had failed to check out with the front desk after her scheduled visit. She was listed as high-functioning autistic. Came every Tuesday. Same time. Same route. Liked the old PKP locomotive in Hall C. Anna drove there herself.
The museum was closed. Security had barely noticed the alarm system hadn’t engaged the night before. Anna found the girl’s body sprawled on the gravel floor in front of the rusted engine. Her head had been caved in. Blood pooled in the shape of her silhouette. Her notebook sat beside her. Pages filled with train schedules, maps, inked-in serial numbers of discontinued locomotives. Anna didn’t need a coroner’s report. The pattern had claimed its fifth.
She returned home and placed a fifth photo on the wall.
She didn’t cry. Didn’t speak. She just opened her file and began to write:
‘This is not random. This is not madness. This is a plan.’
In the dark, a man rode the local line toward Bielsko-Biała. He stared out the window. He saw no reflection.
Only the next place waiting to be cleansed.
By the morning of September 13th, five bodies had been linked in Anna Hryszko’s war room, five cities, five lives extinguished in silence, five tokens left like messages no one else could read. The map stretched farther now, the red pins connected with twine that traced the Vistula basin like a widening wound. She no longer tried to convince the Ministry. They had stopped returning her calls.
September 13 – Bielsko-Biała
The man’s name was Kamil Rogowski. Age: thirty-nine. Traumatic brain injury survivor. Former rail worker. Known around the station by the porters and switchmen, mostly for his habit of standing near the yard fence, watching trains roll past with the same still expression every time. They said he used to talk more, before the fall. Now he mostly smiled and counted aloud under his breath.
He died sometime after 6:00 p.m.
Two teenage freight workers found his body slumped beside a power box near the depot fence. One ear was missing. His head had been struck twice, once from behind, a glancing blow, and once directly above the temple. That one had split the bone. The forensics team recovered a shard of metal from the wound, iron alloy, slightly curved. Possibly part of a rail tool. His body lay beside a torn piece of cardboard where he had drawn a crude image of train wheels. The ink had smeared, but the shape was still there. Eight wheels. One missing a spoke.
September 14 – Łódź
It was just past 10:00 a.m. when two children were found curled together inside a concrete tunnel at a small park.
Marta and Alicja Siedlecka. Nine and twelve. Twins. Non-verbal. Diagnosed with global developmental delay. They had wandered from a nearby supervised play session. The aide noticed their absence within minutes, but it was too late.
Each had a single depression fracture on the side of the skull. No other wounds. No signs of restraint. Their arms were tangled around each other when they died. Inside Marta’s coat pocket was a drawing. Two stick figures with their arms raised, standing under a bright sun. A scribbled blue shape above them might have been clouds. Or maybe waves. The police marked it as a tragic accident, children who slipped away and met the wrong person. Anna read the report that night with her hands clenched so tightly the paper tore.
September 15 – Gniezno
Błażej Zientek, age thirty-three. Local odd-jobber. Neurodivergent, with a history of latching onto strangers, smiling too long, standing too close. He was found behind a hardware store, half-covered by stacked crates. Head caved in from a leftward angle. The strike had driven bone into the orbital socket, shattering the eye.
The killer left nothing but a half-smoked cigarette placed upright in a bottle cap beside the body. The message wasn’t clear. But the intent was. Anna’s board now showed eight victims in twelve days. From Toruń to Łódź, Gniezno to Płock, they formed a crooked shape, like a mouth opening across the center of Poland. The cities had rail lines in common. Transit hubs. Corridors. She circled them with a red marker.
The killer wasn’t just traveling. He was following something. She made another call. This time to Alicja Nowicka, again. Anna trusted her judgment more than anyone. They met halfway in Kutno, a neutral ground, both exhausted and hollow-eyed. Alicja brought prints from four scenes. Anna brought her own theory. They spread their notes across a plastic café table under the dim lights of the train station lobby.
“Look at the object profile,” Anna said, tapping a grainy photo of the skull wound from Błażej’s autopsy. “Curved. Blunt. Not a regular hammer.”
Alicja nodded. “Rail spike hammer, maybe. Or a breaker bar.”
“The killer rides the trains. He knows the stations.”
“But why these people?”
Anna didn’t answer at first. Then she said, “Because they’re visible and invisible at the same time. They live in public, but they’re unseen. No one notices when they disappear.”
Alicja touched one of the photos.
“You think he believes he’s doing something righteous?”
She didn’t answer the question. She didn’t have a clue.
That night, September 15, the killer sat in the back of a local PKP car bound for Siedlce. His eyes were closed. In his lap, a folded piece of paper with three names written in a steady, square hand.
Adrian
Paulina
Krzysztof
He didn’t know their faces yet. But he knew their markers. One flinched at bright lights. One repeated phrases out of sequence. One blinked too slowly. The body was a vessel, he believed. But some vessels were cracked. And when the spirit was gone, something else could slip in. He had read it once, in a book left under a church pew, or maybe whispered in a dream.
“When the sheep fall sick, the shepherd must cut the rot from the flock.”
That was his duty.
September 16 – Siedlce
Paulina Wojciech, twenty-four.
Cognitive delay. Walked the same route from work every day.
She didn’t come home.
Her body was found the next morning in the stairwell tunnel near a tram stop. The strike had come from above. No defensive wounds. She likely never saw him. The killer left her umbrella beside her, neatly closed.
Later that night, a street-sweeper in Bydgoszcz found the bodies of the T. brothers, twins aged seven. They had been walking home from therapy. Both were struck once. Shoes missing. Anna read both case files before dawn. Her breath caught in her throat. They were accelerating.
The forest outside Gorzów Wielkopolski was quiet at night, the kind of quiet that feels wrong. Not peaceful, suffocating. The kind of quiet where breath echoes too loud and nothing alive seems willing to make a sound.
They found Igor Janicki there. Thirty years old. Diagnosed with schizotypal disorder. He’d gone missing from a supervised care unit two nights prior. The staff assumed he’d wandered off during a manic episode. He did that sometimes. Always came back. Not this time. His body was found beneath a collapsed hunting blind. Arms folded. Knees bent like he’d been made to kneel. The killer had written on him, chest bared, paint still wet when the officers arrived. A single word carved into the floorboards beneath him:
Kończymy.
We finish.
Anna stared at the crime scene photos two hours later with her lips pressed flat. The paint had been oil-based. Red-black. Used in rail switch marking. The killer hadn’t just left his mark, he was declaring something. An end. Or maybe a beginning.
September 21 – Kraków
No killing that day. At least none that they could find.
It was the first lull since September 3rd. Anna didn’t believe it was a break. She believed it was a transition. A breath before the next blow. She said it aloud in the war room that night:
“He’s going to change pace. Either he’s growing bolder, Or he’s preparing for something.”
September 22 – Zielona Góra
Ewa Kwiatkowska, thirty-six.
Found beneath the canal bridge.
Missing since the 17th.
Face caved in. Shopping bag still clutched in one hand. Potatoes and eggs scattered on the concrete like spilled offerings.
Forensics suggested the blow was struck from behind. Forceful. Singular. Too precise for rage. Too clean for accident. The strike location had narrow access. The killer had to wait. Had to time it. Had to know her pattern. Anna wrote a new phrase on her whiteboard:
'Ritual through rhythm.’
September 22 – Piła (Later that Evening)
Patryk Mielczarek, twenty-eight.
Gentle. Quiet.
Known to sit on the hill behind the train yard, watching locomotives pass.
His body was found sprawled behind the depot, half-covered in a sheet of discarded plastic wrap. One strike split his skull. No struggle. No scream. Just the hush of metal on metal as trains passed like ghosts.
Anna received both calls on the 23rd. She didn’t go home that night.
September 23 – Toruń
It circled back. Full loop. Full circle.
Anna Czerwińska, fifteen. High-functioning autistic. Loved rail history.
Found inside the tram museum.
Security hadn’t noticed the alarm was faulty. Her body was placed on the floor in front of a rusting PKP locomotive. Strike matched the others. Angle downward. Blood splattered across the metal. In her notebook, rows of engine numbers. One circled three times in blue ink:
Lz 91-072
An obsolete engine. One decommissioned years ago. No one knew why she had fixated on it.
Anna held the notebook like a confession and whispered, “What did you see?”
She felt as though the dead girl had been pointing to something, one last obsessive connection. One last pattern no one else could interpret.
[hr[/hr]
September 24 – Bielsko-Biała (Again)
They didn’t expect a return. But he wasn’t moving linearly anymore.
Kamil Rogowski’s cousin, Tomasz, reported missing that morning.
He was found that night. Same place. Same tool. The killer had come back, like it was unfinished business. The forensic team noted two blows. The second was cleaner than the first. Like he was perfecting the method.
September 25 – Siedlce
Paulina Wojciech, twenty-four.
They hadn’t even buried her yet and the killer wasn’t finished. That night, two more deaths were logged:
Adrian Nowicki and Krzysztof Niebieski, roommates.
Mid-thirties. Mild intellectual disabilities. Worked in packaging at the mill. One was killed quickly. The other died slower. The autopsy suggested a delay between blows. Deliberate. The wounds bore the same bevel, the same serration, and the same lack of hesitation.
In her hotel room in Siedlce, Anna lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. The air was stale, heavy with wet fabric and silence. The report from Gorzów sat in her lap.
The painted word.
The folded hands.
The kneeling.
She whispered it to herself:
“We finish.”
And she knew, with cold certainty, this man wasn’t finished at all. He was just beginning the next chapter.
The first headline appeared on the morning of September 26.
“Serial Killer? Deaths of Disabled Citizens Raise Questions Across Central Poland”
The article ran short. Speculative. Quotes from unnamed sources. One blurred photograph of a body being loaded into a van outside the train depot in Płock. But it was enough. It was enough to turn quiet dread into public noise. Enough to make the Ministry panic.
Anna read it standing in line at a kiosk, coffee in one hand, the paper trembling in the other. She hadn’t slept in two days. Her hair smelled like ash and sweat. Her fingertips were stained with black marker from her wall of names. But the moment she saw it in print, everything shifted.
Now it wasn’t just her file.
Now it was real.
Now the world had to look.
September 26 – Lublin
Katarzyna Sikora, twenty-seven.
Diagnosed with fragile X syndrome.
Worked at a bookstore. Lived with her grandmother.
She never came home. Found slumped on the floor of a train toilet three hours later. The blow had split her skull. The killer left the door unlocked. No one noticed until the conductor checked before disembarking. On the mirror above her body was the word:
“Wskrzeszony”
Resurrected.
Anna stared at the photo in silence that night.
Not "Purified", not "Gone", but brought back.
It made her stomach knot.
September 27 – Warsaw
The capital didn’t believe in rural terror. It believed in politics. In procedure.
So when the body of Jakub Wojtan, twenty-three, was found in the bathroom of a Warsaw train car, it made headlines fast. He was a university student. Asperger’s. Wore headphones religiously. Kept to himself. He had boarded alone. Was found mid-transit. Same trauma. Same blunt object. The sigil was drawn in ink across his notebook. Anna drove there herself.
She was met by two RPBRK officials, federal investigators. They didn’t invite her in. Didn’t share notes. Didn’t acknowledge her wall of names, but she noticed something strange as she
left. One of them was drawing lines across a wall map.
Exactly like hers.
September 28 – Olsztyn
Two more victims.
Lena and Zuzanna Mazur, twin sisters. Age: ten.
Both neurodivergent. Both homeschooled.
Their mother left them briefly at a park near the tram loop. They were found an hour later, curled together, bleeding into the grass. Each had a sigil scrawled across their backs in dry-erase marker. The police tried to cover it up but a nurse had taken a photo and sent it anonymously to the press.
The media called it “The Lazarus Killer.”
Because he left people behind with relics. Because he seemed to believe he was not ending lives, but correcting them. Cleansing them. Because in some of the notes, scrawled or folded, the same phrases kept appearing:
‘Rot wears the face of the innocent.’
‘The soul walks behind the skin.’
‘Lazarus was not asked if he wished to return.’
By September 29, a nationwide alert was issued. Trains were being checked, cameras reviewed, and passengers logged and logged again. Yet the killer slipped through.
He had no face. No prints. No voice. He was the shadow beneath a dozen hats, the hand that reached for a ticket and left no fingerprints. Anna stood before her wall and counted:
Twenty-three victims.
Nineteen cities.
Twenty-six days.
She reached for a marker and circled one location: Rzeszów.
It was next. She felt it in her spine.
September 30 – Rzeszów
Marek Dąbrowski, twenty-eight.
Mild intellectual disability. Delivery worker.
Killed behind a post office, found with a slip of paper in his jacket.
No sigil this time. Just a sentence.
“I tried to speak to him. He wasn’t there.”
Anna arrived two hours later. The local detective met her at the edge of the tape. No resistance this time. Just silence. She stared at the slip of paper in her glove and said quietly,
“He’s starting to lose control.”
That night, she stood on the station platform in Przemyśl, the last stop before the southeastern border. Trains hissed and rolled and groaned into the dark. Anna scanned every face. Every bag. Every step. She thought about the list on her wall. The children. The drawings. The watches. The words. And she thought of the man.
Where he might be. What he thought he was fixing. How he justified the crack of bone.
She stared down the tracks into the dark and whispered,
“Not Lazarus. Just death with a timetable.”
The air changed before the bodies started falling again. A bite returned to the wind. A silence spread through the train stations and side streets. The shadows had weight again. And with them came Dawid Kaczmarek, moving east with ritual in his bones and war in his lungs.
He had become more than careful. More than deliberate. He was now method itself. A prophet of absence. And in October, he was harvesting.
The week began with death in threes.
Gdynia:
Dawid began to move faster. Night trains. Short transfers. Sleeping on platforms with his hood up, his hammer wrapped in plastic beside his ribs.
Kraków – Oct 16: Four killed. All on the same night.
Two caretakers found behind a center for adult disabilities. Struck, then rearranged. Hands folded. Mouths wiped clean. Sigil painted on a storage door: “Even those who touch them carry it.”
Kielce – Oct 18:
A priest. One of the first non-disabled victims. Confessed to hearing voices. Dawid considered him ‘unclean.’ Phrase on the floor: ‘Some shepherds wear skin too well.’
Total confirmed by Oct 20: 57 dead.
Each one carefully logged in Anna’s notes. Each one making the country colder.
The media called it a wave. Anna called it the plague. Katowice, Łódź, Wrocław, Zamość, Białystok, Poznań, Tarnów. Seven cities. Eleven more dead.
Anna followed the names. She tracked train tickets. Passenger manifests. One name appeared over and over:
Dawid Kaczmarek, Age thirty-eight. Former railway technician but fired in 2003. Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He had been prescribed medication he never took. The pharmacies and doctors confirmed the meds had never been picked up. Last known address? razed to the ground during an industrial redevelopment.
A man with no bank account. No phone. No online trace. Only footprints on concrete.
By now, the whole country was watching. Train stations became ghost towns. Caretakers began carrying weapons. Parents clung to children on buses. Every movement was a threat. Every person another mask that might be hollow beneath. And Dawid was circling.
Zielona Góra – Oct 26
:A man killed on a station bench.
No movement captured.
Only a smear of blood on the side of the clock face.
Rzeszów – Oct 27:
A woman beaten to death in a chapel basement.
Phrase on the wall:
‘The righteous fall with the wicked. They both rot the same.’
Chełm – Oct 28:
Two teenage girls, both developmentally delayed.
One of them fought.
Dawid left behind blood that would later match a knuckle gash on his hand.
Lublin – Oct 29:
A conductor disappeared.
His body found two stations east, folded in a storage crate.
He had spoken on a news program about 'identifying behaviors in the hollowed.'
That night, Anna got the tip. A sighting south of Przemyśl. A derelict chapel in the forest near the Ukrainian border and some local kids had seen light inside. A fire and movement. A man they said 'prayed without a voice.'
A woman laid across the alter, a child curled at her feet as if he had been praying. Finally a man slumped against the wall, his head caved inward like so many others before him. Candle wax pooled near the corpses and a sigil drawn in salt at the center of the stone. And finally, Dawid Kaczmarek was seated behind them. Still. His hammer beside him, blood covering his hands, and eyes blank has he stared ahead.
He didn’t resist as Anna approached and raised her weapon.
He slowly turned his dead eyes towards Detective Anna and spoke. “There are still more of them. You won’t stop the rot. I’ve only cleared the path.”
She didn’t respond to his insanity as she removed her handcuffs from her duty belt. She cuffed him and led him out into the frost-covered night as she radioed the arrest into the closest Policja department
“As of this evening, law enforcement confirms the arrest of Dawid Kaczmarek, 38, suspected in the murders of sixty-seven individuals between September 4 and October 31. The victims include developmentally disabled citizens, caregivers, and mental health workers. He was found inside a desecrated medieval chapel with three victims at the scene. The investigation remains ongoing.”
Anna didn’t go to the press conference. She stood inside the empty war room looking at the one final red string stretched across the map. From Toruń to Przemyśl. Sixty-seven pins dotted the string. She didn’t weep. She didn’t speak. She just marked one final note beneath his name:
“He never saw people. Only echoes.”
And closed the file.
The fog didn’t lift the morning after Dawid Kaczmarek was arrested. It clung to the trees like skin too loose to shed. The hills around Przemyśl had turned brittle overnight, dry leaves spinning across the road in low spirals. The chapel sat silent in the clearing, stone walls weeping with frost. Inside, the blood hadn’t even dried.
Anna Hryszko stood just past the threshold, gloves on, coat soaked through, and stared at the scene she’d walked into less than twelve hours earlier. The candles had burned down to stumps. The smell of iron hung heavy in the air, copper, sweat, ash. The bodies had already been removed, but their absence echoed.
She stepped closer to the altar. A crust of salt had been drawn into a sigil, a triangle inside a circle, bisected by a smeared cross. Wax pooled at the triangle’s point, and dried blood spidered outward from where the woman had been arranged.
“Caregiver,” someone said behind her.
Anna turned.
It was Szymon, the regional forensics lead. He held a clipboard in one hand, the other rubbing at the back of his neck.
“Her name was Iwona Maj. Thirty-seven. Worked with children in Przemyśl. She’d been missing two days. The others haven’t been identified yet. The boy was maybe nine. Man was young. Possibly a sibling or neighbor. No ID on either.”
Anna said nothing. She stepped behind the altar and crouched where Dawid had been sitting. There were indentations in the stone where his boots had rested. Near the base, someone had scratched words into the wall with what looked like a nail.
“He walks among them. I walk behind.”
Anna touched the edge of the wall with her glove.
She whispered, “And now you don’t walk at all.”
They processed Dawid at the local station under heavy guard. He didn’t resist. Didn’t speak. Didn’t ask for a lawyer. He just sat in the interview room, hands cuffed to the table, eyes fixed on a corner of the ceiling like he was watching something no one else could see. Anna entered just after noon. No camera crews and no Ministry reps. Just her, the room, and Dawid. He didn’t look at her until she spoke.
“Sixty-seven people,” she said. “Most never saw you coming. Some weren’t even on your list, were they?”
No response.
Anna pulled a photo from her folder and slid it across the table.
Jakub. Age twelve. The first one.
Mapmaker.
Killed September 4th.
Those were the words written on the back of the photo.
Dawid blinked.
“He saw something,” he whispered.
Anna leaned forward.
“What did he see?”
Dawid tilted his head slightly. “They rot inside,” he said. “You just don’t look long enough to see it.”
Anna laid down another photo.
Zofia Marcinkiewicz. Age eight.
Found by the river.
Solar system pinned to her coat.
“She spoke in constellations,” Dawid said. “The dead remember the sky.”
Anna didn’t look away.
“You don’t believe they were human.”
“They weren’t empty,” he corrected. “They were hollow. A vessel with the light burned out. That’s not the same thing.”
“And what about the people who worked with them? The ones who tried to help? The caregivers? The mothers?” Anna asked as her voice showed her fatigue that reached her bones.
Dawid stared at the table for a long time.
“They fed the rot.”
Anna’s voice dropped.
“You killed a priest.”
“He confessed the wrong things.”
She closed the folder slowly.
“You’re not mad,” she said.
Dawid’s lips twitched.
That night, the Ministry released a brief statement.
“The individual responsible for a string of homicides spanning eight voivodeships has been apprehended. Due to the scope of the crimes and ongoing cross-jurisdictional efforts, details remain classified.”
There was no list of victims. No timeline. No acknowledgment of failure. Just a line in an official voice saying it was over. But it wasn’t.
Anna didn’t sleep that night. She sat in the motel room the city had booked for her and stared at the wall. Her own file sat on the bed, thick with photos and notes and pages with names written in black ink.
She pulled one sheet free.
Confirmed Victims – Sept 4 – Oct 31, 2006
67 lines.
Age, name, location, date.
She’d written them all.
The last name: Iwona Maj. Przemyśl. Oct 31.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t drink. She just read the names aloud, one by one, until her voice cracked and her mouth dried out. Then she folded the paper, put it in her coat pocket, and walked into the dark. The state tried to smother the story. No press releases and no full victim list. Just vague language about “multiple jurisdictions,” “classified casework,” and “a suspect in custody.”
But silence doesn't hold up under weight. By November 3rd, the cracks opened. First in regional papers. Then online. Then national headlines.
“Ex-Rail Worker Linked to 67 Murders”
“The Hollow Man: How Dawid Kaczmarek Slipped Through”
“Victims Ignored: A National Disgrace”
The names started to leak. First ten. Then twenty. Parents. Teachers. Social workers. Disability advocates. Survivors. All began naming the dead before the state could deny them.
Anna watched the reports roll in from her office in Toruń, the desk littered with cigarette butts and tea gone cold. Her phone rang once every hour, Ministry liaisons, media, internal affairs. She ignored most of them. She kept going back to Dawid’s ledger. They’d recovered it from his duffel. A 92-page notebook, weather-warped and stained with wax and blood.
Inside:
Scrawled in jagged pen were the words:
“I walked among them, and they did not know.”
“I took the burden of seeing. You took the comfort of blindness.”
At the bottom:
“I walked the path. You will sweep it behind me. That is your penance.”
The surviving families began speaking publicly on November 5.
There were vigils in Wrocław, Łódź, Kraków, Gdańsk.
Candles. Photos. Drawings held in trembling hands. Shoes laid out in rows. In one park, they placed 67 pairs, none matching.
Anna didn’t attend. She stayed in her apartment with the lights off, watching replays of a mother holding up her son’s backpack, still stained with soil from the riverbank.
“He was kind,” the woman said. “They said he didn’t understand. But he did. He understood how to love.”
On November 6, Anna received clearance to re-enter the interrogation room. Dawid hadn’t spoken since the first session. This time, he looked thinner. Hollowed-out. Not frightened. Not angry. Just used up.
Anna placed one item on the table: a child’s notebook, retrieved from a school bag beside a body. Inside, a single sentence written over and over:
“I am not sick. I am just different.”
She slid it forward. Dawid blinked slowly.
Said nothing. Anna stared hard at him.
“What did you really see when you looked at them?”
She waited.
Dawid continued, quieter now:
“I used to watch them… before I believed. They were still. Still inside. Not racing. Not tangled. They didn’t hide from who they were. And I hated them for it. Until I saw the rot.”
Anna leaned forward.
“There was no rot.”
He shook his head gently.
“You never looked long enough.”
The psychologists had their own language for him. They called it structured delusional syndrome, with compensatory messianic complex and morally neutral affect. He didn’t show guilt. He didn’t show euphoria. He was orderly, clean, and polite. A predator with the temperament of a librarian.
One of the prison guards later said, “He says ‘thank you’ every time I bring his tray. Doesn’t even eat half of it.”
On November 7, the Ministry made its first full list public.
67 names.
Dates.
Ages.
Locations.
No biographies.
No faces.
The list was 10 pages long and printed in 12-point font. Anna posted a copy above her desk, then wrote a single sentence in red across the bottom:
“They were not echoes.”
By November 8, the ledger had been scanned, catalogued, and sealed. It sat in a Ministry archive room in Warsaw now, triple-locked and guarded by protocol. But Anna had already memorized most of it. She still had access to her copy, smuggled as a PDF on an encrypted drive marked only with the letter 'K'. She read it each night before sleep, the same way other people might pray. It wasn’t the names that haunted her. It was the footnotes.
Every entry had them.
The last pages were different. Page 91 contained a rough sketch of the chapel, windows, altar, the cross above the rot. Next to it: a list of three names, none matched to existing victims. Anna highlighted them and passed them to her contact at forensics. The reply came back the next morning. They weren’t names. They were rail stop codenames, decommissioned in the early ’90s. But they all sat in a line. A corridor. The same invisible path he had walked for two months.
The final interview took place on November 9. Anna entered the room alone and Dawid was seated with his hands on the table, fingers clean, nails trimmed. He didn’t look up when she entered.
She didn’t sit. She placed the last photo on the table, Iwona Maj, the caregiver killed on Halloween.
Then she said “You planned to die there, didn’t you?”
Dawid didn’t respon, eyes as dead as when she arrested him.
“Three bodies. Candles. Salt on the ground. You made your altar, and you waited for someone else to end it.”
Still silence.
“But you didn’t die. You’re still here. Caged. And they’re still gone.”
He looked up. His eyes were wet, but not in mourning.
“They were already gone,” he whispered. “I just removed what was left.”
Anna stepped forward.
“And what do you think is left of you now?”
Silence
The Ministry inquiry began on November 10. Internal memos were leaked and several high-level resignations were accepted “without comment.”
The state blamed jurisdictional confusion. Poor resource coordination. Lack of cross-voivodeship data systems. But the truth was simpler. No one took the pattern seriously until the count became politically untenable. Anna was summoned for testimony. She brought two files. One was Dawid’s ledger and the other was her own.
She placed them side by side on the conference table and said:
“You missed it. Every single time. While you were deciding if it was real, sixty-seven people died.”
No one answered. They just recorded it, redacted it, and buried it.
On November 11, Anna went to the cemetery in Toruń. It was raining heavily.
She brought 67 white flowers, each tied with a red ribbon. She didn’t know where all the victims were buried, some families had never claimed the bodies, others were laid to rest in silence, without cameras, without crowds. So she laid the flowers at the base of the war memorial, one by one.
For Jakub.
For Zofia.
For Iwona.
For the ones no one named in time.
When she finished, she sat on the cold stone step and whispered:
“They will not forget you, even if the country tries.”
Dawid Kaczmarek’s final statement came via a letter delivered to his public defender. It was one page.Typed with no punctuation..
The court released it to the press the next day.
Anna didn’t attend the first day of the trial. She’d already seen everything worth seeing. She stood in her office in Toruń, filing the last document in her case folder and then she took the folder, locked it in a drawer, and closed her eyes. The case was over but the silence would stay.
The trial of Dawid Kaczmarek began on November 12, 2006, in Warsaw under high security.
There were no cameras. No jury. Just a judge, two psychologists, legal counsel, and a thick steel door between him and the world he’d torn apart. Anna sat in the gallery. Alone. Not for justice. Not for vengeance. She needed to see him one last time before the world decided what to do with the shape he left behind.
Dawid entered in shackles. He had lost weight, his coat was gone, his face was pale, gaunt, and his wrists bruised. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at anyone.
The prosecutors read the names. All sixty-seven names, one after another. No details. No photos. Just names and ages. A list that sounded like prayer.
Anna closed her eyes and imagined them sitting together in a room Dawid could never enter.
A boy with a folded map in his hands.
A girl whispering planet names.
A man watching trains pass.
Mothers.
Daughters.
Brothers.
Forgotten people.
Remembered now in spite of everything.
The court declared Dawid criminally insane. Unfit to stand trial. His sentence would be that he would be institutionalized indefinitely under Article 93a. Anna didn’t react. She had known this would be the end. You can’t try a man who believed the dead were pretending to be alive. You can only lock the doors and make sure no one ever listens to his voice again.
Two days later, Dawid was transferred to a secure psychiatric unit on the outskirts of Lublin. No press were allowed. They issued no photo. No status.
Just confirmation: “Transferred. Secured. No comment.”
On November 12, Anna returned to the chapel. Not as a detective but as herself.
She walked the gravel path in silence, boots crunching over frost-stiff earth. The trees were still. The chapel sagged inward like a dying lung. Inside, the blood had been scrubbed. The altar stripped. The floor bleached. But she saw the outlines. Salt scars in the stone. Cracks where the bodies had lain. A place where breath had ended. She stood at the center of the room and listened.
There was no voice. No rot. No echo of what he claimed to see. Only her own breath. Her own weight. She knelt and placed a folded slip of paper beneath the altar stone. The same list she’d carried in her coat pocket for weeks. The names. All of them. Not for God. Not for judgment. Just to leave them somewhere that had once tried to erase them.
As she stood, she whispered: “I saw them. I remember.”
Outside, the wind shifted. It carried no prophecy. No curse. Just the dry hush of the trees letting go. The snow fell without urgency. It settled on the rooftops like ash from something distant, like a silence given form. The city beneath it seemed muted, an old record with the sound turned low. Every motion was slower now. The trams, the people, even the wind. No one rushed. No one wanted to.
Anna walked toward the river with her hands in her coat pockets. In one was a small, dented tin box. In the other, four letters, each folded twice. There were no cameras. No bodyguards. No Ministry observers. That part was done. This was just grief.
She stopped at the water’s edge. The Vistula moved sluggishly now, the first frost hugging its banks, thin sheets of ice shivering against the stone piers. She leaned on the railing and took a slow breath. She had written the letters over several nights. Not all the names. Not all sixty-seven. Just the first four. The ones that started everything. They had never left her. She unfolded the first one.
Jakub.
Twelve years old.
Mapmaker.
Killed before anyone had a name for what was happening.
His mother had once written Anna a single line:
‘He knew how to get home from anywhere. Anywhere but here.’
Anna had found his last drawing, city blocks marked with red circles, and kept it in a file even after the Ministry shredded everything else. She placed his letter on the railing and held it there.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Then let it go. The paper twisted once in the air, then dropped into the river without a sound.
The second was for Mateusz.
He had been nineteen.
Speech delay.
Ticket collector.
He’d been the one no one noticed missing until his mother came to the station herself.
Anna remembered her in the hallway after the ID, shoes in a plastic bag, eyes that looked too calm.
“She kept saying his favorite bus line had no end stop,” a fellow officer had recalled.
Anna had believed her. She let Mateusz’s letter fall beside Jakub’s, watching both pages drift, then vanish.
Zofia’s letter took longer to release.
Eight years old.
Lover of planets.
Drew Saturns in every notebook.
Her father had refused to speak during the funeral. But he’d handed Anna the laminated solar system that had been found in Zofia’s coat.
“She wanted to be far away from all of this,” he said, voice dry. “She used to say Mars was quiet. That quiet was good.”
The letter was folded in red construction paper. Anna pressed it gently into the wind and closed her eyes.
Then came Patryk.
Thirty-four.
Three clocks in his room.
One always stuck at 7:31.
His caregiver had once said: “He never missed time. Not ever. If he didn’t come back, it’s because something broke the clock.”
Anna couldn’t fix it. But she could leave something behind. She dropped the last letter, then opened the tin box and emptied it over the railing. Inside were fragments of things the system never claimed, ticket stubs, crayon wrappers, a chipped stopwatch, half of a metal key, one bent earring.
They fell like snowfall into the current. She stayed there a while longer watching the letters disappear.
The snow thickened and the air cooled. People walked past without looking. She didn’t blame them. Some grief asks to be hidden. Some names were never meant to be public.
When she returned home, she placed her coat over the radiator and turned on the small television by the sink. She hadn’t watched the news in weeks.
The screen flickered, resolved into the nightly broadcast. She stirred her tea. Then she froze.
“, authorities in Olsztyn today confirmed the discovery of multiple human remains buried in the forest just outside of the city. The bodies, believed to date back several years, were found during routine construction work. Though initial identification is pending, investigators have confirmed at least three show signs of blunt force trauma to the back of the skull.”
Anna didn’t sit down but instead she walked to the window. Outside, snow layered the stree like untouched pages. Behind her, the anchor kept speaking.
“Sources close to the case say investigators are not ruling out a possible connection to Dawid Kaczmarek, who remains in psychiatric confinement following his arrest on October 31st.”
Anna didn’t move. Not for a long time. She kept her hand on the windowsill, her eyes on the snow, her breath fogging the glass. The river was full of names. The soil might be, too. And what terrified her most wasn’t the possibility that he’d killed before September. It was that someone else might already be trying to continue what he’d started. Some things don’t end. They linger. They shift.
They wait.
She turned off the television then turned off the light. And in the quiet that followed, she whispered four names into the dark.
Like a warning. Like a promise. Like a prayer.
Anna’s Apartment – Toruń – 6:18 p.m.
The room was filled with golden dusk. It wasn’t quiet in the way loneliness is. It was quiet in the way churches are, just before a hymn. Every sound had stilled itself. Even the floorboards beneath Anna’s bare feet seemed to understand. The folder on the desk was thick. Eighty names, officially. But Anna had long stopped thinking in terms of what was official. She knew there were more. The unnamed. The unlisted. The unloved. She pulled a blank sheet of paper from her drawer and wrote, not from impulse, but with the certainty of someone finally putting down a weight they’d carried too long.
She folded the letter and set it gently on top of the folder, pressing her fingers against it one final time like a blessing. She turned off the light and lit one small white candle. She removed her coat, folding it. Next were her shoes, sitting them side by side. As she laid down on her worn couch, she pulled the worn tram map over her shoulders like a blanket. Her fingers brushed the corner where Jakub’s name still lived in pencil. Her breath came easily. Slowly.
She closed her eyes.
And waited.
Then silence.
He crossed Żółkiewskiego Street with short, even steps, staying just inside the lines of the crosswalk. It wasn't a habit, it was a ritual. Jakub liked ritual. He was twelve, but he already knew the city better than most of the adults in his life. He didn’t need directions. He had the map inside him. His own private atlas of fences, alleys, overpasses, tramlines. He kept another map folded in his backpack, drawn in crayon, symbols only he understood. He’d marked the dangerous places in red. The depot. The underpass by the train yard. The garage with the broken window.
Places where the monsters lived.
His coat flapped softly behind him. Too long in the sleeves, navy blue and patched at the collar. His mother had bought it for five złoty at the weekend market. He wore it every day. It made him feel like no one could see inside him. He didn’t know he was being watched.
From the rusted fence line behind the Veolia depot, a man stood motionless in the dimness, breath slow, spine straight. His coat was gray. His hands were buried deep in the pockets. One wrapped tight around the handle of something cold and iron. For three days he had watched this boy. Same path. Same hour. Same shuffle of feet along the chain-link fence. The boy walked like a clock wound too tightly. No variation. No change. Even his gaze was predictable, tilted downward, half-focused. The killer understood that kind of gaze. It meant the child saw something wrong in the world. Or nothing at all. He waited until the boy passed the broken fence and stepped into the depot’s shadow. At 6:11 a.m., Jakub turned left, same as always, and the man stepped from the dark.
No warning.
The first strike was low, fast, rising through the arc of the boy’s turning body like a scythe catching wheat. The sound was wet. The body collapsed without ceremony, knees folding, arms spasming. The second strike caved the back of his head. Jakub’s paper map slipped from his hand and landed face-up in the gravel, red slashes bleeding through the folds. The killer crouched and picked it up. He studied the marks. So many red ones. The depot. The bridge. The garage. The boy had seen something. Or maybe he’d sensed it. Either way, he had known the places to fear.
“You were right to be afraid,” he said softly.
He laid the map gently across the boy’s chest, then turned and walked through the thinning fog.
By 7:00 a.m., the police had cordoned off the lot. A sanitation worker had found the body and staggered back in a daze. The man had cleaned vomit from his shoes before calling it in. He didn’t want to remember the smell. He would anyway. Detective Anna Hryszko arrived at 7:38. She was forty-two, with tired eyes and a scar across the bridge of her nose that never quite faded. She didn’t flinch at scenes like this anymore. But child cases cut deeper. She knew it wouldn’t go away this time either.
The boy had been killed with two blows. One to fell him. One to finish. No signs of robbery. No signs of assault. His backpack was untouched. Crayons still zipped inside. A sandwich wrapped in paper. The map, delicate, soaked, clutched like scripture.
She stared at it.
Red slashes drawn with hard, furious strokes. She recognized the Veolia depot immediately. The exact spot where he had died was marked. He’d seen something coming. She wrote the time down: 6:11 a.m. Then she went home and didn’t sleep.
The killer rode the rails east that night. He didn’t speak. He didn’t smile. He sat at the back of the nearly empty car, the weight in his duffel making the floor vibrate under his boots. The other passengers ignored him. They always did. They never saw it until it was too late.
He watched the landscape blur by. Factories. Woods. Rows of crooked homes tucked against the hills. They moved like they were alive. But they weren’t. The next one waited in Bydgoszcz. Another echo walking in the skin of a human being. Another mask that needed to be torn away…
The sun hadn’t yet broken over the freight yards of Glinki when the man was found beneath the trestle. A rail inspector was making his morning rounds, clipboard in hand, head down. He noticed the shape from a distance, a collapsed figure half-buried in weeds and gravel. At first, he thought it was a drunk. Or worse, a junkie who’d frozen during the night.
It was the shoes that stopped him. White trainers. One of them turned outward, like the man had been walking when his legs gave out.
The inspector took two steps closer before the smell hit him. Metallic. Sharp. Old copper coins in water. He backed away and called it in. The scene was already cordoned off by the time the first trains rolled through. Two officers stood at the edge of the site, pale and silent. They weren’t used to this kind of blood. The city had its share of overdoses, fights, drunks who didn’t get back up, but not this. Not a young man with half his face split apart, his jaw visibly dislocated, the blood seeping from a single, deliberate strike to the skull. The victim was identified within the hour:
Mateusz Wiśniewski, age nineteen. He had a mild developmental disability and still lived with his mother. Known in the neighborhood for riding the bus, sometimes all day. He kept a binder of used tickets, hundreds of them, stored in clear sleeves and organized by route number. He hadn’t come home the night before. When they found him, he was still clutching ticket stubs in one hand. Fist clenched so tight, they had to soak the fingers to ease them open. Thirty-six stubs, all stamped from the 91 line. There were defensive wounds, less than expected, but enough to show he had tried. A bruised forearm. A cracked wrist. His fingernails were chipped and bloodied. It was the head wound that killed him. One blow. Maybe two. The object hadn’t shattered the bone completely, it had been crushed it inward. The police noted the position of the body. Curled, like a child. Face turned toward the rail line. They marked it down as a suspected assault. No leads. No known enemies. The case didn’t make it past the second page of the local paper.
Detective Anna Hryszko heard about it the next day. She was at her desk in Toruń when her phone buzzed, a call from Marek, her old friend in Kuyavia, who still kept his ear to the ground.
“Anna, there’s another one,” he said.
Her stomach sank. “Where?”
“Bydgoszcz. Early yesterday. Nineteen-year-old kid. Developmental delay. Smashed in the head with something heavy. Body dumped by the tracks.”
Her hand tightened on the pen she was holding. “Details?”
“I’ll send you the report. But Anna, he was holding ticket stubs. Clutched them. Like he was afraid to let them go.”
Anna didn’t speak for a moment.
“You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Marek added.
She nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see her. “Same M.O. as Jakub. Same vulnerability. No robbery. No witnesses. No goddamn reason.”
“You going to make a move?”
“I don’t know yet.”
But she did. She was already pulling the files.
The killer walked the rail line three hours after the murder. His boots were clean. The blood was not on him. He never let it touch his skin. Not out of guilt, he felt none, but because it was part of the rite. The infected carried rot. You didn’t let rot into you. Mateusz had been a difficult one. He'd almost spoken. That made the man hesitate. Just a second. But it had been enough to see something human behind the boy’s wide eyes. Something not yet hollowed out. But it wasn’t about mercy. It was about necessity. They weren’t human, not anymore. They’d been taken. Or remade. The signs were there. How they moved. How they stared. The ticks and rituals, the desperate need for sameness. Their habits were not survival. They were masks. They had to be stopped before it spread. Mateusz had looked at him once, right before the hammer fell, and his mouth had twitched. The man didn’t forget that. It almost ruined the whole thing.
That night, Anna sat at her dining table, the lights off, a map spread before her and two Polaroids taped side by side.
Victim 1: Jakub Piekarski
Age: 12
Location: Veolia depot, Toruń
Date of death: September 4th
Time: ~6:11 a.m.
Cause: Blunt-force trauma
Notes: Autistic. Carried hand-drawn maps. Known to avoid specific city locations. Map marked with red slashes, found at body.
Victim 2: Mateusz Wiśniewski
Age: 19
Location: Glinki Junction, Bydgoszcz
Date of death: September 6th
Time: ~4:50 a.m.
Cause: Blunt-force trauma
Notes: Developmentally delayed. Obsessed with bus routes. Found with ticket stubs in hand.
Two deaths. Forty-eight hours apart. Different cities, same corridor. Same kind of victim. Same kind of strike. Same goddamn silence from the press.
Anna closed her eyes and listened to the ticking of her kitchen clock. It didn’t feel like the beginning of a case. It felt like the middle of something that had already been going for years. And somewhere out there, she knew, The killer was watching his next shadow move.
The aide had only stepped inside to answer the phone. Three minutes, maybe less. The playground was fenced. The students were all accounted for. Except one.
When she returned, Zofia was gone.
At first, they checked the corners of the yard. The benches. The line of birch trees along the fence. No one panicked, not yet. Zofia had a habit of hiding when the world got too loud. A gifted child, the teachers said. Eight years old. Nonverbal, but not unreachable. Obsessed with astronomy. She knew the names of all the planets, all the moons, all the constellations in both hemispheres. She rarely spoke, but when she did, she recited from memory. Long strings of facts. Prayers. Star charts. The names of Catholic saints in alphabetical order. That afternoon, her voice was absent. By nightfall, the local police were called in. Volunteers searched the alleys and green spaces. Flashlights swept through stairwells and courtyards. But Zofia wasn’t under a bench or inside a school closet. She was nowhere.
The next morning, at 6:42 a.m., a woman walking her dog along the river’s edge spotted something lying just inside the grove. At first, she thought it was a mannequin, too still, too pale. Then she saw the blood soaking into the moss. Zofia Marcinkiewicz had been placed gently on her side, her coat still zipped, her small hands curled near her chin like she was dreaming. Her backpack was untouched. Her laminated solar system drawing was pinned to the inside of her coat.
Neptune was smiling.
The medical examiner said the injury was consistent with a heavy cylindrical object, likely iron or steel. The angle of the wound suggested a downward strike, swift and clean. Her skull had fractured along the temple and split upward, causing catastrophic trauma. There were bruises along both forearms. Defensive wounds. She had raised her hands. It didn't matter. Detective Anna Hryszko arrived from Toruń that afternoon. She didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t even call ahead. She walked past the local officers with her badge out and her coat flaring behind her. Nobody stopped her. She stood among the birch trees and stared at the flattened grass, the dried blood, the rust-colored splotches near the base of the tree. The forest was quiet. The kind of quiet that sticks to your skin.
“Third one,” she said under her breath.
She spoke to Zofia’s teacher that evening.
“She liked planets,” the woman said, voice tight. “She didn’t like when people moved her things. She’d sit for hours with her drawings.”
“She ever wander?” Anna asked.
“Only when overwhelmed. She didn’t understand time, not really. If something changed, if someone raised their voice, she’d go somewhere soft. She liked soft things. Trees. Books.”
Anna jotted notes in the margin of her file. The teacher had been gone less than three minutes. And someone had taken her, moved her, and killed her without being seen by a single witness.
Not a robbery. Not sexual. Not random. Intentional.
The killer stood at the Vistula’s edge that night and stared into the black water.
He had watched her for days.
She walked like the others did, too still, eyes turned inward. She clutched her notebook like it held the last light of the world. When she looked at the sky, he could see something in her. Not fear. Not recognition. It was the stillness. The wrong kind. The kind that told him she was already too far gone.
He didn’t hate her. But he couldn’t leave her behind. Not once he saw the mark. It was always there, once you knew how to look. In the pupils. In the way they stood. The signal was always the same. She had turned when he approached her in the trees. Her mouth opened, as if she might speak, but no sound came. He struck before doubt could enter his hand. Now he stared at the place she had fallen.Another mask removed. Another infection ended.
Anna returned to Toruń that night and stared at the map on her table. The red pins now stretched down the Vistula like a rash. Toruń. Bydgoszcz. Włocławek. Three cities. Three deaths. Three patterns.
She tacked up the latest photo of Zofia.
‘Eight. Nonverbal. Gifted. Planets. Killed in under three minutes.’
Next to her, Jakub’s photo:
‘Twelve. Autistic. Mapmaker. Struck on a regular route.’
Beside them, Mateusz:
‘Nineteen. Developmental delay. Bus route obsessive. Tickets in hand.’
Each victim had been left with something of themselves. A map. A ticket. A chart. Clues, yes. But not for the police. They were messages. The killer wanted the world to see what he saw. Anna leaned against the back of her chair and closed her eyes. The rot was spreading. And someone was purging it, one life at a time.
Patryk Nowak was thirty-four, though he often looked younger from a distance. He had a baby face and moved like someone always on his way somewhere, even if the destination never changed. For the past six years, his destination had been the same: the laundry depot on Bracka Street. He walked there every morning at 7:06. Not a minute early. Never a minute late.
He lived in a group home in Płock’s east side. A modest building with clean floors and fading paint. Seven other residents lived there, some in silence, some in stutters, some in the kind of echo-chatter that filled rooms with soft nonsense. Patryk wasn’t like that. He spoke clearly. He smiled. He knew the time even with his eyes closed.
He loved clocks. He had three in his room. A digital one that blinked in blue. An old battery-powered wall clock with slow hands. And his favorite, a broken wristwatch, the glass cracked, the minute hand stuck between 7:30 and 7:31. He wore it every day, even though it hadn’t worked in years.
That morning, like every other, he packed his lunch, ham sandwich, peeled orange, folded napkin. He tied the top of the bag twice, just like always.
Then he left.
By 7:30, he was dead.
The staff didn’t worry at first. Maybe he’d been delayed. Maybe the bus had come late, or maybe he’d stopped to watch the traffic light cycle like he sometimes did. But by noon, they were worried. By sundown, they called the police. By midnight, it began to rain. The next morning, a groundskeeper found the body behind an old grain silo, half-buried in mud, curled behind a stack of rotting pallets. Patryk’s skull had been crushed. Two direct impacts. Likely a rounded metal tool. No wallet missing. No clothes disturbed. His plastic lunch bag was still beside him, unopened. Next to it was his wristwatch. Cracked glass. Still ticking.
7:31 frozen in place.
Anna drove to Płock herself.
The news reached her by radio dispatch around 6:00 a.m. She barely waited for clearance. By the time she arrived, the rain had turned the silo lot into a mud bowl. Her boots sank as she crossed the perimeter.
The forensics team worked in a kind of sacred quiet. No one cracked jokes. No one commented on the smell. They all knew what this was.
The pattern was complete now.
She knelt beside the tarp and pulled it back halfway. Patryk’s face was partially collapsed, the skin along the browline torn from impact. His lips were still parted. There was something pitiful about the way his shoulders had twisted when he fell, like he’d tried to protect his lunch with his whole body.
Anna noticed the watch immediately. She stood and turned to the technician nearby.
“He was known for clocks,” she said.
The tech didn’t respond.
Anna pressed her palms into her hips and turned to look out over the city.
‘Four deaths. Four cities. Each victim was developmentally disabled. Each killed without theft, without sexual motive, without hesitation. Each left with something sacred to them. Jakub, his map. Mateusz, his ticket stubs. Zofia, her planets. Patryk, his broken watch.’
She called it in and then she drove straight back to Toruń and cleared her dining table for good.
The killer had waited until Patryk passed the corner of the depot lot. He hadn’t followed closely, never did. But he had studied the man’s habits for two days prior. The walk. The lunch bag. The look he gave the wall clock above the laundry office before entering the building.
This one was harder.
Patryk’s face looked too trusting but the killer had learned to separate pity from purpose. He knew what he saw in these people. The glitch. The flicker. The missing thread between soul and skin. They moved through life like nothing was wrong. But he saw it. The unclean spark behind the eyes. The false loop they all repeated. He told himself the same thing each time:
The dead should stay dead.
The first blow came from the back, just under the crown.
The second, diagonal. Down and forward.
He knelt beside the body and laid the watch next to the man’s shoulder.
He didn’t check for a pulse. There was no need.
Patryk had been counted.
Back in Toruń, Anna began organizing what no one else wanted to see. She built her own case file. Labeled every page by hand. Spread the maps across her table and drew lines between cities, marking the time, the method, the silence.
‘No suspects.
No fingerprints.
No witnesses.
No press.’
She stared at the four photos pinned on her wall and wrote in ink beneath each one:
Jakub – 9/4 – 6:11 a.m.
Mateusz – 9/6 – 4:51 a.m.
Zofia – 9/7 – ~12:15 p.m. disappearance / 6:42 a.m. discovery (9/8)
Patryk – 9/9 – ~7:30 a.m.
All within five days.
She flipped open a fresh notepad and wrote one word:
Pattern.
Then she added another:
Purpose.
She called her contact at the Ministry that afternoon. He listened. He asked questions. He promised to elevate the concern. By nightfall, her file had been marked for “internal review.”
No follow-up. No task force. No press conference. Just a polite silence.
Anna stood by her apartment window with a cigarette burning between her fingers and looked out at the city. The sky was starting to rot at the edges again, deep gray and swollen.
The kind of sky that felt like a warning.
Detective Anna Hryszko stood in front of the whiteboard in her borrowed office at the Toruń precinct. The dry-erase marker trembled slightly in her hand, not from nerves, but from exhaustion. Four red pins dotted the map behind her, stretched across the Vistula corridor like a loose necklace of blood.
Toruń. Bydgoszcz. Włocławek. Płock.
Four cities. Four bodies. Five days.
She tapped the board once with the back of her hand.
“All different,” she muttered. “All the same.”
Jakub. Mateusz. Zofia. Patryk.
Each one killed without theft or violation. Each one developmentally disabled or neurologically impaired. Each one left with a piece of their life untouched beside them. She’d written it in bold across the top of the whiteboard. No motive. No message. Just meaning. Her partner, Tomasz Król, stood a few steps behind her, arms crossed. He hadn’t said much in the past half hour.
“I’ve seen spree killings,” he finally said. “Drug-fueled. Domestic breakdowns. But this, ”
“It’s not a spree,” Anna interrupted.
He waited for her to continue. She didn’t.
That same day, two more disappearances were logged, quietly, without coordination.
In Zielona Góra, a woman named Ewa Kwiatkowska, age thirty-six, failed to return home from the market. Mild cognitive delay. Lived independently. Her bag was later found under a canal bridge. Her body wouldn’t be discovered for four more days.
In Piła, Patryk Mielczarek, twenty-eight, didn’t show up for his volunteer shift at the local station. His caregiver called it in. Police took the report but didn’t escalate it. His body was already cooling behind the rail depot, hidden under a scrap of tarp and two loose pallets.
Both deaths would later be tied to the same signature.
But no one knew that yet.
Except for one man.
He walked the line between Piła and Gniezno that night, the rails hissing under his boots.
The duffel on his back swayed with his steps. Inside: the hammer, a cloth for the blood, a small Bible with most of its pages torn out, and a folded paper labeled only with a list of towns written in tight, printed letters. The map wasn’t real. It didn’t have roads. It had marks. Spots. Places of rot. He didn’t choose them at random. He didn’t hunt. He waited. And when the signs aligned, he moved.
He had added new markings just that morning. A woman with too-smooth hands who always looked down. A man who laughed without smiling. A boy who stared at birds like he wanted to join them mid-flight.
He saw them everywhere now, the unclean, the almost-dead. He believed, truly, that the work was righteous. That something inside these people had been replaced. Something sacred was stolen. What remained were shells, vessels, worn out by the illusion of routine. The ritual mattered. The angle of the blow. The moment of stillness afterward. And always, always, he left behind the relic. A watch. A drawing. A ticket.
A kind of mercy.
Or maybe a warning.
By September 11th, Anna had compiled enough overlap to put in a formal interdepartmental request. She needed to link the cases. She needed access to evidence from Bydgoszcz, Włocławek, and now Płock. The Ministry liaison declined to escalate the file. “Speculative connections,” he said. “Unrelated municipalities. Likely coincidence.” Anna bit her tongue until it nearly bled.
That night, she called Alicja Nowicka in Płock, a forensic analyst with a sharp mind and a reputation for connecting dots no one else bothered to see.
“They think it’s coincidence,” Anna said into the phone.
“It’s not,” Alicja replied without hesitation.
“You saw the wristwatch?”
“I measured the crack pattern. It wasn’t broken in the attack, it was placed there afterward. Almost reverently.”
“Four scenes. Four patterns. Four tokens.”
“Someone’s leaving messages,” Alicja said. “Not for us. For himself.”
Anna hung up and added a fifth column to her board.
Symbolism.
By September 12th, another call came. This time from a volunteer at the train museum in Toruń.
A girl, Anna Czerwińska, fifteen, had failed to check out with the front desk after her scheduled visit. She was listed as high-functioning autistic. Came every Tuesday. Same time. Same route. Liked the old PKP locomotive in Hall C. Anna drove there herself.
The museum was closed. Security had barely noticed the alarm system hadn’t engaged the night before. Anna found the girl’s body sprawled on the gravel floor in front of the rusted engine. Her head had been caved in. Blood pooled in the shape of her silhouette. Her notebook sat beside her. Pages filled with train schedules, maps, inked-in serial numbers of discontinued locomotives. Anna didn’t need a coroner’s report. The pattern had claimed its fifth.
She returned home and placed a fifth photo on the wall.
She didn’t cry. Didn’t speak. She just opened her file and began to write:
‘This is not random. This is not madness. This is a plan.’
In the dark, a man rode the local line toward Bielsko-Biała. He stared out the window. He saw no reflection.
Only the next place waiting to be cleansed.
By the morning of September 13th, five bodies had been linked in Anna Hryszko’s war room, five cities, five lives extinguished in silence, five tokens left like messages no one else could read. The map stretched farther now, the red pins connected with twine that traced the Vistula basin like a widening wound. She no longer tried to convince the Ministry. They had stopped returning her calls.
September 13 – Bielsko-Biała
The man’s name was Kamil Rogowski. Age: thirty-nine. Traumatic brain injury survivor. Former rail worker. Known around the station by the porters and switchmen, mostly for his habit of standing near the yard fence, watching trains roll past with the same still expression every time. They said he used to talk more, before the fall. Now he mostly smiled and counted aloud under his breath.
He died sometime after 6:00 p.m.
Two teenage freight workers found his body slumped beside a power box near the depot fence. One ear was missing. His head had been struck twice, once from behind, a glancing blow, and once directly above the temple. That one had split the bone. The forensics team recovered a shard of metal from the wound, iron alloy, slightly curved. Possibly part of a rail tool. His body lay beside a torn piece of cardboard where he had drawn a crude image of train wheels. The ink had smeared, but the shape was still there. Eight wheels. One missing a spoke.
September 14 – Łódź
It was just past 10:00 a.m. when two children were found curled together inside a concrete tunnel at a small park.
Marta and Alicja Siedlecka. Nine and twelve. Twins. Non-verbal. Diagnosed with global developmental delay. They had wandered from a nearby supervised play session. The aide noticed their absence within minutes, but it was too late.
Each had a single depression fracture on the side of the skull. No other wounds. No signs of restraint. Their arms were tangled around each other when they died. Inside Marta’s coat pocket was a drawing. Two stick figures with their arms raised, standing under a bright sun. A scribbled blue shape above them might have been clouds. Or maybe waves. The police marked it as a tragic accident, children who slipped away and met the wrong person. Anna read the report that night with her hands clenched so tightly the paper tore.
September 15 – Gniezno
Błażej Zientek, age thirty-three. Local odd-jobber. Neurodivergent, with a history of latching onto strangers, smiling too long, standing too close. He was found behind a hardware store, half-covered by stacked crates. Head caved in from a leftward angle. The strike had driven bone into the orbital socket, shattering the eye.
The killer left nothing but a half-smoked cigarette placed upright in a bottle cap beside the body. The message wasn’t clear. But the intent was. Anna’s board now showed eight victims in twelve days. From Toruń to Łódź, Gniezno to Płock, they formed a crooked shape, like a mouth opening across the center of Poland. The cities had rail lines in common. Transit hubs. Corridors. She circled them with a red marker.
The killer wasn’t just traveling. He was following something. She made another call. This time to Alicja Nowicka, again. Anna trusted her judgment more than anyone. They met halfway in Kutno, a neutral ground, both exhausted and hollow-eyed. Alicja brought prints from four scenes. Anna brought her own theory. They spread their notes across a plastic café table under the dim lights of the train station lobby.
“Look at the object profile,” Anna said, tapping a grainy photo of the skull wound from Błażej’s autopsy. “Curved. Blunt. Not a regular hammer.”
Alicja nodded. “Rail spike hammer, maybe. Or a breaker bar.”
“The killer rides the trains. He knows the stations.”
“But why these people?”
Anna didn’t answer at first. Then she said, “Because they’re visible and invisible at the same time. They live in public, but they’re unseen. No one notices when they disappear.”
Alicja touched one of the photos.
“You think he believes he’s doing something righteous?”
She didn’t answer the question. She didn’t have a clue.
That night, September 15, the killer sat in the back of a local PKP car bound for Siedlce. His eyes were closed. In his lap, a folded piece of paper with three names written in a steady, square hand.
Adrian
Paulina
Krzysztof
He didn’t know their faces yet. But he knew their markers. One flinched at bright lights. One repeated phrases out of sequence. One blinked too slowly. The body was a vessel, he believed. But some vessels were cracked. And when the spirit was gone, something else could slip in. He had read it once, in a book left under a church pew, or maybe whispered in a dream.
“When the sheep fall sick, the shepherd must cut the rot from the flock.”
That was his duty.
September 16 – Siedlce
Paulina Wojciech, twenty-four.
Cognitive delay. Walked the same route from work every day.
She didn’t come home.
Her body was found the next morning in the stairwell tunnel near a tram stop. The strike had come from above. No defensive wounds. She likely never saw him. The killer left her umbrella beside her, neatly closed.
Later that night, a street-sweeper in Bydgoszcz found the bodies of the T. brothers, twins aged seven. They had been walking home from therapy. Both were struck once. Shoes missing. Anna read both case files before dawn. Her breath caught in her throat. They were accelerating.
The forest outside Gorzów Wielkopolski was quiet at night, the kind of quiet that feels wrong. Not peaceful, suffocating. The kind of quiet where breath echoes too loud and nothing alive seems willing to make a sound.
They found Igor Janicki there. Thirty years old. Diagnosed with schizotypal disorder. He’d gone missing from a supervised care unit two nights prior. The staff assumed he’d wandered off during a manic episode. He did that sometimes. Always came back. Not this time. His body was found beneath a collapsed hunting blind. Arms folded. Knees bent like he’d been made to kneel. The killer had written on him, chest bared, paint still wet when the officers arrived. A single word carved into the floorboards beneath him:
Kończymy.
We finish.
Anna stared at the crime scene photos two hours later with her lips pressed flat. The paint had been oil-based. Red-black. Used in rail switch marking. The killer hadn’t just left his mark, he was declaring something. An end. Or maybe a beginning.
September 21 – Kraków
No killing that day. At least none that they could find.
It was the first lull since September 3rd. Anna didn’t believe it was a break. She believed it was a transition. A breath before the next blow. She said it aloud in the war room that night:
“He’s going to change pace. Either he’s growing bolder, Or he’s preparing for something.”
September 22 – Zielona Góra
Ewa Kwiatkowska, thirty-six.
Found beneath the canal bridge.
Missing since the 17th.
Face caved in. Shopping bag still clutched in one hand. Potatoes and eggs scattered on the concrete like spilled offerings.
Forensics suggested the blow was struck from behind. Forceful. Singular. Too precise for rage. Too clean for accident. The strike location had narrow access. The killer had to wait. Had to time it. Had to know her pattern. Anna wrote a new phrase on her whiteboard:
'Ritual through rhythm.’
September 22 – Piła (Later that Evening)
Patryk Mielczarek, twenty-eight.
Gentle. Quiet.
Known to sit on the hill behind the train yard, watching locomotives pass.
His body was found sprawled behind the depot, half-covered in a sheet of discarded plastic wrap. One strike split his skull. No struggle. No scream. Just the hush of metal on metal as trains passed like ghosts.
Anna received both calls on the 23rd. She didn’t go home that night.
September 23 – Toruń
It circled back. Full loop. Full circle.
Anna Czerwińska, fifteen. High-functioning autistic. Loved rail history.
Found inside the tram museum.
Security hadn’t noticed the alarm was faulty. Her body was placed on the floor in front of a rusting PKP locomotive. Strike matched the others. Angle downward. Blood splattered across the metal. In her notebook, rows of engine numbers. One circled three times in blue ink:
Lz 91-072
An obsolete engine. One decommissioned years ago. No one knew why she had fixated on it.
Anna held the notebook like a confession and whispered, “What did you see?”
She felt as though the dead girl had been pointing to something, one last obsessive connection. One last pattern no one else could interpret.
[hr[/hr]
September 24 – Bielsko-Biała (Again)
They didn’t expect a return. But he wasn’t moving linearly anymore.
Kamil Rogowski’s cousin, Tomasz, reported missing that morning.
He was found that night. Same place. Same tool. The killer had come back, like it was unfinished business. The forensic team noted two blows. The second was cleaner than the first. Like he was perfecting the method.
September 25 – Siedlce
Paulina Wojciech, twenty-four.
They hadn’t even buried her yet and the killer wasn’t finished. That night, two more deaths were logged:
Adrian Nowicki and Krzysztof Niebieski, roommates.
Mid-thirties. Mild intellectual disabilities. Worked in packaging at the mill. One was killed quickly. The other died slower. The autopsy suggested a delay between blows. Deliberate. The wounds bore the same bevel, the same serration, and the same lack of hesitation.
In her hotel room in Siedlce, Anna lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. The air was stale, heavy with wet fabric and silence. The report from Gorzów sat in her lap.
The painted word.
The folded hands.
The kneeling.
She whispered it to herself:
“We finish.”
And she knew, with cold certainty, this man wasn’t finished at all. He was just beginning the next chapter.
The first headline appeared on the morning of September 26.
“Serial Killer? Deaths of Disabled Citizens Raise Questions Across Central Poland”
The article ran short. Speculative. Quotes from unnamed sources. One blurred photograph of a body being loaded into a van outside the train depot in Płock. But it was enough. It was enough to turn quiet dread into public noise. Enough to make the Ministry panic.
Anna read it standing in line at a kiosk, coffee in one hand, the paper trembling in the other. She hadn’t slept in two days. Her hair smelled like ash and sweat. Her fingertips were stained with black marker from her wall of names. But the moment she saw it in print, everything shifted.
Now it wasn’t just her file.
Now it was real.
Now the world had to look.
September 26 – Lublin
Katarzyna Sikora, twenty-seven.
Diagnosed with fragile X syndrome.
Worked at a bookstore. Lived with her grandmother.
She never came home. Found slumped on the floor of a train toilet three hours later. The blow had split her skull. The killer left the door unlocked. No one noticed until the conductor checked before disembarking. On the mirror above her body was the word:
“Wskrzeszony”
Resurrected.
Anna stared at the photo in silence that night.
Not "Purified", not "Gone", but brought back.
It made her stomach knot.
September 27 – Warsaw
The capital didn’t believe in rural terror. It believed in politics. In procedure.
So when the body of Jakub Wojtan, twenty-three, was found in the bathroom of a Warsaw train car, it made headlines fast. He was a university student. Asperger’s. Wore headphones religiously. Kept to himself. He had boarded alone. Was found mid-transit. Same trauma. Same blunt object. The sigil was drawn in ink across his notebook. Anna drove there herself.
She was met by two RPBRK officials, federal investigators. They didn’t invite her in. Didn’t share notes. Didn’t acknowledge her wall of names, but she noticed something strange as she
left. One of them was drawing lines across a wall map.
Exactly like hers.
September 28 – Olsztyn
Two more victims.
Lena and Zuzanna Mazur, twin sisters. Age: ten.
Both neurodivergent. Both homeschooled.
Their mother left them briefly at a park near the tram loop. They were found an hour later, curled together, bleeding into the grass. Each had a sigil scrawled across their backs in dry-erase marker. The police tried to cover it up but a nurse had taken a photo and sent it anonymously to the press.
The media called it “The Lazarus Killer.”
Because he left people behind with relics. Because he seemed to believe he was not ending lives, but correcting them. Cleansing them. Because in some of the notes, scrawled or folded, the same phrases kept appearing:
‘Rot wears the face of the innocent.’
‘The soul walks behind the skin.’
‘Lazarus was not asked if he wished to return.’
By September 29, a nationwide alert was issued. Trains were being checked, cameras reviewed, and passengers logged and logged again. Yet the killer slipped through.
He had no face. No prints. No voice. He was the shadow beneath a dozen hats, the hand that reached for a ticket and left no fingerprints. Anna stood before her wall and counted:
Twenty-three victims.
Nineteen cities.
Twenty-six days.
She reached for a marker and circled one location: Rzeszów.
It was next. She felt it in her spine.
September 30 – Rzeszów
Marek Dąbrowski, twenty-eight.
Mild intellectual disability. Delivery worker.
Killed behind a post office, found with a slip of paper in his jacket.
No sigil this time. Just a sentence.
“I tried to speak to him. He wasn’t there.”
Anna arrived two hours later. The local detective met her at the edge of the tape. No resistance this time. Just silence. She stared at the slip of paper in her glove and said quietly,
“He’s starting to lose control.”
That night, she stood on the station platform in Przemyśl, the last stop before the southeastern border. Trains hissed and rolled and groaned into the dark. Anna scanned every face. Every bag. Every step. She thought about the list on her wall. The children. The drawings. The watches. The words. And she thought of the man.
Where he might be. What he thought he was fixing. How he justified the crack of bone.
She stared down the tracks into the dark and whispered,
“Not Lazarus. Just death with a timetable.”
The air changed before the bodies started falling again. A bite returned to the wind. A silence spread through the train stations and side streets. The shadows had weight again. And with them came Dawid Kaczmarek, moving east with ritual in his bones and war in his lungs.
He had become more than careful. More than deliberate. He was now method itself. A prophet of absence. And in October, he was harvesting.
October 11 – 15: “The Quiet Culling”
The week began with death in threes.
Gdynia:
- Paweł Domagała, twenty-two.
Autistic. Worked part-time in a music shop. Killed in the alley behind the tram loop.
Token: a torn cassette cover tucked into his collar.
Phrase on wall: “They mimic sound but never sing.”
- Magdalena Wrona, thirty-seven. Intellectual disability. Killed in the tunnel under the overpass.
- Adam Wrona, her brother, thirty-four. Found beside her. Strangled after blunt trauma failed to kill.
No token. Phrase scratched into the steel: “Two bodies, one ghost.”
- Janek Rybicki, eleven. Nonverbal. Wandered from his special needs classroom.
Found in a public toilet near the station.
No witnesses.
A drawing in his backpack: a sun with no face.
October 16 – 20: “The Spiral Deepens”
Dawid began to move faster. Night trains. Short transfers. Sleeping on platforms with his hood up, his hammer wrapped in plastic beside his ribs.
Kraków – Oct 16: Four killed. All on the same night.
- A woman in her fifties with Down syndrome.
- A young man with a speech delay.
- A busker who hummed while playing flute.
- A night porter at the train station, killed for “feeding the rot,” as Dawid would later write.
Two caretakers found behind a center for adult disabilities. Struck, then rearranged. Hands folded. Mouths wiped clean. Sigil painted on a storage door: “Even those who touch them carry it.”
Kielce – Oct 18:
A priest. One of the first non-disabled victims. Confessed to hearing voices. Dawid considered him ‘unclean.’ Phrase on the floor: ‘Some shepherds wear skin too well.’
Total confirmed by Oct 20: 57 dead.
Each one carefully logged in Anna’s notes. Each one making the country colder.
October 21 – 25: “The Lazarus Litany”
The media called it a wave. Anna called it the plague. Katowice, Łódź, Wrocław, Zamość, Białystok, Poznań, Tarnów. Seven cities. Eleven more dead.
- A boy who smiled too much.
- A woman who spoke to pigeons.
- A man who clapped when scared.
- A teenager who drew maps of tunnels no longer in use.
- Two social workers.
- One mother who homeschooled her disabled child.
- The child, found beside her.
Anna followed the names. She tracked train tickets. Passenger manifests. One name appeared over and over:
Dawid Kaczmarek, Age thirty-eight. Former railway technician but fired in 2003. Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. He had been prescribed medication he never took. The pharmacies and doctors confirmed the meds had never been picked up. Last known address? razed to the ground during an industrial redevelopment.
A man with no bank account. No phone. No online trace. Only footprints on concrete.
October 26 – 30: “The Preacher’s Endgame”
By now, the whole country was watching. Train stations became ghost towns. Caretakers began carrying weapons. Parents clung to children on buses. Every movement was a threat. Every person another mask that might be hollow beneath. And Dawid was circling.
Zielona Góra – Oct 26
:A man killed on a station bench.
No movement captured.
Only a smear of blood on the side of the clock face.
Rzeszów – Oct 27:
A woman beaten to death in a chapel basement.
Phrase on the wall:
‘The righteous fall with the wicked. They both rot the same.’
Chełm – Oct 28:
Two teenage girls, both developmentally delayed.
One of them fought.
Dawid left behind blood that would later match a knuckle gash on his hand.
Lublin – Oct 29:
A conductor disappeared.
His body found two stations east, folded in a storage crate.
He had spoken on a news program about 'identifying behaviors in the hollowed.'
That night, Anna got the tip. A sighting south of Przemyśl. A derelict chapel in the forest near the Ukrainian border and some local kids had seen light inside. A fire and movement. A man they said 'prayed without a voice.'
October 31: “The Midnight Arrest”
Anna went alone. She didn’t tell the precinct. Didn’t wait for backup. Just brought a service weapon, magazines, a flashlight, and a name. She reached the chapel just after 11:00 p.m. The place was a ruin with the roof open to the sky, stone walls eaten by ivy, and an iron gate broken from its hinges. The silence was absolute. Inside, she found three fresh bodies.A woman laid across the alter, a child curled at her feet as if he had been praying. Finally a man slumped against the wall, his head caved inward like so many others before him. Candle wax pooled near the corpses and a sigil drawn in salt at the center of the stone. And finally, Dawid Kaczmarek was seated behind them. Still. His hammer beside him, blood covering his hands, and eyes blank has he stared ahead.
He didn’t resist as Anna approached and raised her weapon.
He slowly turned his dead eyes towards Detective Anna and spoke. “There are still more of them. You won’t stop the rot. I’ve only cleared the path.”
She didn’t respond to his insanity as she removed her handcuffs from her duty belt. She cuffed him and led him out into the frost-covered night as she radioed the arrest into the closest Policja department
National Statement: October 31, 2006
“As of this evening, law enforcement confirms the arrest of Dawid Kaczmarek, 38, suspected in the murders of sixty-seven individuals between September 4 and October 31. The victims include developmentally disabled citizens, caregivers, and mental health workers. He was found inside a desecrated medieval chapel with three victims at the scene. The investigation remains ongoing.”
Anna didn’t go to the press conference. She stood inside the empty war room looking at the one final red string stretched across the map. From Toruń to Przemyśl. Sixty-seven pins dotted the string. She didn’t weep. She didn’t speak. She just marked one final note beneath his name:
“He never saw people. Only echoes.”
And closed the file.
The fog didn’t lift the morning after Dawid Kaczmarek was arrested. It clung to the trees like skin too loose to shed. The hills around Przemyśl had turned brittle overnight, dry leaves spinning across the road in low spirals. The chapel sat silent in the clearing, stone walls weeping with frost. Inside, the blood hadn’t even dried.
Anna Hryszko stood just past the threshold, gloves on, coat soaked through, and stared at the scene she’d walked into less than twelve hours earlier. The candles had burned down to stumps. The smell of iron hung heavy in the air, copper, sweat, ash. The bodies had already been removed, but their absence echoed.
She stepped closer to the altar. A crust of salt had been drawn into a sigil, a triangle inside a circle, bisected by a smeared cross. Wax pooled at the triangle’s point, and dried blood spidered outward from where the woman had been arranged.
“Caregiver,” someone said behind her.
Anna turned.
It was Szymon, the regional forensics lead. He held a clipboard in one hand, the other rubbing at the back of his neck.
“Her name was Iwona Maj. Thirty-seven. Worked with children in Przemyśl. She’d been missing two days. The others haven’t been identified yet. The boy was maybe nine. Man was young. Possibly a sibling or neighbor. No ID on either.”
Anna said nothing. She stepped behind the altar and crouched where Dawid had been sitting. There were indentations in the stone where his boots had rested. Near the base, someone had scratched words into the wall with what looked like a nail.
“He walks among them. I walk behind.”
Anna touched the edge of the wall with her glove.
She whispered, “And now you don’t walk at all.”
They processed Dawid at the local station under heavy guard. He didn’t resist. Didn’t speak. Didn’t ask for a lawyer. He just sat in the interview room, hands cuffed to the table, eyes fixed on a corner of the ceiling like he was watching something no one else could see. Anna entered just after noon. No camera crews and no Ministry reps. Just her, the room, and Dawid. He didn’t look at her until she spoke.
“Sixty-seven people,” she said. “Most never saw you coming. Some weren’t even on your list, were they?”
No response.
Anna pulled a photo from her folder and slid it across the table.
Jakub. Age twelve. The first one.
Mapmaker.
Killed September 4th.
Those were the words written on the back of the photo.
Dawid blinked.
“He saw something,” he whispered.
Anna leaned forward.
“What did he see?”
Dawid tilted his head slightly. “They rot inside,” he said. “You just don’t look long enough to see it.”
Anna laid down another photo.
Zofia Marcinkiewicz. Age eight.
Found by the river.
Solar system pinned to her coat.
“She spoke in constellations,” Dawid said. “The dead remember the sky.”
Anna didn’t look away.
“You don’t believe they were human.”
“They weren’t empty,” he corrected. “They were hollow. A vessel with the light burned out. That’s not the same thing.”
“And what about the people who worked with them? The ones who tried to help? The caregivers? The mothers?” Anna asked as her voice showed her fatigue that reached her bones.
Dawid stared at the table for a long time.
“They fed the rot.”
Anna’s voice dropped.
“You killed a priest.”
“He confessed the wrong things.”
She closed the folder slowly.
“You’re not mad,” she said.
Dawid’s lips twitched.
That night, the Ministry released a brief statement.
“The individual responsible for a string of homicides spanning eight voivodeships has been apprehended. Due to the scope of the crimes and ongoing cross-jurisdictional efforts, details remain classified.”
There was no list of victims. No timeline. No acknowledgment of failure. Just a line in an official voice saying it was over. But it wasn’t.
Anna didn’t sleep that night. She sat in the motel room the city had booked for her and stared at the wall. Her own file sat on the bed, thick with photos and notes and pages with names written in black ink.
She pulled one sheet free.
Confirmed Victims – Sept 4 – Oct 31, 2006
67 lines.
Age, name, location, date.
She’d written them all.
The last name: Iwona Maj. Przemyśl. Oct 31.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t drink. She just read the names aloud, one by one, until her voice cracked and her mouth dried out. Then she folded the paper, put it in her coat pocket, and walked into the dark. The state tried to smother the story. No press releases and no full victim list. Just vague language about “multiple jurisdictions,” “classified casework,” and “a suspect in custody.”
But silence doesn't hold up under weight. By November 3rd, the cracks opened. First in regional papers. Then online. Then national headlines.
“Ex-Rail Worker Linked to 67 Murders”
“The Hollow Man: How Dawid Kaczmarek Slipped Through”
“Victims Ignored: A National Disgrace”
The names started to leak. First ten. Then twenty. Parents. Teachers. Social workers. Disability advocates. Survivors. All began naming the dead before the state could deny them.
Anna watched the reports roll in from her office in Toruń, the desk littered with cigarette butts and tea gone cold. Her phone rang once every hour, Ministry liaisons, media, internal affairs. She ignored most of them. She kept going back to Dawid’s ledger. They’d recovered it from his duffel. A 92-page notebook, weather-warped and stained with wax and blood.
Inside:
- victim sketches
- travel logs
- tools
- “symptom indicators”
- handwritten prayers
Scrawled in jagged pen were the words:
“I walked among them, and they did not know.”
“I took the burden of seeing. You took the comfort of blindness.”
At the bottom:
“I walked the path. You will sweep it behind me. That is your penance.”
The surviving families began speaking publicly on November 5.
There were vigils in Wrocław, Łódź, Kraków, Gdańsk.
Candles. Photos. Drawings held in trembling hands. Shoes laid out in rows. In one park, they placed 67 pairs, none matching.
Anna didn’t attend. She stayed in her apartment with the lights off, watching replays of a mother holding up her son’s backpack, still stained with soil from the riverbank.
“He was kind,” the woman said. “They said he didn’t understand. But he did. He understood how to love.”
On November 6, Anna received clearance to re-enter the interrogation room. Dawid hadn’t spoken since the first session. This time, he looked thinner. Hollowed-out. Not frightened. Not angry. Just used up.
Anna placed one item on the table: a child’s notebook, retrieved from a school bag beside a body. Inside, a single sentence written over and over:
“I am not sick. I am just different.”
She slid it forward. Dawid blinked slowly.
Said nothing. Anna stared hard at him.
“What did you really see when you looked at them?”
She waited.
Dawid continued, quieter now:
“I used to watch them… before I believed. They were still. Still inside. Not racing. Not tangled. They didn’t hide from who they were. And I hated them for it. Until I saw the rot.”
Anna leaned forward.
“There was no rot.”
He shook his head gently.
“You never looked long enough.”
The psychologists had their own language for him. They called it structured delusional syndrome, with compensatory messianic complex and morally neutral affect. He didn’t show guilt. He didn’t show euphoria. He was orderly, clean, and polite. A predator with the temperament of a librarian.
One of the prison guards later said, “He says ‘thank you’ every time I bring his tray. Doesn’t even eat half of it.”
On November 7, the Ministry made its first full list public.
67 names.
Dates.
Ages.
Locations.
No biographies.
No faces.
The list was 10 pages long and printed in 12-point font. Anna posted a copy above her desk, then wrote a single sentence in red across the bottom:
“They were not echoes.”
By November 8, the ledger had been scanned, catalogued, and sealed. It sat in a Ministry archive room in Warsaw now, triple-locked and guarded by protocol. But Anna had already memorized most of it. She still had access to her copy, smuggled as a PDF on an encrypted drive marked only with the letter 'K'. She read it each night before sleep, the same way other people might pray. It wasn’t the names that haunted her. It was the footnotes.
Every entry had them.
- “Observed staring at flickering lights”
- “Repeated sound five times in twenty minutes”
- “Did not look away when I looked at them”
- “Caretaker smiled too quickly”
- “Touched the walls when no one else did”
The last pages were different. Page 91 contained a rough sketch of the chapel, windows, altar, the cross above the rot. Next to it: a list of three names, none matched to existing victims. Anna highlighted them and passed them to her contact at forensics. The reply came back the next morning. They weren’t names. They were rail stop codenames, decommissioned in the early ’90s. But they all sat in a line. A corridor. The same invisible path he had walked for two months.
The final interview took place on November 9. Anna entered the room alone and Dawid was seated with his hands on the table, fingers clean, nails trimmed. He didn’t look up when she entered.
She didn’t sit. She placed the last photo on the table, Iwona Maj, the caregiver killed on Halloween.
Then she said “You planned to die there, didn’t you?”
Dawid didn’t respon, eyes as dead as when she arrested him.
“Three bodies. Candles. Salt on the ground. You made your altar, and you waited for someone else to end it.”
Still silence.
“But you didn’t die. You’re still here. Caged. And they’re still gone.”
He looked up. His eyes were wet, but not in mourning.
“They were already gone,” he whispered. “I just removed what was left.”
Anna stepped forward.
“And what do you think is left of you now?”
Silence
The Ministry inquiry began on November 10. Internal memos were leaked and several high-level resignations were accepted “without comment.”
The state blamed jurisdictional confusion. Poor resource coordination. Lack of cross-voivodeship data systems. But the truth was simpler. No one took the pattern seriously until the count became politically untenable. Anna was summoned for testimony. She brought two files. One was Dawid’s ledger and the other was her own.
She placed them side by side on the conference table and said:
“You missed it. Every single time. While you were deciding if it was real, sixty-seven people died.”
No one answered. They just recorded it, redacted it, and buried it.
On November 11, Anna went to the cemetery in Toruń. It was raining heavily.
She brought 67 white flowers, each tied with a red ribbon. She didn’t know where all the victims were buried, some families had never claimed the bodies, others were laid to rest in silence, without cameras, without crowds. So she laid the flowers at the base of the war memorial, one by one.
For Jakub.
For Zofia.
For Iwona.
For the ones no one named in time.
When she finished, she sat on the cold stone step and whispered:
“They will not forget you, even if the country tries.”
Dawid Kaczmarek’s final statement came via a letter delivered to his public defender. It was one page.Typed with no punctuation..
The court released it to the press the next day.
i walked where the world had turned away i removed the voice of sickness the mouths of lies the hollowed eyes of the neverpeople i walked the corridor and heard nothing and silence is proof and now that you hear me you are already too late
Anna didn’t attend the first day of the trial. She’d already seen everything worth seeing. She stood in her office in Toruń, filing the last document in her case folder and then she took the folder, locked it in a drawer, and closed her eyes. The case was over but the silence would stay.
The trial of Dawid Kaczmarek began on November 12, 2006, in Warsaw under high security.
There were no cameras. No jury. Just a judge, two psychologists, legal counsel, and a thick steel door between him and the world he’d torn apart. Anna sat in the gallery. Alone. Not for justice. Not for vengeance. She needed to see him one last time before the world decided what to do with the shape he left behind.
Dawid entered in shackles. He had lost weight, his coat was gone, his face was pale, gaunt, and his wrists bruised. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at anyone.
The prosecutors read the names. All sixty-seven names, one after another. No details. No photos. Just names and ages. A list that sounded like prayer.
Anna closed her eyes and imagined them sitting together in a room Dawid could never enter.
A boy with a folded map in his hands.
A girl whispering planet names.
A man watching trains pass.
Mothers.
Daughters.
Brothers.
Forgotten people.
Remembered now in spite of everything.
The court declared Dawid criminally insane. Unfit to stand trial. His sentence would be that he would be institutionalized indefinitely under Article 93a. Anna didn’t react. She had known this would be the end. You can’t try a man who believed the dead were pretending to be alive. You can only lock the doors and make sure no one ever listens to his voice again.
Two days later, Dawid was transferred to a secure psychiatric unit on the outskirts of Lublin. No press were allowed. They issued no photo. No status.
Just confirmation: “Transferred. Secured. No comment.”
On November 12, Anna returned to the chapel. Not as a detective but as herself.
She walked the gravel path in silence, boots crunching over frost-stiff earth. The trees were still. The chapel sagged inward like a dying lung. Inside, the blood had been scrubbed. The altar stripped. The floor bleached. But she saw the outlines. Salt scars in the stone. Cracks where the bodies had lain. A place where breath had ended. She stood at the center of the room and listened.
There was no voice. No rot. No echo of what he claimed to see. Only her own breath. Her own weight. She knelt and placed a folded slip of paper beneath the altar stone. The same list she’d carried in her coat pocket for weeks. The names. All of them. Not for God. Not for judgment. Just to leave them somewhere that had once tried to erase them.
As she stood, she whispered: “I saw them. I remember.”
Outside, the wind shifted. It carried no prophecy. No curse. Just the dry hush of the trees letting go. The snow fell without urgency. It settled on the rooftops like ash from something distant, like a silence given form. The city beneath it seemed muted, an old record with the sound turned low. Every motion was slower now. The trams, the people, even the wind. No one rushed. No one wanted to.
Anna walked toward the river with her hands in her coat pockets. In one was a small, dented tin box. In the other, four letters, each folded twice. There were no cameras. No bodyguards. No Ministry observers. That part was done. This was just grief.
She stopped at the water’s edge. The Vistula moved sluggishly now, the first frost hugging its banks, thin sheets of ice shivering against the stone piers. She leaned on the railing and took a slow breath. She had written the letters over several nights. Not all the names. Not all sixty-seven. Just the first four. The ones that started everything. They had never left her. She unfolded the first one.
Jakub.
Twelve years old.
Mapmaker.
Killed before anyone had a name for what was happening.
His mother had once written Anna a single line:
‘He knew how to get home from anywhere. Anywhere but here.’
Anna had found his last drawing, city blocks marked with red circles, and kept it in a file even after the Ministry shredded everything else. She placed his letter on the railing and held it there.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Then let it go. The paper twisted once in the air, then dropped into the river without a sound.
The second was for Mateusz.
He had been nineteen.
Speech delay.
Ticket collector.
He’d been the one no one noticed missing until his mother came to the station herself.
Anna remembered her in the hallway after the ID, shoes in a plastic bag, eyes that looked too calm.
“She kept saying his favorite bus line had no end stop,” a fellow officer had recalled.
Anna had believed her. She let Mateusz’s letter fall beside Jakub’s, watching both pages drift, then vanish.
Zofia’s letter took longer to release.
Eight years old.
Lover of planets.
Drew Saturns in every notebook.
Her father had refused to speak during the funeral. But he’d handed Anna the laminated solar system that had been found in Zofia’s coat.
“She wanted to be far away from all of this,” he said, voice dry. “She used to say Mars was quiet. That quiet was good.”
The letter was folded in red construction paper. Anna pressed it gently into the wind and closed her eyes.
Then came Patryk.
Thirty-four.
Three clocks in his room.
One always stuck at 7:31.
His caregiver had once said: “He never missed time. Not ever. If he didn’t come back, it’s because something broke the clock.”
Anna couldn’t fix it. But she could leave something behind. She dropped the last letter, then opened the tin box and emptied it over the railing. Inside were fragments of things the system never claimed, ticket stubs, crayon wrappers, a chipped stopwatch, half of a metal key, one bent earring.
They fell like snowfall into the current. She stayed there a while longer watching the letters disappear.
The snow thickened and the air cooled. People walked past without looking. She didn’t blame them. Some grief asks to be hidden. Some names were never meant to be public.
When she returned home, she placed her coat over the radiator and turned on the small television by the sink. She hadn’t watched the news in weeks.
The screen flickered, resolved into the nightly broadcast. She stirred her tea. Then she froze.
“, authorities in Olsztyn today confirmed the discovery of multiple human remains buried in the forest just outside of the city. The bodies, believed to date back several years, were found during routine construction work. Though initial identification is pending, investigators have confirmed at least three show signs of blunt force trauma to the back of the skull.”
Anna didn’t sit down but instead she walked to the window. Outside, snow layered the stree like untouched pages. Behind her, the anchor kept speaking.
“Sources close to the case say investigators are not ruling out a possible connection to Dawid Kaczmarek, who remains in psychiatric confinement following his arrest on October 31st.”
Anna didn’t move. Not for a long time. She kept her hand on the windowsill, her eyes on the snow, her breath fogging the glass. The river was full of names. The soil might be, too. And what terrified her most wasn’t the possibility that he’d killed before September. It was that someone else might already be trying to continue what he’d started. Some things don’t end. They linger. They shift.
They wait.
She turned off the television then turned off the light. And in the quiet that followed, she whispered four names into the dark.
Like a warning. Like a promise. Like a prayer.
Anna’s Apartment – Toruń – 6:18 p.m.
The room was filled with golden dusk. It wasn’t quiet in the way loneliness is. It was quiet in the way churches are, just before a hymn. Every sound had stilled itself. Even the floorboards beneath Anna’s bare feet seemed to understand. The folder on the desk was thick. Eighty names, officially. But Anna had long stopped thinking in terms of what was official. She knew there were more. The unnamed. The unlisted. The unloved. She pulled a blank sheet of paper from her drawer and wrote, not from impulse, but with the certainty of someone finally putting down a weight they’d carried too long.
To whoever finds this and whoever still listens:
There are too many names now. Too many faces. Too many nights that I wake up thinking I had forgotten one. And each time I hadn't. That's the part that truly hurts.
I saw where they died. I saw how. I saw what we didn’t do in time.
Some of them looked at me once, before it happened, and I didn’t know what it meant. I thought it was just the job. It wasn’t.
He said they were hollow. He said they weren’t real. But I saw them.
I saw Jakub’s hands tracing a bus map with his thumb.
I saw Zofia’s smile when she talked about planets.
I saw Patryk straighten the clocks in his group home every morning.
I saw Sylwia laugh at a bird outside the tram stop, even when no one else was watching.
They were alive in ways most of us forget to be. And we let them die for it.
You called me brave. You called me strong. But I wasn’t. I was just the last person in the room when everyone else stopped listening.
I’m tired. Not of pain, of forgetting.
Please don’t forget them.
Light one candle.
Say one name.
And let that be enough for today.
Anna
There are too many names now. Too many faces. Too many nights that I wake up thinking I had forgotten one. And each time I hadn't. That's the part that truly hurts.
I saw where they died. I saw how. I saw what we didn’t do in time.
Some of them looked at me once, before it happened, and I didn’t know what it meant. I thought it was just the job. It wasn’t.
He said they were hollow. He said they weren’t real. But I saw them.
I saw Jakub’s hands tracing a bus map with his thumb.
I saw Zofia’s smile when she talked about planets.
I saw Patryk straighten the clocks in his group home every morning.
I saw Sylwia laugh at a bird outside the tram stop, even when no one else was watching.
They were alive in ways most of us forget to be. And we let them die for it.
You called me brave. You called me strong. But I wasn’t. I was just the last person in the room when everyone else stopped listening.
I’m tired. Not of pain, of forgetting.
Please don’t forget them.
Light one candle.
Say one name.
And let that be enough for today.
Anna
She folded the letter and set it gently on top of the folder, pressing her fingers against it one final time like a blessing. She turned off the light and lit one small white candle. She removed her coat, folding it. Next were her shoes, sitting them side by side. As she laid down on her worn couch, she pulled the worn tram map over her shoulders like a blanket. Her fingers brushed the corner where Jakub’s name still lived in pencil. Her breath came easily. Slowly.
She closed her eyes.
And waited.
Then silence.
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