Chapter 6
Krystyna and Bartosz.
They told me their names on the drive. The words meant nothing to me yet. Names rarely do the first time you hear them. At first, they’re just sounds, and only later, sometimes much later, do they gather consequence around them.
Krystyna turned in the passenger seat to look at me and smiled in a way that suggested she had practiced smiling for children before. That unsettled me, though I could not have said why.
Even then, I noticed rehearsed warmth. Funny what children pick up. Adults often mistake innocence for inattention.
Her makeup was heavy, too heavy. Foundation lay thick across her face like a mask beginning to settle into the fine lines around her mouth. There was something over-arranged about her, as if every visible part of her had been decided in advance.
When she leaned closer, I caught her perfume. Sweet, but wrong. Cheap in a way that lingered too long in the warm air. The sort of scent that arrives before a person and stays after they’ve left.
I remember thinking, in the blunt way children think, that she smelled expensive and poor at the same time. There’s a joke in that somewhere.
Bartosz didn’t turn at all. He kept his eyes on the road.
From the backseat, he looked enormous to me, broad shoulders filling the driver’s seat, thick hands resting on the wheel as though they belonged there. There was something almost carved about him.
When he finally looked at me in the rearview mirror, the eye contact lasted only a second, but it was long enough.
There are people whose eyes feel like rooms you shouldn’t enter. His had that quality. And strangely, it eased me a little. Disinterest is predictable. Disinterest tends to leave you alone. At that age, that could feel close to safety.
Krystyna, on the other hand, was very interested in me.
She kept looking back. Not constantly, but often enough that I noticed, and I noticed because children who grow up watched tend to become watchers themselves.
Her gaze lingered a little too long each time it settled, as though she were measuring something.
At eleven, I didn’t have the vocabulary for unease, but instinct rarely waits for vocabulary.
The body often knows long before thought catches up.
Something in the way she looked at me felt off.
I could not have told you why. Only that a part of me, small and old already, had begun paying attention.
And still, mixed with that unease, there was excitement.
Which is often how danger first enters, wearing enough promise that your suspicion hesitates. There’s dark humor in that, too.
When the staff member had told Krystyna that I didn’t speak, her smile widened.
“Oh, that’s perfectly fine,” she said, waving her hand as if dismissing the idea entirely. Her voice was soft, almost playful.
“You know,” she added, turning toward me again,
“words aren’t always necessary.” Her eyes met mine.
“Sometimes eyes can say much more.”
The house they lived in looked normal.
When people imagine the beginning of something terrible, they expect warning signs.
Cracked walls, rotting floors, something visually wrong with the place itself.
But the house Krystyna and Bartosz lived in looked like every other middle-class house in that neighborhood.
Two floors, pale plaster walls, a narrow garden bordered by a metal fence that had been painted recently enough that the color still looked new.
Even the street felt ordinary. A quiet neighborhood where the air smelled faintly of damp soil and distant wood smoke from someone's chimney.
When Bartosz pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine, the silence that followed felt strangely peaceful. Krystyna stepped out first.
“Come,” she said gently.
I followed them inside.
The moment the door opened, the smell of the house reached me. The smell of warm food from the breakfast they probably had earlier, cleaning products, something faintly floral that I realized must have been the same perfume Krystyna wore, lingering in the air like a second presence.
The floor beneath my shoes was smooth wood instead of linoleum. That alone felt like an improvement.
There was a small rug by the door where shoes had clearly been placed many times before.
A coat rack leaned against the wall with two jackets hanging neatly from its hooks.
Nothing about the place felt threatening.
If anything, it felt… calm. Safe, even. My fingers brushed lightly along the wall as I moved further inside.
I wasn’t thinking about it consciously; it was instinct.
The plaster was cool beneath my fingertips. Real houses have textures that institutions don’t. Small imperfections in the walls, slight creaks in the floorboards, the subtle scent of everyday life layered into the air over time.
I walked slowly further into the house. I wanted to see everything, take it all in. The hallway stretched deeper into the house, narrow but tidy, with doors lining one side of it. Most of them looked ordinary, until I reached one that didn’t.
The door was thicker than the others. Not dramatically so, but enough that I noticed. And attached to the outside handle was a small metal padlock. I stopped. The rest of the house had felt so normal that the detail stood out immediately.
Locks are meant to keep people out of rooms, but this was on the outside of the door.
My hand lifted slowly. The metal looked cold, solid. My fingers moved toward the lock almost without permission, and just before I touched it…
“Rowan.”
Krystyna's voice cut gently through the hallway behind me. I turned. She was smiling again.
“There you are,” she said softly, walking toward me.
“I was about to show you your room.”
Her hand rested briefly on my shoulder as she guided me further down the hallway.
The locked door remained behind us, but something about it stayed in my mind.
Small details often do, little Ghost. They sit in the back of your thoughts until one day you realize they were never as unimportant as they first appeared.
My room was at the end of the hallway.
Krystyna opened the door with a small flourish, like she was revealing something special.
It wasn’t, not really, but to me, it felt like it was.
The room was simple. A bed pressed against the wall, a small desk beneath the window, a wardrobe with slightly crooked handles that suggested it had been assembled at home rather than purchased finished.
Nothing expensive or remarkable, but there was a thick blanket folded neatly at the end of the bed, and the window closed properly.
Those two details alone made it feel like a dream come true.
I stepped inside slowly. Krystyna watched my face carefully, clearly waiting for some kind of reaction.
But reactions had never been my specialty.
Instead, I moved toward the bed and pressed my hand into the mattress.
It was thick, soft, and most importantly, you couldn’t feel the frame beneath.
For a moment, I stood there without moving, and something strange happened inside my chest. Gratitude.
Not overwhelming, just a sense that this place, this small room with its ordinary furniture and its door that could close was already more than anything I had known before. Krystyna seemed satisfied with my silence.
“You see?” she said gently.
“A place just for you.” She stepped closer to the doorway again.
“Take your time.”
Then she left, and the door remained open behind her.
I walked toward it slowly and pushed it shut carefully; the soft click of the latch sounded almost unreal. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around the room again.
For the first time in years, the quiet around me didn’t feel institutional. It felt personal.
If you had been standing there watching me at that moment, you might have mistaken the expression on my face for something close to relief.
And maybe it was. At eleven years old, it’s easy to believe a closed door means safety.
It takes a little longer to learn that some houses simply hide their darkness better than others.
The first few months went by without much happening.
Just the same days, over and over, until routines began to repeat themselves long enough that they stopped feeling new.
Krystyna insisted on homeschooling me. She explained it the second morning after I arrived, standing in the kitchen with a mug of coffee that smelled stronger than the cheap perfume she wore.
“School can be… difficult for children who have had unstable beginnings,” she said. “This will be better for you.”
Her tone suggested the decision had already been made long before she spoke the words.
I didn’t argue. School had never been something I longed for.
Classrooms require participation, teachers ask questions, other children watch you long enough to notice when you’re different.
Silence becomes harder to maintain in places like that.
So when Krystyna placed a stack of worn textbooks on the kitchen table and told me we would do lessons at home instead, it suited me perfectly.
Our mornings quickly developed into routine.
Breakfast first. Krystyna usually prepared something simple.
Bread, eggs, sometimes porridge if she seemed to be in a productive mood.
The kitchen always smelled faintly of strong coffee and whatever perfume she had applied that day, the two scents mixing into something that lingered long after she left the room.
Bartosz was rarely present for those mornings.
Sometimes he had already left for work before I woke up.
Other times, he sat silently at the far end of the table with a cigarette between his fingers, drinking coffee slowly while reading the newspaper.
He never asked questions about the lessons, never commented on anything Krystyna was teaching me.