Agnes walked across the kitchen, which was situated in the basement between the pantry and the laundry room. Pushing her trolley, she weaved her way through cooking pots that would soon be steaming with greasy vapors. She was alone, at that hour suspended between night and day; her only companions were the shadow of a furtive rat and the shapes of slaughtered animals left to hang inside what used to be an ice box.

She took the service elevator up to the first floor. This part of the building was her responsibility, but recently this task had begun to fill her with a nameless dread, like a latent fever that never quite flared up.

The elevator groaned under the combined weight of her body and the trolley, the chains and the cables began to squeal, and the cage rattled as it rose, coming to a shaky halt a few meters above. Agnes pulled the metal grate open. The damp-stained first floor corridor was a long narrow band of dull blue, with a constellation of large panelled windows on one side.

A windowpane was banging against its frame in a steady rhythm. She left her trolley and went over to close the window. The glass was cold and fogged over; she wiped at it with one hand and made a porthole of sorts. Down in the valley, the light of dawn had begun to illuminate the village. The roofs of the houses looked like tiny lead-colored tiles. Further up, at 1,700 meters above sea level and between the settlement and the School, the motionless expanse of the lake was beginning to turn pink beneath the mist. The sky was clear. But Agnes knew that the sun that day wouldn’t bring any warmth to their steep, sloping clearing—by now she had learned to interpret the migraines that plagued her the moment she stepped out of bed.

The fog rose to engulf everything in its path: light, sounds, even smells became imbued with its stagnating presence, that essence of ancient bones. It seemed to come to life as it climbed over the frostbitten grass, and from its tendrils came forth those laments.

The sighs of the dead, thought Agnes.

It was the Buran, a fierce north-easterly wind. From its source in distant steppes, it had journeyed thousands of kilometers and forced its way into this valley, roaring against the river banks below the tree line, whirling across the floodplains, and howling as it emerged on the other side, only to crash against the rock wall of the mountain.

It’s just the wind, she kept telling herself.

The pendulum clock in the atrium chimed six times. It was getting late, but Agnes stood still. She was conscious that she was stalling, and she also knew exactly why.

It’s all in your head. All in your head.