By the fifth tape, Bálint stopped pretending he was alone.
On the second listen, at the exact moment László described Margarita flying naked over Moscow, there was a faint, impossible sound beneath his voice. Not tape hiss. Not distortion. It was a wind. A rushing, freezing wind, as if a window had blown open in the room where he recorded—except László’s apartment, Éva had said, was a sealed interior flat with no cross-draft.
Imagination , Bálint told himself. Old tapes do strange things. Magnetic ghosts.