There are times when the silence, usually an accomplice to my thoughts, turns into a crushing blanket, an oppressive presence that seems to consume me from the inside. That evening, the silence was of that nature, heavy, dense, as if the air itself weighed on my shoulders. The yellowish light of my desk lamp cast flickering shadows on the walls, and each tick of the clock seemed to mark the failure of a new lead. The investigation was stalling. For days, weeks, I had been searching for answers in this maze of uncertainties, chasing ghosts in the darkness.
Then suddenly, through this deafening silence, a sound broke out. The ringing of a telephone. Not just any telephone: the old red telephone, which had been sitting there, on my desk, for years, unused, forgotten like a relic of the past. It was a bright red, almost bloody, a red that recalled scenarios of absolute crises, like the one placed in the Oval Office for emergencies. It was there, connected by simple copper cables, silent, useless, until this evening.
Its ringing, high-pitched, piercing, resonated like an alarm from another time, pulling me from my torpor. The ringing sounded like an echo from the past, a heavy, insistent beat. I stood there frozen, staring at the device, not daring to approach it. Part of me refused to believe it was real.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the dusty device, an object disconnected from the modern world, connected by simple copper cables. It rang, over and over, like a call from the past, insistent, almost desperate. Then, finally, I made up my mind. My trembling hand picked up the receiver.
A voice. Faint, broken, distant, as if passing through miles of fog and time.
“Come… to the bar… around the corner… come.”
I stood there for a moment, the receiver still to my ear. Then I hung up abruptly. The bar on the corner? Why there? Who was calling me? And why now? My thoughts raced, but it all seemed absurd, like a bad dream. Maybe my sleepless nights had finally made me go mad.
I hung up. My heart was beating irregularly. Had my sleepless nights finally driven me mad? Was this a hallucination? It all seemed unreal. I was convinced my mind was playing games with me, that exhaustion was pushing me to the edge.
I stood up, overcome by an agitation that I could not explain, when suddenly my old Olivetti typewriter started up by itself. Its keys, worn by time, struck slowly, heavily, as if moved by an invisible force. The letters appeared, one by one, forming words with a dull click.
"B"..."A"...
The machine seemed to want to form words, letters lined up, hesitant. “Bar.” It urged me to go there, to answer this phantom call. I rubbed my eyes, fighting against the torpor that invaded my mind. It was absurd, impossible. The message was clear. It was an invitation, an injunction. But from whom? I rubbed my eyes, my mind confused.
I looked around, searching for a sign, an explanation. And then, my computer screen, frozen until then, suddenly came to life. Lines of code flashed by, incomprehensible. Then words began to appear, stamped on the screen like hammer blows. Words appeared between the lines, sinister and threatening: Knock, knock, knock.
My heart started beating faster. My fingers trembled on the keyboard.
“Who’s there?” I typed, almost in spite of myself.
The cursor was blinking frantically, a beat that resonated within me like that of my heart. The air was filled with tension, each second seemed to stretch the space around me. I felt dizzy, as if all this were just a strange dream, an illusion.
Then the answer appeared.
"Come... to the bar... we're waiting for you."
I stood there, dazed, unable to comprehend what was happening to me. Was someone waiting for me? But why? Who? I felt watched, as if invisible eyes were scrutinizing me from the shadows.
Without thinking any further, I put on my raincoat and my old hat. I went down the stairs, my steps heavy and hesitant. A light rain was falling, making the streets bright under the glow of the street lamps. The world outside seemed strangely silent to me, as if frozen in another time. Cars passed, horns sounded, but everything seemed distant, unreal.
I walked, my footsteps echoing on the damp cobblestones, toward the bar on the corner of the street. Under the fine rain that was falling, I waited, my eyes fixed on the light of the street lamps, flickering, like a full moon forgotten in an inky night. The bar on the corner of the street stood before me, a heavy and motionless silhouette, as if frozen in time. This place, the old-timers of the neighborhood said, had belonged to the same family for such distant times that its origins were lost in the mists of memory. Its walls, blackened by decades of smoke and oblivion, bore the marks of strange stories, of whispers that no one dared to tell out loud anymore. The building itself seemed to breathe, a tangible, almost unreal presence, like a vestige of another age, of an antediluvian time, where architecture and minds intertwined. Its dusty windows, behind which a pale light shone faintly, looked as if they had not been cleaned for centuries, as if they housed forgotten knowledge or buried secrets that only the thick, ancient walls could keep.
The inside of the bar was even stranger. The creaky floors and old furniture were shrouded in a palpable, dense atmosphere. A lingering smell of stale tobacco and musty wood permeated the air, and every object, every detail seemed charged with a secret history. The few customers seen through the windows remained the same, like shadows trapped in the place, returning again and again to their nightly ritual. The bar itself seemed unreal, like a sort of portal to another world, a place where the laws of time and space dissolved in a strange torpor. It was said that strange figures had been seen there over the years, men and women who belonged to no known era, passing furtively through the mist like ghosts. But tonight, something else awaited me, something deeper, more sinister.
I felt caught in an invisible vice, as if fate itself were leading me there. The door creaked open with an ominous sound, revealing a pale glow inside. An old lady, a frail, stooped figure, stood there, waiting for me, as if my arrival had been foretold long ago.
“Come in,” she whispered, her voice as worn as the wood of the door. “They’re waiting for you…”
I stood there, my feet rooted to the threshold, my gaze trying to settle on the woman who had just opened the door. But her face… I couldn’t make it out. Her features seemed fleeting, as if the light from the street lamps hesitated to illuminate them. It wasn’t just darkness, but a kind of moving veil that prevented anyone from fully contemplating her. She wore an old toga, heavy, with infinite folds, worn by time, and yet immaculate white, almost unreal, as pure as the snow on the highest peaks of the Alps. This striking contrast between her immaculate garment and her appearance eroded by age made me shiver. Everything about her evoked strangeness, a nightmarish familiarity, that tenacious feeling of a presence that one sometimes feels in the dark, when the silence becomes so heavy that it weighs on the chest. That cold feeling that crossed the room, as if an ancient shadow was silently observing you. A dull unease rose in me, an instinctive repulsion, but I could not take my eyes off this figure, like an apparition from the forgotten corners of my fears. She was neither completely human, nor totally other. An echo of a collective memory, that of the beings we meet in dreams, those who wait silently in the shadows, almost invisible but deeply disturbing figures. I felt her presence even before I saw her clearly, and it inspired a kind of visceral fear in me.
Her voice, icy and worn, continued to resonate in my mind. Time seemed to stand still. What repelled me the most was this strange familiarity, as if it were part of a nightmare I had already experienced, but from which I had never managed to wake up. I looked away for a moment, as if to escape this whirlwind of emotions, but the coldness of the air enveloped me even more tightly, and an invisible mist infiltrated my skin. I felt trapped, drawn to the inevitable, unable to turn my back on it.
Without a word, I finally entered the darkness of the bar, letting this presence, this fragment of nightmare, close behind me.
To be continued...
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Disclaimer: This text is a work of fiction-reality. Everything written here is based on real events, but told in a way that resembles a detective novel. Although real names are mentioned, the story aims to explore the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto through the prism of a fictional investigation.
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