## **NEW MINI ADVENTURE #1

#

"DARK CELLARS OF THE FISHERMAN'S HOUSE"

(full, extensive, long version)**

In the early morning, Commissioner Jakub was awakened by a phone call. Sleepy, but with a keen detective instinct, he reached for the receiver before he could even sit up in bed. The voice on the other end was jerky, strained, as if the officer on duty was trying to fight the chill he himself sensed in the situation he was about to report.

"Commissioner... we caught something... not in the water, but *by the water*. It's better that you come."

Jakub sighed deeply. Argo jumped up and was already standing by the door, as if he knew his man had to go to the front lines of the mystery again. Dawn was just beginning to rub his eyes; the light was the color of sleepless mist.

The Fisherman's House stood on the edge of the harbor, an old building reminiscent of the days when fishermen lived a bustling, intermittent life. Abandoned for a decade, it was overgrown with salt, dust, and legends. It was said that the cellars were inhabited by cats, ghosts, and sometimes even homeless people seeking shade from the world. This morning, however, nothing so ordinary existed there.

An unnatural silence reigned inside, as if too tightly enclosed within the walls. The policeman on duty showed the way down. Argo, as always, led the way, paws padding silently up the stairs.

The cellar had a low, heavy ceiling. The smell of damp mingled with something sharper—a metallic note that always heralded bad news. The commissioner's flashlight cut through the darkness. The beam stopped on something that shouldn't have been in such a place.

The body was gone. Instead, a *fishing net* hung carelessly on the wall, and on it someone had hung a… mask.

The mask was wooden, old, darkened with years. The face was contorted, the mouth stretched into an inhuman smile. The eyes were deeply slitted, as if someone wanted to hide the darkness that watched.

“Someone playing some kind of… show with us?” the policeman muttered.

Jakub remained silent. He stepped closer. Argo growled quietly, his voice trembling but confident—the kind that never made a mistake about danger.

Beneath the mask, someone had hung a scrap of paper. Old, yellowed, like the print from a pre-war calendar.

“It’s started. Find me before the salt falls again.”

The commissioner felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.

It was a style he hadn’t seen in many years.

The style of a man he believed he had captured.

A man who should no longer be breathing free air.

Argo gently tugged on his pant leg. The dog found something else. In the corner of the basement lay a small fishing buoy. It should have been orange, but someone had painted it with dark varnish. On its surface was a symbol—a spiral, painted with an uncertain, seemingly trembling hand.

The commissioner didn't like spirals.

A spiral signified the author of ancient crimes whose motives no one understood.

A spiral signified a return.

Jakub knelt beside Argo and whispered:

"I think we have an old friend, my man."

The dog barked once. Not joyfully—more as if confirming a suspicion.

Jakub's gaze returned to the mask. The smile she had carved seemed to grow wider, more mocking with each glance. Or was it just an illusion of the light? The commissioner already knew that it wasn't. Nothing in this story would be an illusion.

The flashlight beam danced across the walls, revealing more elements. Old hooks hung from the ceiling. Someone had stuck blank photographs into them, all with faces torn off. Jakub recognized one as the port, another as the old town. Each photo bore the same cutout mark—the jagged shape of a head.

Someone was setting up a theater.

And Jakub and Argo had just entered the stage.

"We have to find the rest," the commissioner muttered. "And understand what this... salt means."

Argo sniffed the spiral on the buoy and growled even louder.

Something didn't feel right. The Fisherman's House had been closed for years, but someone must have entered, set up this macabre installation, spent time here.

Or perhaps... he had lived here for a long time, hidden between layers of dust and silence?

Jakub glanced at the message again.

"It has begun."

Words like that don't just happen by accident.

Leaving the basement, the commissioner already knew that he was facing not so much an investigation as a game.

A game of cat and mouse with an old shadow from the past.

Argo stopped on the stairs, looking back, as if checking if the darkness was following them.

And the darkness was just waiting for them to return.

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