The seafront street smelled of rain and book dust, although the drops were just gathering on the edges of the clouds. The signboard above the shop window, faded by the years and the salty wind, proclaimed: "Aquilon - Cartographic Antiquarian". The neon sign of the letter lit up whimsically, again and again, as if winking at passers-by who scurried between the streams of lantern light. A night butterfly flitted about the glass, leaving a web of shadows on it. Lena stood behind the counter straightening maps that no one had touched for a long time. When she arrived here after Aunt Hania's death, she found the shelves heaving with atlases in which the seas were bluer than they really were and the rivers straighter than they were in real life. For weeks she had been learning to touch them: the parchment was as soft as breath, the chalky paper as hard as the cartographer's voice, which does not tolerate objections. She didn't yet have her aunt's habits, she didn't have her patience, but she had inherited two things from her: the key to the sealed drawer and the belief that maps are not only a picture of the world, but also a memory of it. That evening, the key finally gave way. The metal squeaked and inside Lena found a thin box with a tin latch. On the lid someone had scratched in small letters: "Read by the wind". She smiled - it sounded like a joke from someone who couldn't help but leave a clue. When she opened the box, she saw the one and only sheet - an untitled map, on paper that shouldn't have survived so many years, yet was springy and warm from the touch, as if it had just been imprinted. The cartography of this map was peculiar. The lines of the streets resembled a network of nerves, spreading radially from a point Lena did not recognise. The scale was silent. The legend was absent. In the margin someone had drawn a small wind rose in pencil, but without the north. In its place was a hollow tooth, like a missing tooth in a child's smile. On the back, in my aunt's small handwriting, it stood: "Not every path exists at once. Some appear when you already know where you want to go." The door rang a bell like a spoon against porcelain. Iwo walked in, wearing a coat that always smelled of ozone and wool. He drove the night trams, spoke little, read a lot, searched Lena for maps of the sky and old timetables of lines that were no longer there today. Sometimes he brought her gingerbread, once he showed her a photo from the cab: empty tracks like threads on the grey canvas of the city. - 'You look like you've found something that's asking for trouble all by itself,' he muttered, hanging up his hat. - Maybe. 'Or something asking to be read in the wind,' Lena replied, lifting the box as if it were a chick. They sat down at a large table with scratches and ink stains. Lena pulled the map apart carefully, the way one pulls open a curtain so as not to scar the view. Iwo leaned over, squinting his eyes. He watched the light from the lamp ride over the folds of the paper, the shadows of the letters hiding in the recesses of the fibres. - 'Here,' he said after a moment, touching a point that had something of the island in it and something of the eye. - There has never been anything here. This thing is at the end of a street that has no name. Pay attention: this corner, this arch... It resembles the last stop of the 9 line, but... - he broke off and looked at her. - Our town doesn't have an edge to the lighthouse. Lena saw it too: the slender silhouette of a lighthouse was growing on a white field of paper. There was no sea there. Even the boldest maps lied gracefully, but this one didn't look like a joke. There were shadows of stairs on the paper, as if someone had drawn them from memory or from a dream. Ink came from somewhere in places where it hadn't been a moment before. Lena felt the tips of her nerves tingle in her fingers; something twitched in the paper's clearance, as if the map had breathed in the evening. Outside the window, the neon sign of the Cynobr across the street hissed and went out. A gust of wind stirred the signboard of the Aquilon. It had darkened, though it was not yet raining. The sounds of the city grew quieter and something new bubbled up to them: a barely audible murmur, like the moaning of ships not here. Iwo raised his head. - Can you hear it? - He asked. - I tune in to hear - she replied. - After all, I'm supposed to read in the wind. She opened the upper window. A draught poured in, ragged the cobwebs over the lamp, moved the pages of the atlases. The map on the table moved a millimetre. The lines of the streets, still fine and crisp a moment ago, grew softer. Lena pressed the corners with weights in the form of small globes. Then a faint, luminous line appeared on the paper, like a scar, and above it - thin words that were not written in ink. They were like a voice that stays in the larynx and vibrates on the edge. Fold the paper along the scar. - Who had written it? - Iwo leaned over so that his shadow covered half the table. - Your aunt? - Not her handwriting. Her letters are more square. These are... - she hesitated because she didn't want to use the word her mind was suggesting. - Parallel to the shadow. They both smiled, but only for a moment. A second lamp lit up in the shop, as if she sensed that the first one was failing. Lena took a deep breath. She knew the rules of handling maps like to do things: don't rush, don't tear, don't be afraid of the paper. She slid her fingers under the edge of the sheet. A scar stretched across half the city, connecting an antique shop to a place that pretended to be a lighthouse without a sea. - 'If we put this together, it's possible that something will unscrew,' said Iwo, in the tone of a man who has seen the intersections that motorists' cabs dream of. - 'What if that's what he's waiting for? - whispered Lena, feeling the taste of rust and sugar in her throat. She bent the paper. When the edges met over the line - soft as a needle scar - something in the shop shifted a fraction of reality. The shelf of atlases leaned over, as if to eavesdrop. The floor, hitherto smooth, creaked like gravel. Dust slid down from the ceiling, dancing in the lamp beam like plankton inside an aquarium. And then, at the point where a line ran along a silent alley on the map, a narrow piece of panelling slid away on the back wall of the antique shop, with a quiet sigh of wood that remembered other times. - 'You don't have such a cache planned,' Iwo remarked calmly. - 'I've seen your drawings. - 'I don't have one either,' she replied, feeling her hands suddenly grow warmer. - But the map does. Behind the panelling was a corridor that had never been here. It didn't look particularly old. Narrow, clad in walls with the texture of smooth bricks, it smelled of salt, dampness and something mineral that penetrated the bones like the cool sound of purple glass. Small, round pebbles glistened on the floor, as if someone had spilled decoration from the river bed here. From below came a clatter, rhythmic and metallic, like a distant tram bell: ding... ding... ding. - Why could it even be heard? - Iwo whispered, but his voice behaved differently in this corridor - it came back, softened, as if someone had wrapped him in a woollen shawl. - The tracks are, after all, two floors away and in a different direction. - 'Maybe the paper folded the sounds too,' said Lena, uncertain whether she was joking or had just said something serious. She took the lamp in her hand - an old paraffin lamp that she used for the mood, not out of necessity. The flame trembled as a draught stroked its sides. Instinctively, Iwo took the doorbell from the stand, as if it would come in handy to ward off anything - he didn't know what yet. They closed the shop door and turned the key in the lock; that mechanical sound - a sheaf of earthy sense - sounded soothing. - Shall we go? - He asked, but there was already an answer in his gaze. - 'Let's go,' Lena repeated, feeling the map, now rolled up and slipped into her pocket, pulsing warmly against her hip. The corridor had no corners, yet each step revealed a new perspective, as if the space was folding together with them, centimetre by centimetre. The walls, though smooth, glittered with patterns of scales. The further they descended, the clearer the noise became - not so much of the water, but of her memory. Lena could feel the salt particles in her mouth; with her tongue she could sense them like Braille. They stopped at a resting place, where someone had carved a wind rose in the stone fastening north. In its centre was a brass bolt. - 'If this were on a tram, I'd recognise the lack of screws holding the brake cassette in place,' muttered Iwo, touching the brass with a devout reverence for the things that hold the world together. - But it's not a tram. - It's not anything we know,' replied Lena. At the end of the corridor, just past the last step, stood a door. They didn't match the rest - they were of dark metal, worn at the edges, as if someone a.k.a. hundreds of people had touched them with careful fingers over the years. In the centre, instead of a handle, was a wind rose identical to the one in the stone, also devoid of midnight. But at the bottom, where she would have expected a bolt, a teardrop-shaped steel handle shimmered, warm from looking at it. Light oozed from the bottom of the holder - barely, as if someone had put a thick sock over the lamp. Iwo knelt down, put his ear to the metal door. - Can you hear it? - He asked after a while. - Like a beat. Not like a man's heart. More... like the pulse of the city when you sleep with the window open and the trams pretend to rain. Lena did not answer. She remembered Aunt Hania's finger tapping on the tip of the mapbook. 'Some roads don't lead elsewhere. They lead deeper," she used to say, without adding anything more. Lena felt a tremor in her chest where curiosity and tenderness mixed, like the smell of coffee and ink at dawn. She put her hand on the handle. It was warm. As warm as if someone had just let it go on the other side. - 'Wait,' Iwo stretched out his hand as if to stop her, but he didn't take it back. - 'If you open this, there's no going back to the ordinary day. - And is today ordinary? - She asked in a whisper, herself surprised at how calm it sounded. A narrow strip of light emerged from between the edge of the door and the doorframe, stronger than before, as if someone had taken a step on the other side. The air trembled and the corridor smelled of announced rain, the first to fall in the middle of summer while the dust is still warm. Something - barely audible, barely perceptible - called her name twice, very quietly: Lena... Lena.... She swallowed her saliva, clenched her fingers tighter and twisted the handle to the right. The metal responded with a low, velvety murmur. She took a breath, and then, before she could push, something snapped on the other side and the light went out, as if someone had put their finger on the key. In the same second, a shudder ran through the metal and the wind rose on the door and a razor-thin shadow cut across it. - 'Do you hear that? - hissed Iwo. - There's someone...