The rain tapped on the signboard as Mira closed the blind after her first lonely day in her aunt's studio. The air smelled of rosin, dust and tea that no one had finished. The neon sign "Clock Repair at Wanda's" blinked as if uncertainly, and the long pendulums whispered their steady calls. Mira picked up the bell on the counter to polish it, and then someone discreetly grunted. The sound did not come from the street, but from the bell itself, which popped up as if offended. - 'Please fingers, Madam Owner, you don't rub your dignity off with a sharp cloth,' it said with a dignified clang. - Felix I am, contour bell, I have been informing you of urgent matters for generations - he introduced himself politely. From the shelf he was nodded at by the Klara lamp, whose shade shone a little warmer than the rest. From the depths sounded the serious cough of the Gabrys Clock, so old that it remembered the last century and all its rains. - 'After closing, before the first tram, we're allowed to talk if the owner is listening,' declared Gabrys. Mira raised her eyebrows, but instead of shouting, she set down her cup and sat down on a stool. - It's probably a good time to listen, at least today,' she confessed quietly. - 'Be quick,' hissed the drawer at the back, its handle shuddering. - 'Someone has taken up residence inside and won't tell us what it is, although everyone here declares a function. - 'Drawers have an overdramatisation,' muttered the safe on the left, but the handle moved restlessly. The barometer by the door indicated a sharp drop, and its silver tongue sounded a warning. - 'Storms stir up everything that pretends to be dead,' Klara added, turning off the rest of the lights, as if the room needed silence. Mira remembered that her aunt had stipulated one sentence in her will: 'Do not open anything that does not tell the truth'. Mira pushed back the rug and placed a chair opposite the drawer, as if at the bargaining table. She reached for her aunt's order book, which smelled of ink and old wood, and opened it to a blank page. - 'I call an assembly of things,' she announced, and Felix's bell rang three times, dignified and brief. - Whoever wishes to speak, let them do so without protraction,' she added, trying to sound confident. The radio on the shelf caught a hum in which the word 'no' flashed and disappeared like a golden carp under the ice. The Gabrys clock counted ten beats and the eleventh jammed in the middle of the air, hovering like a sigh. Something small and heavy flashed on the doormat, as if it had fallen from a darker shelf. Lying there was a key made of matt metal, with a spiral pattern engraved on it, cold to the touch like ice under the eyelid. - 'It's for me,' whispered the drawer with a mixture of fear and hope, and the safe twisted its hinges as if to protest. - 'It's not on our register,' Felix warned, but even he lacked tone as Mira took the key in her hand. The mirror above the counter showed her back, and for a split second also someone's hand, which slid into the reflection and disappeared. - 'Miruś,' someone called out from inside the drawer, using a name no one had said since she was a child, and the handle twitched like a breath.