On a day when the sky hung low over the city like a crumpled blanket, a guard in the library asked us if we really knew what we were looking for. We answered simultaneously: "Map". That always sounded safe. I was fourteen, Natan was fifteen, and our holiday plan was quite simple: hang around places we weren't supposed to be, and pretend it was research. The Provincial Library was housed in a former insurance building, with a dome glazed in green rhombuses and a staircase that creaked like a wardrobe door. Rumour had it that there was a floor in this building that was not on any plan. I couldn't stop thinking about it. "Check it out," whispered Natan at the geography department bookcase. He had a torch and a guitar tuning app in his pocket, because Natan could never go anywhere without gadgets. He swung open a heavy sliding bookcase marked 'CARTOGRAPHY - REGIONS', and behind it, like a place under a tear-off poster, a narrow gap was revealed. A cool, slightly metallic smell of dust and ozone blew from it. Hidden inside was a narrow wooden corridor and a winding staircase leading upwards. "This can't be compliant with health and safety regulations," he - he stated, but smiled as if he had just won a bet with the world. I squeezed in first. The steps were uneven and the wall on the left bore the marks of old maps that someone had once taken down here in a hurry - rectangles of lighter paint, yellowed pins in places. After a few flights of stairs, we arrived at a door with milky glass. On the glass was an inscription in gold paint: "Cartography Reading Room - Special Collections". The handle was cold and smooth. I pushed. The room was high, under the very dome. In the centre stood one long table with a brass wind rose inlay and a lamp resembling an earth globe. Against the walls - cabinets with drawers for maps, bearing yellowed labels with names that sounded like incantations: "Custom scales", "Parallel lanes", "Rotational mappings". The floor, dark as a river at night, creaked as we walked over to the table. A single volume lay on it. The leather on the cover was green, pulled through with brass corners. Burnt into the spine was the title: 'Atlas Between'. Someone who wrote it had a sure hand and a sense of humour. I touched the letters with my fingertips. The cover was warmer than it should have been. "If this is a tease, I'm impressed," Natan muttered and took out his phone to take a picture. The screen shuddered for a second, as if it had caught the wrong focus, then the image sharpened. "Weird. My camera doesn't like it." I opened the atlas. The first page had a dedication, written in ink so black it was almost blue: "For those who seek passages, not places." Underneath, a small note in pencil: "The storm favours, the sound helps. - Ż." We looked at each other. Behind the panes of the dome, the world dimmed even more. The storm stitched the clouds together with flashes of lightning, distant and dully rumbling. I turned over a few sheets of paper. The maps were strangely soft to the touch, as if they were gently springing. The coastline was able to move momentarily at the edge of the page. The place names were unfamiliar, but the way they were written gave the impression that they had always existed somewhere: "The Isthmus of Silence", "The Street That Wraps Around Itself", "The Point That Cannot Be Seen from Outside". "Check this out." Natan pointed to something in the margins. In the back of the table, just below the lamp, was a brass rosette with a groove resembling a twist lock. In one of the drawers we found a linen envelope. Inside - a thin brass key in the shape of a windlass and a piece of paper with short instructions, written in an even calligraphic script: "Allegro 432: Wind according to the signs". "So the notes?" - I asked. Natan was already running the reed application. He slid the key into the rosette. Click. He looked at me, raised an eyebrow and touched the screen. A bright A sound flowed from the phone's speaker. The air above the table moved, barely perceptible, as if someone had opened an invisible window somewhere upstairs. The sound blended with the murmur of a thunderstorm; the bulb in the lamp whirred and flared whiter. The wind rose under the glass began to rotate slowly. The directions, engraved with care, caught the light and rendered it in tiny golden flashes. On one sheet, the one with the plan of our city, the lines of the streets thickened like a reminiscent sketch. Where there should have been a park, something else appeared - a narrow artery without a name, running from the cycle path straight into... an empty space that had not yet been on the map. After a while, the ink drew out the letters themselves: "Intercity". "Did we...?" "Quiet." Natan put his finger to his lips, but it wasn't me he was trying to silence. On the left side of the atlas was an index. I flipped through the pages. My fingers stopped by themselves on page 312: the heading: "Commitments". Under it - two entries: "Lena S. - p. 312, item 4"; "Natan K. - p. 312, item 4". I felt my stomach grow empty, and immediately something cold and sharp filled me, like a sip of water straight from the tap. "Who wrote this in here?" - I asked. My whisper bounced off the dome and came back soft, with a slight reverberation. Natan shrugged his shoulders, then ran his finger along the edge of the atlas. The storm rumbled closer. The panes of glass in the dome trembled. The right wing of the door, the one we had left slightly ajar, closed without a sound, as if someone had held it from the inside and just let it out. The air thickened. The wind rose rosette stopped in the NE, and the key made a short, metallic rasping sound. The lamps in the room dimmed - only the globe above the table now shone brightly, focusing the light in a circle about the size of a tablecloth. On the map, 'Intercoastal' was no longer just a shadow of a name. The waterfront line drew itself clearly. A note appeared in the margin, as if added just now: "Window: when the rain is thick and the sound is clear. Don't open if you don't know if you'll be back. - Ż." "That doesn't sound like a warning to primary students," Natan muttered, but he didn't stop smiling. His fingers trembled as he gripped the brass key and tried to move it gently. The lock spun slowly, resisting like milk in a jug. I felt myself getting light-headed, as if I were climbing a staircase that was too narrow. "Wait," I said. - "If it does anything, then... maybe it really does." Instead of answering, Natan increased the volume of the reed by one level. The sound became clearer, clean and disturbingly present. At the same moment, the first large raindrop hit the glass of the dome. It was followed by another. A wall of whispers fell over the city, cutting it off from our breaths. Under my fingers I could feel no longer paper, but a slightly damp, springy surface. The line of the 'Interwebs' trembled and widened, as if someone from that side had rested their hand against it. At the junction of the leather cover and the table that spoke with all the winds, light came into focus. A clear outline of a circle appeared. Inside it, the maps began to slide one after the other, as if someone were knocking them over from underneath. The seas became the sky for a second and the roads became glowing lines. "Do you hear?" - Natan whispered, but the sound of the instrument suddenly died away. In its place came another tone, deep and soft, like the singing of metal pipes. It did not frighten me. It was like a call. And then, from the same place where the tone came from, I heard a whisper, completely human, very clear: "You are late." We froze. Natan looked at me questioningly, and I nodded: yes, I heard the same thing. There was a flash in the lamp. The index in the atlas flipped itself to the next page. Where our town had been, there were signs I didn't know - tiny, thin pictograms resembling feathers and sickles of the moon. One of them, resembling a bird with too long legs, flashed for a second and returned to the edge of the page, as if sticking its head out to see what we were up to here. "All right," - whispered Natan, and it was his "good" that didn't sound at all like the usual - "either we run away, or... check." I didn't reply. I stood up and placed my hands on either side of the circle of light. It was cool, but not cold; I could feel its border, as clear as the border of a sheet of water. When I moved my finger across the surface, it made a smudge, which disappeared after a moment. The room was quiet. Even the rain had chosen another place for a moment. "Lena." - Natan touched my elbow. He was pale, but sparks lit up in his eyes. - "If this is the entrance, someone wants us to make it in time. Maybe it's the... ¿?" "Or someone we haven't seen." My words hung in the air. A crack appeared on the edge of the circle of light, thin, as if drawn with a fingernail. It widened slowly, in a quiet crack, like an ice crack on a lake. Inside - darkness, but not the kind that consumes, but the kind that moves, like breath. The lock in the wind rose and wailed quietly. When the crack had become wide enough for a hand to fit through, salt and cold wind blew in from that side. Clearly, unmistakably, the distant cries of seagulls also reached us. A smile, which I did not control, pulled at the corner of my mouth. Natan reached out his hand, not towards the circle, but towards me. I grasped it. His hand was dry, warm. I counted to three in my mind. Then the circle of light, hitherto as even as a plate, tightened and undulated. The crack line flashed and suddenly spread wider, as if something from that side had taken a step forward. A shadow cut through the glare, and on the surface of the atlas, right in front of us, the outlines of something that was certainly not just a drawing were outlined....