In Brzezina nad Wodą, between the river and the railway embankment, there was a shop whose signboard had creaked in the wind for years: 'U Jan Silnickiego - Zegary. Tuning time". Nobody had the courage to take it down. The rain smeared the letters and squeezed under the rusted metal plates, as if trying to write their own sentence. Since the embankment stopped trembling with trains and the river flooded every few seasons, the shop window has become overgrown with a tin of dust and crumbled gold from worn-out dials. Lena liked to stand opposite and look into the glass, although she could only see her reflection, crooked through the old glass. She was fourteen years old, with a pocket full of nuts and brass screws that she fished out of the ground like treasures, and a pocket watch that she didn't know what to do with. The watch had belonged to her grandfather. She got it on the anniversary of his disappearance - the day he stopped answering the phone, didn't close his studio door and seemed to have melted away between the minutes. The watch was not ordinary. Underneath the silver, you could feel the warmth of the skin of someone who had worn it for years. In the evening, the hands seemed to grow lighter and turn around, gliding back a few dashes, as if the night breathed into it on its own account. When Lena put it to her ear, she heard not so much a ticking as a quiet, steady inhale and exhale. - 'He does,' Nikolai whispered one day as she handed him the watch in the schoolyard. - As if he had lungs. Nikolai's hands always smelled of peppermint gum and notebooks full of tidy letters. No one like him could keep silent together with Lena. He was a year younger, but more prudent than many a teacher. He liked to play chess with the gentleman from the newsagent's shop and question people about things that others missed. That afternoon, as the wind braided the river's hair into long braids of foam, they stood along the full length of the wall at the embankment. Against the wall, as always on the equinox, a staircase began to emerge. Inconspicuous, water-lined steps of slate that disappeared under a thin layer of silt in summer. There were whispers about them in Brzezin: that they led to the 'old workhouse under the river', that when the bells from the two towers - the chapel and the town hall - struck at the same time, the stairs led not only downwards. - 'Today they'll strike together,' said Nicholas, pointing to the paper. - 'See, the tide forecast, the shift of the town hall clock fixed this afternoon, the chapel is always late. Have you got it? Let's see it. Lena tightened her fingers on the cold metal of the watch. Her heart was on her left side, but it seemed that her other heart lived here, in her hand. As she descended the first step, the metal heated up so that she could barely hold it. A car dropped out from behind the overpass and disappeared into the rain. The world narrowed to damp walls that were like smooth gills. Silence sounded beneath her feet and above her - the clatter, clatter, clatter of water against the beams. - 'You can still make up your mind,' Nikolai muttered, pushing his hood more over his eyes. - 'You know, if it's just a basement, it'll still be cool, right? - If it's a cellar, why does the air smell of paraffin and something... - she broke off. - Like a brown light. - A shallow wine cellar? - tried Nikolai with a smile. - No. As if the clock had just drawn in the air. The staircase oozed the city, and at the end of it hung a plaque on a chain with scorched letters: "Do not open until your breath is equal to the bell". The plaque had not rusted. Beneath it, in the brickwork, there were cracks that resembled neither cracks nor graffiti. They led into a circle, forming a sort of shield. In the middle, someone had scratched out a tiny socket, the size of a fingernail. - 'This looks like a key, which is also a question,' muttered Nikolai, crouching down. - Lena, your fingers...? He didn't ask directly, but Lena was already applying her watch to the recess. She risked the edge of the envelope. The metal touched the brick, the air vibrated. There was the same sudden double sound from the distance: two bells from two towers struck simultaneously. The watch drew him in like oxygen. Something thin and cold slid across their necks. The wall gave way, not so much opening as sliding open like eyelids. Dry warmth gushed from inside, the smell of oils and old wood. They slipped in, piling their steps on a soft floor that didn't creak. This was no cellar. The hall stretched so far that the light of their torches met gold dust in the air and returned. There were clocks hanging here: round, triangular, snail-shaped, of wood, of milky glass, of brass. Some had strings of water beads instead of pendulums that wouldn't fall; others had more teeth than you could count in a week. And yet the silence was so thick that all they could hear was their breaths and... something else. It was not a ticking. It was a gentle, joint inhale-exhale, like the breath of a sleeping creature that cannot be seen. - Can you hear it? - asked Lena almost silently. - As if the room was breathing. 'Or as if someone had taught it to breathe,' replied Nikolai, nudging the nearest number plate with his elbow. It didn't budge. - 'Don't touch it, okay? At the end of the room, where the light was fading, something glinted. They approached slowly, stepping as if the ground might crack. This 'something' turned out to be a door of dark, smoked glass. It had no handle or hinges. A circle of white metal had been inserted in place of the lock. A circle slightly smaller than Lena's watch. Under the door someone had written in the same hand as on the plaque: "Equal beating of hearts and bells. Only then." - We don't have bells," remarked Nikolai. - But hearts...? I don't know how to tune them. Lena felt the words were too heavy. She slid her fingers under the watch chain. The metal gave her warmth, as if it had been waiting all along. She put it in a circle. At first nothing happened. Then the hands hesitated, as if someone behind the cloudy glass held his breath, and then - as if an exhalation ran from one mechanism to another - all the clocks around joined in a whisper: sss, sss, sss. Lena's watch began to count down. Not forward, not backwards. In a rhythm she didn't know, the numbers fell off the dial like dewdrops, although the dial wasn't losing them at all. For a moment she thought she saw a thin thread connecting the envelope to something on the other side of the glass, something huge and patient. - 'If your grandfather were here...', Nicolas began, but cut off as something in the ceiling moved like a school of silver fish. Above them there was no concrete slab or bricks, just some liquid dark matter, like the surface of a river seen from below, in which someone had dissolved a few stars. The hall grew cooler. The dark glass door fogged slightly from the inside, like a window behind which someone is breathing. Somewhere far away... or maybe right next door... a very soft knocking sounded three times. Then a second, louder one. Finally a third, so distinct that they felt it in their sternums. - Do you hear that name? - whispered Nikolai, blanching. Lena didn't have to ask who was pronouncing it. Someone, on the other side of the glass, pronounced 'Lena' the way one does at home when called to the table, and the way one does when one doesn't want to wake the whole house. The glass trembled. The watch in the circle remembered a sequence; his breathing turned into one long, quiet, stretched tone. - 'If we open, and this isn't the door? - Nikolai asked in a voice made of rough air. - 'If we don't open it, and it's the only chance,' replied Lena, but so quietly that she could have been talking to herself. Then all the clocks at once held their breath. Something like the shadow of a hand spread across the dark glass, just at the level of her face. Pac. One trace. Pac. A second, larger one. Pac. A third. The circle of white metal flared, as if a tiny lantern had awoken inside it. And before any of their thoughts had time to jump to the first shelf of reason, the circle startled, the glass vibrated - and the air behind it moved as if it was about to go inside.