The rain drummed against the tall windows of the former convent, converted years ago into a museum wing. The narrow corridors smelled of wax, paper and cool stone, and the steady, reassuring purr of the dehumidifiers trembled in the conservation studio. Lena moved a lamp with a cold light and leaned over a canvas on an easel. The 18th century landscape - a bridge, water, a few small figures whose peeling paint had made ghosts - required a delicate hand. - 'A little more, old man,' she muttered to the painting, reaching for a cotton swab. - 'Let's get that amber coat off you. The varnish, yellowed to a honey shade, came off with difficulty. Each movement of the cotton swab in the thinner was a record of patience over time. Lena liked this work: the slow peeling away of the layers, the touch so light, as if she was stroking the membrane between yesterday and today with her hand. In the silence, she could hear her own breathing and the rustling of a cat perched on a box of cardboard boxes. Fig, brindle and old, opened one eye and stretched lazily. On the wall, above the tool table, hung IR reflectography photos: thin, barely visible lines under layers of paint. Last night, Lena had noticed something odd on the register - there was an arched structure underneath the visible bridge, as if it were another bridge, another clearance, drawn by a more confident and contemporary hand than would be consistent with the date of the painting. She wisely made herself wait. Strange things come out from under the varnish, said the professor in class. Document first, then ask. - Ms Lena? - The voice reverberated off the stone vault. In the doorway stood Mr Frederick, the night watchman, with his baseball cap tilted slightly to one side. - Twenty past two. I'm supposed to lock the south wing, so ring the bell if you need anything. There's something buzzing in the corridor, but I don't know if it's the lady's machines or those old pipes. Lena smiled and showed him a thumbs up. - Thanks. If Figa tries to sneak out again, stop her in the passage. - I'll try. She listens more to pictures than to people,' he replied with seriousness and disappeared behind the door, leaving a slight creak behind. Lena went back to work. Wetting a new cotton swab, she made a test on the margin of the canvas. The layer she was now touching was different. Thinner, cooler under her finger through the glove. The light from the lamp behaved wrongly with her - it did not reflect softly, but seemed to disappear, to fall into the depths. Lena held her breath. She brought the magnifying glasses closer, adjusted the lens. The pigment had no familiar graininess. It resembled ink drawn into paper, except that the paper here was a layer of paint from three centuries ago. She stepped back, switched off the UV lamp and switched on the IR for a moment, taking a series of photographs. The arc of the drawing beneath the surface lay more clearly. This was not a bridge. It was a gate. An opening of proportions a little too narrow, a raspberry line with a white spark in the centre of the picture, like a speck of light in a needle's eye. Lena felt a slight tingling in the nape of her neck, a reflex from the time when, as a child, she used to catch herself staring into the black mirror of the television after switching it off. Seemingly nothing, and yet something. - Document," she reminded herself aloud, reaching for her notebook. She wrote down the time, the temperature in the studio, the parameters of the lamp. Fig moved her ear, as if confirming the procedure. A single tap came from the corridor - probably a window by the stairs, she thought. The rain was insistent at this time of year. Lena returned to the canvas. She touched the brush with a soft solvent - barely a brushstroke - and saw something that stopped her. The brush had dipped a tad deeper than it could. Not in a physical sense; it was more a sensation of, shall we say: resistance not where it should be. She took the brush out. The tip was cool, damp in a 'not local' way. The air above the canvas smelled .... salty. - 'Follies,' she said to herself, as if the loud word would relegate the phenomenon to a prank. - I am prolonging my changes. She checked the window - closed. The humidifiers and dehumidifiers were working as usual. The thermometer wasn't jumping. The phone lay on the table, the screen black. She reached out to take a more close-up picture. As the lens approached the black, light-absorbing spot, the autoexposure went crazy for a split second, as if the camera was trying to illuminate the night endlessly. The old, wide planks of the floor creaked slightly as she shifted position. The rectangle of the lamp showed cracks and dust, illustrated by the angles of the light. Somewhere in the depths of the building, a clock struck; its voice went through the interior like a wave. Lena mechanically counted four strikes ... then realised that the other clock above the door, the electric one, had gone off by a second. The digits blinked a protracted 23:59:60 and went back to 23:00, as if the time apparatus had caught a hiccup. - Mr Frederick? - she called out, and her voice was muffled by a tone by something other than air. Silence. Only the drips at the window and the steady purr of the appliances. Lena jumped with her eyes to the canvas. The blackness in the centre was no longer a mere stain. It was pulsating. Not violently, not like a heart, more like a sleepy breath; it alternately gained depth and faded out. The features of the bridge and the trees around it, barely visible from beneath the remnants of the varnish, vibrated so slightly that it might have been an illusion of reflections had it not been for the fact that one of the microscopic humans on the bridge had picked up a lantern. The light flashed. Once. The second. Lena let the air out through her teeth. She thought of Boris, the painting curator, who still carried an old, discharged Nokia in his pocket and claimed he didn't believe in instruments, only the eye. She wanted to call him. She picked up the phone. The screen lit up with a cascade of notifications from paint shops, then turned into a white void. Network: no service. Wi-Fi: invisible. "Could it be that they're renovating something a floor below again?" - she thought, though she felt it was an excuse. She set up a second tripod with a lamp so that the light came from the side. She noticed that the shadow of the picture frame completely disappeared when she moved the lamp to a particular point. Where the arc of the underpainting intersected with the drawn line of the river. There the shadow did not form. It was as if something was eating the light and giving it away elsewhere. - Well, all right,' she said, more to herself than to the world. - Procedures. Extra documentation. Not to touch unnecessarily. She put on fresh gloves. She prepared a tissue paper sample. She used the longest, thinnest spatula to touch it, as if distance mattered in the face of what had no name. She pressed the edge of the blotting paper against the dark oval. The blotting paper sucked minimally, as if attracted by the shadow. She pulled back. There was moisture on the fibres. A drop, translucent, cool. She put it to her nose, automatically, as if sensing a solvent. The smell of the sea struck her clearly - iodine, salt, the coolness of the morning, all the things she knew from trips to the Baltic, but overly pure, as if distilled. Fig raised her head and hissed quietly. The hairs on her back stood up. After a moment, she meowed as if to warn a man sitting on the end of a branch above the water. Lena looked at her and, for the first time in the evening, felt something not mixed with craft: a hard, cool pebble in her belly. The door to the studio slammed treacherously on the draught. A metallic clatter reverberated off the walls. Lena twitched, then snorted a stifled laugh at her own nervousness. She went to the door, turned the lock. She returned to the easel. The painting, her painting, was no longer hers. The blackness in the centre had widened, swallowed a section of paint from the river and a section of the bridge, not destroying them, just seeming to move them deeper. In the centre, beyond the black, there was a texture she could not immediately name. Neither stone nor water. Something with the lightness of smoke and the weight of glass, shiny and yet dull. She caught herself searching for words that didn't match the familiar materials. - 'Mr Frederick,' she said louder, this time without feigned freedom. She was answered by a tap. But not from the corridor. From inside the painting. She choked on the air. She pushed the lamp even closer, risking overheating the bulb. Something refracted in the blackness, as if the passage had entered a phase not taught at any seminar. The oval had enlarged and was already the size of a plate. Maybe bigger. Seen at an angle, the surface pulsed faintly, in a rhythm that no mechanism in the studio contained. The rustling of tissue paper on the table sounded like paper being shaken by the wind. Lena took a step, then another. In her head she reassured herself with learned gestures: lay the tools parallel, don't touch the old cracks, don't blow on the paint. Her hands, however, were doing something else. She reached for the rolling tape measure, the metal one, tightly rolled in a yellow casing. She slid out ten centimetres and carefully inserted the tip into the dark oval. The tip disappeared softly, without resistance, as if she had put it in cool water. She pulled back. The metal was damp and riddled with tiny, bright pollen. Crystals? She pressed one against the light with her fingernail. It dissolved like salt. - 'No,' she said, this time completely voiceless. Fig jumped off the carton and ran closer, as if attracted by curiosity, but stopped two steps from the easel. She turned her coat green. Something in the middle of the painting twitched with clearer intention. Like the shadow of a man passing close to the other side of the glass. Like the shadow of a man? The weight of the presence was obvious, although her eye only saw shifts of light and flashes that couldn't have come from the LED lamp in the studio. The radio at Mr Frederick's belt beeped from the corridor. In its crackle, Lena heard her own name - short, clipped, as if from a distance. "Lena... downstairs... Lena?" The voice was similar, but not the one she knew. Like a double, as if it was carrying across the surface of the water. "You're not alone" - she thought, not sure to whom. Or maybe just to someone on the other side. Before she had time to gather the other documentation, before she had time to unfold yet another blotter and say all the wise things to herself about caution, the black oval stretched like a pupil to the light. The picture frame creaked as if someone was about to lean on it. The air thickened by degrees. There was salt on her tongue. On the skin of her arms - the chill she knew from mornings by the sea, here in the city centre. A sound came from inside the small, impossible clearance: a single thump, like a step on wet stone. Lena did not step back. She reached out her hand, not yet touching, but close enough to feel the temperature change in inches of space. The blackness just in front of her fingers trembled like a pigeon's skin under its feathers. She thought suddenly, sharply and very clearly, that her life would split in a minute into 'before' and 'after'. At that moment, something on the other side shifted once more - this time more clearly. The edge of the oval opening rippled and, on the border between light and shadow, the outline of a hand appeared: slim, as if unfamiliar, but strangely familiar in the shape of its fingers. It paused at the threshold, as if hesitating to cross, and then made a slow, irreversible movement towards the studio.