The rain was beating against the windows of the City Library at Foksal as evenly as if someone on the other side of the glass was moving a thick comb across it. It was nighttime, an hour at which usually only the readers, their green LEDs and Mr Roman from the porter's lodge, a man with a hundred keys and one slightly too big coat, remain. Lena twisted the tea cup all the way until the lid clicked. She knew this building better than some of the flats she had lived in - the cracks in the plaster, the stifling smell of cardboard, the breath of the pipes that once toasted without memory and once were silent as if offended. "Just this more," - she said half-heartedly to herself, clutching a folder of fiches to her chest. There had been a mistake in the map section: a page leading to the plans of a town that had existed for less than seven years was missing and blurred on the edge of the last century, as if someone had erased it with an eraser. In the change log of today - her handwriting, her signature, and yet her memory had no snapshot of that moment. She thought of the fatigue and how she might start talking to the cauldron in the kitchen again, as Grandma Halina used to do, muttering to the couple stories about doors that only appear during storms. Mr Roman poked his head out of the gatehouse, correcting his cap. - 'Downstairs again, Miss Leno? - Just for a moment. If anything, please shout,' she replied with a smile, slightly crooked as always. She was familiar with his habit of ripping the gatekeeper out of a movie when she stayed up late. Only that today his radio, usually too loud, whispered barely audibly, as if afraid to disturb the rhythm of the rain. The gridded lift sighed and started down to the storerooms. As the sliding doors buzzed and stood, she was struck by the coolness of the basement, the smell of old glue, ebonite and something else, sweet, completely out of place. Without. She paused for a moment, listening. Where did the lilac smell come from in November? She remembered her grandmother Halina's garden, the branches heavy with buds, the spring evenings when the sound of breaking dishes in the neighbourhood mixed with the song from the radio. For a moment she had the impression that she could hear that radio - the same old soprano - but it was just the wind managing to find its way to the air vent. She smiled at her own nerves and turned into an aisle of catalogues. Hundreds of tiny drawers, brass handles, paper labels - alphabet, alphabets within alphabets. Her finger slid over 'A', 'At', 'Atlas-Asia'. When she pulled the drawer marked 17-K, it twitched. It was heavier than all the others, as if someone had sewn a stone inside. She slid it out carefully and stood with the thin case in her hands. Inside - order, a row of cards as even as a comb, but between the "Road atlas of the province..." and "Atlas of herbs - edition..." stuck a card she had never seen in any inventory. Paper slightly cracked at the edges, ink saturated, as if fresh: "Atlas of the Ways They Thought". The signature pretended to be from their system, but the lettering was different, more careful, with a tiny star with eight arms next to the number. She remembered the star from Halina's embroideries - it appeared on cloths, tablecloths, the edges of cushions, in the corners of her grandmother's eyes when she closed her eyelids, spinning stories. - 'Strange,' she muttered, though the sound disappeared into the thick silence of the magazines. She reached deep into the drawer and felt her fingers touch something cool. Not cardboard. Wood? She pushed back a handful of phials and reached further. The source of the coolness was behind the back of the catalogue, where the wall should be. She placed the drawer on the bookcase and grabbed the front with both hands to pull the whole thing out. She'd never done this before; catalogues were sometimes stubby, but it gave up with surprising ease, as if someone had lubricated the slides with fresh oil. There was no plaster or brick behind the row of wooden drawers. Where she had expected the back wall to be, there was a crack as wide as a doorway, from top to bottom, filled with light without a source. The air that flowed from it smelled more distinctly of lilac, but also of something else: the dust of sun-warmed pages and the metal of a watch's heated gears. Lena felt the skin on her arms cover with a fine goosebump. Beyond the crack was no ordinary room. She could see a narrow corridor, wallpapered with cards, fiches, parchments, different formats of paper, overlapping like tiles. They vibrated gently, as if breathing. And when she took a step to the side, everything moved in response, a rustle passed along the side of the paper, the urban equivalent of a forest leaf rubbing against another leaf. She glanced reflexively behind her. No one was walking down the alley. The fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling flickered; one, the one by the lift door, blinked on and off, leaving a distant corner in an unpleasant twilight. "Don't panic!" - she wanted to say aloud, but swallowed her saliva instead. The corridor behind the catalogue seemed to have no shade: light was everywhere and nowhere, like on a cold day when the clouds are thin and yet you can't see the sun. She reached for the page of the 'Atlas of the Roads They Thought'. The paper was warm. The letters twitched slightly, just enough to make her fingers tremble. When she lifted it closer to her face, she noticed that the star next to the number was not a drawing. It was a thin metal plate, pressed into the paper, cool on her tongue of air. She touched it. A ripple went through her skin, something between sound and image: the rumble of a train and a landscape receding faster than she should remember it. The plate warmed under her pad to the temperature of milk straight from the pot. The corridor beyond the passage brightened. The Professor, a library cat, steel-grey with white spots on his paws, jumped down from the left-hand shelf. He usually ignored everything but his own slumber, but now he stood before the crack and raised his head, drawing in the air as if he had just encountered the smell of an old house. He looked at Lena, at the passage, and slipped between the slats of the catalogue without a second thought. He disappeared after three steps. His claws rang once against metal and once against glass, and then - silence. On the other side, something moved the pages, as if correcting a cat's back. - Professor? - called out Lena, and the 'o' was longer in her own ears than it should have been. She was answered by something between a sigh and a yawn, but not in the air of the library, but from within. A voice, or a non-voice, that crawled into her thoughts without question. She moved the catalogue front to the side, creating an isthmus as wide as her shoulders. She felt she had to leave a mark for herself. She pulled a strip of red ribbon from her pocket, with which she used to tie up rolls of plans, and tied the other end to the brass handle of the 17-K. She pulled, checked the knot. It held. Everything about her movements was suddenly surgically precise, as if someone else was controlling her hands. Her breathing slowed, and her grandmother's words came effortlessly through the years: "Never argue with the road that calls you. Just check that you have something to come back with." She slipped her foot in a black half shoe onto the threshold. There was no concrete under the sole. Something springy, softly hard, like walking on a thick book laid flat but alive. The pages in the corridor puffed up and down like a lung. She took her second step more carefully; in the light she saw tiny marks on something that resembled a slat - four circular signifiers and one elongated one, like after a cat's paw. The pattern repeated further, deeper, until it disappeared into the billowing air. - Leno - she heard. Not that someone called out from the library. Not that it echoed through the pipes. The voice came from inside the corridor, soft, lined with the laughter she'd been familiar with since childhood. If she'd had any doubts, they would have crumbled at the sound of that vowel that her grandmother always uttered a little longer when she put her hand on her head and said: "Go get the jug". Except that Grandma Halina had been dead for three years. The light in the storeroom dimmed, as if someone had put their hand through a bystander's fabric. Water dripped from the ceiling, still far away - two, three, two, three - but the drops did not hit the floor, but hung for a moment in the middle, as if puzzled. The ribbon she had tied tightened, as if someone on the inside was pulling it slightly, in a friendly, encouraging way. Lena took in the passage with her eyes once more. Every detail of the library was in place, even the small scratch on the third from the top slat that she had once made by hitting it with a cardboard box. She felt the weight of her briefcase in her bag, her keys in her pocket. Everything that was her was clad in these items. Only the smell of lilacs came through the barrier, like a hand through water. - 'Leno,' repeated the interior. This time the sound had something else. A breath that seemed to know her own. More of a request than a command. More a promise than a question. Under her fingers, still resting on the metal star, she felt a slight pulsing. Something soft whispered deep within, a murmur passed over the phish, along and across, resembling a sea wave. A shadow blurred from the far end of the corridor. He was not a man. He was not a cat. He was a movement about to become someone, or something. Shadows don't cast a glow, and this one, ironically, had a narrow, milky sheen around the edges. Lena took a breath and lifted her foot to put it deeper, over the threshold. In the same instant, all the pages, as if on silent command, lifted slightly and circled a hair, returning the white fields to her, blank as fresh snow. And then, from where the shadow narrowed into a point, something took a step, and that something