The wind off the sea carried salt and cold, as if someone had slashed the evening with a razor and served it up on a blade. Lila stood on the edge of the cliff at Rozewie and watched the sheaf of lanterns sweep over the black waves, breaking them into flashes. Something rattled in the pocket of her jacket - a thin metal disc on a leather thong, as old as the photograph of her grandfather Victor, a lighthouse keeper and diver who smelled of tar and coffee all his life. After his death, she found a wooden casket in the wardrobe, and in it a notebook, green from the damp, with margins full of dashes, numbers and short sentences, as if someone was thinking in the rhythm of a wave. - Ready? - She asked, turning around. Maks, tall and hunched over from a backpack stuffed with electronics, nodded and corrected his headlamp. Nora, wearing a baseball cap and with a map tucked behind her bosom, smiled briefly. She handled the boat better than the people, but today it was she who led them along the path between the buckthorn bushes, avoiding puddles like traps. - 'That makes sense,' Maks said, glancing at the notepad Lila was holding carefully, as if she were holding something alive. - 'If those dashes are some of the flashes of the lantern, and those numbers are the gaps between them, we have a sequence. Four short, seven long. And arrows in the margin to where the cliff gets lower. Lila ran her thumb over a faded line: "When the light falls silent, the descent listens." She thought she remembered her grandfather's voice, that hoarse voice in which laughter melted. She also remembered him repeating that the sea is not just water, that it has layers that humans cannot see, like a palimpsest. She didn't understand it then. Today she was rereading it. In front of them, right next to a rusty information sign from the 1960s from which the letters were falling off, Nora knelt down and pushed back the grass. Beneath it was a metal manhole, so tarnished that it resembled stone. There were tiny grooves running along the edge. Lila knelt down beside it, and the disc on the thong seemed to cling to her hand on its own. - Do you think it's... - Nora began. - 'I don't know,' Lila replied, and put the puck into a slight indentation. - 'But if Grandpa was writing the truth, then it's nothing that opens up at random. Maks raised his hand and looked at the lantern. The beam moved across them and then disappeared, as if he had taken a deep breath. - 'Now,' he whispered and tapped his knuckles four times against the metal. - 'We're waiting seven. Seconds passed, drawn out and thick. The lantern shone again and the wind trembled in the branches. The hatch groaned deafeningly, like a sore tooth, and gave way, revealing a narrow, steep ladder leading downwards. The smell of dampness hit their heads, instantly familiar, just as the smell of a school corridor at seven o'clock in the morning is familiar: recognisable and slightly depressing, yet promising. Nora slipped her foot onto the rung first, then the other, disappearing into the darkness. Lila moved behind her, and Maks closed the parade, trying not to think about what would work underneath if the rung broke. Headlamps cut through the twilight, revealing walls of rough concrete cracked like dried earth. To the left and right ran wires entwined with cobwebs. Everything sounded like a machine long since switched off, still remembering its rhythm deep inside. The corridor was surprisingly narrow, as if it had been built by someone who didn't like people with broad shoulders. On the wall someone had long ago painted an arrow and the letter P, which could have meant 'north' or 'room', or it could have meant nothing at all. After a dozen metres or so they reached the first fork. A thin trickle of water glided along the ground, running straight into the darkness. - Can you feel it? - Lila asked in a whisper, unsure if the voice even fit in this place. Maks nodded. The whole interior trembled slightly, as if something far above or below them was working in cycles. The beam of the lantern, although it couldn't penetrate the ground after all, could be felt in minute changes of intensity - every now and then a glare seemed to settle in the walls. - 'Grandpa drew a circle,' Lila said, looking into her notebook. - A circle within a circle. And the words: "It is not water that opens, but time." - That is to say, what sounds responds to the rotation of the lantern, explained Maks. - If it's coupled by some miracle.... - 'You're in a hurry for miracles,' Nora interrupted him, but a slight tremor could be heard in her voice. - Shall we go? They chose the left corridor. After a few turns they entered a circular chamber. In the centre stood a metal pedestal with an inset circle, more ornamental than practical, laced with a carved motif of waves and lines reminiscent of bathymetric maps. On the edge, someone had carved dates - years - that scattered under her fingers as Lila moved her hand over them. - 'Victor,' she whispered, because between the dates was also the one she knew best: the day her grandfather first went down with the bottle himself. She stopped her gaze on one of the dashes, the same as the ones in the notebook. - This is it. Lila pressed the puck into the socket above the wheel. It fitted perfectly, as if someone had once traced the shape from it. Something sighed under the floor. The wheel vibrated and could be turned, offering stubborn but not impossible resistance. - 'Four,' Nora counted, and Lila turned the wheel four times clockwise. - Seven - added Maks, and Lila moved the metal to the left. The air thickened. A pale light flashed in the frogs' eyes of the lamps on the walls, as if someone in a distant part of the building had stirred the dust. They did not fight. They waited to see if it was alive. And they saw. Somewhere beneath them, a soft, low sound echoed - not a bell, rather the dragging breath of an old mechanism that once in a while wanted to remind them that it was there. With it, along the corridor, more lamps lit up: first one, then another, a third, each trembling and uncertain, but enough to reveal the end of the chamber - a steel threshold masked by slabs, the outline of a doorway once shifted into the rock. - How can there be electricity here? - gasped Maks, exploding at last with the question that was bubbling up inside him. - Emergency stations? Some kind of generator? It must have woken up with a beacon.... - Or with us - Nora looked at Lila. - Your watch, that disc.... Steel wailed, transitioning to a high-pitched screech that settled in their teeth. The door steeled sideways, leaving a gap the width of a hand, then two, then enough for a man to squeeze through. A chill flowed from the interior, in which there was something clean, something like the smell of newness, though it was old after all. A plume of cold air brushed against Lila's face and brought something else: a trace of grease and iodine, but also... lemon, as if someone had once squeezed the peels there to chase the smell of the sea away from the rust. - Lila? - Maks touched her elbow. - If anything is going to work here in an unforeseen way, it's now. Before we go in, let's think. - 'I've already thought as much as possible,' she replied, feeling a movement inside her that wasn't entirely her own. It was like jumping into the water after a long summer spent on the pier: fear crashed against thirst and strength was lost. Before she could take a step, a sound that didn't match their maps - a metallic, regular clatter, as if someone in the distance was tapping the tracks with an invisible spoon - came from the darkness, from which they expected nothing but cold. Clatter after clatter. And then, in the same instant that the beam of the lantern slid over the cliff again, a tiny, very busy spark flashed at the other end of the corridor, like the light of a torch held by the hand of someone in a hurry. - 'Did you hear that? - drew in a breath of air from Nora. Lila nodded. Her eyes were getting used to the semi-darkness, the outlines sharpening as her vision after a cry. She could see now that it wasn't a torch at all. That it was something else reflecting the light at a speed that didn't belong to the wind or their breaths. Something that was approaching steadily, though no footsteps could be heard. The circle in her hand twitched again, as if it wanted to turn without her. And before they had time to say anything, the mechanism beneath their feet gave out a longer sigh, the door swung all the way open, and from inside, where the air had stood still for years, came a soft voice, muffled and snarling, as if coming through old speakers: - Are you in or are you out? Only one of these clocks can be stopped.