The rain slid across the tiles of the Lower Town like someone who knows every corner and every crevice. The street reeked of damp, sewerage and baked bread from the night bakery around the corner. Lena Radecka walked slowly, carrying a heavy leather trunk that creaked with every step. The trunk belonged to her Aunt Regina, an archivist who lived in watches and catalogues, and always spoke in a half-hearted voice, as if she was afraid that the sentence she uttered would wake something that preferred to sleep. Regina's flat in a building on Łąkowa Street was chilly when Lena crossed the threshold. Empty shelves looked to the side, as if they pretended to know nothing about the fact that someone had just put the baggage of someone's life here. The wallpaper remembered a different smoke - the smoke of her grandfather's pipe, the smoke of candles, the smoke that made the light amber. Lena, a paper conservator from the museum on the Motlawa River, did not like surprises professionally. Paper was fair game for her: it yellowed, cracked, smelled, spoke in spots more than people did in entire conferences. She knew the language of fibres and adhesives, knew how to lay her hand over a frothed page so that it wouldn't crack with fear. But the trunk she'd been given "just in case" - that's what the card nailed to the handle with a pin sounded like - was not paper. She cut the thongs with a knife, opened the lid. The smell of leather, lavender and something sharp and metallic hit her in the face. Inside rested an old inkwell with a dried lump of ink, a magnifying glass in a brass frame, a thick bundle of pencils wrapped in silk, and a roll of paper, so heavy it was strange for an ordinary plan. At the bottom glistened a bunch of keys on a navy blue string - one of them, the largest, had a smooth shaft but a carving of a moth instead of teeth at the mouth. Lena moved the lamp closer and carefully unrolled the roll. The paper crackled quietly. A view of the city - not the one she carried in her memory, but the one she knew from the museum showcases - spilled out onto the table: turn-of-the-century Danzig, swollen with the roundness of its towers and the fragility of its bridges, full of names that now survived only on postcards. The cartographer had a light hand and a mischievous sense of order: each alley had a shadow assigned to it, each lamppost a dot of light so precise that Lena involuntarily blinked. But that wasn't the strangest thing. On the left, near the margin, in fine handwriting and purple ink, someone had added a few words: "Lenka - don't open in daylight. See steam." She froze. No one had called her "Lenka" since her school years. An aunt? Her childhood neighbour, Mrs Wanda, who fed her with yeasty biscuits? Who else remembered the tone? She had a habit of listening to advice written on paper. She boiled the water in the kettle and covered the map with a glass window so the steam wouldn't wet the old fibre. When the steam went, she ran her hand gently over the glass. The steam scrambled up with a spine of cold, swirled and - as if attracted by a thin line - settled thicker in several places on the map. Beneath the glass, in a milky haze, additional lines emerged that had not been there before. The markings resembled spider threads - silver, almost non-existent. They connected several points: two gates by the canal, an alley behind St Barbara's Church, a square with three lime trees and a the no-man's wall by the bastion Żubr. Next to one of the points - near the seemingly blind wall - was inked a symbol also repeated on the key: a moth with outspread wings. Beneath it the inscription: "Lighthouse keepers' alley". Lena swallowed her saliva. She knew every handbook that had ever published a guidebook about the area. The name didn't come up in any. She moved the map around, checked with the water from the atomiser and the light from the UV torch - new little details were revealed. Next to one of the canals in small writing was written: "Water says after eleven o'clock". By another: "Don't look at the clock, look at the shadow". These were not mere notes from an archivist. This was leading by the hand, but whose hand? The phone beeped. On the display was Igor - the night watchman from the museum and the only man Lena had ever talked to after hours, if only about the algae on the water at Olowianka. She picked up. - Are you alive? - He asked without greeting. - Have you arrived? How was the funeral? - Quiet - she replied. - 'Igor, I found something after Regina. A map. One that isn't there. With annotations. Someone calling me by a name that only my grandmother used. - No kidding - he snorted. - I'll be right over. I have a patrol anyway. I'll take the torch, the one that shines like a blowtorch. Don't touch it without gloves, okay? - 'It's too late,' she said, glancing at the vapour that was settling over the key butterfly like a wing coating. - But be careful. Do you know anything about Lighthouse Keepers' Alley? Silence fell. - 'Sounds like someone who invents a street when it needs one,' he finally said. - I don't have it in my head. I'll check in the duty station in the old plans. Ten minutes. He hung up. Lena, meanwhile, took down the glass and wrapped the map back up. It felt strange to leave it unfolded, as if it might roll into the bedroom at night. She took the moth key in her hand. The weight settled pleasantly in her hand, the coolness of the brass soothing. Under the light of the lamp, the moth's wings flashed with something metal can't do - an iridescence, like on a real insect. When Igor called again, he spoke more quietly than usual. - 'I don't have anything in the atlases about such an alley, Lena. But... there's a note from Aunt Regina in the 1970s deposit book. Under the entry about the keys to 'Lighthouse 0'. No further details. Just a note: "Do not give out to third parties. Lenka only." - She knew. - Lena's voice darkened. - Or she wanted me to think she knew. - 'Don't go alone,' Igor said more quickly. - 'Wait, I'm two streets away, Raccoon Street. Lena looked out of the window. The rain had slowed down, flowed more evenly, sparse drops circled under the lamp like late flies. Down the street a tram passed, leaving a red line in the glass behind it. She slipped the map into the tube, the key into her coat pocket. She left the lamp on over the table, like a sign that she would be back and someone was about to return to something. When she came downstairs, the smell of the bakery was thicker. A cat was rubbing against the threshold of the tenement, and two teenagers in hoodies, headphones in their ears, sat in front of the cage, indifferent to anything that didn't fit the rhythm. Lena turned towards the canal and the bastion of the Bison. She knew the way well, although she rarely walked this way at this hour. Danzig breathed differently at night: a silence that is not empty, but filled with steps yet to be taken. By the bastion, the water stood dark and seemingly unmoving, but the surface was marred by a fine current. A street lamp suspended a circle of pale blue light in this water. Lena stopped by the wall she remembered from her childhood - tall, made of brick so parched it was as red as freshly spilled wine. Its surface was overgrown with ivy and clumps of moss. On the map, it was here, on this blind wall, that a moth spread its wings. She came closer. Moisture settled on her face, answering her breath. She moved her hand over the bricks. Under her fingers, just above the hip line, she felt something like a catch, cold and sharp. She pushed back some ivy leaves. Out of the darkness came a gouge in the wall. It wasn't large - maybe the size of a hand - but it was shaped perfectly to match that flat, smooth part of the key where the shaft ended and the insect carving began. Lena breathed in, like someone afraid to sneeze over a fragile light. She took the key out of her pocket. The metal was doused with dew. She placed it in the niche, at a slight angle, looking - as with old locks - for the right entrance. This collapse was out of the ordinary: she did not feel the serrations that should have snagged the mechanism, but a kind of smooth resistance, as if she were pushing a thick book deep into a narrow shelf. As the key went in for the handle, the brass moth touched the brick with its wing. Something vibrated in the brickwork, as if dragged by a man awakened from a dream - a very long, very old one. The water in the sewer murmured at the same moment, low and quiet, like the throat of a tube. Lena felt it tremble under her shoes. She realised that in this part of the bastion, the lantern never shone directly on the wall. Today, however, the light seemed to shift towards her and a whitish circle settled just above her hand, bringing out shapes in the wall that she had not seen before: cracks like cracks, arranged in an arc. The moth's wings on the key flicked. The magnifying glass in her bag beeped against the metal of the torch as Lena moved reflexively. - Lena! - Igor's voice slashed the rain like from under a needle. It was coming from somewhere behind, far away, too far away for where it was supposed to be. - Don't move! She didn't turn around. The air had the taste of iron, like the old lifts when they move. Something clicked in the wall, very quietly, as if two pieces of glass touched at their edges. At the same moment, she felt a cool breath from within the bricks - not a breeze from the water, but from inside, like from cellars that no one has looked into for decades. From the depths also came something else: a smell - not of lavender, not of dampness, but of ink and wax, that mixture in which she had spent half her life over the conservation tables. A smell that said: here is the paper, here are the words. The niche blinked darkly. A mechanism she could not see came to peace in her mind with music: something had a rhythm, as even as a pocket clock, and it was speeding up. Lena tightened her fingers on the shaft of the key. Then, on the other side of the wall, where there should be no passage, footsteps echoed. They didn't carry from the water or the street - they came from behind the bricks, from inside, from a world that wasn't on any map. The sound was first a single, cautious one, and then a second, closer, soft as leather soles on old wood. They were followed by a quiet scratching, as if someone had touched the wall from the inside with a fingernail, exactly opposite her hand. - 'Lenka,' said a voice then, warm and familiar, though impossible. - If... you hear... The wings of the moth on the key moved, making a sound so soft that it might have been a mistake of the ear. Something in the wall let go. The whole arch around the niche trembled and moved, millimetre by millimetre, like a curtain. Lena saw the brick move away with lazy precision and the gap of darkness widen to the size of a hand, then two. For a moment, she had the impression that a pair of eyes were watching her from the darkness - not cold, not angry, but very alert. - Lena! - repeated Igor from close by now, so close that the air behind her neck was stirred by his running. - Back up! In the same second a light flashed from inside, some separate, warm and impossible light, and something on the other side moved visibly, as if bringing its face closer to the crack.