In Kwirytow, the library was housed in a former railway waiting room, smelling of plaster and jam from a fair. Its manager was Mr Jan, a man who was polite, pedantic and a tad suspicious of silence. He claimed that the order of the bookcases reminded him of chess, in which the jumpers were the bibliography. He did, however, have one weakness: the E-F shelf, perpetually perverse, perpetually crooked by half a centimetre. To straighten it, Mr Jan invented an exercise called stretching reality by questions. It sounded ridiculous, but it worked so effectively that the Uncomfortable Questions Club was born. The club met on Thursdays at seven o'clock, by a photocopier called Benek. Mirek, the computer scientist and illusionist, Mrs Lidia from P.E. and the baker Sośnia would come. They asked questions that were harmless, yet perplexing, like needles in the mayor's plush chair. "Why does the town hall clock strike thirteen when you have something to hide?" "Who sets up all the notice boards so that they point the office towards each other?" A month later, a letter arrived, laconic as a haiku: no uncomfortable questions after eighteen, for plumbing reasons. Mr Jan coughed ceremoniously and rescheduled the meetings for 5.59pm, in spite of the literalness. That day, the coffee machine displayed an ironic "Are you sure?" as he pressed the espresso button. - 'Just one question today,' he announced, 'and we'll see together who's really guarding the answers.' Together they formed a formula: "Who is responsible for the questions that no one answers?" Benek murmured, coughed up the toner and spat out a sheet of instructions like a board game. It read: "Entrance between 820 and 821. Password: I'm knocking because I'm thinking. Time: after hours." There was no entrance between the bookcases, just a wall with a texture of very convincing ordinariness. Ms Lidia tapped the bricks, Mirek shone his torch and Sośnia climbed on her toes. Mr Jan stroked the spines of the volumes until he slipped out a thin pamphlet on the rules of understatement. Something clicked and the wall trembled, opening a narrow staircase that smelled of toner and slightly of cardamom. The library clock struck thirteen, even though all the phones showed seventeen fifty-eight. From above came the crackle of Benek printing out a warning: "Don't go down alone now". - Well, let's go down in a group," suggested Mr Jan and put the punch in his pocket. Ms Lidia took the skipping rope, Mirek checked the powerbank and Sosnia packed a poppy seed bun. The stairs creaked like Enter keys, and the echo always added what no one had finished. Downstairs, a steel door with a sign waited: "Rejected Answers Department. Please ask before entering". The crack in the door slammed, the lock roared, and a light phosphorescent wink came from the darkness. As the handle vibrated on its own, and the walls upstairs shifted an inch, Mr John took a breath to