In Pogorzała, a town stuck to the shore like a seashell, time had its whims. Above a square with cobblestones that knew the names of all the cats, a stone clock tower towered. Four dials, one for each side of the world, measured the hours with a stern gaze, and on windy nights their hands trembled as if catching their breath before jumping. The sea hummed below, the boats rocked in the harbour, and the salt ate the railings and memories. I returned years later, with a suitcase in one hand and a folder full of papers in the other. My mother's flat smelled of dust, lavender and old books. Under the windowsill lay a cardboard box that I hadn't associated before: bills, postcards, clippings from the local newspaper, a checked notebook with a greyed-out cover. Inside, between the pages, was a fern leaf, pressed and brittle. And beneath the leaf - a scrap of paper with his mother's slanted handwriting: "3:17: Do not touch the bell." I read it twice and felt that the flat was suddenly too small. I opened the window. The air carried the metallic smell of rain, though only the heavy sheen of clouds still hung in the sky. I associated stories - muttered phrases heard as a child when I looked out through the curtain on the tower. That once, long ago, at 3:17 a.m., something happened that no one liked to talk about in full words. That the clock could stand or count differently than it should have. I never knew where superstition ended and fact began. I met Michael on the platform. He arrived on the evening train, laden with a bag and that anchor-breaking energy of his. He was four years younger than me and liked to explain the world, even if the world didn't ask. - The township continues to pretend it doesn't know the word 'rush'? - he threw in a greeting, glancing at the station clock, which showed a quarter past eight, although the train arrived at nine. - I don't "pretend" - I replied. - It just has it that way. In the corner café, where the chairs creaked like old decks, I pulled a fern leaf and a piece of paper from my briefcase. Michael stopped joking. - 'Did she write this to you? - He asked. - I don't know. I found it in her things. Do you think it's about the tower? - What else would it be about? - He sighed. - 'Don't touch the bell' sounds like a request that no one before us has listened to. The next afternoon we went to the lighthouse grounds, although we didn't have a climb planned. Mrs Sophie, the lighthouse keeper, lived in a low house just down the road, in the shadow of a concrete cylinder with a winding staircase. She was petite, with grey hair tied in a knot, and looked at us like someone who remembers more tides than dates. - Lena. - She smiled, as if my name had a taste of childhood. - Did you come back by tidying up or by the clock? - And where did you... - Here one hears even silence when one wants to say something important,' she replied. - Your mother was under the tower more often than she admitted. There are as many gaps in history as there are cracks in the wall. Not everyone likes to plug them. I took out a piece of paper and handed it to Mrs Sophie. She shifted her gaze from the paper to me, back to the paper. She was not surprised. Instead, she reached into a shelf and fetched an old metal key. It was small and strange: the head was shaped like a seagull's wing and the shaft had delicate teeth that seemed more like a symbol than a mechanism. - For the service panel under the clock,' she explained. - Not everyone knows it exists. You shouldn't go there at night, so you probably will. When three o'clock strikes, the clock will start to settle down. And then... well, let your steps be lighter than your thoughts. - Sophie - I started, feeling my throat tighten - Mum... She left some.... - Answers? - she smiled briefly. - Answers rarely wait where you write them down. But sometimes they wait. Don't press things forcibly. And remember: not everything that moves is alive, and not everything that stands is dead. The evening flowed down on the town softly, like oil on water. Shops closed in a hurry, as if the signs were afraid of the wind. Two lanterns were burning in the square: one orange, electric, the other yellowish, as if it were gas, although no one had used gas here for a long time. The rain began to rustle the roof tiles, danced across the parapets and played out a rhythm to return to. My knees were strangely light, like before an exam. We entered the tower just before three o'clock. The thick wood door gave way under the weight of our arm, the hinges aching for the whole square. Inside we were lifted by the chill and the smell of iron. The spiral staircase winded upwards, scuffing the bricks against our steps. Each step had a crack, each arm of the handrail remembered someone's hand. The walls were inscribed with tiny, stealthy marks - initials, dates, arrows without purpose. Someone had long ago left a foreign coin here, pressed into the weld. It stopped the flash of the lamp I was carrying. - Do you hear? - whispered Michael as we passed the first floor. - It's not the wind. I could hear it. Something in the depths of the tower was clicking, softly, at even intervals. As if someone was turning the crank of an old projector. As if the metal was telling its version of the past. Clocks get louder when they want to be noticed. Under the dial, at the height of the bell, we found a small door with a rusty escutcheon. This is where the key should fit. Mrs Sophie told us where to look. I cringed in silence as the lock accepted a gull wing. I turned it slowly. The latch let go with a sound that sounded like "for a long time". Inside was a sensitive mechanism and two levers. One, the larger one, was secured by a wax seal with a fingerprint on it - I couldn't tell whose. The other, smaller, rose and fell together with the rhythm of the clock. - See," Michael pointed out. - Notches. On the inner wall of the panel someone had left vertical lines, very thin, almost invisible, gouged with a sharp tool. They were arranged in groups, some crossed out, others bearing initials. My eyes moistened when I recognised: "A.N. 3:17". In my mother's handwriting. Next to it - older and younger hands, different letters, different years. Like an old song, repeated differently each time, but always at the same time. - No. - Michael withdrew his hand when I reached out my finger to touch the inscription. - She said not to touch the bell. It's connected to that. Can you feel it? I felt it. Not just in my fingers. Something was thickening in the air, like before a storm that is not about to erupt over the sea, but inside the tower. My lamp dimmed for a moment and came back on in full light. I looked at the dial from inside - milky glass, behind which the shadows of the seconds spun in an arc. The hands stood at 3:16. 50. From outside I could hear the waves, laboured and indifferent, and the distant cry of a seagull whose head must have lit up with something important. Down below, the square had drunk the light of the lampposts, only a rectangle of lightened cobblestones remained. In the tower, something shifted by a hair's breadth. The bell moved minimally, as if checking the weight of its own existence. - If we do this, do we undo something? - Michael spoke each word slowly. - 'Let's not undo anything,' I replied, although I wasn't sure what this referred to. And then we heard footsteps. Slow, decisive, from below, on stairs that had a memory better than ours. We looked at each other. The door was closed. We would have sworn we had slammed it properly. The footsteps stopped for a moment, as if someone was listening, and then moved again, closer. Michael lifted the lamp towards the stairwell. The light vibrated and danced on the wall, revealing specks of dust that are usually invisible. I felt a metallic taste on my tongue, as if from blood biting my lip, although I had not bitten anything. My hands were cold and damp. My fingers touched haphazardly patched places on the railing, finding old nails. The clock counted the seconds: 51, 52, 53... the first air at three in the morning is always thicker than at three in the afternoon. The seconds hand hesitated at 56, as if it had stumbled, then suddenly found a rhythm. The pendulum - the shadow of the pendulum - moved steadily, but the sound of its march changed colour. It was no longer merely "tick-tock". It was revealing layers within itself: an echo, a breath, something like the noise of a leather strap remembering another hand. The footsteps hit the last turn of the stairs and stopped when there were barely a few steps left to the platform. I held my breath and the end of the word I wanted to say fell apart on my tongue. Michael leaned over to look behind the wall. He saw nothing, but the light of the lamp hit something shiny: a wire safety pin, left on the step by someone who had a plan in his jacket pocket. The clock lifted its lever. The bell flexed its muscles, if you can say that about metal. We had already heard the sea and the drops falling from the roof straight into the gutter, but now something else joined it: a barely audible sound, like the tone that comes out of a crystal glass when you brush it with a wet finger. 3:17. The first ringing of the bell was soft and full, just as I remembered from my childhood, when I used to fall asleep by the open window in the heat. The second slightly lower, like a drop falling into a bigger drop. The third - vibrating, passing through my skin into my bones. I was stopped then by a whisper that did not belong to me or Michael. - Leno. It wasn't loud. It was close. As if someone was speaking from inside the wall. At the same instant, the minute hand twitched and moved back a millimetre, as if someone had caught it with a fingernail. The door of the panel trembled, although I did not touch it. Somewhere below, a lantern in the square squeaked, shifting its shadow. I already knew we were not alone here, even if no one could be seen. - Who is here? - Michael tried to sound tough, but his voice seemed thinner than usual. Then the deadbolt on the other side of the door at the bottom - the one we had locked, in no uncertain terms - sounded, as if someone had lifted it succinctly and without hesitation. The sound shot up the stairs and cut through the silence, which suddenly became thicker. The lamp flicked on and off for a blink, then came to life with a slightly weaker light, like a heart after exertion. I touched the key in my pocket. It was icy cold. A thin scent of an old candle flowed from the panel, from the wax seal - quite as if someone had held their hands warm over the flame. All I could hear now was my own breathing, three floors echoing downwards, and a soft rustling that did not resemble the movement of an animal. The steps on the last steps moved again, slowly, as if someone liked the pace. The bell was taking in air by the fourth beat. The minute hand hovered on the dash of 17. The wall beneath my fingers was porous. Part of me wanted to get down, part of me wanted to hold the minute hand like a blind on a window before it fell. And in that suspension, just before the iron hit the iron, a hand - not ours - slid out of the darkness of the stairwell. A shadow arranged itself around it, as if this movement had been repeated at the same time for many years. The fingers hovered over the rope from the bell, which someone had once tied in a knot, and tightened on the fibres with a quiet tug that we should not have heard from so close. And then the metal stopped breathing and a fourth half-stroke hovered over the square, which had no right to resound.