In the old market square by the river, the town hall tower rose above the rooftops like a pocket of time. That evening Lena, a student of historic preservation, was climbing the stairs to prepare an inventory of the clock. Locals said the mechanism remembered more than people, but she trusted the notes, not the legends. Her pocket buzzed with the keys of Mr Sparrow, who only muttered: "Please be careful at twelve o'clock". Dusk carried mist from the river, which pressed into the crevices of the door like soft fingers. Inside it smelled of oil, dust and copper, and the wheels moved slowly like breath. On the table lay a binder of thin pages, filled with even entries from a century ago. Each entry described a visit from someone anonymous, always in one sentence, astonishingly precise. Today's date was blank, as if waiting for someone to complete her thought. The cover was greased, as if someone was constantly opening it, but the sequence of entries never stopped. The phone rang; it was Mr Sparrow, checking that it had arrived. "The clock sometimes snouts, Ms Lena, but it doesn't bite." - he joked, then hung up without saying goodbye. As the switch sparked, the light went out for a second, and the mechanism chimed. Lena gripped the tension crank and felt a gentle tremor, as if something had moved behind the blind board. Pigeons circled in the glass of the cage, their wings echoing with a long reverberation. Behind the board, she found a brass sleeve and a rolled-up strip of paper, as dry as a leaf. On the paper was the sentence: 'Tonight, before midnight, Lena will see herself'. She had a simple comment in her mouth about a bad joke, but she stopped it and took a picture. She sent it to Oskar, a colleague from the studio; he wrote back quickly: "Retro puzzle room? Take it." The ink, though pale, reacted to her warmth, as if it remembered the hand of the time seller. She recognised it as a reaction to sweat, a cheap trick from the chemistry lab, but the paper remained cool. Lena walked to the narrow gallery behind the dials, where the light of the city seeped through the milky numerals. On the inside of the glass she noticed scratches arranged in letters, invisible from the street. She rubbed the number "XII" and a warning emerged: "Don't turn around when the clock is silent". She put her ear to the glass and heard a quiet, steady scraping, as if someone was writing from the other side. At the same moment, all the bells in the area chimed, but the tower of the town hall only numbered eleven. The mechanism stopped at 23:57, although the phone stubbornly showed 22:41 and shuddered with notifications. Outside, behind the milky glass, the shadow of someone standing on the parapet shifted, too close to the edge. A metallic footstep came from the spiral staircase, singular, like a comma in a long sentence, and then silence. The phone rang from an unknown number signed "Lena", and when she answered, she heard her voice: "Don't go down yet... not down those stairs". The sound of the city's test siren wailed from below, but no one in the tower was setting off the alarm.