Everything in Lena's townhouse was a little older than it should have been, but it worked. The trams outside the window shuddered like slim cats and the brass mailboxes tinkled with their flaps. Lena worked in a small bookshop in the evenings and knew the house like the backs of books. She collected the neighbours' parcels, kept an eye on the dryer and lubricated the creaky stairs with linseed oil. Rumour had it that the boxes sometimes whispered, but no one would admit what they heard. On a rainy Tuesday, one of the flaps twitched and called her name without a sound. Inside lay an envelope signed: To Lena, from Tomorrow. The card held only one sentence: Be three minutes late today, please. She obeyed, and with that, a truck reversing blindly into puddles passed her, and her ground-floor neighbour avoided a wet avalanche from the awning. Since then, small instructions have come, always polite and strangely apt. Water the fern on the mezzanine today because it will burn with longing, believe. Bring Mr Victor of Seven bread before the bakery closes. In return, the house took shortcuts in the corridors, unbuttoned the light for her and slipped the right coins in her coat pockets. Lena began writing answers on the back of receipts and slipping them into an empty box without a name. On Friday, a heavier envelope arrived, sealed with a token from the laundry, like a locket. It had no sender, just a sentence: Don't open at your place. Go to the second floor, cage B, box with no name. She trembled as she climbed the stairs, because the house sounded like an old guitar in which one string had broken. It smelled of vegetable soup, cinnamon and something unfamiliar that resembled wet stone. At the box without the plaque, she heard a noise like a shell, although it was far from the sea. The envelope was warm, as if lying under a lamp, and smelled of library dust. Inside she found a leafy key of greenish copper and a sketch of the building plan, led in pencil through the laundry room and through the locked storeroom. On the edge was the sentence: don't go alone, call someone from downstairs. She looked around, but the corridor was silent, only the lifts rattled the doors, though no one called them. Lena was already about to go back for Mr Victor when the boxes rustled again, all at once: Now. The door to the storeroom had a painted pane of glass and a bolt on the bald head, but there was a twig-shaped crack in the lock. Applying the leafy key, she felt the house breathe and the candle in her stomach make a small flame. Outside the door a draught blew with the smell of paper and wet stone, as if the stairs were going down where the plan said a simple no. The phone in her pocket vibrated with a short message from an unknown number: Trust the house. If you don't open it now, it's gone. She tightened her fingers on the key and pressed the handle.