Leon and Zosia find a hidden passage inside an old attic clock, and step into a strange world where time seems to move by different rules.
Leon and Zosia lived in a tenement on Sunken Clocks Street, in a house that always seemed to keep one secret more than it should. In the attic, tucked between cobwebs and trunks with broken clasps, stood the enormous wooden clock that had once belonged to Leon's grandfather.
Every evening, just as the sky turned grey-blue over the rooftops, the clock began to tick on its own. Not forward. Backward. The hands trembled, jerked, and turned the wrong way, as if some invisible hand were rewinding the whole house.
One cloudy afternoon, while Leon's parents were busy with dinner, he found Zosia at the attic door and lowered his voice.
"Come on," he said. "I want to show you something."
Zosia's eyes lit up at once. Secrets were her favourite kind of adventure, and Leon never stayed curious for long without dragging her along after him. She slipped up the stairs with a torch in one hand and her notebook in the other, careful not to let the boards complain beneath their feet.
When they reached the attic, the clock was waiting in the half-dark, huge and solemn, its polished face glowing faintly in the dust.
"Do you really think it's enchanted?" Zosia whispered.
"Listen," Leon said.
The clock was ticking, though no one had touched it.
Zosia stepped closer. The metal around the face felt cold under her fingertips, then strangely warm, as if something inside had woken up. A shiver ran through the wood. The hands spun backwards so fast they blurred.
Click.
A narrow seam appeared between two carved numbers.
Leon stared. Then, before Zosia could stop him, he slipped his fingers into the crack and pulled.
The front of the clock swung open.
Behind it was not a nest of gears and springs, but a narrow spiral corridor descending into darkness, lined with brass cogs that gleamed like eyes. A pale mist drifted through the passage, thin as dust and cold as breath from an open grave.
Zosia caught Leon's sleeve.
"Should we go in?"
Leon swallowed, but he nodded.
Together they stepped over the threshold.
The floor vanished.
For one breathless moment they were falling through a spinning tunnel of shadow and light, past chiming bells and quick flashes of strange metal shapes. Something with wing-like clock hands whirred close to Leon's ear. Then, just as suddenly, they landed hard on something soft and springy.
Spinning hands.
They had fallen onto a moving carpet of clock hands that turned beneath them like the ripples of a living thing.
Before either of them could speak, the air changed.
Grease. Dust. Cold stone.
And from somewhere ahead, hidden in the dark corridor, came a whisper so quiet they almost missed it.
"Who dares enter the Clock Labyrinth?"
Leon and Zosia looked up.
A shape was standing in front of them.