Three friends slip into a shuttered watchmaker’s shop and find a clock that should not exist. One touch is enough to break the afternoon open and send them somewhere impossible.
On Cicha Street, tucked behind the comic book shop, stood a watchmaker’s workshop with dusty windows and a door no one in the neighbourhood seemed eager to open. The adults called it creepy. The younger kids called it cursed. Patrycja, Kacper, and Lena called it interesting, which usually meant trouble.
That afternoon the street looked washed out and sleepy under a low grey sky. The bakery was closed, the comic book shop had already locked up, and the old workshop sat in the middle of the block like it was waiting for someone. When they noticed the door hanging slightly open, none of them spoke at first.
Then Lena raised her eyebrows. Kacper grinned. Patrycja counted to three under her breath, and they slipped inside.
The air was thick with dust, machine oil, and something old enough to feel almost alive. Clocks covered every wall. Pendulums swung in slow, stubborn arcs. Tiny brass pocket watches lay in trays beside cracked wooden cases and piles of gears. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sounds overlapped until the room seemed to breathe around them.
At the far end of the workshop, half hidden beneath a sheet of curled-up papers, sat a clock unlike the others. It was larger, heavier, its face made of dark glass that reflected the room back at them in warped fragments. The hands were moving.
Not normally. Not steadily.
They were racing.
“Do you see that?” Lena whispered.
Kacper stepped closer before either of the girls could stop him. The clock gave a sharp, metallic tremor, and the second he reached for it, the whole room deepened, as if the air had thickened into water. A low throb rolled through the floorboards. Patrycja felt it in her teeth.
Kacper touched the minute hand.
The clock snapped to 03:15.
Light exploded across the workshop.
Patrycja stumbled backward, blinded for a heartbeat, and when she blinked the room had changed. The windows were no longer grey with rain. Sunlight poured through them, and outside, where cars had been moments ago, a horse-drawn carriage rattled past the shopfront. A woman in a long dark dress looked up at the building as if it had just appeared there.
Lena grabbed Kacper’s sleeve. “No,” she breathed. “That’s not possible.”
Something creaked deep inside the workshop.
Not the floor. Not the walls.
A door.
Slow footsteps moved toward them from the back room, measured and deliberate, and the shadows between the clocks seemed to gather together, taller than before. Patrycja stopped breathing. Kacper froze with his hand still on the clock. Then, from the darkness beyond the shelves, a voice spoke their names as if it had been waiting for them for years....