The number in the green notebook that morning was three hours and ten minutes, and Haeseul looked at it for so long that the pen dried in her hand.

It was an improvement. That was what she told herself, sitting on the edge of her bed in the small apartment above the stationer's, with the blinds half drawn and the afternoon sun laying a pale stripe across the quilt. Three hours and ten minutes was nearly half an hour more than the night before. A pharmacist who tracked her own data could not very well ignore a trend. She wrote the figure down, and beneath it, because the notebook was private and she was in the habit of being truthful in private, she added a second line in smaller letters: Dreamed about a clock. No hands.

She had not told anyone about the dream. It was nothing, a stray piece of the night's debris. A round white face with no hands, ticking, and a voice somewhere behind it counting softly. She had woken at noon with her heart racing and the sheets damp, and lain for a while listening to the traffic below, and wondering why a dream about a broken clock should have felt so much like being held.

She closed the notebook. She stood and went to the window, and looked down at the street, where a boy on a bicycle was weaving between two parked trucks and an old woman was dragging a trolley full of cabbages toward the market. It was an ordinary Thursday in an ordinary city. The sky over the harbor was a clean, rinsed blue. She told herself that all of it, the flickering lights, the dead hum of the refrigerator, Mr. Gu weeping in a silent shop, had a rational explanation, and that the explanation was that she was tired.

It was a very good explanation. She had been using it for years.

On the dresser, beside the hairbrush and the little dish of safety pins, sat a slip of heavy tea-colored card, curled at the edges. She had meant to throw it out. She had meant to throw it out the first night, and again after she came home from Slow Hours the day before, with the pleasantly strange feeling of having been seen. Instead she had propped it against the lamp, face out, where she would have to look at it every time she crossed the room.

Slow Hours. A clock with no hands.

"Do not be ridiculous," she said aloud, and went to make coffee.

By eight that evening she was behind the counter at Dawnbridge, in her white coat and her fraying cardigan, with her hair tied back and her ring turning on her finger, and she had very nearly succeeded in convincing herself that she was the same person who had walked out of the shop at dawn two mornings before.

Gyeol arrived at a quarter past, ten minutes early, which was unlike him, carrying a paper bag of dumplings and wearing the expression of a man who had not been sleeping either. He set the bag down on the counter without a word and began to restock the antacids, and Haeseul watched him for five minutes before she spoke.

"You are early."

"I could not stay in the flat." He did not look up. His hands moved with a fixed, mechanical precision, squaring each box against the edge of the shelf. "My roommate had the television on, and every time the sound dropped between scenes, I thought..." He laughed, short and unhappy. "I thought it was coming through the wall."

"What was?"

"The breathing, Noona." He put the box down. When he turned toward her, there were violet marks under his eyes that had not been there a week ago. "It has been getting louder all week. I told you. I am not imagining it. At night when I lie down, it is there, and it is not in my ears, it is in the room. It is so sad. It is the saddest thing I have ever heard." His voice thinned. "I know how it sounds."

"It sounds like you are overworked."

"You do not believe me."

"I believe that you hear something." She came around the counter and put a hand on his shoulder, as she would have done with a patient, and was alarmed to find the muscle there as tight as a wire. "I believe that you are frightened, and that you have not been eating properly, and that you have been absorbing the mood of this shop, which, I admit, is not a restful place at three in the morning. I would like you to take two days off. I will speak to the manager."

"I cannot. I need the hours for my placement."

"Then I will lend you mine."

"Noona..."

"I am serious. Go home, Gyeol. Sleep."

"You are the one who ought to sleep." He said it quickly, almost fiercely, and then flushed to the roots of his hair. "I am sorry. I did not mean it rudely. But you do not look well either. You look like you are holding up the building by yourself. And two nights ago, when Mr. Gu was..." He swallowed. "You were not afraid. Why were you not afraid? I was shaking like a child, and you just walked up to him as though it were nothing."

It was a question she had been asking herself. She did not have an answer, and she could not give him a false one, so she did what she always did and told him half the truth.

"I have spent a long time in rooms where people were in pain," she said. "I think it is a little like swimming. After enough years you stop being afraid of the water. You only remember how to float."

Gyeol looked at her for a long moment, with the face of someone who had been told a very polite lie and was too kind to say so. Then he picked up the box of antacids, and went on shelving.

The night wore on.

It was a slow one. A taxi driver came in at ten for a muscle relaxant, and a student at eleven for emergency contraception, which Haeseul sold her without a word of judgment, and a couple at midnight for a sick child's fever syrup, the mother with a shawl pulled over her nightgown and the father carrying the baby, both of them gray with fear. She explained the dosing slowly, twice, and wrote it on the box in marker. The father squeezed her hand when he left. She stood for a while after the door had swung shut, with the warmth of that grip still on her skin, and felt the familiar exhausted fullness of having been useful.

At one in the morning, it began to get cold.

She noticed it first in her hands. She had been counting pills into a vial and her fingers went numb on the plastic, and she put the vial down and rubbed her palms together, and glanced at the door, thinking someone had left it open. It was shut. The bell hung still. But the air in the shop had begun to feel thick, like a held breath, and the fluorescent lights had taken on a slight yellowish tinge, like old teeth.

"Gyeol," she said, not loudly.

He was in the second aisle. She saw him through the gap in the shelving, standing perfectly still, with his head tilted. He did not answer. And then, in the quiet, she heard what he must have been hearing: a long, soft, exhausted exhalation, as if the building itself had been holding its breath for years and had at last let it go.

It was not in her ears. He was right. It was in the room.

Every hair on her arms stood up. She had a clear, calm, scientific thought, which was: this is not an auditory hallucination, because I can feel it in my sternum. Then the bell rang, one bright brass note, and the door opened, and Baek Eunhae walked in out of the dark.

She was in the gray jacket again, though she had pulled a charcoal scarf up around her throat, and under the lights her face looked drawn and shadowed and very much alive. She shut the door behind her without looking round. Her eyes went straight to Haeseul, and then, with the quick, hard, assessing flicker of a sentry, to the shelves, the ceiling, the floor.

"Where is the boy?" she said.

"The second aisle." Haeseul's voice came out calmer than she felt. "What are you doing here? It is not three o'clock."

"It is not three o'clock yet." Eunhae crossed the floor at a pace that was almost a run, and her left hand dipped into the pocket of her jacket and came out with something that glinted: a round silver pocket watch on a chain, its lid open, its face old and pale and very clear. "I need you to stay where you are. Do not go near the back. Do not touch anything that feels cold."

"Miss Baek..."

"Please."

It was the word that did it. It was not an order. It was a person at the end of her strength asking for a thing, and it landed in Haeseul's chest with a force she was not prepared for. She stood where she was.

Eunhae went down the second aisle. Haeseul heard her stop, and heard Gyeol draw a shaky breath, and heard Eunhae say, in a low, even, impossibly gentle voice, "Do not look behind you. Look at me. Look at my hand. That is right. Just look at the watch."

Haeseul could not help herself. She moved to the end of the counter, where the angle opened up, and she looked.

Gyeol was standing against the shelves with his back pressed to the cough syrups, his face white and rigid. Eunhae stood a few feet from him, with the watch held out between them on its chain, swinging a very little. And beyond her, at the far end of the aisle, where the wall met the floor in the corner by the cold storage, something was kneeling.

It was a woman. That was Haeseul's first thought, and she would never be able to say afterward whether she had actually seen it or whether her mind had simply made the nearest shape it could out of something that had no shape at all. It was a woman, or the outline of one: a slender, stooped form, almost transparent, the color of dishwater and old rain. It knelt with its back to the room, bowed forward, the head sunk between the shoulders and both hands flat on the floor, pressed down, as if she were trying to push through the tile. The air around it shivered. And she was crying. There was no sound, and yet Haeseul knew it as certainly as she knew her own name. She was crying with the dreadful, exhausted, bottomless patience of someone who had been at it for a very long time and was not going to stop.

"Oh," Haeseul said. She did not mean to say it. It came out of her like a breath of air.

The kneeling thing turned its head.

She could not see a face. There was a pallor, a smear of shadow, a place where features should have been. But it lifted itself from the floor, slow and boneless, and began to move across the tile toward Gyeol, dragging one hand, palm flat, the way a child crawls. Gyeol made a thin, high, terrible noise.

"Eunhae," Haeseul heard herself say, and it was the first time she had used the name. "Eunhae, it is coming..."

"I know."

"What do I do?"

"Nothing." Eunhae had not turned her head. Her whole body was drawn taut, her free hand rising to cover the face of the watch, and Haeseul saw the tendons in her wrist standing out like cords. "Stay exactly there. Whatever you feel, do not run."

And Eunhae began to count.

It was not a prayer, and it was not a spell. It was simply numbers, spoken low and slow and steady, in time with the tick of the watch, and under the numbers there was something else, a vast, deep, quiet pressure, like the stillness at the bottom of a lake. One. And two. And three. The voice did not rise. It did not plead. It simply was, flat and certain and tireless, the way a tide is certain. Four, and five, and six.

The thing on the floor slowed.

Haeseul felt it before she saw it. A heaviness came over her, soft and sweet and utterly unexpected, a kind of gravity in her limbs, as though someone had laid a warm hand across the top of her skull and was pressing down, gently, very gently, insisting that she was allowed to stop. She had not felt anything like it in years. It was the leaden, delicious drag of the last minutes before sleep, the moment when the mind lets go of its own rope.

Her eyelids drooped. Her fingers loosened on the counter. She thought, with astonishment: I am tired. I am actually tired. It was not the grinding, brittle, wired exhaustion that she carried everywhere like a stone in her shoe. It was clean. It was the ordinary, rightful tiredness of a person who has finished a long day, and is allowed to lie down.

Seventeen, said Eunhae's voice. Eighteen.

The crawling thing stopped. It lifted its blurred head and seemed to listen, and the weeping, that soundless, enormous weeping, grew fainter, and fainter, until Haeseul could not tell whether she was hearing it or remembering it. The thing's hands loosened on the tile. Slowly, with infinite reluctance, as a child folds in on itself when it has cried itself out, it curled down onto the floor, and shrank, and thinned, and went out like a breath on a mirror.

The lights steadied. The hum of the refrigerator returned. In the second aisle, Gyeol slid down the shelves and sat on the floor with his arms around his knees, breathing in great, broken gulps.

Eunhae closed the watch.

She did it with a small, soft click, and Haeseul saw that her hand was shaking so badly that she had to use both of them to close the lid. Then she swayed, only slightly, and put out a palm against the shelf to hold herself up.

Haeseul was around the counter before she knew she had moved. She dropped to her knees beside Gyeol first, because he was the nearest and the most obviously in need, and she put her arms around him, and said, "It is all right. It has gone. I have you." He folded against her, shuddering. "I heard her, Noona," he said into her shoulder. "I heard her, she was looking for her baby..."

"I know. Shh. I know."

"How did you know?" he whispered. "How did you know what I was hearing?"

"I did not." She stroked his back. "Breathe. In. And out."

She stayed there with him until the sobbing slowed. When she looked up at last, over his shoulder, Eunhae was standing a few paces off with her back against the shelves, watching them. There was a hard, bright flush across her cheekbones and sweat standing at her temples, and she was holding the pocket watch against her breastbone as if she were afraid it would run away. But it was not her face that arrested Haeseul. It was her eyes. They had gone as soft and unguarded as a child's, fixed on the sight of Haeseul holding the boy, and what lay in them was so naked, so tender, so starved, that Haeseul felt it like a hand laid flat against her ribs.

Then Eunhae saw her looking, and the expression slid away like a stone behind water.

"He will be all right," she said, a little hoarsely. "It was not interested in him. It was only drawn to the nearest warmth. It is gone. It will not come back to this place tonight."

"Tonight." Haeseul got to her feet. She helped Gyeol up, and settled him in the old chair by the counter, and put a cup of warm water in his hands, as she had for Mr. Gu. His color was returning slowly. "Not tomorrow, then?"

"I cannot say."

"No," Haeseul said. "I do not suppose you can."

She poured another cup. She crossed the floor and held it out. Eunhae looked at it, and at her, and for the second time in three nights took it in both hands, as though it might vanish, and drank.

"Sit down," said Haeseul. "Before you fall."

"I am quite..."

"You are gray as a sheet. Sit."

Eunhae sat. She sat on the step stool where Gyeol had been shelving vitamins, with her knees drawn up and the watch in her lap, and drank the water to the bottom of the cup. The shop was very quiet. Gyeol, in his chair, had closed his eyes and was breathing slowly, with the heavy, exhausted look of a child who has been carried home from a long journey.

Haeseul sat down on the floor, with her back against the counter, because it was the nearest available space, and pulled her white coat around her knees.

"Have you seen it before?" Eunhae said, in a low voice. "That. Before the other night."

Haeseul opened her mouth to say no. It was the sensible answer. It was the answer she had practiced, in the mirror, over breakfast, in the dim hours between three and four. But she had seen it. Not only tonight, with its drowned hands pressed to the tile, but in some half-forgotten way over the years, in the corner of a hospital room, in the hush after a heart monitor flatlined, in the heavy gray air that had once pressed on her mother's bed like a lid. She had seen it, and she had never been afraid, because she had thought it was only grief.

"I do not know what I have seen," she said, slowly. "I know what I felt. Just now. While you were counting."

Eunhae went very still. "What did you feel?"

"Tired." It sounded absurd, said aloud. "Not the usual kind. I mean, it was the kind where you put your head down on a pillow, and there is nothing in the way." Haeseul looked at her hands. "I have not felt that in a very long time. I did not know I could."

For a moment Eunhae did not speak. When she did, her voice was strange and thin. "That was not me," she said. "That was not what I was doing."

"Then what was it?"

"I was counting. That is all. It is what I do to hold them. It should not have reached you, not like that, not from so far off." Her fingers closed around the watch. "Unless..."

"Unless what?"

She did not finish. She turned her face aside, and looked at the long, bright, ordinary aisle where nothing was kneeling now, and Haeseul had the sudden, unreasoning conviction that she was watching a woman fight with herself, and that the fight was an old one, and that she was losing it.

"Miss Baek," Haeseul said.

"Eunhae."

"Eunhae." She drew a breath. "I am a rational person. I am a person who counts pills and reads labels and does not believe in ghosts. And I think that something very strange has just happened in my shop, and that you know what it is, and that you came here tonight not because you were passing by but because you knew it would come." She held the other woman's eyes. "I think you owe me an explanation. I do not think it was the coat."

Eunhae gave a short, broken breath, and something like a laugh, and pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth.

"No," she said. "It was not the coat."

"Then tell me. What did you do to me?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing."

"Nothing yet," said Eunhae.

The words fell into the quiet like a stone into a well. Haeseul felt, all at once, a surge of pure, hot, human anger, the exhausted anger of a person who has been handled for years, by doctors, by landlords, by a mother who could not say what she needed and a lover who could not stay. She was on her feet before she knew it.

"That is not an answer," she said. Her voice shook. "That is a riddle. I have been very patient. I walked into a shop full of clocks on the strength of a piece of card, and I have been lied to by a pleasant face and a cup of water for two days. I do not like being managed. I do not like having things done to me, or around me, or on my behalf, without being told." She drew breath. "I am not a child. I am a person who has spent her whole life being useful to people who did not tell her what they needed. I will not do it again."

Eunhae had risen too. She did not step back. She stood very straight, with her chin up and her eyes steady, and took it like a person receiving a verdict she had known was coming.

"You are right," she said.

It was so calm, and so absolute, that the wind went out of Haeseul all at once.

"You are entirely right," Eunhae said again. "I should have told you at the shop. I meant to, and I lost my nerve. I have been a coward about it for three days, and for longer than that in other ways. I am sorry." A pause. Something moved in her throat. "But I will not tell you in front of the boy, and I will not tell you at two in the morning with the dark pressing on the windows, because it is not a thing to be said in haste. It is a thing that asks for a great deal. And you ought to be able to say no."

Haeseul stared at her. She had come prepared for a fight, and instead she had been handed a kind of terrible courtesy, and the anger in her chest did not so much die as turn, uncertainly, into something else. She was aware of her own heartbeat. She was aware of the exact distance between them, which was perhaps four feet, and the way that Eunhae's hand, still gripping the watch, had stopped shaking.

"Ask me, then," she said.

"Not yet."

"When?"

"Soon." Eunhae looked at the clock on the wall. It was nearly two. She looked at the sleeping boy in the chair, and then, finally, at Haeseul, and her face was very pale and quite resolute. "There are four nights until the new moon. I will not be able to do this alone, then. What happened tonight was only a small thing. A very small thing. The dark of the moon is when they come in earnest, and I am..." She stopped. She started again, carefully. "I am not well. You can see that I am not well. I need to ask something of you, and I need to ask it properly, in daylight, with the whole truth in front of you and nothing hidden."

"All of the truth?"

Eunhae's eyes did not flicker. But there was a half-second, a heartbeat, in which something passed across her face, quick and shadowed and tight, like a bird across a window, and Haeseul saw it and filed it away, and did not know yet what to call it.

"As much as I can bear to say," said Eunhae. "And as much as you can bear to hear."

It was not a promise. It was a great deal more honest than one. Haeseul looked at her for a long moment, at the shadowed eyes, the stubborn jaw, the tremor that had crept back into the long hands now that the work was done, and she was aware of a strange, resentful, helpless gentleness rising in her that she had no wish to feel.

"Daylight," she said at last. "Tomorrow. Or the day after. Not at the shop. Somewhere with a door that locks and a window that opens." A beat. "And you will eat something first. I will not talk to a woman who looks as though she is about to fall over."

A very small light went on in Eunhae's face. It was not quite a smile, only the memory of one, a corner of the mouth drawn up and then hastily drawn down again.

"That is a reasonable condition."

"I have many of them." Haeseul crossed her arms. "Be warned."

"I would expect nothing less."

She went to the door. The bell chimed for her, one clear note, and she stood on the threshold with the night wind lifting the ends of her scarf, and looked back. Haeseul had not moved. She was standing exactly where she had been, in the white light, with her arms folded and her hair coming loose from its band and her cardigan slipping off one shoulder, and her face, for all her sternness, was soft.

"Good night, Haeseul," said Eunhae.

It was the first time she had said her name. She said it quietly, carefully, as though she had practiced it, as though she had been saying it for a long time to an empty room and was only now learning what it was to say it to someone who could hear.

Then the door closed, and the dark took her.

Haeseul stood in the humming light and listened to the footsteps fade down the hill. After a while she went back to the counter. Gyeol was asleep in the old chair, his chin on his chest, his breathing slow and even and untroubled for the first time in a week, and she took her cardigan off and laid it over his shoulders, and stood for a moment looking at him.

She sat down on the step stool, in the place where the other woman had been sitting. It was still faintly warm.

For the first time in years, she thought, she was not afraid of the hour. It was nearly three o'clock in the morning, the hour when the dark was thickest and the old grief came up through the pipes, and she was not afraid. She felt strangely lit, strangely alive, strangely close to something she had been walking toward for a long time without knowing it.

Four nights.

She took out the green notebook and opened it to a clean page. She wrote the date, and then, after a long hesitation, in a hand that was not quite steady, she wrote: She said my name.

Then she closed the book, and held it against her chest, and listened to the clock.