before young lady, and I’m still trying to learn the procedures. Again, I’m sure someone will be able to help you on Monday.”
Elli heard nothing of what the woman said beyond her saying that Ms. Simonson was gone. Forgetting about the book momentarily, she asked, “How soon will there be a replacement for her?”
“My understanding is there will be no replacement, and that they plan to hire out the management of the library to an operations management company.” She added, as if she were signaling sudden expertise in the area of concern, “There is really very little need for librarians any longer, now that we have the Internet.”
Elli had no idea what the woman could possibly have meant by the remark, and considered it useless to carry the conversation any further. “Would it be possible for me to go downstairs and find it myself? I could spot it easily, I know, and it would only . . .”
“Young lady,” the woman interrupted, seeing that a small line had now formed behind Elli, “I can’t be of any help to you today. You will simply have to return on Monday when someone else besides me will be here. Now,” she added quickly, looking at the man who was behind Elli, “may I help you?”
The man actually reached over Elli’s head and put his books on the desk in front or her. Elli slipped aside to let the man get to the counter. She simply stood there and wondered: why couldn’t she herself go to the basement? That was what she was trying to ask the woman at the desk, but she was never given the chance. She thought to herself, “No one told me I couldn’t go to the basement!”
Elli glanced about the large reading room and noticed to her delight that what appeared to be the door to the basement was not only not behind the circulation desk, but was also open—as if it had been opened just for her, she pretended. Actually, the dark, oak paneled door, just around the corner behind the drop-off counter, wasn’t open very far—just an inch or so, as if someone had intended to close it, but had forgotten to make sure it was closed tightly—or had shut it, but, like many older doors, it just opened by itself. The bright light from the reading room poked through the partially opened door, allowing Elli to see that just to the other side was a flight of stairs—going down.
That had to be it, she thought. But maybe she’d better try to ask permission again before going any further. Elli moved a little closer to the front of the line where she had just surrendered her position to the man whom the woman was now helping. The woman’s eyes caught Elli’s and, sensing that Elli was not going to give up her quest just yet, she glared at Elli with a look that said, “I am not going to talk about this anymore.” And with that, as if sensing Elli’s thoughts, the woman, while walking past the basement door with a stack of return books, pushed hard on the door to make it shut, as if by the slam she was announcing both her authority and a final decision. She followed this with a dismissive look that was enough to persuade Elli to try to find the book on her own. When the woman returned to the circulation desk, Elli caught her eyes, stepped out of line and then headed straight for the bronze doors through which she had entered the building only minutes earlier, hoping the woman would think she was leaving.
When Elli was about four feet from the exit, however, she began to turn ever so slightly to her left—while looking back and giving a furtive glance toward the woman at the desk. When Elli saw that the woman was fully occupied with another young girl, she turned and headed back into the library around the many tall shelves of books, as if she had been the hand of a clock that had moved suddenly counterclockwise from twelve o’clock to nine o’clock, and then to five o’clock, where she located the basement door just twenty feet ahead of her. She could see, peeping above a row of books from the end of a shelf, that the woman at the desk was still occupied. But it was also apparent that Elli would be in her peripheral line of vision were she to make a dash for the door. Elli waited for just the right moment. The woman turned, as if suddenly ordered to do so by a commanding officer in an army, and began walking quickly in the direction of Elli, causing Elli to wonder if she had been discovered. But then, as if suddenly remembering she had forgotten something, the woman turned abruptly on one heel back toward the desk. Elli realized instantly that this was her best and perhaps only opportunity, and made a quiet dash for the door.
Elli tried the knob and found the door locked. She looked for a key and found a rather large and old one on a nail next to the door. She grabbed the chain holding the black skeleton key, unlocked the door and then slipped inside, shutting the door ever so gently behind her.
The head of the stairs she had noticed earlier through the slightly opened door was no longer in sight, and she was standing in pitch-black darkness.
Elli stood still in the small space, not wanting to fall down the stairs, and groped the three close walls enveloping her for a light switch. Like a blind woman trying to “see” another’s face with her hands, Elli let her probing fingers dance lightly over the surfaces of the cracked plaster walls, not wanting to miss the one spot where the switch was located. She found nothing. Perhaps it was a bulb with a switch or pull chain hanging from the ceiling. Elli stood on her toes and waved an arm throughout the impenetrable darkness while she leaned against one wall and then another to keep from falling. Still nothing.
All of a sudden, Elli heard the sound of the heels worn by the acting librarian. They were getting louder—and closer. Elli had to decide either to open the door and disclose her presence or, still in the dark, to lock the door and go quickly down the stairs. With little time for consideration, Elli locked the dead bolt and then groped for the handrail she had discovered in her search for a light. She found it and began an initially swift, but careful, descent. Elli descended no more than a few steps when she heard the knob jiggle, indicating, apparently to the woman’s satisfaction, that the door was locked as she had intended it to be. Elli then heard the heels walk away, as if in victory.
Elli assumed that the bottom of the stairs must be near, and that surely there she would discover a light switch. However, the handrail suddenly disappeared and the steps turned abruptly into stairs of stone that spread themselves like an unfolding fan into an ever-widening spiral. It was, she felt, as if she were a young woman in a wide skirted gown slowly descending the staircase of an elegant mansion to join her waiting escort.
Elli continued her descent on the stairs that, to her astonishment, seemed to have no end, and on a spiral that seemed ever to widen, as if the spiral staircase never intended to reach any sort of ground or pavement whatsoever, but simply existed for its own sake. She balanced herself against the stone wall as she stepped, careful with each footfall to make certain there was always another step or, better, a landing. To be sure to not lose the key, Elli placed the chain about her neck, tucking the key inside her shirt.
“Surely,” thought Elli, “I must have made a mistake—this couldn’t possibly be the stairs to the basement!” Elli stopped and turned, paused for an indecisive moment, and then began walking back up the stairs. But as soon as she began her ascent, Elli heard a door open just several feet below, and the bluish light from the doorway cast a large shadow of her small body on the stairs above her. Elli stopped, startled, and was about to run the rest of the way up the stairs when the voice of what had to be that of a very old man said to her kindly,
“Now, young lady, why would you be leaving when you are almost to the book?”
Elli, more puzzled than frightened, but duly fearful, too, turned toward the door that had opened from the wall only five steps below her, but with the stairway itself still continuing to descend into the darkness beyond the light. She could not see the man, but she could see through the doorway rows of dark wooden bookcases containing what she thought must be hundreds, if not thousands, of old books. The musty odors drifting onto the staircase made her think of what she guessed to be the scent of old monasteries, their libraries filled with devoted scribes and scholars laboring with ideas and words that mattered.
“Hello?”
