Scrivenings of the King-Beyond-The-Wall

Mirror Mirror #7

The strangest thing about the top floor of the university library wasn’t that nobody went up there except for people who wanted to make out in the stacks, or the handful of students for which the old, dusty texts in the archaeology and architecture sections actually applied to their majors; it was the fact that one corner of the top floor seemed to be smaller than the other floors of the library. In fact, Curtis had actually measured the distance and found that, from one side of the building to the other, all the other floors were approximately two hundred steps. On the top floor, there were only one hundred and eighty steps from one side to the other. It was almost like the interior walls of the entire floor were set twenty-ish feet back from the exterior walls.

As an architecture major who did have occasion to visit the top floor often, Curtis knew that there were occasionally crawl spaces between the drywall on the side of a structure and the exterior wall, but he had never heard of that much space. You could almost fit an entire other room inside that space between the walls. Was it an accidental mistake by the contractor who build the library? Or an intentional feature of the place?

Whenever he wasn’t working on an actual research project, Curtis spent every free moment of his time examining the walls of the top floor of the university library. They seemed completely normal; even an exploratory knock on them felt solid. He looked for subtle signs that maybe a door used to be somewhere but had been walled up. All of the shelving and books made it difficult to fully inspect the space without pulling them away from the wall, and the idea of a secret passage unlocked by a switch hidden in a particular book was intriguing, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t the case since he had tried pulling nearly every book on the floor off the wall, but that just resulted in him looking like a crazy person whenever the occasional other student would walk by and see him literally taking book after book off the shelf, one at a time.

The only other explanation is that there was some other point of ingress and egress that he was missing. What about... above or below? He had only been up to the roof of the library once or twice before, and now made a more thorough search. Although there wasn’t much to search; mostly a collection of commercial air conditioning units and an assortment of blankets and deck chairs that someone had brought up so they could use it as a hangout spot.

Down on the fourth floor, though, Curtis noticed that an “Employees Only” door set into the corner of the floor had higher than normal traffic. Based on the layout of the floorplan, that couldn’t have been anything other than a supply closet or something equally mundane. So why did so many different people keep using that room? And going into it for quite some time? Staking out the place for a whole day, Curtis noticed that people would go inside the room and be there for hours. At one point, eight different people went into the room before someone came out, and Curtis was pretty sure that would make for pretty cramped quarters in something that appeared to be about the size of a supply closet.

Curtis casually hung around nearby until someone left the room, then slipped through the still closing door before it had a chance to shut all the way. And wouldn’t you know it, Curtis’ suspicions were confirmed; there weren’t any supplies or storage items present. There was just a staircase, leading up to the top floor. He didn’t hear anything, so he quietly moved up the stairs and into, as he suspected, a space with about twenty feet between the walls, just enough to make sense of why the library’s main floor on the top level was so much shorter than the others.

There were a furniture store’s worth of couches, sofas, recliners, bean bag chairs, and all manner of other seating strewn around. And the thing that stood out to Curtis the most was the stunning views from the windows. All the other floors of the library had some windows, and the top floor of course had none, but now he knew why. The hidden room inside the library had a wrap-around view of the entire campus! Curtis found himself wondering if it were a wrap-around room with windows, if the whole thing was just a glorified reading nook. Or was there something more interesting on the other side of the floor?

Curtis heard voices coming from down the hallway and quickly ducked behind one of the couches. There was just enough space to wriggle between the couch and the wall, and it offered total concealment from the group of students that were approaching.

“Is everything ready?” one of them asked.

“Yes, we just have to find Curtis and then we can begin the ritual sacrifice.”


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(858 words)


Prompt: Start your story with a student discovering a hidden room in a university library.