Should I pretend I’ve been here before or not? That would have been a good question to ask Dorian. Zachary guesses the answer would have been yes, considering he’s supposed to know where the back door is, but it makes that more difficult not to stare.
The hallway is bright and high-ceilinged with white walls, lit by a line of crystal chandeliers running from the foyer to the stairs at the back. A deep blue carpet covers the stairs and flows down into the hall like a waterfall, catching the irregular light that makes it appear even more liquid.
But what Zachary cannot help but stare at are the doorless doorknobs hanging on either side of the hall.
Suspended from white ribbons at varying heights there are brass doorknobs and crystal doorknobs and carved-ivory doorknobs. Some seem to have rusted to the point of staining the length of ribbon to which they cling. Others have gathered greyish-green patinas. Some hang near the ceiling far above Zachary’s head and others skim the floor. Some are broken. Some are attached to escutcheons and others are only knobs or handles. All of them are missing their doors.
Each doorknob has a tag, a string attaching a rectangular piece of paper that reminds Zachary of the type of tag placed on the toes of corpses in mortuaries. He slows his pace so he can take a closer look. He catches city names and numbers he thinks might be latitudes and longitudes. Along the bottom of each tag is a date.
As they walk through the hall the air around them shifts over the ribbons causing the doorknobs to sway gently, knocking into their neighbors with a sorrowful hollow ringing sound.
There are hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
Zachary and his escort ascend the waterfall of stairs in silence, the doorknobs echoing behind them.
The stairs turn and loop in both directions but the woman goes up the set on the right. A larger chandelier hangs in the center of the looping stairs, lightbulbs obscured behind droplets of crystal.
Both sides of the stairs lead to the same hall on an upper floor, this one with a lower ceiling and no ribbon-strung doorknobs. This hallway has its own doors, each painted a matte black in stark contrast with the white walls surrounding them. Each door is numbered, a brass numeral in the center. As they walk down the hall the numbers are all low but do not appear to be sequential. They pass a door marked with a six and another with a two and then eleven.
They stop at a door near the end of the hall by the large barred window Zachary could see from the street, this one marked with an eight. The woman pulls a small ring of keys from her pocket and unlocks the door.
A loud chime strikes from below them. The woman’s hand pauses over the doorknob and Zachary can see the conflict playing out on her face, to go or to stay.
The chime strikes again.
“I can take care of this,” Zachary says, holding up the book for good measure. “I’ll see myself out the back. No worries.”
Too casual, he thinks to himself but his escort bites her lip and then nods.
“Thank you, sir,” she says, returning her keys to her pocket. “Have a pleasant evening.”
She takes off down the hall at a much brisker pace than before as the chime rings a third time.
Zachary watches until she reaches the stairs and then he opens the door.
The room inside is darker than the hallway, the lights arranged in a fashion he has occasionally seen in museums: the contents lit at carefully chosen angles. The bookshelves that line the wall are lit from within, books and objects glowing, including what appears to be an actual human hand floating in a glass jar, palm facing outward as though in greeting. Two long glass display cases run the length of the room, lit from the inside so the books appear to float. Heavy curtains hang over the windows.
It does not take Zachary long to find the book he has been sent for, there are ten books in one case and eight in the other, and only one is bound in brown leather. The light around it catches the formerly gilded edges of the pages, the pieces around the corners that have held on to their gold more tightly shimmering. It is one of the smaller volumes, thankfully, easily pocket-size. Others are larger and some appear quite heavy.
Zachary inspects the case, trying to recall if any of his instructions included how to open it. He cannot find any hinges or latches.
“Puzzle box,” Zachary mutters to himself.
He looks closer. The glass is set in panels, each book in its own transparent box even though the boxes are connected one to another. There are nearly invisible seams separating one from the next. The brown book sit
s in a section near one end, second from the last on the left. He checks it from both sides and then crawls under the table to see if it opens from beneath but finds nothing. The table has a heavy base made of some kind of metal.
Zachary stands and stares at the case. The lights are wired, so the wires must go somewhere, but none are visible on the outside. If the wires run through the table, maybe the entire thing is electric.
He searches the perimeter of the room for switches. The one next to the door turns on a chandelier he didn’t even notice in the shadows above. It’s simpler than those in the hall and doesn’t add much light.
The wall with the windows has complicated latches but nothing else. Zachary pulls open one set of curtains and finds a window that overlooks the brick wall of the building next door.
He pulls back the other curtains and finds not a window but a wall with a line of switches on it.
“Ha!” he says aloud.
There are eight switches in something that resembles a fuse box, and none of them are labeled. Zachary switches the first one and the lights on one of the bookcases go out, the suspended hand vanishing. He turns it back on and skips down to the eighth switch, guessing that the top six are the shelves.