Beneath Wood and Stone.

The library was a sprawling conglomeration of wood and stone. A maze of towering bookcases filled the space, with ladders twenty feet high needed to reach the tallest of shelves. Lucy wasn’t afraid of heights, not after working in the library for so long. She pushed the trolley across the stone floor, leaning on the handlebar. She listened to the squeak of the old wheels turning and the echo of her footsteps bouncing off the stone floor and echoing up the walls and the beams and the bookcases. Lucy found herself in the center of the library, a circle of biographies rising around her, spiraling inwards to the middle of the room. As she always did, Lucy looked upwards to the great glass skylight so high above her. Today it was raining, and for just a moment she listened to the peaceful patter of precipitation above her. From the biography section the library branched out in a number of directions. It was an ancient building with arches and crevices, and rooms of different shapes and sizes, each now filled to the brim with thousands upon thousands of words.

Lucy was taking her trolley to the eastern wing today. She made her way through the corridors made of books until she found herself in a back room she barely visited. The library rarely had visitors, not anymore, which meant Lucy often found herself returning books to shelves which may never be touched again for months, or even years. As Lucy entered the room, she could taste the staleness of the air and feel it on her skin. The cold of the room bit at her, and the hairs on her arms stood up. This room was windowless, and the strip lighting installed in the ceiling sputtered to life. At one end of the room the light flickered as if threatening to plunge the room back into darkness. She found the bookcase that belonged to the book, and she picked up the book that belonged to the bookcase. She looked at this spine of the book and then up at the highest shelf. Lucy sighed as she dragged the ladder along to where it needed to be. She took off her navy blue suit jacket and her heels, letting out a huff of annoyance for not bringing any spare shoes to work today. I won’t be here much longer she thought. She climbed the rungs with her bare feet, and felt her shirt tighten on her arms as she climbed. Lucy reached the top shelf and returned the book back to its rightful place, sliding back into its home. A faint handprint could be made out in the dust of the shelf, an imprint of where the patron had climbed up to claim the book she had just returned. Lucy took a moment to look at the books around her, paperbacks, hardbacks, tall, short, thick, thin. Each had a title she didn’t care for, and an author she never heard of. All except one. Lucy spotted an unassuming black book, hiding at the corner of the shelf. No title. No author. Stretching out with her arm she grasped for the little black book, but it was just too far. She dropped her arm back to her side and gave the book one last look before scaling back down the ladder. She slipped on her heels, and her jacket, and turned the trolley round to leave. As she reached the door, she paused. She could feel the little black book staring at the back of her head. She released her white knuckled grip on the trolley. Lucy slid the ladder along to the edge of the bookcase. This time she didn’t wait to take her shoes off as she ascended. Her hand ran down the spine of the little black book. She felt the grooves of the real leather against her fingertips. Opening the book in its center she smelt the mustiness of the old book and examined the yellowing pages. From back to front Lucy let the pages flip, each page with drawings of different lines and curves. In jagged handwritten calligraphy the very first page read “take only what you need”.

The interview had gone terribly. Lucy had arrived at her bus stop to find out the L23 had been delayed. Lucy braved the rain in her heels, her umbrella fighting against the wind. When she arrived late at the office her umbrella had been beaten by the wind, and mascara was dripping down her nose. Lucy felt small sitting across from the publisher as she dismantled her lack of work experience. She had pled a passionate case, but with each desperate plea she only sank further into herself.

Lucy walked through the heavy wooden door of her apartment building. She felt the cracked varnish of the bannister glide beneath her hand as she made her way upstairs. As she turned a corner she heard the creak of a door behind her, and only hoped that the rain had hidden her tears well enough. Her landlord was a spindly scarecrow of a man, his fingernails long and yellowing with cigarette smoke. Eyes wide with thick spiked eyebrows he asks, “rent?”. Lucy dumped her bag on her kitchen table, the bottle of wine she bought at the off license clinking as it landed. Somehow, she managed to convince her landlord to forgive another month’s rent. “The money is coming” she had lied. She took off her wet clothes, showered, and slipped into a big baggy t-shirt that smelt like her ex-boyfriend. She planked herself on her old fading leather sofa, looked up at the cracks in her ceiling. The white paint was peeling off her windows, and she had stripped the ancient wallpaper off the walls long ago, revealing a barren red brick landscape. For all its kinks and quirks this was her home, and damn anyone that tried to take it from her. With one twist of the wrist she opened the bottle of wine.

Lucy dreamt of the library, laying on the ground in the dark, staring through the skylight up into the night sky. Starlight staring right back at her. The bookcases of the library had gone, and tall green trees had taken their place, shadows of leaves dancing around her. She looked around at the stone and the wood of the building around her. The stone floor beneath her had turned to grass, moonbeams bouncing off the shining blades.

When Lucy awoke she was still on her sofa. An empty wine bottle tumbled to the floor as she sat up. She looked out her window to see the orange aura of streetlamps tumbling through her window. Lucy stood up, slowly, dragging herself toward the bedroom. In the deep orange light Lucy collided with the kitchen table and crumpled to the floor as a sharp pain surged through her hip. Pulling herself up from the ground, Lucy stopped. Her bag was still here from when she arrived home, and the corner of the little black book was peaking out of the top. Lucy lay in bed with the white satin covers up to her chest, dangling the book above her head. She flicked through the pages, examining the lines on each one. Her eyes were drooping with tiredness but not quite giving up. She stared into the lines and imagined herself walking in between the maze on each page. After seventy pages or so, she stopped. Lucy bolted upright. A tiny little ‘X’ sat between the lines. She pulled on a nearby pair of jeans, tucked the big baggy t-shirt into them, and quickly found herself inhaling the scent of hot coffee.

The blue light of dawn was creeping over the horizon when Lucy found herself at the library. She slipped her set of spare keys back into her frayed brown trench coat and punched in the security code for the alarm. It would still be a couple of hours before anyone arrived to open the library. She fumbled through the little black book in her hand and began slinking between the bookcases. Adrenaline and caffeine were keeping her awake, but even though her heart was racing she still stopped in the biographies section and stared up through the great glass skylight, as she did every time. Pink mixing with blue. Lucy passed by millions of words and brushed her hand against the stone archways as she made her way to the northern wing.

She found herself in a tiny room, the light of the morning sky cutting through the small slit windows. Only a few bookcases sat in this room, and a small round table with a couple of creaking wooden chairs sat in the middle. Lucy looked at the ‘X’, pacing around the room, and noticed the silence. She looked down at her feet, and the carpet beneath her. This is the only room with carpets in the library. Lucy dragged the table and chairs away from the center of the room. With as much might she could muster in her sleepless arms she pulled the carpet up and away from the walls and the bookcases. The floor was wooden and felt hollow beneath her feet. She looked curiously at the floorboards, where the nails had been hammered in. She positioned her fingertips around the edges of the wood, and pulled, her fingertips pressing into the rough wooden texture. The floorboards were loose. Bit by bit, Lucy disassembled the floor beneath her, a dark chasm opening up to swallow her whole. The floor of the pit was about eight feet beneath her. Lucy grabbed one of the creaking wooden chairs and lowered it down as far as she could before carefully dropping it into place. She sat at the edge of the hole and shimmied into position, lowering herself. Her arms were almost completely outstretched when her feet touched the seat of the chair. Lucy stepped off and into the dark, only able to make out shapes through the dust. She pulled a torch out of her coat pocket, faced the dark, and turned it on. Her eyes were almost blinded by the reflection. Lucy forgot to breathe and collapsed to her knees. She began laughing hysterically, her echoes joining her in chorus. She found the strength to climb back to her feet and began walking amongst trunks full of gold and diamonds. Shelves filled with ruby’s and sapphires. She found piles of cash and coin spanning from five years to a thousand years ago. She shone her light on a gleaming golden statue. It was a young woman with a book in her hand. The book wasn’t made of gold. It was a little red leatherbound book, no larger than her little black book. Lucy found herself sat on a trunk filled with silver chalices flicking through its pages. It was a ledger. One scruffily written entry read 1987, forty ruby’s, business loan. Another entry read 1949, diamond ring, true love. Each entry different from the last, dating back hundreds of years. Lucy remembered the writing, take only what you need. Lucy pulled a pen out of her coat pocket and wrote her message in the ledger and signed it off “for home”.

Her feet echoed as she walked around the library. The pockets of her coat were full, so she held the little black book in her hand. She made her way to the biographies section. The lack of sleep was encroaching upon her now and her movements were slow and sluggish. Lucy climbed up the twenty foot ladder in the centermost bookcase of the room, each rung providing a greater challenge. She stopped at the height of the ladder and placed the little black book facing up on top of the bookcase. Lucy looked up through the skylight as she so often did. Clouds rippled through the clear blue of the morning sky, drifting to an unknown destination.