Chapter 2

Turning on her heels, Elizabeth started to browse around, looking for something good to read. There were shelves of books that stretched up to the ceiling, and various piles of old paperbacks lying around that had no real home among the other books. Finding nothing that looked particularly interesting, she walked up to one of the public computers and decided to look up something to read. It was an old monster of a computer, and the layer of dust that she blew off showed that it was unused next to the laptops that filled the room. She typed in her name to go to her account, but then the screen went black. Looking behind the computer, she discovered that somehow, the computer had become unplugged. She shoved the plug back in the outlet, and a small line of blue electricity came out and shocked her hand. 

“Ow,” she exclaimed as the computer slowly came back to life. As Elizabeth cradled her singed fingers, the computer lit up with a blue light, and she continued her search for a book. However, no matter what she searched, the computer brought up the same book, every single time. There was no title and no author provided, but there was a code that showed you where to find it in the library. After a while, Elizabeth gave up trying to look for any more books, and decided there must be a glitch in the computer system. 

“Well, maybe its fate,” she chuckled to herself. “Maybe it will be the best book I’ll ever read, and if I don’t go find it this instant, I’ll be kept wondering about it my whole life.” She continued to chuckle to herself as she wrote down the location code of the book on her smartphone, and marched off to the other side of the library. She came to a row between two ceiling-high shelves of non-fiction books. She saw stories about George Washington and other famous presidents, historical inventions, and many other stories that were just too real for Elizabeth. She hoped her book (she had started calling it that in her head now) wasn’t nonfiction, as those usually bored her out of her mind. She needed the surprising plot twists and magical events that have you finishing a book in one sitting that only comes from fiction.  

She continued down between the shelves, and it soon turned from non-fiction to biographies and auto-biographies. Elizabeth looked at all the different books with wonder. There were blue leather-bound ones and green and red colorful hard backs. She thought it was cool that each of these books was the story of someone. It was telling the story of their lives. Looking down, she checked the code and realized from looking at the codes on the bookshelves around her that she was getting close. 

It was around then that Elizabeth noticed that she had never been in this part of the library before, at least she didn’t think she had. The books on either side of her were some of the largest and thickest books she had ever seen, and they had a slight look about them that made it seem like they had been there a long time, but had never even been removed from their places. Yet, at the same time, they were pristine, almost like fossils that had been preserved for hundreds of years. Shuddering, she looked away from the books as they were giving her an odd feeling, and continued down the winding row. It seemed like it went on forever.

“An endless library. How neat that would that be.” She whispered the words out loud and finally realized something peculiar that had been in the back of her mind this whole time. All the other noises from the library were gone, the pages rustling and familiar voices had vanished and been replaced by silence. Even the high heels of her shoes made no noise against the wood floor. She was also starting to notice how the lighting had changed as she had gone farther back in the library. The light in the entryway had been the harsh white light from the LED lights hanging from the ceiling, but back here, it was soft shades of all different-colored lights, making beautiful patterns on the floor. It would have been quite enjoyable and calming, except for the fact that it made no sense, as there were no sources for the lights to be seen anywhere. 

Suddenly, she turned a sharp left and saw that she had finally reached the end of her so-called adventure. There in front of her was a small alcove, surrounded by bookshelves on two sides. You would think that these two bookshelves wouldn’t have surprised her, since she was in a library after all, except that they were completely empty, both of them.

“Well, with all the extra books out front, I can’t believe that they would just leave these two bookshelves empty! What a horrible waste of space!” However, she couldn’t keep that thought in mind for very long, as she looked at the wall she was facing and gasped. It was a plain beige-colored wall, and it was not too exciting itself. On it, however, was where she guessed the colored light had been coming from. A beautiful stained glass window stretched from the floor to the ceiling and illuminated the room with vibrant colors. Elizabeth decided after a couple seconds that it must be abstract because, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t figure out what the picture was supposed to be depicting. There was also an immense amount of light coming through the window, but she couldn’t see what was on the outside. 

Then something that Elizabeth hadn’t seen before caught her attention in the bottom corner of her eyes. Before this, she had thought it was nothing important, but her brain had finally registered what it probably was. Standing in front of the bottom part of the window was a small black wooden podium, looking almost like a simple bedside table, but with no knobs or drawers. Sitting on top of it, was a small brown leather-bound book. The front leather looked older than Elizabeth herself, and it was beginning to peel and fade to a lighter brown. The spine of the book was gilded with a gold leaf pattern, and the gold flakes extended onto the front where they slowly faded away. Elizabeth looked at this small book in awe, and could just barely see the tip of a thin silky gold-and-silver bookmark sticking out of it, almost at the end of the book. Interestingly enough, there was a small piece of paper hanging from the front side of the podium that had the exact same numbers and letters that Elizabeth had seen on the computer only a little while ago. She had found her book, and it was better than she could have imagined, even before she read the first page.