“I’ll just wait here in the car,” I told Beth.
“Ah, come on in with me Jason. It won’t take me long and it won’t hurt you. Maybe you’ll see something you’ll want to read.”
“Yeah right. I don’t even have a library card.”
Reluctantly I followed Beth into the public library which was in the left half of one of the oldest buildings in the small Connecticut town. It consisted of a good-sized main room that housed the checkout counter, three rows of tables and chairs, and a periodical area. One row of tables had computers and printers. There was a sign that said New Releases on a wall above several bookshelves. I could see into four smaller adjoining rooms crammed with books.
“This way,” Beth said as she led me into one of those rooms. “This is where the history books are.”
While Beth looked for a book on the Spanish Conquistadors for a school report, I wandered around the narrow aisles of bookshelves. I never was much of a reader but found poking around the stuffed bookcases interesting. I noticed a little nook, perhaps an old storage closet, located off to one side of the room, so headed that way. It smelled musty and contained shelves of older, probably less popular books. Many had covers so aged, I couldn’t read the titles. There was dust on most of them. One book caught my eye. Its cover looked especially nondescript and boring. I wasn’t even sure what color it was supposed to be. It was a dull orange, or brown, or maybe red. I could barely make out Trip To on its cover. I reached out to grab it and as soon as I tilted it outward there was a whirling noise. I stepped backwards as a section of the bookshelf opened in like a door, exposing a deep dark tunnel.
“Holy crap, check this shit out, Beth,” I said in a low but excited voice.
Beth hurried over and saw me looking into a creepy passageway. “Wow, that’s way crazy. Isn’t this part of the outside wall? There’s just an alley back there.”
“Yeah, unreal. I wonder where it goes,” I said.
“Well, I don’t want to find out. Let’s just tell the librarian. We don’t have a flashlight anyway.”
“No way dude, we found it, so we need to check it out. I can use my phone for light. There might be treasure or something.” I activated the flashlight on my phone and stepped into the tunnel.
Immediately the passage walls began to glow, illuminating its full length. “Cool. There’s another door at the end and I don’t need my phone.” I stuck it back in my pocket.
“This is so strange and freaky, I don’t like it,” Beth said, shuddering a little.
“Come on, chill, don’t be a chicken.” I grabbed her arm and pulled her behind me further into the tunnel.
The bookcase whirled again and closed behind us. “Oh shit,” Beth said looking back.
She stepped backwards and touched the door. It opened back up.
“See, it’s fine,” I insisted, relieved.
We headed down the long corridor. When we approached the second door, I reached out and poked it. It opened. We peeked through the opening and saw a large, round, brightly lit chamber. Closed doors lined the perimeter. We wandered around the chamber, but there wasn’t anything in its glowing interior other than the doors. There had to be fifty or more of them. I touched one at random and it opened, exposing another deep, dark tunnel.
“Let’s see where this goes,” I said as I stepped through it, causing the walls to glow.
We headed down the passageway toward the door at its end. The door opened when touched, revealing a room filled with racks of old, tagged clothes. All the writing we saw looked like Chinese and we heard people speaking a foreign language.
“Let’s go back,” Beth said with a worried look on her face.
It was probably just the back room of a cleaners, and I wasn’t up for a confrontation, so I said, “Yeah okay, I don’t see anything interesting here.”
When we got back to the main chamber we looked around again and noticed that there were odd-looking symbols above the doors, otherwise they all looked the same.
“Which door did we come from?” Beth asked.
“Hell, I don’t know,” I replied.
So began our great adventure, exploring our world and many others.