Twilit Mage

Chapter 6: Paige & Turner

Shaking off her thoughts, Mercury turned around and walked through the mall, navigating through more crowds, letting herself be pushed up more escalators, trying to focus on the task at hand. The top floor...she had to reach the top floor. Then she had to get to fast food hell, as Principal Blake had called it...and then the elevator...

Slipping through several large families with even larger burgers between Subway and McDonald's, Mercury stumbled out of the crowd...and suddenly found herself in front of the elevator she'd been looking for. It looked completely normal; there was nothing even remotely magical about it, and once again Mercury caught herself wondering if she was really, really in the right place.

Well, just one way to find out.

Making sure no one was watching her too closely, Mercury pressed the button, waited, and stepped inside as soon as the doors opened.

Everything looked normal.

Then the doors closed, and suddenly a ripple went through the small, bad-smelling elevator cabin.

The crowded mall outside disappeared. The scratched glass and matted metal seemed to turn into crystal and polished steel. The worn-out buttons shone once more, and above them all, where nothing had been just a second ago except the elevator wall, another button lit up out of nowhere, branded with a large open book.

Mercury smiled nervously, her hands trembling with excitement, and pushed the button.

The elevator started moving. She couldn't tell if it was going up or down, but for a second her body felt weightless. Outside the windows and doors everything was swallowed by a foggy half-light, completely empty except for the uncanny shapes flitting by every once in a while, just fast enough to be impossible to follow with the eyes.

Then the elevator stopped, the door opened, and Mercury found herself in front of a place she had never seen before.

The elevator seemed to open straight into a dimly-lit store. It was large and high, with rows and rows of tall shelves reaching up to the ceiling and ladders standing beside them to reach the upper levels. The floor was covered in a fluffy burgundy carpet, and the smell of old paper lingered heavy in the air, grains of dust dancing lazily in the sunlight under the handful of small windows. And every corner, every nook, every cranny was filled with books. Large, small, old, new, more books than Mercury had ever seen in one spot before, even at the library. Between the shelves stood some boxes of books, all of them with the logo from earlier and the name Paige & Turner printed on them in big letters.

"How much longer are you planning to stand there?"

Mercury jumped. Her eyes darted about for the origin of the voice, finally resting on the cash desk in the middle of the room.

Sitting behind the desk was a very scruffy man in his late thirties, pale, messy-haired and in need of a shave, wrapped into what looked like six layers of sweater, cardigan, scarf and blanket, at the very least. The bags under his eyes were so dark they looked almost painted on, and he was glaring at Mercury with irritation in his eyes.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Mercury stuttered out, stumbling out of the elevator, whose doors instantly slammed shut behind her. "I didn't see you there...I mean...it's just...I didn't expect to end up in a place like this, you know? I mean..." The man was still glaring at her, and she shrank back. "W-We're...above the mall, right?"

The look on the man's face was more than enough to tell her she had just asked a very stupid question.

"W-We're not?" she ventured, panic rising inside her. "Okay, sorry for assuming! I just wondered how–"