Shhhh! This is a Library (L1.3)

In the bathroom of the studio apartment she’d rented for a month to work in Santiago de Compostela, Lavinia was brushing her teeth and thinking about staying longer. The location was perfect, the street was quiet, foot traffic was lively, and her main research site was only two minutes away. She was happy spending hours alone in the vast library of the Museo do Pobo Galego, the Museum of the Galician People. She also enjoyed the conversations with the head librarian, Pilar. After her teeth were brushed, she looked in the foggy mirror, but instead of seeing her face, she heard something. Just a faint click, or ping, or tap similar to a pebble striking a hard surface. Then a shuffle-like sound. Nothing more.

Lavinia thought her imagination had become too active as a result of having been asked to look at some items that’d been unearthed during the process of remodeling an old building on Pombeiro Street. Her friend Xan, the cook from the María Castaña restaurant, had volunteered her to take a look at the items that had been stored in a long-lost box, because there seemed to be some written in English, which nobody at the restoration site understood.

“I need to get back to my real reason for being here,” she told her reflection, now visible after the steam had dissipated. Just because the box had also contained a note in Galician that said ‘Para a nosa biblioteca’, For our library, didn’t mean that Lavinia, who was herself a professor of library science, had to devote time to solving a mystery that belonged to others. Her focus was studying the travels and photography of an American woman who’d visited Galicia several times in the 1920s and 1930s and had left a legacy of perceptive images and skilled journalism. Her writing and photographs were an ethnographic treasure to the people she portrayed, but she was utterly unknown in her own country. Lavinia had come to change that if she could.

The sounds beside, or behind the mirror had been pure fantasy. That day Lavinia spent four hours reading Ruth Matilda Anderson’s book, noting as she did several places to visit in a few days in order to compare the traveler’s experience a century earlier to the present. Sitting on the bed, head turned toward the bathroom door, in one corner of the apartment, she heard a soft sound. It might not have come from the bathroom. This time it sounded like it had come from just outside, maybe from behind the small freestanding clothes closet. It definitely had come from the other side of the wall. It could not have come from the street, however.

Lavinia slept fitfully, dreaming about women accused of witchcraft, some of whom had managed to escape. She admired how they had used narrow passages, underground tunnels, because she was claustrophobic and enclosures, even elevators, could give her a panic attack. She thought of Tituba, a legendary woman, dark yet of undetermined color, who was said to teach spells to 17th century young women in Salem. Her story, as she might have told it, would be worth more than many boxes of gems or gold. Suddenly wide awake, Lavinia saw it was only four A.M. and all she could do was think about the soft rustlings that penetrated the studio space, moving in some direction she couldn’t identify.

Strong daylight brought other tasks, but in the afternoon Lavinia knew she had to move the closet. It took some effort to slide the heavy nineteenth century closet, made of the finest chestnut, three feet to the right. She didn’t want to scratch the floor, newly installed. 

The closet had been set in front of a crack in the wall. “That’s odd,” thought Lavinia. The rest of the wall is fine. This crack is fairly straight, too. Something’s not right. She was correct. It wasn’t a crack at all. Logic told her that and she drew away, curling up on the bed, hoping and fearing night would come so she could sleep. Maybe she should let the owner of the apartment know, and briefly recalled how it had been recommended to her. She also knew her friend Carmiña had recommended her as a tenant. At the time it had seemed almost too easy to find a reasonably priced, well situated place to stay in Santiago. Far too easy. What was going on around the studio?

Night did not show signs of arriving for a few hours yet, so Lavinia went to the wall and pushed slightly on the area inside the crack that wasn’t what it seemed to be. Under pressure, the rectangle was revealed - a rectangle like a narrow, low door frame that had been skillfully concealed through remodeling. When she moved in, Lavinia had learned her space, the lower level of the sixteenth century house, faced Rúa do Medio. Parallel to that street ran Rosario Street, and the old structure was actually sitting on both of them, and had two addresses, one for above and the other for below. That meant the studio actually was built into a wall of rock and had only one exit - the door to Rúa de Medio, Middle Street, if you will.

As she pushed the white rectangle inward, Lavinia thought about the building and about how there couldn’t be anything behind it because there was nothing but sheer rock. She also thought about the building’s location, on a slight rise that had a downward slope toward the Museo and the attached Church of San Domingos. San Domingos had been founded in the thirteenth century as a Dominican convent and the part that was now museum had for some time housed the deaf and blind. Lavinia thought about the possible significance of a tunnel, dark, unlit, hard to traverse, leading to the residence of persons who could neither see nor hear. That seemed like idle speculation, so she thought about how those two buildings were also on a slight rise, with the result that a tunnel between house and museum cum church could be fairly straight and flat.

“What am I thinking? Just because I had a nightmare about dark tunnels, now I’m imagining them everywhere. Tunnels on the brain.” It didn’t help that there were people in Santiago who swore there were tunnels everywhere under the city. “Just like Salem,” Lavinia thought, although the tunnels in the home of many witches were documented, books written about them, and stories of smugglers and pirates weren’t hard to prove.

Tunnels indeed. Salem was far away and Lavinia had just entered one that started, or ended, at the studio she was renting. Still, she ran to get her phone to use as a flashlight.

Walls of rough-hewn, sturdy, mica-flecked granite. Glittering and sparking when illuminated. Wrinkled like the faces of nonagenarians. No moisture to speak of, despite Santiago’s rainy climate. No sound, except for her own footsteps. The face of the wall wrinkled in silence. Claustrophobia be damned. The researcher could not stop. She walked, feeling each step first with her toes, because the floor of the passageway was rather rough, almost like the stepping stones over brooks that Galicians call a ponte de poldras. There was no brook here, though. No running water, no grass, no tress, no light, no room.

After about three hundred feet, Lavinia’s phone light showed a widening in the passage. Just beyond the jagged angles of the bigger opening, what looked like shelves had been hacked into the rock. There were also some slabs of stone inserted horizontally to serve as support for whatever had been stored - hidden? - in the tunnel. 

Lavinia needed to see what had been placed on the shelves, and she forced herself to continue, a step at a time, slowly, concentrating on her goal so as not to suffer a panic attack in that narrow space. Panic, she knew, could make her move impulsively. If she did that, she might trip, run into the wall, or drop her phone, which would sink her into total darkness. It would be the death of her, she reminded her logical self as her breathing became agitated, shallow, rapid, breaking the almost-silence. She had to remain still for a moment if she ever wanted to get out of there. In her efforts to concentrate and control her breathing, she didn’t notice the tiny clicks moving toward her from behind. She was focused instead on the forms that finally seemed to have assumed the shapes of books, as well as a few parcels and a few slender boxes. All of these were wrapped in plain paper and tied with either cotton string like they used to use in delicatessans, or with white silk ribbon. Some had been tied with simple bows, which led Lavinia to think they would be easy to open.

There was nothing else visible, nothing that might indicate if the tunnel actually did lead from the studio to the left, in the direction of the museum with its adjoining church, from the thirteenth century. It was impossible to discern any of the titles of the books wrapped in paper, and maybe they weren’t books after all, since her phone’s flashlight was dim. There might have been a wooden footstool off to one side, but she wasn’t sure. It might just be a shadow that was darker than the others. The tiny click-click still went unnoticed. Her breathing tensed another degree. She was nearly hyperventilating.

“What is this? Why are these things here? Who put them here? And when?” There was nothing odd about these questions, but normal researchers or archivists wouldn’t be asking them in the depths of a pitch black tunnel. Her voice sounded hoarse, because she had spoken in a whisper but the whisper had echoed. Lavinia now longed for the comfort of the building with the box that had some English documents, the building that was being remodeled. At least there she could sit comfortably in a back room with a window and enjoy a glass of albariño wine as she worked with the content of the box they’d handed to her. Here there was nothing but almost-silence and shadow. 

There was nothing to indicate to Lavinia - at least at a glance - how long the collection of items had been on the shelves. There was no dust, no mold or water damage. No way to date anything. Time did not seem to exist in the tunnel, and in fact it didn’t. This might be the most terrifying aspect of all: no time, no air, no movement. Nothing more than you would find in a sepulchre.

The tiny taps began again, then stopped abruptly, just behind Lavinia, by her right shoulder. She froze, panic about to take over.

“So you’re here. It’s time someone came.”

Lavinia had certainly never been the type to faint, despite the panic attacks, but she came close. She could no longer speak, but neither did she scream. Her whispered questions, uttered to nobody but the wrinkled walls, were gone. In their place, in place of whimpered sounds that told her she was still alive and rational, all sorts of scenes from the murder mysteries she liked to read ran through her mind. It took a split second, no longer. Lavinia knew had been more than foolish to open the door in the apartment and cursed her impulsiveness, maybe even her arrogance at thinking she could classify and catalogue everything, use her professional skills to solve matters that were really none of her business. Curiosity can kill more than cats.

“You’re here for a reason. Maybe it’s only your reason, but maybe we have a common interest. You will have to reveal that to us. Our library, a nosa biblioteca, needs to be taken to a safe place. It might not be one easily reached by most people, but we need to locate that site and take everything that belongs in it to be placed so that others can, some day, make use of it. There is more than you see here, much more.”

Lavinia, uncertain how much she had seen, how many books or parcels, turned around. She saw only a lighter shadow near one wall, not too far away. It was dim and she didn’t dare try to touch it to see if it was real The voice might have belonged to a woman, but she could only imagine a figure clad in white cloth. She uttered no response to what she had heard, and instead turned in the direction of the doorway and the safety of the studio. She didn’t run, but walked with her breathing strictly controlled, until her left hand gripped the rectangular opening and she could step through. When she arrived, it was evening. Time had stopped in the tunnel, but in the rest of the world almost five hours had passed.

The next day the sun shone in the windows, struck Lavinia’s eyelids, and woke her. She was surprised at having slept so long. The closet was in its original place, but she couldn’t recall having moved it on reaching the apartment. It was probably just a nightmare and she had to get ready to go to the library to work on the project that had brought her to Santiago in the first place.

Whose library?