Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. The lad you
Speaker 1: are here, Let's get into it. One spring morning, before
Speaker 1: the river had burned off its mist and the city
Speaker 1: had properly worken, I found myself descending the main staircase
Speaker 1: in the town library with a pad of graph paper
Speaker 1: tucked under my arm. The sub basement was always to him,
Speaker 1: but that day the light almost seemed to change, thicker,
Speaker 1: as if every landing divided the air into separate rooms.
Speaker 1: I counted the steps without thinking, thirteen from the ground
Speaker 1: floor down, then a landing, and then twelve. More er
Speaker 1: was of fourteen. I paused, felt beneath my foot, and
Speaker 1: tried again, thirteen going down, but only twelve coming back up.
Speaker 1: The numbers stuck in my head as I turned, letting
Speaker 1: the door close softly behind me. I'd been an engineer
Speaker 1: long enough to know that old building stretched and sagged,
Speaker 1: that stairs ballast as loosened with time over decades. A
Speaker 1: wall could drift by an inch, a ceiling dep by hair.
Speaker 1: But these details meant something in the language of Asian
Speaker 1: nother near arithmetic of to day. Still it needled me.
Speaker 1: My right knee felt every stair, and it reported one
Speaker 1: more on the way down, as if the building forgot itself.
Speaker 1: Inside the first sub basement, the air was cool, smelling
Speaker 1: of stone, dry and glue, and yesterday's detergent. The libraries
Speaker 1: in this town always ran along the river, clinging to
Speaker 1: the dry seasons and sheltering from floods when they arrived.
Speaker 1: This one had been rebuilt twice already in my lifetime.
Speaker 1: I'd watched it rise from mud and sand begs as
Speaker 1: a young engineer, later returned to Vizan waterproofing, and now
Speaker 1: in retirement, I volunteered in the mornings before the city's
Speaker 1: noise penetrated these walls. If not for a weathered fondness,
Speaker 1: and I'll admit a persistent restlessness, I'd never have noticed
Speaker 1: what the rest seemed to take for granted, the ceiling
Speaker 1: in it hallway was lower than I remembered. It pressed
Speaker 1: just above my head, but the open floor beyond spread
Speaker 1: wider than seemed possible. Door frames, when traced with my eyes,
Speaker 1: failed to align with those on the upper level. I
Speaker 1: ran my hand along one absently, tracing were plaster bulshed
Speaker 1: and would sack from an old flood. The main corridor
Speaker 1: felt shifted at askew somewhere below I should have been
Speaker 1: another floor down, Yet here I was surrounded by cinderblock
Speaker 1: walls and the vakedrone of the ventilation. I checked my
Speaker 1: watch as if time might offer us uncompressible logic, but
Speaker 1: it only blinked back the minutes. Unconcerned, Marnie, the morning supervisor,
Speaker 1: called up as I hesitated by the next door. She
Speaker 1: was brisk in her movements, her grave bob flicking as
Speaker 1: she looked back at her clipboard. You lost or ready, tom?
Speaker 1: I offered her my most unbothered grin just checking the steps.
Speaker 1: Something didn't add up. She didn't so much as slow
Speaker 1: her stride. Old building oddities. They never fixed the stack
Speaker 1: hand after the last carpet job. Don't let drivy nuts nuts?
Speaker 1: Maybe not curious, Certainly I made a mental note to
Speaker 1: pay closer attention. There was order in old wood and
Speaker 1: poor concrete, But this building, I was starting to suspect,
Speaker 1: had more stories touched beneath it than I'd given credit for.
Speaker 1: Once the light changed behind me, some breaking through glass
Speaker 1: blocks somewhere overhead, I moved toward the utility closet. This
Speaker 1: was my morning routine chart up, which let flicker which
Speaker 1: piped stripped from the ceiling. Town took comfort in the
Speaker 1: library's routines when the river swelled in the well felt uncertain.
Speaker 1: This was where people came to read and wait out disaster,
Speaker 1: to mark time among their neighbors. I'd seen it more
Speaker 1: often than I could count. Now, in quieter times, with
Speaker 1: retirement pressing in, I found perhaps ancouring myself to species
Speaker 1: like these. Marnie preferred efficiency, not nostalgia. She corralled her
Speaker 1: volunteers in the main staff room every morning, splitting the
Speaker 1: work as briskly as she took inventory. Eric at twenty, lanky,
Speaker 1: unfailingly polite, always paid the more obscure tasks so he
Speaker 1: could collect building stories, as he called it miss cesspower
Speaker 1: at the last of the old God, favored her catalog
Speaker 1: of cards, and was known for her memory on any topic, except, strangely,
Speaker 1: the nuts and bolts of the building itself. I like
Speaker 1: to think I'd made myself useful, not by getting in
Speaker 1: the way, but by patching things others work passed. The
Speaker 1: main staircase on the grand floor creaked three times as
Speaker 1: reliably as a heartbeat. Low only two steps creak, though
Speaker 1: the stairs were made of the very same mind. Humming
Speaker 1: buzz from a distant transformer followed a different path through
Speaker 1: the ceiling beams with every rain. Eric caught up with
Speaker 1: me as I examined the utility. Cause it watching me
Speaker 1: fiddle with my tape measure you record these things in
Speaker 1: a journal or gesture head? I smiled, bit of both.
Speaker 1: Want to check something with me? He nodded and bent
Speaker 1: to see what had caught my attention. Is it the
Speaker 1: weird air, he asked, feels different by the old bathrooms,
Speaker 1: Not like regular humidity, I shrugged. It's always more humid
Speaker 1: after rain, but this spot's something else. Eric put his
Speaker 1: hand flat against a wall and sniffed the air theatrically.
Speaker 1: It's not the books. That's like river fog, but dry
Speaker 1: aging brickwork, maybe, I offered, but I was unconvinced. I
Speaker 1: dropped my tape back into my satchel and wrote down
Speaker 1: an extra mark on the graph paper, one for every
Speaker 1: odd sensation. To the people who cared, the library was
Speaker 1: more than just mortar and glass walls, it was a
Speaker 1: monument of flood survived, A marker of stories kept up
Speaker 1: of the highway to mark its edges held that stubborn
Speaker 1: pride found in towns built on floodplains equal pots anxiety, humor,
Speaker 1: and ingenuity. I spent the rest of that morning tracing
Speaker 1: my steps through the low boiler room, pacing from west
Speaker 1: to east wall. The floor pitched slightly, nothing unusual for
Speaker 1: a poet's slab above a river. Yet the corridor next
Speaker 1: to the ouckouse seemed wider than it had on last
Speaker 1: week's walk. Back in the staff room, I started a
Speaker 1: sketch on my graph paper. To anyone else, it probably
Speaker 1: looked like a series of rectangles, strong together at odd angles.
Speaker 1: But there was a reassuring logic to mapping things, even
Speaker 1: if the answers weren't there yet. I held my notes
Speaker 1: up to the wall display of floorplands sturdy official blueprints
Speaker 1: behind glass. My numbers, paces and steps didn't quite line
Speaker 1: with the ones marked in inch. I measured again. The
Speaker 1: main corridor by the archives stretched forty two feet on
Speaker 1: the printed plan, but I consistently measured four to four
Speaker 1: with my tape. I checked for transposed digits or miss columns,
Speaker 1: not Then the more I compaied, the less the building
Speaker 1: agreed with itself. That same afternoon, I happened to mention
Speaker 1: my puzzles to Eieric as we organized a card of
Speaker 1: return books. He leaned his hip against a metal shelving
Speaker 1: unit and said, I mapped the basement once for a
Speaker 1: school history project. There is the ground floor, first sub basement,
Speaker 1: second and third rite, I frowned. Marnie says there's only
Speaker 1: two sub levels. City records agree, he laughed quietly. Then
Speaker 1: where are the stairers accounted last year? There's got to
Speaker 1: be three, maybe four, if you can the crawl spaces.
Speaker 1: Misses Bauer organizing catalog cards near by China, and with
Speaker 1: that of hand confidence only she could muster. There used
Speaker 1: to be an east reading room underground, lovely orange lamps,
Speaker 1: very cozy, she wrinkled her brow. Maybe not so cozy
Speaker 1: if you were claustrophobic. But it was there, all right.
Speaker 1: Eric shot me a look. I shrunked back. I'd never
Speaker 1: seen such a room, nor was it mocked on any
Speaker 1: current nap. Yet Missess Barr was certain. That night I
Speaker 1: lay in bed mentally rearranging walls, doors, hallways, recalling the
Speaker 1: extra step on the stairs and the half lined door frames.
Speaker 1: More than curiosity now tugged at me, a desire to
Speaker 1: explain the unexplainable to fit what I knew about building
Speaker 1: with what I was experiencing. Our next volunteer day, I
Speaker 1: invited Eric to join in a more systematic mapping. We
Speaker 1: armed ourselves with a laser tape and a compass up
Speaker 1: on his phone. The plan was simple. Starred at the
Speaker 1: main entrance, moved methodically through the lower halls, noting every measure,
Speaker 1: every door, every angle. Maybe it would amount to nothing,
Speaker 1: but I needed to show myself that the building could
Speaker 1: be measured, that every oddity was a product of neglect, renovation,
Speaker 1: or a time. The trouble began quickly. We marked the
Speaker 1: main corridor at twenty five feet from north to south.
Speaker 1: When I checked it from the opposite end twenty minutes later,
Speaker 1: the laser tapes baut At thirty one. I looked up,
Speaker 1: expecting some explanation, a jog in the wall, an alcove missed,
Speaker 1: but the corridor was as straight as any I'd ever seen.
Speaker 1: We laugh at first blaming the technology, then the amateur
Speaker 1: cartographers ourselves included, and finally the building itself. I tried
Speaker 1: the mob closet next. By every plan I'd seen, it
Speaker 1: should have been just a brooms lent deep a service crawl.
Speaker 1: I locked my fingers around the old latch, expecting the
Speaker 1: soft assistance of a shallow space. Instead, the door opened
Speaker 1: into a narrow alkilve stretching back several feet and a
Speaker 1: single dirty window, half fogged from condensation. Looked at at
Speaker 1: what should have been blind earth. I pressed my forehead
Speaker 1: against the glass. It made my field of view swim,
Speaker 1: but I could see a wedge of the river bank
Speaker 1: in fracture, daylight, and angle that shouldn't exist from this depth.
Speaker 1: For long seconds, I waited for my mind to resolve
Speaker 1: what I saw into something rational, but the sensation was
Speaker 1: more like balancing at the edge of a waking dream.
Speaker 1: Eric peered over my shoulder. That can't be right. That's
Speaker 1: a ferry dock or something like it. That's impossible. I said,
Speaker 1: We're at least ten feet underground here, and the window
Speaker 1: was about quart a story above grade. He shrugged, trying
Speaker 1: to joke it away. Maybe we're in two places at once.
Speaker 1: We took turns, testing each door, each wal even measuring
Speaker 1: temperature gradients, searching for plumbing leaks. The answers were treated
Speaker 1: with every step. At lunch, we showed our crooked sketches
Speaker 1: to Marnie, who was organizing forms behind her desk. She
Speaker 1: tilted her head half focused, then fran for the first
Speaker 1: time since I'd known her. That's not right, she murmured,
Speaker 1: comparing our marks against the tidy blueprin behind her. Her
Speaker 1: eyes fixed between maps, and then she waved us off.
Speaker 1: Probably just marked wrong. I'll have to check one. I
Speaker 1: have a minute. Eric and I exchange glances. He smirked,
Speaker 1: shrugging as if to say, you see what I mean.
Speaker 1: It was around then that Jasmine joined us, a friend
Speaker 1: of Eric's studying geography at the college. She brought an
Speaker 1: old servy map from the town archives and laid it
Speaker 1: out on the staff table. This is from nineteen forty six,
Speaker 1: she said, tapping swells of hand drawn lines and blocks.
Speaker 1: It's marked future site, unbuilt. But y've all been in
Speaker 1: this part of the building. Yes, I traced her finger
Speaker 1: along the block extending west. According to her map, half
Speaker 1: of the Modern's abasement didn't exist. But here we all
Speaker 1: were putting our hands on the walls. Miss Sespower, trailing
Speaker 1: the discussion with friendly amusement, left and returned, dragging a
Speaker 1: yellow folder florpund from before the renovations. She announced. She
Speaker 1: pointed to her rectangular room along the outer wall, label
Speaker 1: sub level, reading lounge lovely spot. I read half the
Speaker 1: classics stand there as a girl. None of us could
Speaker 1: recall a lounge on any current apple find a space
Speaker 1: that matched where it should be. Miss Espower simply nodded
Speaker 1: as if the matter were closed, and tidied her folder away.
Speaker 1: With every exchange, the lines blood further. The sub basement
Speaker 1: seemed to shift with memory. The oarc of stretched time
Speaker 1: as well as space, and the physical wells refused to
Speaker 1: sit still long enough to be measured. When I checked
Speaker 1: the staff break room a second time, it no longer
Speaker 1: existed where I was cerfind left it. Instead, the old
Speaker 1: ocad vault had moved in. My engineer's brain ticked over,
Speaker 1: considering settling warping renovations. But no, these were room sections
Speaker 1: of hallway dose maneuvering through the logic of memory, not
Speaker 1: through the mechanics of construction. I looked to Eric. Could
Speaker 1: the building have been built in layers like sediment, one
Speaker 1: on top of the other, old rooms bricked behind new ones.
Speaker 1: He shook his head, crooning at the way the idea
Speaker 1: ignited his curiosity. Either that or we missed the day
Speaker 1: they taught to un travel in architecture. Marnie Overhearing added
Speaker 1: her own skepticism as she filed a stack of returns.
Speaker 1: I've worked here twenty years. There are two sub basements. Period,
Speaker 1: don't complicate it. We press her for details, but she deflected,
Speaker 1: more interested in checked and books than checked out theories.
Speaker 1: One Jasmine compared the present day space with her old map.
Speaker 1: She frowned. According to this, she said, these rooms shouldn't
Speaker 1: even exist, but we're in them. If the building was odd,
Speaker 1: their records were odder. Additions from the nineteen fifties included
Speaker 1: rooms drawn in on one sheet, raised from another, and
Speaker 1: doubled on a third. Once I found an annotation in
Speaker 1: green pen re measured after small flood nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: seat ass sketch. No sketch was attached. That afternoon, Eric
Speaker 1: and I crept back to the block Over the window.
Speaker 1: The sunlight was gone, replaced by the blank monotone of
Speaker 1: cinder block and dust. Someone had left a pair of
Speaker 1: galoshes in a corner, sasso small, they to fit a child.
Speaker 1: I jotted that down. The longer we explored, the more
Speaker 1: I felt that the building's lays ran deeper than concrete
Speaker 1: or brick. After two weeks mapping, our best efforts were
Speaker 1: shot through with contradiction. The more detail we plotted, the
Speaker 1: more that detail refused to be pinned down. The biggest
Speaker 1: oddities never repeated precisely, like a trick of daylight shifting
Speaker 1: with the weather, or sound echoing from the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: I had prided it myself for decades on solving little mysteries.
Speaker 1: A section of walmus aligned, a leak that only appeared
Speaker 1: under certain pressure, a saddling crack. But this wasn't a
Speaker 1: puzzle that could be solved by replacing a gasket or
Speaker 1: withdrawing a blueprint. The urge that had begun as idle
Speaker 1: curiosity was now pressing need a certainty that something in
Speaker 1: this place did not want to be measured, mapped, or
Speaker 1: made definitive. I set out for City Hall with the
Speaker 1: original blueprints and jasmine survey map in a battered shoulder back,
Speaker 1: determined to settle the matter once and for all. City
Speaker 1: records produced as many contradictions as answers. The stack of
Speaker 1: files at the Planning Office was surprisingly thin for a
Speaker 1: building of such long service. The official plans listed three
Speaker 1: full sub basement levels, but none for the curious. How four,
Speaker 1: as Eric's wore, he'd explored a room marked doc have storage,
Speaker 1: vanished from a later planning revision, replaced by a jog
Speaker 1: in the hallway labeled maintenance access. I returned to the
Speaker 1: library with the corpus of three decades worth of plans,
Speaker 1: everyone differing in some small but essential detail. Decades after
Speaker 1: the last recorded flood, the building lines had shifted on
Speaker 1: paper almost as much as in practice. Eric, restless, as always,
Speaker 1: was unbowed by bureaucracy. Let's just walk it, he said.
Speaker 1: Let's go all the way down and count together. It
Speaker 1: was a Tuesday, after a quick thall and steady rain
Speaker 1: and springs. Dampness hung in the air. The marble steps
Speaker 1: were faintly slick. We began at the top, counting aloud,
Speaker 1: each landing a checkpoint. Passing through the may Knock Aft
Speaker 1: corridor felt unremarkable at first. He low hum from fluorescent tubes,
Speaker 1: the sharp time of Kleano where someone had mopped earlier.
Speaker 1: For halfway down the next corridor, Eric's wuon compasspun twice
Speaker 1: as we crossed under a beak are path, doubling back
Speaker 1: without warning when we reached the bottom, expecting a door
Speaker 1: to the mechanical room. We instead faced a blank wall.
Speaker 1: Eric tapped it, suspecting a fire door or access panel,
Speaker 1: but there was nothing. The only sound was the gentle
Speaker 1: press of water through pipes hidden deep in the wall.
Speaker 1: We went the wrong way, he said, though we both
Speaker 1: knew we hadn't. We were traced our steps this time.
Speaker 1: The old entrance appeared as if it had never left,
Speaker 1: though utility sign that had been there that morning was gone.
Speaker 1: I wrote it all down, wondering if the record would
Speaker 1: mean anything by tomorrow. Jasmon arrived soon after, comparing her fundings.
Speaker 1: How the city's first river bridge had once landed just
Speaker 1: east of the library. Howse sections of the earliest town
Speaker 1: griered had been touched away under landful and floodplaine recovery.
Speaker 1: To see, she pressed, pointing out overlapping lines on the
Speaker 1: old map, the grounds always rising, sinking. Maybe that's why
Speaker 1: nothing lines up the building. Settling could explain a lot,
Speaker 1: I admitted, But not doors shifting always stretching, or windows
Speaker 1: showing daylight when your room's underground. Her voice brightened, half
Speaker 1: in serious interests, half in speculative fun. There are stories
Speaker 1: the layers of a town, all pass rooms that only
Speaker 1: open after a flood. Some places hold onto their old footprints.
Speaker 1: Maybe here is just a little more active. That got
Speaker 1: a laugh, then a pause. The sword that sparks when
Speaker 1: everyone stands on the edge of a new idea. We
Speaker 1: made our way back up stairs, past miss Espauer, who
Speaker 1: was muttering over a pile of catalog cards. She looked
Speaker 1: up as we came near. It's just like when I
Speaker 1: was little. The stairs were different every few years after
Speaker 1: big floods, after they moved the stacks. My mother always
Speaker 1: said the basement grew every time the river cane close.
Speaker 1: She chuckled. Maybe she meant mole, not rooms. Hard to say.
Speaker 1: Now that evening, reviewing our map spread on the long
Speaker 1: reading table where pigeons would soon return, a thought began
Speaker 1: to crystallize. The irregularities had taken on a life of
Speaker 1: their own. We'd come from counting bricks and tracing moles
Speaker 1: to drawing a tangled web of memories and maps, all
Speaker 1: traditions and impossible measurements. The more we tried to pin
Speaker 1: things down, the more elucid the truth became. I looked
Speaker 1: at the brash school age sketches. Eric had dug out
Speaker 1: of his back back. These should not all be true
Speaker 1: at once. Maybe none of them are, Jasmine joked, No,
Speaker 1: maybe all of them are in their our own way,
Speaker 1: I replied, only half in jest. We gathered once more
Speaker 1: at the staff room, the others hoping for a simpler
Speaker 1: answer than the ones multiplying in our notes. Marnie, always
Speaker 1: level headed, rolled her eyes at the imagined complexity. The
Speaker 1: old plans were always sloppy. Old time is like to
Speaker 1: leave surprises, that's part of working here. But I could
Speaker 1: tell the contradictions were starting to warn their way under
Speaker 1: her skin as well. The doubt grew with each passing day.
Speaker 1: My tape measure evidence, once solid, behaved like a top Frid's,
Speaker 1: slackening and tightening without warning. Shadows and hallways changed not
Speaker 1: only with the sun, but with the movement of people
Speaker 1: through rooms half remembered and newly discovered. One mile Thursday,
Speaker 1: after the city had dried off from a week of rain,
Speaker 1: our little group made a new attempt to fix the
Speaker 1: location of the infamacised reading room. Miss Cess Bauer, bright
Speaker 1: eyed at the adventure, promised to guide us according to
Speaker 1: childhood memory. The library echoed with dust and the shuffling
Speaker 1: of staff above, their steps drifting and from above around.
Speaker 1: We moved as one, counting doorways, peering round corners, feeling
Speaker 1: walls for slight coolness. We reached a narrow passage that,
Speaker 1: by any calculation, should have been part of them Intian's corridor. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was a dead end. No reading room, just faint
Speaker 1: marks in the dust, as if some one had rearranged
Speaker 1: things behind the scenes of a theater set. Eric's voice
Speaker 1: was hushed. You get the feeling the building's listening. We
Speaker 1: all chuckled, too, and settled to deny outright. I tried
Speaker 1: once more to chart distances, counting shadows, steps, and the
Speaker 1: length of my own sarade. I recorded everything twice, then
Speaker 1: three times, and found the numbers disagreed by small but
Speaker 1: persistent margins. Then, yet, though small mismatches slowly gathered gravity,
Speaker 1: each inconsistent measurement weighed on my mind. By this point
Speaker 1: we'd earned enough sidelong glances from the other volunteers. With
Speaker 1: every puzzle, I confessed to feeling both foolish and exhilerated,
Speaker 1: as if I had stumbled into the middle of someone
Speaker 1: else's secret written under the floorboards in a language only
Speaker 1: half under my command. There came a certain release in
Speaker 1: admitting confusion. I let myself enjoyed anomaly, not as a threat,
Speaker 1: but as an invitation. So what next, boss, Eric asked
Speaker 1: at the end of that week, folding up his own sketch,
Speaker 1: kentucking it into a messenger back scrolled with band stickers.
Speaker 1: I grinned, shaking my head in amusement. Try not to
Speaker 1: fall through to the next floor or the past. He grinned, back,
Speaker 1: his eyes a storm of questions, but my own mind
Speaker 1: ticked over again, as always did. There were holes in
Speaker 1: the building, story spaces where logic thinned and memory flooded in,
Speaker 1: Refusing to be built over entirely. We agreed to step
Speaker 1: up our investigations, no more half measures. If the building
Speaker 1: wanted to play games with space and recollection, it would
Speaker 1: have to suffer a team of retirees, students, and true believers,
Speaker 1: measuring every square foot it could conjure. The following Monday,
Speaker 1: we arned ourselves with boxes of colored pins and sticky notes,
Speaker 1: extra clipboards, spare batteries. We laid out our current subbasement map,
Speaker 1: mocking every nun door, corridor, alcove, and stair, each of
Speaker 1: us took a different colored set of pins. The plan
Speaker 1: placed the pins in every location as we moved through,
Speaker 1: confirming placement every hour, we chart movement, see what changed
Speaker 1: and compare notes. Jasmine set out east airquent west, miss
Speaker 1: Espoun north to her supposed reading lounge, and I traced
Speaker 1: the central corridors. Within two hours flop and look like
Speaker 1: a printing press had run wild, pins had migrated or
Speaker 1: been replaced without explanation. Misses sparswore she left of red
Speaker 1: pin by the old storage closet. Now it had appeared
Speaker 1: by a stair there shouldn't have been there. Jasmine's sequence
Speaker 1: of yellow stickers led to a blank wall. On the
Speaker 1: next round, My green pin, meant to mark the electrical panel,
Speaker 1: materialized instead by a windowless room filled with nothing but
Speaker 1: an old book trolley and the smell of wet cardboard.
Speaker 1: We gathered at the main sub basement intersection, comparing our findings.
Speaker 1: Jasmine laughed, shaking her head. It's like the building's a
Speaker 1: mace that shuffles when you're not looking. Maronie, summoned reluctantly
Speaker 1: to consult, pressed her lips together, not pleased by the inefficiency.
Speaker 1: It's an old place. Don't get too wound up, doors
Speaker 1: get moved, wall shift, that's what happens. But she looked
Speaker 1: over the new map and front, her finger pressing on
Speaker 1: the necks that should have matched a stair, only to
Speaker 1: find the stair now led nowhere. We washed her struggle
Speaker 1: with uncertainty for the first time, the shirdy in her
Speaker 1: voice wavered. That was the moment, the gentle given the
Speaker 1: mask of certainty, the moment when even the stubbornly practical
Speaker 1: had to concede that the ordinary rules had slipped. I
Speaker 1: glanced around the circle of our little group. Each of us,
Speaker 1: in our own way, felt the thrill of standing with
Speaker 1: both feet and mystery, the kind that doesn't threaten so
Speaker 1: much as beckon hinting at something larger beneath the surface.
Speaker 1: We stood in silence for a minute, each of us
Speaker 1: processing a puzzle in our own tongues. I'm starting to think,
Speaker 1: Eric said, speaking as much to himself as to us,
Speaker 1: that it's not just the building we're trying to measure.
Speaker 1: For a heartbeat, nobody disagree. Jasmine picked up one of
Speaker 1: the colored pins between thumb and forefinger, squinting at it
Speaker 1: as if she could spot any explanation in the walls
Speaker 1: of plastic. How does a green pin move by itself?
Speaker 1: She asked me, but her voice held more wonder than skepticism.
Speaker 1: I looked around at our cluster framed and flickering light,
Speaker 1: as the old fluorescent tube of her head buzzed, sometimes
Speaker 1: fading in and out, as if the electricity itself was nervous.
Speaker 1: Eric crossed likely beside his bat at messenger bag, drummed
Speaker 1: his fingers against a loose floor tile. Missus Bewer leaned
Speaker 1: on her cane, tapping it gently, her eyes half to
Speaker 1: find half distant. I pressed my hand to the col
Speaker 1: cinder block. The wall's felf as real as they had
Speaker 1: when I was a young man drawing up reinforcement plans
Speaker 1: for the post flood repairs. But lately the library's substance
Speaker 1: had become less certain, as if the act of paying
Speaker 1: attention could change rare in what it was. The air
Speaker 1: seemed denser, and a faint scent of river mud that
Speaker 1: always lingered after vrain had seeped in again stronger than
Speaker 1: it should be. So far down. We need to map
Speaker 1: this in real time, Eric said, pitching his voice lower,
Speaker 1: meaning to sound official. Simultaneous observers. The things move of pins,
Speaker 1: doors or rooms don't line up for each of us,
Speaker 1: then it's not but bad memory or misplaced pluprints. Jasmine nodded,
Speaker 1: glancing at her phone's compass, which bun twice before sticking north.
Speaker 1: It's almost interactive, like we changed the space by choosing
Speaker 1: a route or expecting something. I offered a skeptical arch
Speaker 1: of an eyebrow, but I was less committed to certainty
Speaker 1: than I been. Whatever we were mapping now it wasn't
Speaker 1: just stone and steel. A long echo of voices filtered
Speaker 1: down the staywall from the morning volunteers, Marnie's PRIs kasions,
Speaker 1: a heavy male off probably balowed from facilities, and the
Speaker 1: snatch of something that sounded like a folks on from
Speaker 1: the children's librarian. The sub basement's hush was never absolute.
Speaker 1: There was always a distant resonance, a sense of the
Speaker 1: day's live trickling down along with the light. Miss espar
Speaker 1: broke the moment her gaze unsettled. When I was young,
Speaker 1: there was a workshop down the east corridor. Mister Nouveldt,
Speaker 1: the old janitor, had a work bunch there. He'd let
Speaker 1: me help polish wood sometimes. But it's not there now,
Speaker 1: is it? No? I confirmed it isn't not that any
Speaker 1: of us could find er khunch forward eager, let's ask
Speaker 1: not just staff residence old timers. He was already crafting
Speaker 1: messages to post, scribbling reminders in the margin of his map.
Speaker 1: That afternoon, sun flickering behind riverbank willow leaves, we joined
Speaker 1: a community coffee social at the local church hall. I
Speaker 1: felt finely ridiculous engineer with a cliport accosting retired school
Speaker 1: teachers and crossing God about their memories of a library basement.
Speaker 1: But as people gathered in circles, spooning powdered cream into
Speaker 1: mugs and arguing about which decade the floods had been worst,
Speaker 1: I reassured myself even the most unlikely dat points sometimes
Speaker 1: hid the true connections. I started with Earl Hoskins, former postmaster.
Speaker 1: He was clear eyed in his eighties memory shop when
Speaker 1: a suit at him sub basement. Sure I remember bringing
Speaker 1: camp beds down there during that big Filodelo eighty nine
Speaker 1: maybe or earlier. He waved a hand. There was a
Speaker 1: side room near the boilers, always two warm pipes overhead.
Speaker 1: We'd keep the radio going. You tell me it's not
Speaker 1: there now, I shook my head. No room like that
Speaker 1: on the foreplans. Now did it use to flood? He blinked, flood. No,
Speaker 1: never saw any water down there after. They sealed up
Speaker 1: around seventy two. But odd though, Now you say, some
Speaker 1: mornings after snow mall, you'd swear you smelt the river.
Speaker 1: His words settled and settling. Other residents sold Hailey Kore,
Speaker 1: who ran the Green Crozer, Gladys Prentis, who once ran
Speaker 1: after School Storyo, offered their own such recollections. Gladys a
Speaker 1: river reading room with blue tiles on the walls, stories
Speaker 1: during the rainy season. It had a glass block window.
Speaker 1: Not sure where it's gone. Each memory had its unique geography.
Speaker 1: Sometimes two different people described the same object of brass
Speaker 1: sign that once marked flood level nineteen thirteen, but placed
Speaker 1: it intutally incompatible rooms. Several remembered an annual basement candle walk,
Speaker 1: but it never appeared in official programming. The contradictions built
Speaker 1: like sediment, evidence of some shifting fossil history beneath the town.
Speaker 1: On my way out, I bumped into Anna, my wife,
Speaker 1: who had come just to say hello, but got drawn
Speaker 1: in as she often did, by the lore of unwinding
Speaker 1: local mysteries. She stood quietly by my side as I
Speaker 1: recounted what people had told me. Her brow knit with
Speaker 1: half amusement. You know, she said, I read about towns
Speaker 1: where every generation thought they'd met the whole place, only
Speaker 1: to find there were gaps, the buildings layered atop themselves,
Speaker 1: or the river started to shift it banks, stories flowed
Speaker 1: down like sil filling the gaps. When facts ran out,
Speaker 1: I smiled, comforted more than I admitted. Do you believe
Speaker 1: a building can have memories? Anna looked up at the
Speaker 1: dark clouds gathering above the steeple. Maybe not memories, maybe
Speaker 1: places hauled onto the shape of stories, things people steped
Speaker 1: to see or need to remember. Sometimes if enough people
Speaker 1: walk the same hole, it's as real as a wall.
Speaker 1: Eric Shepherd. Missessked burrow toward us, eager for her guidance.
Speaker 1: In the River reading room, she paused before describing its layout,
Speaker 1: claimed at hello benches, a wall covered with old prints
Speaker 1: of the river, and a big slow found that creaked
Speaker 1: on its chain. Neither blueprints nor living memory could reconcile
Speaker 1: the room's position, but she drew the rout all the
Speaker 1: saying it was this way I used to do my
Speaker 1: reading there. After quiet practice, we agreed to try and
Speaker 1: retrace her steps. Later that week our memory walk meander
Speaker 1: through the sub basements. Mercess bar tapped her cane on
Speaker 1: warm flockstones, tracing her childhood path by the fading logic
Speaker 1: of recollection. Gismond held her phone up to catch any
Speaker 1: geomagnetic oddities. We found ourselves in a corridor between knockoff
Speaker 1: storage and old mechanical so an arrow of three people
Speaker 1: could barely walk abreast. Miss esspos stopped a wall, ran
Speaker 1: her hand along the cinder block seam, and said, simply
Speaker 1: here the reading room door was here. Yet when we
Speaker 1: returned the next day, the corridor was walled off, corrogated,
Speaker 1: a conduit running over what should have been a doorway,
Speaker 1: no hint of passage. Eric grinned, a little odd, a
Speaker 1: little dismayed. Did we dream it? I shook my head,
Speaker 1: No dream, just another layer. I patted the wall as
Speaker 1: if it could recall its own history. Each day brought
Speaker 1: a new account of vanished workshop, a corridor that leaped
Speaker 1: impossibly back into itself, a room assess bowswore was real,
Speaker 1: and Anna remembered visiting with our daughter, but not quite
Speaker 1: in the same season or with the same particulars. The
Speaker 1: more people we asked, the more stubborn that the details
Speaker 1: refused to stay fixed, even tangible objects the old green
Speaker 1: book caught on the second level. The dented brass flood
Speaker 1: level plaque sometimes found by the washrooms, migrated through time
Speaker 1: and for turning up wherever someone expected to see them.
Speaker 1: During a break in the middle of spring rains, Eric
Speaker 1: arrived breathless with what he called evidence. Sheets of local
Speaker 1: legend Ford copied from the high school year because challenges
Speaker 1: of Montien's fine phantom rooms, stories of library adventures where
Speaker 1: the only way out was two follow yesterday's footprints. Some
Speaker 1: tales ended with a closing bell ringing at midnight from
Speaker 1: a level everyone agreed didn't exist. We compared focal to recos,
Speaker 1: examining every anecdote for clues. A pattern began to emerge.
Speaker 1: No major catastrophe, nothing dramatic or destructive, just persistent shape
Speaker 1: shifting anecdotes, particularly vivid after floods or renovations. One morning,
Speaker 1: after a night of thunder and heavy rainfall, I made
Speaker 1: my way down extra early the shop Tanng of Ozen
Speaker 1: lingered in the stairwells, the river's breath traveling deep through
Speaker 1: scene channels, descending into the sub basement. I paused at
Speaker 1: the last landing. The first flight was dry, but the
Speaker 1: bottom four steps glistened with a thin layer of standing water, coals,
Speaker 1: melted snow. The boundary was sharp as a ruler's edge,
Speaker 1: above dry painted wood, below water shining darkly. Yet only
Speaker 1: at the mid landing did the water extend beyond. The
Speaker 1: stairs continued dry, as if nothing was amiss. I bent
Speaker 1: finger tips brush into water. It was stagnant, but not foul,
Speaker 1: and astray leaf, one of the little willow leave so
Speaker 1: often swept into the library's vestibule, sat perfectly centered in
Speaker 1: a puddle. I considered pipes leak, spurious condensation, drain and
Speaker 1: sheech engineer's answer, but nune sufficed. I waited, watching the
Speaker 1: daylight seep across the steps, and slowly, as if embarrassed,
Speaker 1: the water began to drain. It left behind a scent
Speaker 1: not of plumbing, old books, but clean riverbanker mud after storm.
Speaker 1: When I told the others, Jasmine Grinn delighted. It's like
Speaker 1: the library acts out the river's stories on its bones.
Speaker 1: Eric rolled his eyes but smiled, caught in the tug
Speaker 1: of war between skepticism and wonder. Yet the more we
Speaker 1: pushed the puzzle, the more it seemed to resist, obliging
Speaker 1: us with glimpses, but never the saying twice we pivoted
Speaker 1: from seeking more examples, none repeated to asking a deeper question,
Speaker 1: Why did the anomalies come and go it all? What
Speaker 1: tied the strange special shifts to rain, or to collective memory,
Speaker 1: or to renovations and rituals lost to time. Anna suggested
Speaker 1: we search for the river's original footprints. She found maps
Speaker 1: at City Hall, shering past channels. The river had once
Speaker 1: run directly under the west wing of the current library,
Speaker 1: Fearing only after a catastrophic flood in nineteen thirteen, layers
Speaker 1: of silt were transported in new foundations laid atop the
Speaker 1: old water course. She joined us for a nighttime walk
Speaker 1: under light rain, tracing the old path. The air down
Speaker 1: stairs was thick with the same living wetther smell. Jasmine
Speaker 1: noted her compass lock north more consistently as we near
Speaker 1: where the river had once flow. A certain block in
Speaker 1: the sub basement, the one closest to the old river
Speaker 1: PEDI felt the hair on my arms rise, as if
Speaker 1: the floor itself was electrically charged. We stopped. Our store
Speaker 1: room locked most of the year at our request. Monia
Speaker 1: led us inside, more out of a desire to squash
Speaker 1: foolishness than to foster it. I think under the buzz
Speaker 1: of bare bulbs, we found a window set high in
Speaker 1: the wall. Impossible, this far below grade. Yet through the
Speaker 1: class dap of gold light poured in, as if the
Speaker 1: sun were setting over the water. Jasmine and Eric stayed
Speaker 1: without talking. Then slowly the view damed, the light flickering
Speaker 1: out like a candle snuffed by wind. I left the
Speaker 1: store room in silence, unable to explain the slip, and nerved,
Speaker 1: but not afraid. If anything, I felt as if we
Speaker 1: were seeing a shadow and old world surface in for
Speaker 1: a moment, the river's memory burning through Sterne. The next day,
Speaker 1: Anna called her friend, our retired tumplanner named a whit Over,
Speaker 1: over big coffee in the staff room. He told us
Speaker 1: how the library's deepest fittings were built atop salvaged masonry
Speaker 1: pieces from buildings submerged during the early twentieth century. Floods
Speaker 1: caught at him when the land was only just stabilized.
Speaker 1: They didn't throw away anything that survived, maybe even some
Speaker 1: entire cellars filled and re used. De Whitt described a
Speaker 1: founding ceremony. The townsfolk had lined the walls with black
Speaker 1: paint marking high water, then buried corns and tokens to
Speaker 1: appease the river. We wanted the place to remember both
Speaker 1: the worst days and the best. I asked him if
Speaker 1: he thought the land itself could remember. He laughed, displaying
Speaker 1: his big hands on the table. He spend enough time
Speaker 1: in river country, you know the grounds, always moving, buildings, roads, people,
Speaker 1: They all drift and reappear. May be spaces due to
Speaker 1: After he left Jasmineport, over maps for hours, she found
Speaker 1: that old layet, when overlaid with present blueprints, lined up
Speaker 1: at odd impossible intersections, rooms, overlapping doors, duplicated corridors existing
Speaker 1: only when memory insisted, it's a palempsis, She murmured, tracing
Speaker 1: with her finger a manuscript written over the old Still
Speaker 1: peeking through, we gathered our growing pile of blueprints, personal maps,
Speaker 1: community recollections, and photographs. Tom the builder, the engineer, pushed
Speaker 1: for a synthesis. There was a logic wanting to emerge,
Speaker 1: but not a geometric one lane transparencies atop one another
Speaker 1: under the reading room lamp. I saw it recurring. Impossible
Speaker 1: rooms appeared at the intersection of past and present layouts,
Speaker 1: the same sub level reading lunge. Missess barclained the same
Speaker 1: vanished Workshoppel remembered the narrow blind corry doors each overlap
Speaker 1: when two plans disagreed, occupying the same locusts in different
Speaker 1: versions of the building's history. It was as though collective
Speaker 1: expres tian could open or closer room, guide a hallway,
Speaker 1: or lock a door. The library ship was being written
Speaker 1: and rewritten by years of stories, plans, and memories, with
Speaker 1: the river's old course serving as the hidden through line.
Speaker 1: Frustrated by the lack of hard proof, we brought out
Speaker 1: a camera trying to catch one of the shifting doors. Channi,
Speaker 1: a short minded volunteer need that week, helped us by
Speaker 1: watching one store and for whole morning. Reviewing the camera's footage,
Speaker 1: we found it in one frame. Had do simply wasn't
Speaker 1: there just a blank wall? But every time Shanny looked
Speaker 1: up from her cross words, she saw it open and
Speaker 1: close as usual to her, nothing had changed. I found
Speaker 1: myself saying aloud, what if the space flexus to memory.
Speaker 1: If enough people expect a room, it's here for a while.
Speaker 1: Anna nodded her eyes alight. Cities every river room assemble,
Speaker 1: layered cities where old spaces surface in floods or festivals
Speaker 1: or dreams. You can chart the lines, but the meaning
Speaker 1: lives in what the community remembers together, or what it
Speaker 1: needs to remember. Jasmin added quietly that evening, as we
Speaker 1: sat at the big basement table, turning pins and plans
Speaker 1: over in our hands, I realized what had been dancing
Speaker 1: at the edge of logical alarm. Every change, every new wing,
Speaker 1: every flood, every generation's repairs, road, the building, the sub basements,
Speaker 1: more than the floors above were imprinted with these changes,
Speaker 1: like mud press by countless footprintsince the town first built
Speaker 1: by the river. When the river swelled, or the town
Speaker 1: shifted of mudded recollections, new stories, rituals. The library's depths
Speaker 1: obliged revealing their layers, impossible rooms and corridor surface not
Speaker 1: as a threat, but as a kind of community echo,
Speaker 1: summoned into reality by consensus of memory, necessity, and tradition.
Speaker 1: The revelation hum through me, not fear but marveling humility.
Speaker 1: Wherever many lives pressed together overlap in their needs and
Speaker 1: their stories, a past and present could stand side by side,
Speaker 1: each unlilling to fully vanish I sketched a master map
Speaker 1: with the rest, knowing even this could not capture all
Speaker 1: the shifting boundaries, but it was something, a living recor,
Speaker 1: if only for as long as we believed in it.
Speaker 1: That spring culminated in one final act, Anna suggested we
Speaker 1: try what massess by recall from childhood the mid we
Speaker 1: to close in ritual. We couldn't wait for the right date,
Speaker 1: so we made you a closing ceremony in one of
Speaker 1: the impossible rooms, the one none of us could find
Speaker 1: on a blueprint, but each of us believe existed for now.
Speaker 1: We gathered trinkets and tokens. Annas pressed penny from the
Speaker 1: river front fare. Eric's hand drawn map, crude and bright
Speaker 1: with hope, Jaosman's compass recalibrated again, Missus Bowers's ancient library cards,
Speaker 1: much but legible. I supplied a battered pencil, stub used
Speaker 1: and sharpened for decades of sketches. We placed each object
Speaker 1: on the low center table, spoke wishes, some for clarity,
Speaker 1: some for memory, some for the simple joy of witnessing oddness.
Speaker 1: Together we sat in silence, the air dense with the
Speaker 1: smell of damp stone, the muffled pulse of the river
Speaker 1: deep below. Cheney and Marney joined, each incertain in their
Speaker 1: own way, each quietly contributing a button, a folded note,
Speaker 1: a brass pin. We waited. As I closed my eyes,
Speaker 1: I heard the distant, dream like sound of a bell,
Speaker 1: not the library's shine, order, rounder deeper, as if an
Speaker 1: echo from water logged would. When we opened our eyes again,
Speaker 1: every object was gone. Only the table and an impression
Speaker 1: in the dust remained. We left the room together, hesitating
Speaker 1: at the threshold, unwilling to look back. In the morning.
Speaker 1: When I went back, all the door led to Janitor's closet,
Speaker 1: smelling faintly of wax and cedar. There was no table,
Speaker 1: no dust, no hint of what we'd done. Weeks pasted
Speaker 1: in midsummer, a new volunteery, young woman named Petro brought
Speaker 1: up a battle pencil stubs she had found in the
Speaker 1: far back of the tilty shelf on its warm side.
Speaker 1: My initials were faintly carved, just as I'd done as
Speaker 1: a board under grande at half a lifetime agir. She
Speaker 1: handed it to me, assuming I'd dropped it recently. I
Speaker 1: turned it over in my palm, feeling a quite shiver
Speaker 1: of recognition. Had the space returned it as a kind
Speaker 1: of kindness or as a gentle reminder, I couldn't say.
Speaker 1: Petra watched me, but amused by my credulity, curiosity mixing
Speaker 1: into her own. Perhaps the rooms weren't meant to be
Speaker 1: solf just encountered by this willing to look. Perhaps it
Speaker 1: was enough that for a moment impossible space had gathered
Speaker 1: us together, writing our story among the others buried under
Speaker 1: the river and its restless city. When I next measured
Speaker 1: the main corridor, I found it at length I didn't expect,
Speaker 1: and let the discrepancy remain. The urge to correct was
Speaker 1: replaced by a subtle, perpetual readiness to discover and acknowledgment
Speaker 1: that some mysteries prefer to remain just beyond the reach
Speaker 1: of tape and line. I found myself sharing little fragments
Speaker 1: of all this with newer volunteers, a hint here an
Speaker 1: unexplained creek, their encouragement not to take the ordinary for granted,
Speaker 1: not as a warning, but as an invitation. There is
Speaker 1: base here, I'd say, for your story too. On a
Speaker 1: late spring afternoon, lights stall slick on the streets, after
Speaker 1: rain had paused. Under the shelter of the library. Overhand,
Speaker 1: the river blow ran high, sky lingered between blue and pewter.
Speaker 1: Looking back, the lines of the buildings stacked, all the
Speaker 1: angles seeming to melt into each other, doors framing more
Speaker 1: than they should. I found myself speaking aloud to no
Speaker 1: one in particular, and to every one who dever cared
Speaker 1: to wonder at the quite strangeness of an old place.
Speaker 1: What other buildings, what other streets and pucks slipped between
Speaker 1: their lines? When memory and geography and twine. What if
Speaker 1: every town hides at least one impossible room, patient waiting
Speaker 1: for the right question, the careful look, the collective need
Speaker 1: for a story. Returned, rain tapped at the gutters. Some
Speaker 1: one inside the library laughed as they shelved a stack
Speaker 1: of returned books. I felt, for the first time in years,
Speaker 1: deeply at home, inside a puzzle that deserved its permanence.
Speaker 1: Perhaps some place are meant to change ship when we
Speaker 1: remember them, And perhaps that wonder, layered and open ended,
Speaker 1: is meaning enough and that is the end. Thank you
Speaker 1: for listening, and I will see you in the next one.