Chapter 3 — The Reading Room

Elm Street ran four blocks from the college gate to the old water tower, and the house Ellis was looking for was the seventh from the corner. She had walked past it a hundred times without looking. Thursday at ten in the evening the block was quiet — windows lit here and there in the way of a college town in February — and she stood on the brick walk for longer than she should have before she climbed the steps.

There was no bell. There was a brass plate the size of a playing card, set into the frame of the door at eye level, and the letters on it were so shallow that she had to tilt her head to read them. ROOM SEVEN. Below the words, smaller, also engraved: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Ellis had no appointment. She had an invitation pinned to a page torn from a book that should not have been possible to tear. She raised her hand and knocked.

The door opened so quickly that she understood, with a small lurch, that whoever was inside had been standing on the other side waiting for her.

The woman who opened it was in her sixties, white-haired, in a grey wool cardigan. She wore a silver ring on her thumb. She looked at Ellis the way a conservator looks at an unfamiliar piece of paper — carefully, without touching it yet — and then she stepped aside and said, “Come in, Ms. Marsh. We've been waiting a long time for you.”

The hallway was lit by two wall sconces and smelled, faintly, of beeswax and old leather. There was a hat rack. There was a runner on the floor that had been walked on for a century. Ellis hung her coat where she was shown to hang it, and she followed the woman in the grey cardigan down the hallway and through a second door into a room she had not been prepared to see.

Seven people were sitting in a circle of armchairs around a low table. On the table were seven books. They were seven different books, and Ellis knew all of them — she had held each of them in her own hands, in the Elmwood Rare Books Room, across seven different years.

The people in the armchairs stood up when she came in. Nobody spoke. One of them, a man with a trimmed beard and a dog-eared paperback Bleak House tucked under his arm, smiled at her as if he had been expecting this smile for a very long time.

“Sit down,” said the woman in the grey cardigan, gently. “You're the eighth.”