Up the Spiral Staircase


You climb the dark stairwell, running your hand along the outside wall to make sure you don’t lose your orientation in the blackness, until you bang your head noisily against a wooden ceiling that you couldn’t have possibly seen coming. Feeling around in the dark, you can’t find anything on the ceiling, until you have a flash of common sense. Must have hit my head harder than I thought, you think, and you pull out your cell phone to use its dim light to illuminate your situation.


Such as it is, your cell helps you make out the outline of a trap door, which you push up in a cloud of dust and cantankerous hinges. Yellowing light streams down on your face, and you realize that you’ve somehow gained access into a kind of attic area in the rafters of the school library. It has old windows in dormers at intervals along the long walls, and the light streaming in those windows guides you now as, lunch hour and schoolwork forgotten, you climb into the dusty yet enchanting space.


“What’s up here, then?” you muse quietly to yourself, looking around for some hint of the purpose of the space.


Where do you start?
If you crack open a seriously antique-looking chest in a darkened corner of the attic to see what treasures it holds, click here.
If you peruse the piles and piles of cardboard boxes that are strewn throughout the space, click right here.