Sarah hated the third floor, even when she didn't have to haul a crate of books along with her. The ceiling was low, the aisles were narrow, it was always either too hot or too cold. There were no windows, and the only exits—the main stairway and the emergency fire escape—were often hard to find amongst the maze of shelves. As much as she loved books, spending long periods of time in the top reaches of the store always gave her creeping sensations of being trapped.
She cursed her luck that now, an hour until closing time on a dead Sunday night, Mr. Winters had decided that this was the best time for her to do shelving up there.
She'd worked as fast as she could, avoiding her usual side-tasks of straightening and dusting in favor of just dumping the books in their approximate locations as fast as possible. She was now down to the last few in the crate, an assortment of political commentaries earmarked for Middle Eastern studies.
She rounded the corner to proper alcove, already fantasizing about a warm shower and bed, then stopped in surprise.
The bookshelves on the lower, friendlier floors were proper bookshelves. Up here, they were mostly accumulations of scavenged wood planks and cinderblocks. One of these planks had collapsed, spilling its books onto the shelves below. Since this shelf had been the top shelf, and the top shelves often held oversized, heavy books, their considerable weight had taken out every single one of the rickety shelves below them. Some of the cinderblocks had fallen over too, scattering cracked stone amongst the books scattered across the floor.
She dropped the crate in shock as she surveyed the carnage, broken spines and crushed covers everywhere. She debated pretending she hadn't seen it. No one had heard the crash, so there would be no way to tell that it hadn't simply happened overnight. She could just gently tuck her books in amongst the mess and call it a day.
But as quickly as she weighed this idea, she abandoned it. Mr. Winters was old, and it was hard enough for him to even get up to the third floor. Repeated bending and kneeling to sort the books and drag out the broken shelving would be beyond him. And even though customers often stuck to the lower floors, her pride couldn't abide the thought of letting the store open with this mess left in the open. Depending on when one of the few other employees was next on the schedule, it might not be dealt with for a couple days.
With a resigned sigh, she knelt down amongst the mess and started gently pulling out and stacking books.
She worked in silence, nothing but the sound of the gentle scuffs and thumps of the books as she moved them, and subtle creaks of the building. Normally she would probably hear customer voices drifting up the stairwell from the lower floors, but tonight the store was empty.
Thus, she noticed right away when a heavy set of footsteps slowly ascended the stairs and stepped onto the wooden floor. She paused in her work. The steps hadn't sounded like Mr. Winter's usual wheezing, heavy climb, but a customer at this late hour was equally unlikely.
"Hello?" she called tentatively. There was no verbal response, but she heard the steps start to move slowly across the floor. "Careful coming over here, some shelves broke. I'm working on dealing with it now but let me know if you need anything."
She leaned over to get back to work. She could hear the heavy footfalls navigating the maze of shelves a few aisles over, but the person attached to them still hadn't said anything. Part of her thought it was a little creepy, but she told herself it was probably just one last-minute browsing customer that had a set of headphones in their ears.
As she sorted, she realized with frustration that the collapse had spilled a bunch of subjects together that wouldn't be easy to parse back out again. The stack of books on Alexander the Great, for instance, could just as easily go under World History as Ancient History, and there seemed to be an arbitrary distinction whether works on Turkish culture were shelved in history or grouped with the other modern Middle Eastern stud—
