Shaking off her thoughts, Mercury turned around and walked through the mall, navigating through more crowds, letting herself be pushed up more escalators, trying to focus on the task at hand. The top floor...she had to reach the top floor. Then she had to get to fast food hell, as Principal Blake had called it...and then the elevator...
Slipping through several large families with even larger burgers between Subway and McDonald's, Mercury stumbled out of the crowd...and suddenly found herself in front of the elevator she'd been looking for. It looked completely normal; there was nothing even remotely magical about it, and once again Mercury caught herself wondering if she was really, really in the right place.
Well, just one way to find out.
Making sure no one was watching her too closely, Mercury pressed the button, waited, and stepped inside as soon as the doors opened.
Everything looked normal.
Then the doors closed, and suddenly a ripple went through the small, bad-smelling elevator cabin.
The crowded mall outside disappeared. The scratched glass and matted metal seemed to turn into crystal and polished steel. The worn-out buttons shone once more, and above them all, where nothing had been just a second ago except the elevator wall, another button lit up out of nowhere, branded with a large open book.
Mercury smiled nervously, her hands trembling with excitement, and pushed the button.
The elevator started moving. She couldn't tell if it was going up or down, but for a second her body felt weightless. Outside the windows and doors everything was swallowed by a foggy half-light, completely empty except for the uncanny shapes flitting by every once in a while, just fast enough to be impossible to follow with the eyes.
Then the elevator stopped, the door opened, and Mercury found herself in front of a place she had never seen before.
The elevator seemed to open straight into a dimly-lit store. It was large and high, with rows and rows of tall shelves reaching up to the ceiling and ladders standing beside them to reach the upper levels. The floor was covered in a fluffy burgundy carpet, and the smell of old paper lingered heavy in the air, grains of dust dancing lazily in the sunlight under the handful of small windows. And every corner, every nook, every cranny was filled with books. Large, small, old, new, more books than Mercury had ever seen in one spot before, even at the library. Between the shelves stood some boxes of books, all of them with the logo from earlier and the name Paige & Turner printed on them in big letters.
"How much longer are you planning to stand there?"
Mercury jumped. Her eyes darted about for the origin of the voice, finally resting on the cash desk in the middle of the room.
Sitting behind the desk was a very scruffy man in his late thirties, pale, messy-haired and in need of a shave, wrapped into what looked like six layers of sweater, cardigan, scarf and blanket, at the very least. The bags under his eyes were so dark they looked almost painted on, and he was glaring at Mercury with irritation in his eyes.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Mercury stuttered out, stumbling out of the elevator, whose doors instantly slammed shut behind her. "I didn't see you there...I mean...it's just...I didn't expect to end up in a place like this, you know? I mean..." The man was still glaring at her, and she shrank back. "W-We're...above the mall, right?"
The look on the man's face was more than enough to tell her she had just asked a very stupid question.
"W-We're not?" she ventured, panic rising inside her. "Okay, sorry for assuming! I just wondered how–"
"Under what rock do you live?"
Mercury blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"I said, how clueless are you?" the man snapped, his glare slowly turning murderous. "You don't even know how that thing works? That's simple technology. That elevator's disguised as a mundane mall thing, but it's got sensors that disable the illusion when they sense magical energy and let the user travel through the Otherworld to– Wait, why am I explaining this to some kid?" He scowled like all of this was somehow Mercury's fault. "Forget it. What do you want?"
"Oh, uh..." Mercury almost dropped the notes in her hand. "I need schoolbooks...hold on–"
"Whole freshman kit, right?"
"...Huh?"
"Don't 'Huh' me! Freshmen all get the same set of books 'cause they only got mandatory classes! You know why? So clueless beginners like you can learn basic Magic for Dummies and keep up in high school!" The man dived behind the counter and reappeared with a whole stack of books. "Here. Don't ask me how I know you're a freshman!" he added, noticing Mercury's gaze. "Nobody else is that stupid! Same thing every year..."
Well, sorry! Mercury wanted to snap. This man was definitely starting to get on her nerves, but the most frustrating part was that he was also too intimidating to talk back to.
"Thank you," she muttered instead, searching through her bag for her wallet. The man continued to watch her with that dark-eyed stare, as if urging her to hurry up. His blanket slipped slightly off his shoulders, revealing a name tag reading Turner and the head of a surprised-looking black kitten that gave a tiny meow.
Mr. Turner gave a start and pushed the cat back down, glancing nervously from side to side. "You shush," he hissed. "If Paige finds you she might kill me, or worse, kick you out." He turned to look at a tall, strong-looking blonde woman standing on a ladder at the back of the store, holding a huge box of books in one hand, sorting them onto a shelf with the other and whistling as she worked.
"Is that your wife?" Mercury blurted out, then she turned red and quickly clamped a hand over her mouth. "Wait, sorry...it's none of my business...sorry, you don't have to answer–"
"My sister," Turner replied with a roll of his eyes. "Now stop nosing around. Pay for those books and get out of here."
Mercury would have loved to have a better look at the books, but with this rude stranger manning the cash desk it didn't sound much fun. So she sighed, paid for the stack of books, and waited as Turner stuffed them all into a bag before rather roughly shoving it into her hands.
"There," he said. "Now get out. Come back when you know magic next time."
"Thank you," Mercury said awkwardly. She had no plans of returning at all, unless this man quit or at least wasn't on shift. Talking to him felt a lot like trying to handle explosives, and the risk of him blowing up in her face was quickly wearing her out. Not knowing how to talk to someone was scary enough when they were nice, but with someone like him it felt like an exam in a subject she'd never had before.
With a forced attempt to smile she turned, making her way back towards the elevator doors. "Um...Have a nice day!"
"It will be if you leave me alone," came the grumbled answer.
Mercury said nothing and reached out to press the elevator button, but she didn't mean to. At this very moment the doors swooshed open, and a girl stepped out, nearly knocking into Mercury as she moved past her.
"Oh, apologies," she said quietly.
Mercury muttered an apology back and slipped into the elevator. Behind her Turner's voice sounded over from the cash desk, suddenly sounding much less cranky than before, almost friendly. "If it isn't our favorite little regular," he said. "Ran out of books again? What brings you here this time?"
"Strictly business today, Mr. Turner," the girl started to reply, just as the elevator doors closed and her voice was cut off. Paige & Turner disappeared, and the elevator moved back through the half-lit nothingness before finally stopping back in the mall.
The doors opened again, and it looked like a plain old elevator in a plain old mall once more.
Mercury stepped outside, looking around. Everything looked the same as before. Even the family with the huge burgers was still in the same place. The burgers had barely shrunk in size. It was as if no time had passed, not even a second.
Without the heavy back of books in her hand she might have asked herself if her journey to Paige & Turner had even been real.
~ ~ ~
And if it helps you, Principal Blake's words echoed in her head, there's at least one other Twilit Mage kid in your grade.
Mercury gazed back at the mall as her father's car set into motion. Principal Blake's words had come back to her as she returned here, keeping an eye out for Raoul in the faint hopes that he might have forgotten something and come back. Another Twilit Mage like her...If Blake hadn't said that one sentence, she might never have agreed to go to this magic school. Who was that person, she wondered? What were the odds of her running into them? Were they nice?
She hoped they were as nice as Raoul. Not that she thought Raoul himself might be it.
That would be a little too good to be true.
Comments (2)
See all