The Thing in the Tiers
Picture a complicated building—four floors, thick stone walls, heavy tile ceiling. Now double it, double both its size and complexity—it’s a twin building, connected by a series of doorways off a long hallway. Add more doors, ones that lead nowhere; inaccessible floors, random storage areas, elevators in cages. Light it very dimly, and then fill it full of a century and a half of books.
That’s the main library building at the university in Berkeley. Pride and joy of the California higher education system, built a hundred years ago at the very heart of the campus. A building like that was destined to attract…something.
It was first called the thing in the stacks, because there it made its presence known. There it lurked, lingered, loafed along the darkened passageways, piled high with books, musty dusty old-library-smelling books. Things love books, as we learn from all the stories.
The main library stacks were special. They were built in the core of the building, top to bottom, two low-ceilinged levels for every proper floor—nine layers of stacks. And the floors (and therefore ceilings) were glass brick. Thick, murky, nearly opaque glass bricks. A student up on the seventh level, poring through Near Eastern Studies, could see if someone switched on a light down on the sixth level, for chemistry texts in German. Just the light, though. It wasn’t as though anyone was looking up anyone’s skirt.
One needed a special pass to access the stacks. So they were poorly trafficked, obscurely organized, and wonderful. Other than a few privileged graduate students, only library employees could enter them. And everybody knows how strange library employees are. Antisocial, spooky, preferring the company of books to that of people. So if one or two or three of these folks went missing over the years, no great alarm was raised. Especially not in Berkeley. For Berkeley is a place where people come in order to go missing.
After eighty or so years, somebody in the upper echelons of university administration came to the astonishing realization that a nine-story building made mostly of glass, and holding millions upon millions of books on metal shelves, might not be the best idea in the heart of earthquake country. The Hayward Fault ran barely a quarter-mile from the library. The Hayward’s last major event was in 1868—the same year the university was founded. The Hayward was long overdue.
Money was raised, plans were approved, ground was broken. The nine floors of glass were demolished, leaving an empty core. And soon the university at Berkeley was the proud owner of utterly modern underground stacks.
These new stacks were bright, sterile, well lit. They featured climate control, compact shelving on rolling aisles, computers everywhere, large comfortable meeting areas. Plush couches, shiny work tables, wheelchair-accessible bathrooms. No dark corners. No hidden nooks and crannies. And they were now open to anyone!
You wouldn’t expect to find a thing living in such a place.
But wait, you ask. You said the building was double? What of the second building, on the other side of the long hallway?
Ah, yes. The special collections library.
A special collections library houses everything that is old, rare, peculiar, valuable, or doesn’t fit anywhere else. Berkeley’s special collections library is world-renowned. It contains—in addition to thousands of plain old, ordinary, unspeakably valuable rare books—original manuscripts, oil paintings, reel-to-reel audiotapes, marble statues, printing presses, photographs, personal papers, oral histories, Super 8 film, and fragments of ancient Egyptian papyrus. It employs the oldest and most eccentric librarians and curators. And it, too, was built with a floor between every floor.
These nine floors were called tiers. They were off-limits to anyone but carefully screened employees, and they were not made of glass. So they escaped the Great Stacks Remodel Project.
They were a nice place for a thing to retreat to, as well.