What happens when you stumble by accident into Columbia’s best-kept secrets?

I. As Above

The fog had set in the night before, heralded by rainfall hammering its way into my dreams. I had slept fitfully, or perhaps not at all, caught in that strange and hazy state between consciousness and unconsciousness. All today, the university had seemed to me unreal, the marble pillars of Low Library flickering and shifting with such mist clinging to them, my fellow students no more than silhouettes moving to and fro in their unknowable patterns. Pools of water disrupted the straight lines of each brick and cobblestone, pools of sky dragged down to earth.

All this is to explain my distraction. Every day I traced the same path to my studies, and back home again afterwards, a path so familiar along these wide sidewalks that it hardly bears explaining. Yet today the wide cellar entrance adjoining the Earth Institute, over whose rusted steel doors I had so often walked, was thrown open, and I—my head swimming with fog both literal and metaphorical—was fool enough to fall in.

Before I could stagger to my feet, one ankle throbbing with what I fervently hoped was not a break, those doors squealed and slammed shut. The weak sunlight, already filtered and grey now vanished entirely save for one small chink. I shoved against the metal, but for all my strength, I could not budge it, as if chains had been suddenly wrapped around its hinges. I shouted, but there was no response; the sound echoed in my ears and no one else’s. I had only fallen a few feet, yet an interminable gulf had opened between this cellar and the university paths above.

My phone’s flashlight was weak, and the ice-white beam would only last me a few hours before the battery gave way. But it was light nonetheless. Sandbags and old, antique furniture were stacked against the walls, dust thick upon them, emblazoned with labels of buildings and classrooms which no longer existed or had been renamed for newer, wealthier donors. Stranger still was the stuffed goat in the corner, fur worn down with age and a brass plaque at its feet. And as I paced around the room’s confines, I became aware of a distant sound, the strike of metal on metal like bells.

I followed it to an elaborate, inscribed archway, past which a set of steep stairs spiraled downwards, lit from beneath by a peculiar blue glow. Perhaps they led to the tunnels about which I’d heard so much, though whether fact or myth I’d never been able to discern. Perhaps they merely led farther into the depths of this strange place. It hardly mattered—unless I wanted to stay and hope for rescue in this small and dingy room, they were my only way out.

II. So Below

Grimy concrete and rebar gave way to polished marble as I descended, inscribed with the same dead men’s names which graced our library, as though someone had seen fit to recreate each of the university’s landmarks on the wall. Fitting, I supposed. Here I was in the role of Odysseus, of Aeneas, of Dante—but to what end? Was I journeying back home, having been unfairly torn away from my fleet and companions? Or was I questing into the depths of Hell itself, seeking the king who lay, frozen, at its center?

I reached the bottom of the stairs, raising my light to the long corridor which stretched in front of me. Shelves of leather-bound books cracked like old bones upon the wall, and oil lanterns hung unlit in their wrought-iron brackets. The sound had grown louder now, interspersed with the hiss of steam and rush of flame, and now that I was closer I could see that same glow flickering and jumping like lightning. I will not lie to you—at that moment, I knew I stood firmly in the latter story, and yet I saw no path but forwards.

Pale statues lined the walls, standing at their eternal watch. It was only when my light chanced across the characteristic mustache of one that I realized who they were, what I had so unwittingly stumbled into. The figure I stood in front of was Seth Low, he of the library which bore his name, every precise detail rendered here in stone, down to each thinning hair on his scalp. Had he sat here in these sunless spaces for long hours as they painstakingly chiseled him from marble? And surrounding him, therefore, were the other presidents of Columbia University, the eyes of all two and a half centuries of our history surrounding me.

Abruptly, that infernal, rhythmic sound ground to a halt. I peered around the corner to see a forge, where dust and steam lay thick in the air, lit from behind by leaping arcs of electricity. In the center of the grand room was a slab of obsidian, polished to a sheen, and upon it lay a half-finished statue, lines of marble without the detail I’d already come to expect. Of course. They would need a new statue at the end of this year, a new name to add to that long and storied list.

But why keep it such a secret? And who had it been just seconds ago working here that I’d heard, what architect or stonemason with the ability to craft such exquisite sculpture?

The coils behind the statue lit up once again, and a terrible cracking sound echoed through the room. A hammer fell to the ground, and I saw that it had fallen not from any shelf, but from the stone fingers of the statue itself! Stone flowed like water as it levered itself up using one arm, shadows dancing where the sky-blue light could not reach. It—no, not it. He. The detail achieved on all the previous statues was not simply lifelike, it was life itself, transformed and preserved here for eternity. The university’s presidents made history, and so they, at their tenure’s end, were made history.

His jaw creaked open. I do not know, then, if he was more man than stone or vice versa, for the words that emerged were so familiar they could have been engraved into his tongue.

They began: “Dear fellow members of the Columbia community…”

Falling Into The Cellars via the wonderful Shane Maughn