Free The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

guards—in fact not a single living soul.
    It wasn’t dark enough for the keychain flashlight in the Staff Only area, but neither was there nearly enough light for me to see well. I was in some sort of records or storage area. The offices were lined with filing cabinets floor to ceiling, metal shelves with plastic mailroom crates and cardboard boxes. The narrow corridor made me feel edgy, closed in, andmy footsteps echoed so crazily that once or twice I stopped and turned around to see if somebody was coming down the hall after me.
    “Hello?” I said, tentatively, glancing into some of the rooms as I passed. Some of the offices were modern and spare; others were crowded and dirty-looking, with untidy stacks of paper and books.
    Florens Klauner, Department of Musical Instruments. Maurice Orabi-Roussel, Islamic Art. Vittoria Gabetti, Textiles.
I passed a cavernous dark room with a long workshop table where mismatched scraps of cloth were laid out like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In the back of the room was a jumble of rolling garment racks with lots of plastic garment bags hanging off them, like racks by the service elevators at Bendel’s or Bergdorf’s.
    At the T-junction I looked this way and that, not knowing where to turn. I smelled floor wax, turpentine and chemicals, a tang of smoke. Offices and workshops stretched out to infinity in all directions: a contained geometrical network, fixed and featureless.
    To my left, light flickered from a ceiling fixture. It hummed and caught, in a staticky fit, and in the trembling glow, I saw a drinking fountain down the hall.
    I ran for it—so fast my feet almost slid out from underneath me—and gulped with my mouth pressed against the spigot, so much cold water, so fast, that a spike of pain slid into my temple. Hiccupping, I rinsed the blood from my hands and splashed water in my sore eyes. Tiny splinters of glass—almost invisible—tinkled to the steel tray of the fountain like needles of ice.
    I leaned against the wall. The overhead fluorescents—vibrating, spitting on and off—made me feel queasy. With effort, I pulled myself up again; on I walked, wobbling a bit in the unstable flicker. Things were looking decidedly more industrial in this direction: wooden pallets, a flatbed pushcart, a sense of crated objects being moved and stored. I passed another junction, where a slick shadowy passageway receded into darkness, and I was just about to walk past it and keep going when I saw a red glow at the end that said EXIT .
    I tripped; I fell over my feet; I got up again, still hiccupping, and ran down the endless hall. Down at the end of the corridor was a door with a metal bar, like the security doors at my school.
    It pushed open with a bark. Down a dark stairwell I ran, twelve steps, a turn at the landing, then twelve steps to the bottom, my fingertipsskimming on the metal rail, shoes clattering and echoing so crazily that it sounded like half a dozen people were running with me. At the foot of the steps was a gray institutional corridor with another barred door. I threw myself against it, pushed it open with both hands—and was slapped hard in the face by rain and the deafening wail of sirens.
    I think I might have screamed out loud, I was so happy to be outside, though nobody could have heard me in all that noise: I might as well have been trying to scream over jet engines on the tarmac at LaGuardia during a thunderstorm. It sounded like every fire truck, every cop car, every ambulance and emergency vehicle in five boroughs plus Jersey was howling and caterwauling out on Fifth Avenue, a deliriously happy noise: like New Year’s and Christmas and Fourth of July fireworks rolled into one.
    The exit had spat me out in Central Park, through a deserted side door between the loading docks and the parking garage. Footpaths stood empty in the gray-green distance; treetops plunged white, tossing and foaming in the wind. Beyond, on the rainswept street, Fifth Avenue was blocked