It wasn’t as interesting as I had hoped. I found myself in what appeared to be a hallway that also doubled as storage. There were four doors leading off from the hallway, and each of them was shut.

I walked forward slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible, just in case any of the doors led to occupied rooms. The hallway was cluttered with items that appeared to be left over from old displays and other objects from previous exhibits. There were old signs and banners and a large bookshelf pushed against the wall at the end of the hallway. Most everything in here was covered with a thick layer of dust, and I could guess that most of these things had not been used in a long time. I could see other locking frames, like the ones currently hanging in the DeSantos exhibit, except these were leaning up against the wall and all different sizes. Some of them were tiny, while others were taller than I was.

I spent a moment looking at the mechanisms that locked the frames. They were all the same kind of lock that I had seen in the exhibit. If someone wanted to take whatever was within one of these frames, they would need to know the combination.

Cautiously I began opening the doors leading off from the hallway. The two doors closest to me both contained small offices, likewise filled with props from old exhibits. Next there was a storage closet, and finally a closet filled with cleaning supplies. But these were all small rooms and didn’t explain all the extra space that must have been somewhere else in the museum.

I was about to give up and go back out through the STAFF ONLY door, when I looked down at the floor and noticed something interesting. The closer you were to the walls of the hallway, the dustier the floor became. This was true everywhere except the far wall where the bookcase was. There was a clear rectangle of not-dusty floor just to the right of the bookcase. I was willing to bet that was where the bookcase had previously been standing, and that someone must have recently moved it.

I walked quickly over to the bookcase and checked everything that was on it. There wasn’t much. Old lights and some smaller frames. I leaned around to look behind the bookcase, and hiding behind it was another door. I knew there had to be more to this museum!

There was just enough space between the bookcase and the wall that I could squeeze in between them, and hopefully open that door. I began sidestepping and reaching toward the door handle. I was completely behind the bookcase before I realized how much dust I had stirred up. It was floating all around me. But I still managed to get my hand on the door handle and it was—locked.

The light wasn’t great back there, but I could just make out a keypad above the door handle. It seemed that everything in this museum was locked through the use of combinations. If I wanted to get through, I would need to figure out the numerical code specific to this door.