Speaker 1: The morning mist always seemed to settle thickest around the headland,
Speaker 1: swirling in slow white coils outside the library windows. From
Speaker 1: the bus stop, the buildings roofle and looked half round,
Speaker 1: a jumble of weathered brick and pale stone, Gothic gables
Speaker 1: roaring back from squat Georgian bays, everything softened by moisture
Speaker 1: and silence. For years, during my regular walks along the
Speaker 1: sea wall, I'd admired the odd rambling structure crouched just
Speaker 1: above the Shingle Beach maroon, between fog and the sound
Speaker 1: of distant goals. And now six months into my retirement,
Speaker 1: I found myself making almost daily pilgrimages here, ostensibly to
Speaker 1: help with the archive backlook, but just as much if
Speaker 1: I was honest, for the pleasure of belonging somewhere, even
Speaker 1: temporarily after a career s bench shaping spaces for other
Speaker 1: people's lives. This particular morning, the weather was so dense
Speaker 1: you could barely make out the tide. Water ran in
Speaker 1: rivulets down the ladded window panes. I paused inside the
Speaker 1: front hall, shaking droplets off my umbrella, and took in
Speaker 1: the usual smells paper floor polish, the faint, browny tang
Speaker 1: that seeped into everything near the sea, says Fenwick. Glanced
Speaker 1: up and smiled, her smile as always as efficient as
Speaker 1: the rest of her then gesture toward the rear staircase,
Speaker 1: where a hand lettered sign announced archives this way please.
Speaker 1: The main rooms were closed for minor roof repairs, so
Speaker 1: the staff had decamped for the wheat, to which she
Speaker 1: called the Octicon. Near Peculia annex that had a gathered
Speaker 1: always been part of the building, but rarely used. Inside
Speaker 1: the room struck an immediately odd note eight high windows
Speaker 1: ringked the walls, curtains drawn back to catch diffuse morning light.
Speaker 1: The air was called the Achistics, faintly hollow. I found
Speaker 1: myself assigned to a sun drenched table by the east
Speaker 1: facing window. The light pail of Vladocross papers registers are
Speaker 1: steaming mug of tea at my elbow. I unpacked my notebook, ruler,
Speaker 1: and a handful of h B pencils architect tabst I
Speaker 1: hard and began sorting through a stack of neglected birth registers.
Speaker 1: It took perhaps half an hour for that first troubling
Speaker 1: detail to clang in my mind, quiet as a nick bell,
Speaker 1: every object before me, every bat of volume or polychromein
Speaker 1: dix card was supremely legible. A sheet of paper remained
Speaker 1: just as visible nearer the edge of the desk, despite
Speaker 1: the angle of light. My wristwatch's metal band leaned as
Speaker 1: it shurreed, but were its shadow ought to have curved
Speaker 1: on to the oak, but would stay uniformly bright. The
Speaker 1: familiar soil wet of my teacup, usually leaving a small
Speaker 1: lips of shade, didn't cast so much as a suggestion
Speaker 1: of darkness, even in the direct path of the sunlight.
Speaker 1: My own hand, when I stretched it above my memopad,
Speaker 1: hovered over the bright surface, but left no pen number behind.
Speaker 1: You might say it looked washed out, but that would
Speaker 1: imply the light was stronger than it was. The visual
Speaker 1: feel was gentle, the definition stark and yet flat unmodulated.
Speaker 1: Of course, I blamed my impression on the weather folk
Speaker 1: play tricks. An overcast light could be peculiar. I shifted
Speaker 1: the pile of papers, then angled the lamp on the
Speaker 1: desk to check its beam, watched as the chicken scratch
Speaker 1: notes glowed pale as frozen milk. Nothing. I consider the
Speaker 1: effect of the newly painted walls. The place was done
Speaker 1: in a bone pale wash, colorless, unadorned, almost institutional. Even
Speaker 1: the lead work on the glass seemed marred by shadow,
Speaker 1: perhaps gloss paint, a muse, perhaps some clever in direct
Speaker 1: lighting from above. Yet there were no visible ceiling fixtures.
Speaker 1: When a Cessphemick brought in a tray of sand which
Speaker 1: his lunch will be later than usual, if you don't
Speaker 1: mind builders in the kitchen again, I held the thought
Speaker 1: back would be before mentioning it a trifle sheepish, funny
Speaker 1: thing this room. The light. Has anyone ever remarked that
Speaker 1: you don't get shadows in here? She set the tray
Speaker 1: down with a brisk nod, barely sparring a glance. It
Speaker 1: is very even here. Isn't it something to do with
Speaker 1: the windows? It's nice and clear for paperwork. She plucked
Speaker 1: a sandwich from the pile, her mind already drifting toward
Speaker 1: the next interruption. Let me know if you need the
Speaker 1: heat of running, you'll feel the cold. The stones keep
Speaker 1: the drafts in. I watched her stride out, clicking the
Speaker 1: door shut just so, leaving the odd, gently liminus silence behind.
Speaker 1: Part of me wanted to let it pass. As with
Speaker 1: many coastal oddities, sometimes it's easy to attribute these things
Speaker 1: to the sea air. And yet all morning, every object
Speaker 1: I handled, even the stripes of sun on the floor,
Speaker 1: remained utterly shadowless. Later, when Tom arrived the breeze in
Speaker 1: the form of a young man scoff ascue sketchpack under
Speaker 1: one arm, I made a show of holding up a
Speaker 1: ruler against the light. Half joking. Tom peered grin shrugged.
Speaker 1: Suppose there's nowhere for a shadow to fall, what with
Speaker 1: all the windows? He equipped and turned back to alphot
Speaker 1: as he new baper cuttings. But by lunch I had
Speaker 1: found myself drawing the edge of my own hand, over
Speaker 1: and over, pencil tapping absently as I waited for shadow
Speaker 1: to bloom beneath none dead. It was a small thing,
Speaker 1: hardly worthy of alarm, but the absence grew within me,
Speaker 1: an unanswered not quieter than mystery, more persistent than mere
Speaker 1: trick of the light. For over thirty years I'd spent
Speaker 1: my life making sense of space, angles, corners, recesses, designed
Speaker 1: to play with sun and shade. Here the rules felt
Speaker 1: not bent, but missing. I resolved to pay attention. The
Speaker 1: sea always brought oddities. Perhaps this would prove another pleasantly unexplained,
Speaker 1: nothing more yet oppressed in behind the every day, a
Speaker 1: crease in routine that would not smooth out. The library
Speaker 1: had that effect on many things. The town perched where
Speaker 1: the North Sea wore the flanks of England smooth, had
Speaker 1: built itself from other people's detritus in the slowest silt
Speaker 1: of forgotten centuries. I had lived here seventeen years, walking
Speaker 1: its terrace lanes and weather piers, learning the local patterns
Speaker 1: of polight ecentricity. Brooke met Flint, met more in Victorian
Speaker 1: fancy work. At every turn, nothing matching quite right. The
Speaker 1: library is a p much guarded by mismatched lines, exemplified
Speaker 1: the town's habit of gathering, repurposing, and forgetting. There were
Speaker 1: stories of hidden causeways beneath the streets of smugglers, widening
Speaker 1: sea caves. Everything layered and never quite reconciled in official records.
Speaker 1: The library itself sat where the carb was slope shoppy
Speaker 1: towards shingle, half a block from the tumble of moat
Speaker 1: boats and salt stone kiosks, fronted by a haphazard porch
Speaker 1: ground over columns. Mordyson sizes sprawled out and back, as
Speaker 1: if drafted by rival hands over decades. The main reading
Speaker 1: room sworded with ceilings of dust filmed glass and Gothic tracery.
Speaker 1: The older wings hunched beneath lower beams, paneled in the
Speaker 1: pail with a soften pine particular to the region. The
Speaker 1: octagonal room, by contrast, was barely remarked upon an usual
Speaker 1: guidebooks or local histories. Its interests lay at the deep
Speaker 1: rear of the building, passed the fire door in a
Speaker 1: short corridor that dogged choppy to the left of devition
Speaker 1: that always felt as if it existed to reach the room,
Speaker 1: rather than lead from any were natural. Each wall was
Speaker 1: pierced by a tall, narrow window. The glass, old and
Speaker 1: slightly misshapen, refracted the gray light into odd gradients. There
Speaker 1: were no curtains, just tidy roller blinds always drawn up.
Speaker 1: Its surfaces seemed perpetually cold, the air echoing softly, as
Speaker 1: if the room trembled at human prisons. Nobody seemed inclined
Speaker 1: to linger here. On my first day, Missess Fenwick had explained,
Speaker 1: not without irony, that even the staff only used it
Speaker 1: when necessity struck, When renovations crowded out the main spaces,
Speaker 1: or when someone needed short termaco storage. It has its uses,
Speaker 1: she had said, but people forget about it too far
Speaker 1: from the tea room. Missus Fenwick, herself, never a less
Speaker 1: than brisk, appeared perfectly acclimated to the strange decrees of
Speaker 1: her domain. Her routines were cocroculists, sign and sheets, readings
Speaker 1: of the boiler dials. Her conversation always practical, but with
Speaker 1: the drivage of humor that I come to relish odd corners.
Speaker 1: Keep libraries honest, she told me once, And every British
Speaker 1: tone wants to pretend its past is more orderly than
Speaker 1: it was. Tom the University ate volunteer, drifted in and out,
Speaker 1: always chasing a mislaid notebook or hunting a missing index file.
Speaker 1: Disorganized in a charming way given to gentle teasing, he
Speaker 1: appeared eager to master a dozen small jobs, rarely completing
Speaker 1: more than two. His interests, by preference, wander toward the personnel.
Speaker 1: Did you see the clouds this morning look like steam trips?
Speaker 1: Or you know there's supposedly a tunnel under the prom
Speaker 1: but Liam says it's just council rumor. Ellen, a penchner
Speaker 1: with snowy hair in the placidy of someone to whom
Speaker 1: libraries had always been home. Could be found most mornings
Speaker 1: sorting yellowing scraps or querying census rolls for a femal
Speaker 1: family connections. Her manner blended deliberate focus with a kind
Speaker 1: of dreamy curiosity, always researching, yet never in a hurry.
Speaker 1: She had lived through so many iterations of crystal reinvention
Speaker 1: that the libraries ought to be seen as natural to
Speaker 1: her as tides. And then there was Liam the Kerdica,
Speaker 1: whose slow economical way with tools suggested that he neither
Speaker 1: invited nor remembered fuss. His accent was the local deep
Speaker 1: water drawl, and he claimed to know every inch of
Speaker 1: the building and the stories behind every repair ticket. When
Speaker 1: asked about peculiarities radiator pipes that chose went to rattle,
Speaker 1: light switches that governed other rooms, he'd simply smile and
Speaker 1: mutter about old stones and the funny mute my days,
Speaker 1: specially in winter, at quickly settled into ritual. A morning
Speaker 1: walk down Church Lane a paused to inspect the sea
Speaker 1: for visible boats or lingering falk, some reading at home
Speaker 1: over eggs and strong, then into town for library duty,
Speaker 1: which offered both a sense of purpose and an excuse
Speaker 1: to trespiss thru civic memory. The work itself was straightforward, alphabetizing, sorting,
Speaker 1: typing up notations lost to accident in time. The context
Speaker 1: stroll birth records, bankruptcies, and tidy lists of weekly choir
Speaker 1: members lent the task a kind of gravity. Yet that
Speaker 1: morning in the octagonal room, I found myself less concerned
Speaker 1: with civic business than with a growing hunch something about
Speaker 1: the air, the feel of walls too cold to hie,
Speaker 1: something about the place's refusal to let the ordinary rules apply.
Speaker 1: The absence of shadows at first was subtle, but as
Speaker 1: the days passed it became impossible to ignore. One afternoon
Speaker 1: alone in the octagonal room, I decided to test matters.
Speaker 1: As stuttering afternoon sundappled the glass with cold, watery light.
Speaker 1: I retrieved a small desk lamp from the supply cupboard
Speaker 1: and a battered wooden ruler from the bottom of my workback,
Speaker 1: tools familiar to any architect's hands. Setting the lamp at
Speaker 1: a distinct angle, I placed the ruler perpendicular across a
Speaker 1: blank page, then powered the lamp on, careful to shield
Speaker 1: its direct Claire, I expected, I admit, I wanted a
Speaker 1: shark contrast, the ruler casting a clear shadow stripe. What
Speaker 1: I saw instead was simply nothing. The page stayed and altered,
Speaker 1: just as luminous as before, the ruler almost as as
Speaker 1: suspended above a false illuminated ground. I moved it slowly
Speaker 1: en to end. The effect didn't change. I tried with
Speaker 1: my hand my pencil, a stack of index carts, placing
Speaker 1: them at different hangles, twisting the lamp, even cupping my
Speaker 1: fingers until they hevered an inch a of the page.
Speaker 1: No shadow formed objects retained, the outline perfectly above, remained ruthless,
Speaker 1: unstuck from any into play of light and dark. The
Speaker 1: air prickled. Even my own arm crossing in front of
Speaker 1: the lamp left nothing behind, just the faint sense of movement,
Speaker 1: but no silent turn of darkness. I stepped back, checked
Speaker 1: the lamp, verified that it functioned, unplugged it plugged it
Speaker 1: in again, turned to test on my own face in
Speaker 1: the mirror of my phone. No difference. Then, as an afterthought,
Speaker 1: I carried the lamp into the corridor outside the octagonal room.
Speaker 1: There a standard as she marble bust, one of the
Speaker 1: many that littered the libraries. Holstoed atop a fluted blinth,
Speaker 1: I set the lamp to the side at once the
Speaker 1: expected The chatter sprang forth, crisp and marble edged. Satisfied,
Speaker 1: if not comforted, I wheeled the lamp back to the threshold,
Speaker 1: leaned against the jam, and attempted the same experiment, one
Speaker 1: foot in the corridor, one in the octagonal room. The
Speaker 1: result clarified things uncomfortably. The shadow of my hand cast
Speaker 1: into the corridor existed my hand over the threshold into
Speaker 1: the octagonal room. A shadows stopped abruptly at the line,
Speaker 1: like a light switch, but with no physical mechanism and
Speaker 1: no apparent source. I waved Ham down when he next passed,
Speaker 1: arms full of brochures. Indulge me for a moment. Come
Speaker 1: look at this, I said. He obliged, grinning at what
Speaker 1: he surely considered retirement, and duced eccentricity. When I demonstrated
Speaker 1: the effect, he watched, shrugged and offer funny that some
Speaker 1: kind of chick paint or eah. I never actually thought
Speaker 1: about it. Liam says the room's always a bit ot,
Speaker 1: but he means the draft. Besides, do shadows matter if
Speaker 1: the place is bright enough. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe
Speaker 1: I thought the difference lay in the choice of bulbs
Speaker 1: or some property of the old glass. Libraries had their
Speaker 1: share of corks. Nobody had ever died of a shadow shortage,
Speaker 1: but something it shut the base of my skull. More
Speaker 1: architectural than superstitious spaces told their own stories even when
Speaker 1: people failed to listen. That afternoon, my notes grew dent
Speaker 1: with sketches, angles, winter positions, the height of lintel's, any
Speaker 1: minor anomaly in proportions. I drew the room, mapped the
Speaker 1: sunlight patterns, all in hope that a pattern would betray itself.
Speaker 1: If I was attentive enough, sleep wouldn't come. That night,
Speaker 1: I lay reviewing facts and theories, from the practical, clever
Speaker 1: paint indirect layer to the more intriguing anomalous glass perhaps
Speaker 1: built for some kind of photochemical experiment, But none accounted
Speaker 1: for the totality of the effect of the utter absence
Speaker 1: of even the faintest pennumber. The following week, driven by
Speaker 1: both boredom and an obscure sense of mission, I widened
Speaker 1: my approach. It was no longer enough to simply take
Speaker 1: things at face Valley. I fetched my phone nothing fancy,
Speaker 1: just a serviceable model with a mid level camera, and
Speaker 1: attempted to take shots of the stock of registers on
Speaker 1: my desk. Looking through the screen, the room appeared perfectly normal.
Speaker 1: The lines of books, the angular walls, the dense grade
Speaker 1: of windows, everything in place. I'd tapped the shutter, eager
Speaker 1: to compare. Reviewing the photo, my breath stored in a quiet,
Speaker 1: ridiculous flutter. The photo was white, blank, a luminous field,
Speaker 1: with a faint circle of a yacht of the edge,
Speaker 1: as if the room had resisted even the attempt to
Speaker 1: be captured. I tried again, focusing instead on Tom, who
Speaker 1: obligingly made a phase for the lens nap. The resulting
Speaker 1: picture was entirely grayscale, overexposed to no Tom, no books,
Speaker 1: only a shallow wash, like the first stage of water color,
Speaker 1: before details accreted the tree. I fetched an old polaroid
Speaker 1: from the soft closet, a relic saved for children's events,
Speaker 1: and attempted a shot of the window. The print came
Speaker 1: out developed and remained stubbornly blank, a field of gray nothing.
Speaker 1: Unwilling to attribute failure to mere camera issues, I stepped
Speaker 1: into the corridor, aimed the device to Tom and clicked
Speaker 1: the polaroid word. The result was exactly as expected, Tom
Speaker 1: squinting at me from beneath his mob of hair, room
Speaker 1: behind him, full relief shadows, and all back at the
Speaker 1: edge between rooms. I took another half the view show
Speaker 1: and corridor half the octagonal room. Once the image resolved,
Speaker 1: a transition was jarring the corridor a period as normal,
Speaker 1: but beyond the threshold, a featureless swat impossible to penetrate,
Speaker 1: as if the room's very present, and disrupted the act
Speaker 1: of image making. Even holding an object halfway over the
Speaker 1: boundary and outdated directory because a brick produced a partial
Speaker 1: blankness where it hovered outside the book appeared shadowed where
Speaker 1: it entered the octagonal room. Detail faded, edges, blood into life,
Speaker 1: Curiosity burned hot. Now I borrowed a digital ESSLA from
Speaker 1: my nephew, an amateur photographer, and attempted more sophisticated shots,
Speaker 1: different isol levels, flash, multiple angles, even a trope of
Speaker 1: for long exposures at lunch when sunlight streamed between cloud banks.
Speaker 1: The results were ever sawk her inside the octagonal room,
Speaker 1: every image file came back corrupted, the display, freezing by
Speaker 1: the image vanishing from the card. The moment across the threshold,
Speaker 1: machines returned to obedience. Something more was in played than
Speaker 1: mere oddness of glass, trick of the fog, or error
Speaker 1: of technique. My usual skepticism yielded reluctantly to broader possibilities.
Speaker 1: After Thursday lunch, I detered to the library's arc of cabinet,
Speaker 1: a batter much mended oak thing near the main desk,
Speaker 1: and began combing through the musty file folders, floor, planned
Speaker 1: event brochuers, committee documents, anything that might pin down the
Speaker 1: octagonal room's provenans. Yet among the finally ink blueprints, it
Speaker 1: appeared only in passing an unlabeled dependix jutting from the
Speaker 1: north corner, lacking any identifying marks or measurements. A vent
Speaker 1: invitations from the war years referred to the north reading suite,
Speaker 1: ore records, chamber staff members inserted the phrase auxiliary study
Speaker 1: or front sem in our room. Never one consistent label
Speaker 1: the shelf with these were indexed according to the library's
Speaker 1: own system existed, But as for the documents themselves, many
Speaker 1: were misfiled and some abruptly ended In the middle of ascendence.
Speaker 1: The room slipt through definitional cracks referenced with the mutability
Speaker 1: that made my head ache. No one else seemed concerned.
Speaker 1: When I asked Tom or Ellen, they shrugged. It's just
Speaker 1: the old reading room, Allen said, the one near the sea.
Speaker 1: I suppose, what would you call it? The octagonal room?
Speaker 1: I pressed, She considered, it's always had to name me, know,
Speaker 1: the study. The spare stack never really settled in my mind.
Speaker 1: It's where we put the parish records for a while,
Speaker 1: didn't we I leafed her more floor plans, feeling like
Speaker 1: a man drawing maps for a coastline that rearranged itself
Speaker 1: behind his back. Athough he's accumulated. As I cataloged book
Speaker 1: stored in the octagonal room, scene repelled by the aging process,
Speaker 1: binding still crisp paper and yellowed. Some volumes dating to
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties as bright as those purchased the last year.
Speaker 1: I examined. The stamps issue dates decades old. The same
Speaker 1: shelf quoted in at least three op books, Yet the
Speaker 1: books themselves felt to touched by time. A sea salt Eire,
Speaker 1: I began to lose track of time in small ways.
Speaker 1: On one occasion I entered to organize pamphits. Soon after tea,
Speaker 1: when I next glanced at my watch, i'd apparently miss lunch.
Speaker 1: The gears lagged by nearly forty minutes, but only, it seemed,
Speaker 1: while I remained within the eight sided space stepping out.
Speaker 1: Time caught up uncomfortably. The library clocks took forward my
Speaker 1: own sense of hunger striking all at once. I asked Liam,
Speaker 1: in his melodious county voice, if he'd ever had trouble
Speaker 1: with the room. Perhaps repairs that never seemed to a
Speaker 1: stake or bobsa never burned out? Odd, really, he replied,
Speaker 1: rubbing his chin. I keep all the logs you see done,
Speaker 1: everyone's schedules to every lock, fix heater's rest. Never replace
Speaker 1: a bulbin there now I think of it, never even
Speaker 1: touched up the paint. Might be the only room not
Speaker 1: to get a single maintenance form since I started. Makes
Speaker 1: you think a he winked an easy smile, settling over uncertainty.
Speaker 1: One afternoon, shoving a tartenbound copy of the gazette, I
Speaker 1: noticed a children's rime written in pintle on a slip
Speaker 1: bit of flyerly for half line that stuck in my mind.
Speaker 1: There is a room by the sea, slash where the
Speaker 1: light forgets thee the phrase Doug gets something earlier, something
Speaker 1: half remembered from childhood. My parents, coastal folk both used
Speaker 1: to sing a varian in winter, where the sea winds
Speaker 1: blow and the colocan stall slash comes the place with
Speaker 1: no shade at all. I laughed, startled to find it there.
Speaker 1: In the stacks, I found scribbled notes in several hands
Speaker 1: of shadow as reading rooms slipped between more regular entries
Speaker 1: about meeting minutes and furniture purchases. The fragmentary dates disagreed,
Speaker 1: one nineteen forty eight, another nineteen sixty two. The handwriting
Speaker 1: belonged to different generations. The pages themselves were creased out
Speaker 1: of order, as if the narrative had been shuffled and
Speaker 1: reassembled without much care for continuity. Each reference treated the
Speaker 1: room obliquely, no clarity about its use or origin. On
Speaker 1: the passing mention always on the margins. Having exhausted arcadectural explanation,
Speaker 1: I wondered allowed to missess Fenwick one rainy Friday, for
Speaker 1: usual designs were common among such coastal buildings. He could
Speaker 1: always tell which parts of the town were built. When
Speaker 1: fish was dear and beer was cheap, she answered, gaze
Speaker 1: sliding over my shoulder to severe a stack of unshoved boxes,
Speaker 1: oddities come and go outide carries, and all sorts of
Speaker 1: strange bits does in it room stories sometimes you forget
Speaker 1: how they arrived. She cocked, her tongue, lost in a
Speaker 1: private ledger of due dates, commandingly embarded. By now, it
Speaker 1: was clear the room's peculiarity exceeded mere architecture. Cameras, failed, records,
Speaker 1: blowd People registered the space, but struggle to describe it
Speaker 1: with any fixity, and even history itself seemed to dodge
Speaker 1: around its presence. My earlier theories clever lighting, selective for painting,
Speaker 1: the peculiar habits of windows had been chewed away by
Speaker 1: contradictory evidence. Space I thought should be concrete, mappable, shape
Speaker 1: begets function, Yet here shape marked certainty. I entered the
Speaker 1: octagonal room the next morning, braced for subjective confusion, determined
Speaker 1: to test the limits of its anomaly. I focused less
Speaker 1: on the sensation, the hair raising feeling of being watched
Speaker 1: by the walls, the gentle push of air that never
Speaker 1: quite warmed him, more on the mechanics. I studied the mortar,
Speaker 1: measured each ok took in an angle with the protractor
Speaker 1: examined the baseboard's withering detail. Then, as I circumnavigated a
Speaker 1: smaller puzzle surfaced. The room stonework did not match its neighbors.
Speaker 1: The color differed a pale, almost opalescent, where the corridor's
Speaker 1: bricked altar orange red. I scraped a bit of mortar
Speaker 1: with a borrowed utility knife. The dust fleat with quartz
Speaker 1: perhaps felt strange to the finger, as if both slick
Speaker 1: and chalky at once. The pointing lines didn't conform to
Speaker 1: the orientations elsewhere. Instead, each angle and seam aligned to
Speaker 1: compass points north, northeast, and so forth, while the rest
Speaker 1: of the library conformed into the town grid. Paid no
Speaker 1: such homage. The archtrey above a door, carved with a
Speaker 1: modest fan motif, was a style I'd seen only in
Speaker 1: older rural chapels, never in public buildings from the relevant era. Curious,
Speaker 1: I revisited the staff records, seeking any mention of renovation, extension,
Speaker 1: or refit pertaining to this odd corner. Ours passed in
Speaker 1: the Dame muffled hum of the libraries under populated morning,
Speaker 1: Apart from a few willy allusions to repurposing in the
Speaker 1: mond after the Second World War. I discovered nothing, no
Speaker 1: inverse tender on note from any contractor no entry in
Speaker 1: Liam's maintenance long since his own hiring two decades earlier.
Speaker 1: Even parish minutes, those endless files of civic fuss over
Speaker 1: gutters and lease old squabbles remain silent where the optic
Speaker 1: and no room should have demanded line items and petitions.
Speaker 1: Feeling the pressure of diminishing leaves, I asked Liam if
Speaker 1: it was possible the room had been attached late, or
Speaker 1: perhaps a local builder using stone reclaim from elsewhere, had
Speaker 1: simply omde a paperwork. Now there's a question, he patted
Speaker 1: the wall, affection palpable. I've seen stone like this before.
Speaker 1: Mind up the cause. Not here. Old our crops that
Speaker 1: weren't worth quarrying we used for some of the lost
Speaker 1: break orders, more like lighthouse stuff. If you ask me,
Speaker 1: bits that survived the storms. You know. My thoughts snag
Speaker 1: on the idea refusing to free themselves. Why would a
Speaker 1: public library build the neterative waves since eighteen sixty something
Speaker 1: include a room and in anomalous style using materials from elsewhere,
Speaker 1: Absent every normal thread of provence before retirement, I would
Speaker 1: have shrugged this offerrs happen, records fail. But the combination
Speaker 1: of inconsistency is not the nonconformist geometry. The stubborn near
Speaker 1: marked timeline, the memory lapses among staff, the room stubborn
Speaker 1: refusal to appear in photographs will be named with consensus.
Speaker 1: Above all the way, physical evidence, books, Stone, even my
Speaker 1: own notes havevered at the periphery, a reality present but
Speaker 1: never quite fixed. The notion had become a resistible, demanding
Speaker 1: not just my skills as a retired architect, but NAMA
Speaker 1: capacity for its session. I resolved to pursue every avenue
Speaker 1: not limited to the library, but branching to its context,
Speaker 1: land records, local property files, sea sweat directories in the
Speaker 1: Council's care. This afternoon, with cold rain clattering against the
Speaker 1: upper glass, I arranged a meeting with Margaret Plimselt, the
Speaker 1: senior archivist of the Borough Council, of precise, formidable woman
Speaker 1: with a taste froward, a harder than stone. We met
Speaker 1: in her cramped office, two flights below the street, where
Speaker 1: folders bulged in the electric heater rattled in protist. After
Speaker 1: a brief chat about the weather and the Winter Rates Emerald,
Speaker 1: a handful of bloodprint reproductions I borrowed from the library store.
Speaker 1: I am looking for clarity about the origins of the
Speaker 1: octagonal room, I explained, I can find records for every
Speaker 1: expansion or extension everywhere, but there, Margaret pursed, her lips,
Speaker 1: ricked out angular glasses glinting in the mutifluorescent light. It'll
Speaker 1: be there, council signs, every edition off. Let's look together.
Speaker 1: We thumped through the rolls. The original nineteenth century plant square,
Speaker 1: clean lined coping stones rented in articular sink, the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty two reading room adendum in red, the nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: nine bombs shutter notes in cheeky pencil, the nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: eight modernizations, kitchenette and bins. We found every wall, every doorway,
Speaker 1: every spiral staircase except the octagonal room was cleanly missing
Speaker 1: avoid on the plans, no dotted lines, no pencil proposals.
Speaker 1: Margaret's goold visibly affronted that campy it's well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's big. They must have just missed updating the drawing.
Speaker 1: I've heard people ask about that room for decades. It's
Speaker 1: always been in use. Why wouldn't the plans show it.
Speaker 1: She refused to believe blueprints could omit such an obvious
Speaker 1: feature for one hundred fifty years, yet her copy index
Speaker 1: exhaustively file yielded nothing. Armed with this contradiction, I moved
Speaker 1: to the microphone room for an hour. I dove into
Speaker 1: crumbling local newspapers, wartime issues, festival bulletins, autumn notices of
Speaker 1: lost pets, and sea risks. I found several mentions tantalizing
Speaker 1: but never explicit, of a map room at the rear.
Speaker 1: Dates range from nineteen forty three to nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: Each described the octagonal room as a place for civil
Speaker 1: defense planning, or confusingly, as converted record storage. Then in
Speaker 1: the library's event programs from adjacent weeks, not a single
Speaker 1: word about such a room. Events leapt from the main
Speaker 1: reading hall to the kitchen, skipping over my obsession. Frustrated,
Speaker 1: I compared citations from the oral History Project. A local
Speaker 1: woman's diary copied into the archive referred to monthly town
Speaker 1: meetings held in the Stone Chamber by the beach. The
Speaker 1: next year at the same entries, detailed meetings elsewhere at
Speaker 1: the chamber omitted, never explained. Finally, desperate for surety. I
Speaker 1: scrutinized my own notebook. Several pages where I had recorded
Speaker 1: observation's numbers about light levels, sketches of the abnormal flour
Speaker 1: patterns were not just blurred, but some entirely missing. I
Speaker 1: flicked through in confusion. I remembered writing them the angle
Speaker 1: of the sills, the odds smell beneath the window the
Speaker 1: moment I had watched fog swell behind the glass, but
Speaker 1: they faded physically or perhaps in my memory. What sort
Speaker 1: of place can persists so powerfully in stone and yet
Speaker 1: to solve on the edge of recollection in footgaff, plan
Speaker 1: and mind. The octagonal rooms enigma now seemed not just
Speaker 1: a matter of architectural anomaly, but a puzzle that in
Speaker 1: snare documentation, memory, and the boundaries of what would occurred
Speaker 1: to be marked down, All the old orderly logic of
Speaker 1: construction and record keeping failed to domesticate the place. There was,
Speaker 1: the room itself, uncertain lineage, intractable geometry, shadows, absent time
Speaker 1: wavering at the periphery around it, the swell of partial
Speaker 1: remembrances and lost paperwork of town legends and erased plans
Speaker 1: with borrowed stone whose provements nobody could name. It no
Speaker 1: longer felt like a question of how light worked on stone,
Speaker 1: but how history, communal and personnel worked on space. What
Speaker 1: did it mean if something so durable, so concrete as
Speaker 1: a room could weave in and out of memory, never
Speaker 1: quite forming the anchor it should. I decided this wasn't
Speaker 1: simply about architecture gun astray This was about the strange
Speaker 1: fault lines where reality pressed against a fabric of experience
Speaker 1: in Rica, the scene where what we notice and what
Speaker 1: we forget entangle. To move forward, I'd have to look
Speaker 1: not only at blueprints and brick, but at the deeper currents,
Speaker 1: the wondering the stones of the coast, the shifting fortunes
Speaker 1: of shoreline structures, perhaps under ways of small town chooses
Speaker 1: to shape, preserve, or discard the oddities in its midst
Speaker 1: My first stop the next morning was the Town Registry
Speaker 1: at Dull Frayne Office, at the edge of council buildings,
Speaker 1: bathe in lucormfluorescence and the hum of ancient radiators. For
Speaker 1: the first time since retiring, I felt a hint of
Speaker 1: the nervous energy for my student days, as if asking
Speaker 1: too many questions might get me mistaken for someone still
Speaker 1: in the game. After an awkward exchange with the young
Speaker 1: desk clerk Coup, when I explained my interest in building
Speaker 1: materials and all renovations, took me for a local history
Speaker 1: enthusiast with more hours than since. I was shown into
Speaker 1: records room, paneled and scratched glass, smell of floor wax
Speaker 1: and paper dust thick in the air, historic correspondents, tile samples,
Speaker 1: faded ledges, boxes open in sequence my architectural and tenny
Speaker 1: twitching for the mere scrap of origin story weeks or
Speaker 1: months ago. I might have described the feeling as a
Speaker 1: kind of hunt, but already confronting the odd, smudged after
Speaker 1: math in my own note book, I suspected I was
Speaker 1: wrestling with something that did not want to be neatly
Speaker 1: pinned down. Ledg's reference stone deliveries and terce formal school
Speaker 1: and municipal construction West a repair storm damaged nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: two a replacement Lindall's local supplier. But as I worked
Speaker 1: through shipment manifest after shipment manifest, I noticed a recurring insertion,
Speaker 1: difficult to detect unless you've grown bold enough to see patterns.
Speaker 1: Every few years. An entire column or line would be missing.
Speaker 1: A shipment listed as material received from island to see
Speaker 1: other file only at secondary Foule never emerged from the
Speaker 1: catalog once a shipment was described, then struck dury, leaving
Speaker 1: behind the phrase for future council purposes, no receipts, nothing else.
Speaker 1: On my way out, I was handed the Register's complaints book,
Speaker 1: full of missing inverses for projects that never quite resolved, everywhere,
Speaker 1: a steady discouraging absence of anything definitive. At the library
Speaker 1: later that day, I tried again with missus Fenwick and Tom,
Speaker 1: less as an inquisition than as a kind of survey,
Speaker 1: almost in hope that repeating my story allowed would stir
Speaker 1: something forgotten awake among us. I keep coming back to
Speaker 1: that octagonal room, I said, gesturing with my hands as
Speaker 1: though trying to sketch the impossibility out in the air.
Speaker 1: The walls aren't right, the windows don't match the other wings.
Speaker 1: The light well, you know, no shadows, it sounded thin,
Speaker 1: said out loud, Tom, winding twine around a bundle of
Speaker 1: old maps, smiled the smile of someone who's heard a
Speaker 1: gentle extricity one too many times. It's just the spare
Speaker 1: records room, isn't it, he shrugged, looking slightly past me.
Speaker 1: Place he gets sent to when the RESTful or when
Speaker 1: the main reading room floods. He grinned apologetically. I've never
Speaker 1: really thought about it, that's just there. What about the
Speaker 1: way it feels? I pressed, Changes in the air, cuppets
Speaker 1: that don't keep dust, lost truck of time. Tom reached
Speaker 1: for another map, blinking a little, and nodded. It is odd.
Speaker 1: I suppose sometimes I think it'd be a good art studio,
Speaker 1: but I don't notice much else. Miss s Fenwick, arriving
Speaker 1: with a stack of utility bills, gave me a careful look.
Speaker 1: We have so many quocks here, love, he stopped chasing
Speaker 1: them all. You'll never finish cattalogging, and every year something
Speaker 1: new turns up at the bottom of the stairs, old stones,
Speaker 1: odd books, records. Nobody ever recals buying. She gave a
Speaker 1: little huff. If you ever do track it all down,
Speaker 1: let me know which cupboard it is hiding in. I
Speaker 1: tried Ellen, who was cross referencing the names of shipbuilders
Speaker 1: in parish records. The study by the Sea, she said,
Speaker 1: her tone pleasant, distracted. That's what I always called it.
Speaker 1: My cousin said, his father build it, but he told
Speaker 1: fits about most things. I do go in sometimes, but foe.
Speaker 1: Now I can't recall why the light is very white,
Speaker 1: isn't it? Did you want to find something lost? There?
Speaker 1: She moved on, comparing indixes. These conversations, I realized slipped
Speaker 1: always sideways. I could draw no one else into focus
Speaker 1: with me for more than a moment at a time.
Speaker 1: Back to the walls and windows. The library, when viewed
Speaker 1: as a whole, was a palimpsist of styles, every block
Speaker 1: and beam recorded in someone's ledger. But the octagonal rooms
Speaker 1: still work resisted description. Some part of my training told
Speaker 1: me that given enough time, enough samples, I could match
Speaker 1: the pale opalescence of its walls to some local source.
Speaker 1: I poured over older architectural guides, traced the names of
Speaker 1: old quarries and builders. Then a memory turned up at
Speaker 1: once years back, taken a boat tore out to the
Speaker 1: old light House Island, a slab of rock long since abandoned,
Speaker 1: just visible and clear weather. Tourists didn't visit any more.
Speaker 1: It was cordoned off after the apple like Clapston winter storm.
Speaker 1: The boatman warning us not to step ashore. I recalled,
Speaker 1: as clearly as one is allowed, the peculiar shimmer of
Speaker 1: its stones in morning, some something between chalk and felspar,
Speaker 1: glinting in a way unlike any mainland granite. I found
Speaker 1: Liam fixing the staff kettle. You ever seen stone like that?
Speaker 1: Not from around here? Surely he set down his tools thoughtful.
Speaker 1: I have led doubt that the island light beyond the shoals.
Speaker 1: They ferried some back after the storm. Folks said it
Speaker 1: was indestructible, though the sea proved them wrong. There's a
Speaker 1: saying old as the tides stones best left at sea.
Speaker 1: Some reckoned the stuff didn't like to sit on droy Land.
Speaker 1: He glanced up with something like self mockery old stories,
Speaker 1: you know. But after they built the extension with it,
Speaker 1: If that's what happened, folk stopped talking about it. Maybe
Speaker 1: the town just needed the stone and the restcouts swept under.
Speaker 1: There was something in his phrasing it pricked at me.
Speaker 1: Not a refusal to remember, but knowing that sometimes certain
Speaker 1: things drift for communal peas. It was as if the
Speaker 1: town who come the small axe preferred to smooth Wait's
Speaker 1: own odd roughness, like the tide ray stories that didn't suit.
Speaker 1: Back up stairs, my fingers sticky with dust. A comb
Speaker 1: through shipping registers from just after the lighthouse storm. In
Speaker 1: one barely illegible was a reference to Mason me delivery
Speaker 1: salvage stone from off Island for municipal use see procure
Speaker 1: and correspondence. But the reference to correspondence, as I checked
Speaker 1: the next volume had been cropped from the binding, as
Speaker 1: if removed by scissors or fate. Laid of registers simply
Speaker 1: listed stone to library, add no specification. I tried for
Speaker 1: my own sanity to catalog what kept us solving, but
Speaker 1: even my own inventory betrayed me. Liss when reading the
Speaker 1: octagonal room had neat handwriting insensible dates, but outside words
Speaker 1: faded or rearranged themselves, as if the act of taking
Speaker 1: them beyond the threshold shredded part of their substance. What
Speaker 1: I was left with was residue of suggestion and a
Speaker 1: growing sense that no record could remain entirely fixed to
Speaker 1: fit involved that space. I pondered the practical consequences Thomas
Speaker 1: placing a pencil, allan forgetting a half transgrid set of dates,
Speaker 1: even my own till sometimes going missing, only to reappear
Speaker 1: weeks later underneath some forgotten pamphlet pile. What kind of place,
Speaker 1: what kind of stone could eliminate not just shadows, but memory,
Speaker 1: even the traces of our trying to notice. One afternoon,
Speaker 1: just as the damp preston and the rooms windows fogged over,
Speaker 1: I was interrupted by missus Femi's announcement of visiting historian
Speaker 1: Doctor Mathel de Graves had come from London to consult
Speaker 1: the archives for her book on vanished coastal buildings. She
Speaker 1: was being shown the holdings in the main collection, but
Speaker 1: would likely want to examine the oddities as well. It
Speaker 1: was suggested, perhaps, with the gentle malice reserved for single
Speaker 1: minded volunteers, that I might wish to welcome the specialists
Speaker 1: to our more eccentric corners. Doctor Graves, when I met
Speaker 1: her over mugs of tea and the staff kitchen, turned
Speaker 1: out to be neither as richard nor as starched as
Speaker 1: her reputation among the council seemed to warrant. She was
Speaker 1: perhaps in her late forties, sharp eyed, her manner brisk
Speaker 1: but warm, with a voice that carried the cadence of
Speaker 1: someone trained to make a concitrant materials yield their secrets.
Speaker 1: When I described the shadowless room and its resistant records,
Speaker 1: she didn't dismiss me. Instead, she grew attentive, scrowling notes
Speaker 1: in about her journal head ducked over the pages. I've
Speaker 1: come across things like this before, she said, after some
Speaker 1: quiet exchanges, not often, and always in conjunction with certain
Speaker 1: coastal phenomenous faces that don't appear on official maps, or
Speaker 1: that resist being drawn accurately. This short up to local legend.
Speaker 1: But there are clusters long old maritime routes, especially buildings
Speaker 1: that have absorbed parts of rex or lighthouses up north.
Speaker 1: There's an old customs how same reports, light, always flat,
Speaker 1: no shadows, and no fowed grass of a from the interior,
Speaker 1: no matter how often taken. They called it the soaker.
Speaker 1: I explained the oddities, the vanishing records, the fluctuation in
Speaker 1: personal memories, the books that didn't each as other volumes date,
Speaker 1: the strange reputation shifts among even the staff. Her brows needed,
Speaker 1: and she started listing questions ENTI looping script heavy plotted
Speaker 1: the ages of each building phase on a time line,
Speaker 1: not just the stones, but the oddities when they begin
Speaker 1: to appear in diaries. When they vanish, she leaned forward.
Speaker 1: My suspicion is that this isn't just material but also social,
Speaker 1: some confluence of physical substance and the community's willinness conscious
Speaker 1: or otherwise do not notice. Intrigued, I offered to show
Speaker 1: her the room. As we crossed the threshold, I warned
Speaker 1: her of the shadow phenomenon. She carianned, stepping carefully, measuring
Speaker 1: angles with her own compass, and holding up a pocket torch,
Speaker 1: eyes shining with a child's still light. At discovery inside,
Speaker 1: I demonstrated the tricks of the light, the reluctance of
Speaker 1: objects to gast darkness, the way sound echoed faintly, just
Speaker 1: slightly too long. She took notes, vigorously, pausing now and
Speaker 1: then and peering at the grain of the wood, and
Speaker 1: the way the stone met the window ledges. Extraordinary, she murmured,
Speaker 1: this is beyond optical oddity. She pressed the back of
Speaker 1: her hand against the stone block, then frowned. You feel
Speaker 1: that it tingles almost and the mortar too clean. Two
Speaker 1: and one for local mix, we took samples, carefully scraping
Speaker 1: mortar grains, pressing flatten tape to lift flecks of stone.
Speaker 1: She batted them labeling with the date and time. I
Speaker 1: felt the now unwelcome twined of skepticism. Would these samples
Speaker 1: even persist outside to try to keep them near you,
Speaker 1: I said, half joking, watching as she tucked them securely
Speaker 1: in her bag. We sat together at a desk inside
Speaker 1: the room, plodding up on crisp white paper, timeline of
Speaker 1: all known modifications to the library structure, drawing lines to
Speaker 1: sources from other local anomalies, mathodo sketch connections, the lighthouse's destruction,
Speaker 1: the importation of salvage stone, the rumors of rooms that
Speaker 1: soak up secrets. She spoke of her research elsewhere, of
Speaker 1: town holes and sea wad walls built from the bones
Speaker 1: of ships, rooms whose existence served after storms or rumors
Speaker 1: of misfortune. We compared Faucore. There were formentary rhymes. The
Speaker 1: room on the headland no picture can sure slast, the
Speaker 1: room build of light, where the old stories go. There
Speaker 1: were children's gains, one hop over the line, one never
Speaker 1: to go inside Forktales of lighthouse keepers whose diaries turned
Speaker 1: blank after too many years alone with this stone. Matheld
Speaker 1: had described an old theory from architectural superstition that octagons
Speaker 1: had always been transitional shapes, neither square nor round, liminal, unclaimable,
Speaker 1: Saints and devils can't tell which weighs north in an octicon.
Speaker 1: She courted with a smile. So what are we dealing with?
Speaker 1: I asked forice low, disturbed by my own growing willingness
Speaker 1: to treat the inquiry as if it bent toward the
Speaker 1: uncanny something yan an intersection of geology, psychology, intention and accident.
Speaker 1: And then theres the town. She caused for a notebook
Speaker 1: and gave me a side. Always look, I think the
Speaker 1: community does the last smile of the work. If a
Speaker 1: room helps a town forget what it can't afford to remember,
Speaker 1: well maybe that is as real as science in its way.
Speaker 1: Later that week, intent on not losing our momentum, we
Speaker 1: staged controlled experiments. We began belaying out objects inside the room,
Speaker 1: a pencil, a slip of paper marked with the day's day,
Speaker 1: a bright red library card. Each was locked, frotographed, and
Speaker 1: described both within the octacon and just beyond the doorway.
Speaker 1: Notes left in sight survived, words crisp, But when we
Speaker 1: carried the same note ackout, passages faded, or the ink blurred,
Speaker 1: or words came back rearranged. Digital photograph showed foul, corruption
Speaker 1: or blank spots where the room should appear. Mathel the
Speaker 1: muse It's like the place is designed and not accidentally,
Speaker 1: but almost as an act of property to repel the
Speaker 1: active documentation, an anti record, or perhaps an absorber of
Speaker 1: noticing itself. We recruited both Ellen and Tom Furtest, inviting
Speaker 1: them to witness the odd behavior of object, asking them
Speaker 1: to write down what they saw, then step out and
Speaker 1: repeat their description within the room. They agreed pencil note card,
Speaker 1: all present, no shadows, quite odd, not alarming. Outside. Only
Speaker 1: moments later they could recall the erran but not the specifics,
Speaker 1: as if their impressions had become a scene from last
Speaker 1: week K's lunch, pleasant and undemanding. All details slipped, the
Speaker 1: written notes bought up with them became under their hands
Speaker 1: nothing more than shopping lists. Meanwhile, we mapped the room's
Speaker 1: chronological appearances in the community of Memory. A handful of
Speaker 1: older residents claimed the octagonal room had been there since
Speaker 1: before the war. Others remembered its addition after the floods
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty five, or after the library modernization in
Speaker 1: the sixties, or not at all. Small square mats in
Speaker 1: a reference book shows a vague protrusion, sometimes marked as auxiliary,
Speaker 1: sometimes not marked at all. Town planners disagreed, and when pressed,
Speaker 1: always suggested the answer likely lay in misspelled documents. Methel
Speaker 1: appoured through more local legends. She found repeated references along
Speaker 1: the coast line, the map room, the secret stone wall,
Speaker 1: the room that never makes the record. Every rumor trace
Speaker 1: back not to documentation, but to incidents when a town
Speaker 1: was forced by flood or accident or embarrassment to begin
Speaker 1: again and needed a place for awkward facts to settle.
Speaker 1: We tried again to link this to the stone's properties.
Speaker 1: Matheld pointed out that pale, shimmering coastal stone, especially when
Speaker 1: cut from deep water outcrops, was long associated and brit
Speaker 1: to superstition with places where the earth remembers less. Lighthouse
Speaker 1: keepers mourned in such complexes for years, often reported disturbances, compasses, failing,
Speaker 1: clocks going awry, stacks of logs vanishing. Some said the
Speaker 1: stone soaks up the sea's forgetfulness. She noted I speculative
Speaker 1: scientific research here methodics hailed a wistful breath, hint at
Speaker 1: a strong magnetic fields, mineral impurities, all the typical explanations,
Speaker 1: but never enough in some to account for the social amnesia,
Speaker 1: the bending of record and habit. As we worked, it
Speaker 1: became obvious that the act of investigation itself accepted a
Speaker 1: kind of drag. Our meetings were vivid, urgent inside the
Speaker 1: octagonal room, outside the Russianale, for our experiments quickly faded,
Speaker 1: intensions blurring to trivia. Even recapping the problem or our
Speaker 1: chain of evidence, felt like trying to narrate a dream
Speaker 1: between haphazard surfaces. At one point, matheld sat back and
Speaker 1: closed her eyes, voice suddenly very quiet. Architects historians, anyone
Speaker 1: who works with memory wants things to last, to bind
Speaker 1: mean into place. But if this room is what we
Speaker 1: think it is, she murmured, fingertips pressed to the stone,
Speaker 1: it's almost a vessel for unnoticing a conscious or extent
Speaker 1: act made physical, which the town then over decades ports
Speaker 1: by its habit. Was this some supernatural mechanism, I wondered,
Speaker 1: to something old that wore the skin of consequence. Oh,
Speaker 1: merely a stack of odd accidents allied to a community's
Speaker 1: habit of filing away that which un settles. Marthelder drew
Speaker 1: out a broader hypothesis assembling scraps of folklore, material evidence,
Speaker 1: our own fading notes. The Arcticonal Rooms Stone was a
Speaker 1: fragment of the isolated lighthouse, itself, known from magnetic uncertainties
Speaker 1: and the slower cresh of rumors migrated to the library
Speaker 1: after the storm. The stone kept a piece of the
Speaker 1: sea's forgetfulness, aided by the octagonal geometry of the ancient
Speaker 1: language of in between us, the thirstshold where it doesn't
Speaker 1: fait his ease away and the town, with all its
Speaker 1: half spoken inclinations, continued what the stone began, quietly, omitting
Speaker 1: the room from active memory when it could, allowing paperwork
Speaker 1: and recollection to atrophy, carrying only the impression of an
Speaker 1: unremarkable space by the sea. The deeper effect was cumulative.
Speaker 1: Together material geometry, communal will, all conspire not in conspiracy,
Speaker 1: but in the gentle, stubborn way. Towns learned to men
Speaker 1: to move on to tidy away or what cannot be reconciled.
Speaker 1: One morning, as Mathel and I flit through a battered
Speaker 1: town Sombruk, looking for one last scrap of insight, an
Speaker 1: elderly patron appeared at the edge of our table. Her
Speaker 1: voice was rough, as stones rolled and tied the lighthouse
Speaker 1: stones gather what we leave n seen. She offered, that's
Speaker 1: what my grandmother told us. She smiled, as if both
Speaker 1: apologizing and blessing the impossibility. Then wandered towards the periodical racks,
Speaker 1: humming a wordless tune. In that moment, effelt with a
Speaker 1: trim of humility that we had reached the limits of
Speaker 1: our knowing. The phenomenon was not just an oddity to
Speaker 1: be solved, but functioned the pressure valve for the unassimilable
Speaker 1: debris of personal and social life, a kind of anti
Speaker 1: vault for what a community couldn't organize, what needed to
Speaker 1: be gently let go Mathela. Ever, the scientists tried to
Speaker 1: press for one more physical test. We brought an a
Speaker 1: movable stone block from the parapet, placing a macker on it,
Speaker 1: then moving it into the octagonal room. After several hours
Speaker 1: leaving and returning, the mark remained, but we found our
Speaker 1: own notes about the marker's color and position had faded.
Speaker 1: So we repeated the test, only to realize we'd repeated
Speaker 1: it already several times. Each attempt left us with the assumption,
Speaker 1: but not the certainty, that something had happened or not.
Speaker 1: In the gap between action and recal, we could not
Speaker 1: reduce the mystery to its bones, nor could we tear
Speaker 1: the anomaly from the town. A fragile contract older than
Speaker 1: understanding Broom's purpose, I thought was not to harbor a
Speaker 1: ghost or to venin, but to make a small clearing
Speaker 1: where not everything need be held up to the harsh
Speaker 1: light of memory. On my last official day of volunteering,
Speaker 1: I gathered my sketches, notes, odd paid fragments, all I
Speaker 1: could not bear to lose again. I placed them in
Speaker 1: a folder, one of those stubborn old library files with
Speaker 1: a frayed string tie, and left it on the shelf
Speaker 1: inside the octagonal room, near the window that looked up blankly,
Speaker 1: peaceably on to the endless whirl of miss washingle. That
Speaker 1: was enough, I fell, not to triumph, but to have
Speaker 1: participated to be, for a while the most attentive witness
Speaker 1: to something meant neither for remembrance nor for oblivion, but
Speaker 1: for an in between, a gentle, neutral ground. Not every
Speaker 1: story must be written in stone, Sometimes the most honest
Speaker 1: spaces of those that allow forgetting its proper work. When
Speaker 1: I came out into the corridor, the afternoon was already
Speaker 1: shifting towards dusk. I looked back at the door, now
Speaker 1: unremarkable and brass and painted door in memory as much
Speaker 1: as in fact, MATHELDO squeeze my arm, smiling with a
Speaker 1: kind of recognition or condolence. Perhaps in the end, she said,
Speaker 1: all towns of a room like that, even if only
Speaker 1: in some slopy sulit corner of their minds. I nodded.
Speaker 1: There was nothing left to prove, and nothing more I
Speaker 1: could hold tight against the gentle dissolutions of habit and time.
Speaker 1: The walk home through the damp lanes felt lighter than expected.
Speaker 1: By the time I reached the sea wall, I had
Speaker 1: almost forgotten what new questions I had meant to ask,
Speaker 1: though something in me felt satisfied, as if an imbalance
Speaker 1: had been sincerely, if not finally, addressed. Cloud clung low
Speaker 1: over the roofs. Passing the library, I paused, involuntarily, searching
Speaker 1: for what precisely had gripped me so fiercely these past months.
Speaker 1: I could not remember the name of the room, only
Speaker 1: that I had once felt a needy, resistible necessary to
Speaker 1: understand something top within its walls. A fog horn sounded
Speaker 1: far off shadows from the lamplight, stretched briefly, sharpened against
Speaker 1: the pavement. I watched them, smiling, nearly aware of each line,
Speaker 1: each pocket of darkness, bending clean, present because they could
Speaker 1: be noticed. And as I walked the last stretched home,
Speaker 1: a questioned sofas to gentle, insistent, quietly de light. If
Speaker 1: some spaces are meant to be remembered and others to
Speaker 1: be forgotten, then what overlook corners of our own lives, towns?
Speaker 1: Our memory quietly shaped the stories we tell ankleas shimmering,
Speaker 1: waiting for someone to see what cannot quite be held.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.