Speaker 1: I pressed the record button with the thumb goun almost
n arm, the chill of the marble flour bleeding up
through my shoes. The red light blink quickly in the
dim and I tried to keep my voice at a whisper,
pressing the tiny recorder close, close enough that my own
breath stood loud in my ears. Entry, I murmured, then stopped.
The word sounded silly. It wasn't an entry. I was stoling,
heartsick with the sun side course from routine into something fragile,
all because of a sheet of paper tuck between reference
book snow and checked. After nine Deep in the aisles,
the old pipes crunedd watery, breathless complaint, low enough to
feel like the library's real voice, of voice that rose
and faded, cycling from near to far and back again overhead.
Then bulbs hung behind cages of yellow plastic one in
thrieflickered at the edges there are and even glow casting
rainbows against the white glass windows, amplifying the cold and quiet.
A pile of returns weighted at my elbow. The library
after closing always felt changed down to it, but somehow
more attentive. Most nights, I could believe in the mondanity
scan stack shelf motion repetition, but to night, with the
sky black and hard behind those vast panes, I traced
the note I had found not ten minutes before, with
shaking fingers. It had been wedg tight inside foundations of
American municipal law, a tome i'd only handle to dust
off the house shelf. As soon as I noticed the
acid yellow paved hedge protruding. My norse had prickled, a
change in the pattern of silence, not a prank, not
the result of Kell's shelving some one had wanted dis found,
or never found at all. Leaning into the circle of
feeble light, I unfolded the note ballpoint letters, cramped as
though trying not to be heard. My voice when I
read was rough as I tried to fix the words
on to the tape. If you find this, please return
the key. They are listening in the walls. That was all,
no signature, no date. The last line trailed off inside
a deepened increase, as if the hand that wrote it
had schicken at the end or been interrupted mid thought.
I set the note gently on the desk, as if
it would keep it from disintegrating. My id badge clipped
to my collar reflected the k go shits in the
dusty glass window to my left. My own outline exhausted, nervous,
then kemp sweep of my hair looked back at me,
already somehow foreign. For a breath. Behind my unshadow movement quick,
indistinct inside the compacted shells. Something darted behind a row
of government recoats, colorless, insubstantial. I tensed, then, after a beat,
forced a short, scornful laugh at myself. Rodents wore something
in the glass, or too much caffine, but the shells
had their own gravity. I set the recorder down, carefully,
nudged a note beneath the weight of interlibrary, returned and
stood for a moment. My throat felt dry, Remembering the
caution thessessory always gave about lingering beyond neat where it
was dark. Still, I paced towards the last place I'd
seen movement, pums open, scanning, knee high, an elbow high
between the unwave rain, walls of texts. Nothing but a
shift in the pattern of dust, no footprints unless the
subtle sweep of the carpets snap ruffled and itsigig accounted
for evidence. If I was hoping for some closure, some
sign revealing the joke of the purpose of the note,
I went unrewarded. The only answer was the sound from
the pipes, a tremulous croon, and a sudden pricking certainty
that something now knew what I'd found. I stepped back,
spine prickling, and called my own adventure For the moment,
my trembling finger fumbled with the stop button on the recorder.
Wed light blinked off, and the weight of the dart
pressed and all the heavier as if it approved. Before
all that nights at the library ran their peculiar doorless course,
I started my shifts a little before seven in the evening.
After the last day patrons shuffled off, clutching their overdue novels.
The building's exterior shrank with the falling dusk, a single
red sandstone block, three stores squatting on the corner of
two silent streets. Inside, though it was always larger than
any one could map, piles given to shifts and angles,
children's next opening into research corridors, distant echoes bouncing up
from the basement periodicals. That confusion of space grew more
deliberate at night, when sound magnified and time spread. Then
most of my eyros were solitary, reshwling, saving battered hard
covers from the dangerous tides of the book drop, adjusting humidity,
monitors forced to ignore the water stains creeping up the panel.
In the ram manuscripts room, I listened to podcasts to
myself of running audio lock to keep me awake and
stave off the restless pulse of insomnia. Talking to myself
was both the defense in a crutch, and the stack shelves,
with their relentless order, did their best to absorb my voice,
flattening the sharp edges of my thoughts. By day, the
reading room swarmed, students nesting into corners with power bars
and laptops, retire volunteers squabbling over the bi weekly columns
in the community archive, high schoolers using the free WiFi
as an excuse to be anywhey but home. The reference
desk and massive horseshoe of gray oak attracted every one
with a question, some sensible, some knot. There was a
dignity to the chaos. I'll grant that the air felt
different during daylight, busy, warm, expansive, but once seven struck
and the janitorial staff began their worksome the library turned
hollow and strange, contract until every step echoed further than
it should, and the walls themselves seemed to lean in.
I was not truly alone, not always there were my colleagues,
most barely more than nodding acquaintances. Jan the circulation manager,
was brisk and sarcastic, always in a hurry, her arms
wrapped around in label boxes. Young Joe. He repaired bindings
and always listened to dark thumping music on ancient headphones,
eyes at half masted, and then assess Severy the archivist,
who never failed to catch my eye on her way up.
Miscess every reminded everyone not to wander outside the lighted
stacks a warren, and dressed as a joke, but always
delivered with eyes that slid elsewhere while she talked. I
first met her on a ring lashed of toboro evening,
both of us startled by the other's presence at the
door to the basement arcave. She was quick to step
aside and quicker to chastise. You do welt to stick
to routine, Dear, this isn't a building that rewards curiosity.
That was one of the stores that grew up around
the library, stories told and break rooms and behind the
information desk. Some said the founders built over all city tunnels.
Secret passage was blocked, and during Prohibition, some said the
blueprints changed with every major audition, but nobody could agree
which version was the right one. There were plaques, most faded,
a few fresh, naming pride, directors, benefactors, and the elusive
friends of local history. Splashes of black mold crept over some,
as if raising the past. There was an entire wing
name for a former may lost to scandal, though the
details were never included in the tours. Rumors of lost
books blamed on thieves or ghosts mingled with memories of
staff who never left old hands, or unseen keepers whose
voices supposedly echoed if you answered the wrong reference, call
Wolven more quietly. Among all these were the whispers about
doctor Ruman, not from the course staff necessarily. I'd only
known the name because I passed of reference checkouts. Rudman
was a local historian specializing in city growth in public myth,
who'd made the dusty sub basement map's room his own.
Night after night he poured over nigh impossible, microphomericos digging
for some vanished at less. No one else could describe.
His presence was a given and institution, until suddenly his
correspondent ceased. I alone through Jan Lips, pursed when she
said his name, that nobody's seen him in a week.
His box is still full of returned clippings, just left.
Such disappearance should have stung more, maybe, But the library
thrived on absence, the pass forever patching over with new
stacks and new names. Still there was something self protective
in our indifference. I felt uneasy, but not implicated. Patrons,
the regulars, at least, were the touched uns. There was
missus Strift, who always wanted the same Armenian cook and
always forgot she had already checked it out. One night,
early in my hiring. She came to the desk prosclutched
in one trembling hand and voice conspiratorial. Your hiding things
on us, she accused, mouth twisted upward in a no
unfriendly smile. The bulk, of course, was not on the shelf.
The catalog claimed it had never even left the facility.
I promised. The sky of the usual places, returns, stacks
lost and found she left not entirely mollified, and I
chalked it up to fate, muttering an apology to the
vast ledger of unsolved mysteries. If I felt anything keenly,
then it was fatigue. Night after night blowed together insolemnly
carved out, gaped between my thoughts. The habit of keeping
an audio journal my so called sanity look started as
a joke, but became a necessity, specially after the first
week with the new stacks. I felt guilty sometimes that
I didn't care more about the rumors or even Doctor Rudman.
I should have been more curious, more concerned that the
volume of other people's anxieties built up until I learned
not to attend to them. For a while, I thought
that was practical. Now I'm not so sure. There was
always faint hints of rumness floating between a woe of
coppers and hashes of the h shrack system. But routine
kept me whole, gave structure to the unreal. I told myself,
if I followed the prescribed path, nothing could seep through.
For a time I believed it. Not long after I
on Earth the note certain patterns, the kind best dismissed
in esolation, now visible as a slow turning cycle began
to emerge from the usual noise. The first hint came
as annoyance, not revelation. Irregular Mardyn stalked into my circle
of lamp light, waving his lip for volume four of
an ardencyclopedia. He've moved things again, he half accused, lips pressed.
Then nothing's ware it should be. I pulled up the record,
checked in only hours before the call number correct shelf location,
remarked dutifully. I followed him down the aisle, expecting to
find the book tuck behind a row, misfiled by an
attentive patron of the Ghosts of Kells staff. Instead, all
the call numbers marched in advancing order need as a ruler,
except midway, a half inch gap just wide enough for
small fingers to extracts something and not replace it. The
route proceeding a gap pressed in tighter, as if the
whole shelf had shifted to compensate. I repeated the search
I performed a dozen times. Internally, I started inventing errors.
The shelve re marked the return wrong, the patron remembered wrong,
but other inconsistencies formed a faint ring around the incident.
That evening, during my closing shelf walk, I noticed a
carridindic stock, slightly yellowing file with exquisite precision, but out
of order. His call number thirty two per cent g
didn't match any known system. The title personal Song's catalog
memory was unregistered and certainly not one of our holdings.
I traced it front and back, no bar coding, no
librarian's mark, nothing to tie it to the line of
the living of the dead. I left it where I
found it, an omen among the methodical lines. Morines arrived
quietly and ceaselessly, missing book reports trickled in a book
or two. Each shift was aligned between the digital and
physical records. The catalog was always pristine, but the shells,
despite constant reordering, never matched by exactly enough to notice
only if he were obsessive aboard. On the night when
I stayed late enough to count, my own numbers came
up short by a margin so small as invited self doubt. Still,
the gap shifted nightly, never the same, never settling. It
wasn't only paperwork either. Once the clock hit closing, a
gradual chill crept from the under four vents, carrying whispers
that slid between the library's bones. The air felt thick
with presents. On several evenings, most recently, two days after
I found the note, I heard what sounded like recitations,
slow and methodical, from the locked ends of the stacks,
A droning litany of numbers and names, a moving and
uninfected interrupted now and then by breath of static, as
though a radio tuned to a dead station. Following the
voice always led me to silence, a cold patch on
the floor, and not so much as an unsettled a
smote left behind. After such incidents, I returned to routine
by force, carrying my bat At recorder in my pocket,
trying to commit my impressions before Duck could erode them.
Sometimes at my desk, i'd listened back on playback. It
was easy to believe it all harmless, A coff haired
a snap as a book settled on its spine, there
at least until I heard it, the faintest of whispers
trailing the edge of my own remarks, syllable shaped like
a return oral lissen, words that did not belong to
my mouth or anyone nearby. I began to joke, mostly
to myself, sometimes to Jan that the library at night
was a shifting maze with only the cruel sense of humor.
But even jokes curdled in the early hours, and I
wondered when the laughter would stop sounding like something entirely
my own. The next phase, if I am honest, felt
like evolution, evidence stacking up, pointing towards pattens. Too stubborn
to ignore, I started documenting every quirk, recording each sudden aberration,
the book talis, the out of place cards, even the
temperature dips near certain archieve shelves. A tally grew in
the back of my invasion budget. No book never left
un attended, never referenced by any one but me. Some
nights the miscount stood its hero more, typically off by
a sliver. Although the catalog's memory remained picture perfect, the
missing books felt urgent, and a kind of desperate curiosity
infected my nightly patrols. I made subtle over Jewish authority
when I asked miss As every if I might checked
the old archave stacks. After another book on my inventory vanish.
She paused, lips thinning, then agreed, but not without warning.
You can go down, but don't wander off, not even
to find a short cut some places downstairs. If you
lose your away, you'll never find it again. She handed
me a ring of jangling keys, each labeled with tape
in minuscule ballpoint. I noticed the lust key had no
label at all, brass gundel from years of handling. What
followed felt half like research, half like trespass. I spent
a lunch I raking through the d news back offices,
searching for something, anything, that would explain the building's erratic memory.
In a bottom drawer Beneacheet's stamptop's leech do not use,
I found a battered blueprint listing dates stretching back to
the nineteen thirties. Peeling the layers free, I found something odd.
The original library far more modest and scope squared off
in places that he was shot off at angles. Later
editions were clear enough, except for one section when new
walls and corridors seen to merge, the transition marked by
a seam of raised lines and ambiguous measurements. The blueprints
map rooms that didn't exist anymore, or maybe never did.
One mark a rectangle half hidden by an overlapping paper
was labeled special arc of nabric. Around midnight, on my
next shift, inventory duties took me again to the stacks.
I resolved to test the maps, plotting a line from
al Tea to the rare map's annex, where the missing
items tended to appear, only to find myself popping out
next to the emergency exit at the opposite end of
the floor. Retracing my steps failed to restore the normal
geometry the layout walked underfoot. I ended up at a
blind wall with no sign of doors passed or present,
though the blueprints insisted a corridor continued. My heart thuded
fierce behind the wall of my ribs. The sense of
trest besore, consuming the library, it seemed was built to confound.
Trying to ground myself, I ran my hands along the
backs of the shelves, fingers closing on an impossible object,
which behind a bout it at the sparely visible but
unmistakable wood, I tugged a child sized brassquy, worn and
untouched by reason crime. I stared at it for a while,
half listening and certain if I should leave it in
case it was part of some childish pranco pocketed in
a moment of impulse, I slipped it into my jacket,
feeling the teeth pressed against my palm. It weighed almost nothing,
but felt heavier than iron. Later, when I raised the
matter softly to Joe, he shruked, face flickering between concern
and dismissal. All buildings have hidden stick of maintenance dutes
used to leavesepair keys write probably a blank nothing more.
He pivoted immediately into a story about the time the
elevator ate the delivery, leaving me uncertain if our exchange
was a warning or just practiced deflection. Growing bolder and
more desperate, I built my own primitive system for navigation.
I tied a scarff to the end of the shelf
where the corridor had vanished, hoping to beat the maize.
When I returned after an hour, the scarf was gone.
The whole way had lengthened its far bounds and touched
by any mark I could remember, making. The feeling of
secularity settled deep in my muscles, as though I were
being led to ruin invisible loop by an unseen hand. Worse,
with each step, a new echo followed me footfalls. I
could not belong to my own movement. That evening, combing
back through the last week's recordings, I caught more than
breath and shuffling in several entries. Plain zinc urgent whispered syllables,
so echoed what I'd said second before, like a shadow
of copying my thoughts. Others muttered, only they are listening
in the walls. Hearing it, my mouth went dry. The
phrase from the note returned as if on a loop,
always quieter on the tape than it felt in my
own memory. The breaking pot when a route fear gave
way to resolve, if only in the way repetition let
suscumfoplour into routine. I resolved to map the anomalies in person,
bracing myself with recorder and the scavenged brass key, daring
myself deeper into the most out of bound's reaches of
the stacks. The rules of the ordinary had already started
peeling away. To linger at the edge just brought dread.
But her retreat now would mean seating the territory forever.
Whatever weighted in the architecture, whichever truth or fiction gave
birth to shifting rooms and recorded echoes, would pivot that
night from rumor to reality. I prepared my supplies like
a real investigator. Blueprint notepad jackets it past my collar bone,
fresh batteries in the recorder, edging past the public reading
room I made for the older stairs for once connecting
the first stacks to unrenovated ground at the bottom step,
the light flick of painting the doors and feeble shifting yellow.
The unfamiliar brass key felt cold in my hand, fitting
none of the labeled rings, but still promising entry to
something never named. The store room at the far end
of the basement of badoed padlock steel door had always
been dismissed as a junk cause it but the key
slaiden with the soft clack the locks are rendering as
if it had been waiting for just this moment. Inside,
the air was so thick it seemed saturated with paper,
dust and cold, a weight that clung to my tongue. Shells.
Receded into the dock, piled with ledgers and stacks of
tangle film reels, all unloerered and unlabeled. Old cardboard boxes
sat cocker beneath the center table. Yelled labels from decades past,
redacted dispose when done. Behind them, a rock wall glinted
at the brooks, irregular, darkened with ancient leaks. No sign
of mortar repairs or recent work, just stage layered upon age.
I swept the flask light side to side, hard beat,
spiking with every fresh discovery on the table, half barred
beneath the ledger, a photograph curled with humidity, seepy face's
starrings stiffly at the camera, each figure in a faded
staff uniform. I rade before what looked like this fery wall.
The date on the back was sculled in Fountain Pen
nineteen forty, though the people looked older than that, their
expressions unreadable. A second photograph was overlaid with a note.
I recognized doctor Rudman's looping script from his catalog cards.
Do not open. Records are all we have to keep
us safe. The warning was blunt, the urgency like a slap.
I ran my fingers over the words, certain now that
the secrecy was no accident. They hid in more than
just extra supplies. The records are all we have, I
repeated into my recorder, voice thin and bragged. No sooner
had the words left my mouth than the well dropped
into a sharper clarity. The overhead bulbs pocked in and
even flickered once twice before plunging the room into a
half lit strobe. From behind a brick wall, a course
of voices rose, urgent, wordless, conducting old grievances and to
mans through cracks and stone. The sound was not organized
enough to be conversation, nor animal enough to dismiss his
pipes or weather. I stumbled back, recorder pressed to my lips,
hot racing in my ears, convinced those voices had noticed me,
recognized the trespass of my presence. The contents of the storeroom,
the ledgers, the film reels, the curious, the breaked off
wall would not passive relics, but pieces of an ongoing process.
Some one or something actively maintained the gaps, covering over
their own history, hiding books that the library and perhaps
the city was not meant to remember. I should have
fled or called for help, but instead I sat heavily
on the edge of a cold iron stewel. I whispered
into the recorder, words humbling out until cents left me.
There here I hear them reading to each other, the
shell's chain shape. When I blink, the records were as
doctor written, why does no one check? I crossed outbit
out of routine into the realm of secret custodians, and
the sensation grew that I was being quietly inventoried and
weighed from a distance, even as I tried to catalog them.
In return, A sudden crisp sound cut through the roar,
a footstep no more than six feet from my back.
The footfall was distinct, heavy, definite, too purposeful for accident.
I froze, head turned halfway, flashlight trembling in my hand.
The voices shifted to a low rustle, as if retreating
the air charged from somewhere inside of beyond the brick wall.
A scratching started, a patient, expectant sound, as if something
of someone was searching methodically for what had been hidden
too well. It was then, and only then, that I
understood the investigation of cross from the superficial missing books,
confused layouts, idle rumors to whatever waited in the sealed
heart of the library. I could not tell the ford
approached was human, or if the shelves themselves, in some
impossible way, had decided to make their own audit. I
pressed the record button again. Bret Shallow knowing that before
the night ended I might learn precisely what the library's
arkhouse had been built to contain. My hand shook with
the recorder so badly. Each clickin's grape was probably etching
static across the tape, but I forced myself not to flinch,
not to betray any noise louder than a harby. The
storm's gloom was absolute, between flashes of the dying bulb,
the shuddering light swinging shadows up across stacks of handwritten ledgers.
The footstick came again, more measured, this time moving on
the other side of the damperrick, dragging just slightly at
the end, as though its owner was halted by the
same low and ease as I was. I listened to
mouth dry as paper for anything more. Pipes perhaps, or
the expansion of oldstone, But no ordinary sound repeats as such,
patient rhythm, the kind only made by the wig intention
of a body hiding from or searching for something. Swallowing
down the ouch to run, I fixed my eyes on
the scene in the wall, the bricks pressed against one
another with the heavy patients of a century neglect. Yet
at the base, and the scene closest to the floor
dust had been swept away in an uneven arc. Someone
had touched the spot recent maybe to night. That or
whatever press from inside, had disturbed what no custodian bothered
to clean. I couldn't leave, not with the strange completeness
of the moment holding me hostage, and not with doctor
Rudman's name whispering through my head like a warning. I
pressed my ear to the cool brick, listening for a second.
All I heard was the low rush of my own blood. Then,
between the clatter of far off returned books and the
faint vibration of the building's bones, a thread of words
coiled in the darkness. On the other side, Entry returned.
The records keep us. They overlapped different voices, one graveled
with age, another sharp and anxious. Many roughened into nearly
wordless groans. Not just one person, but a group, or
an echo of many groups, fractured murmurs running together at
the scenes. I jerked away, all my bravado gone, with
the chill cling up my arms. When I blinked, I
shape pressed into the corner shadows, just at the periphery,
a figure or else the memory of one My flash
flight couldn't land on it. The beam diffused helplessly against
boxes and rags, showing only ordinary detritus. A slow scrape
metal on stone now made me whip around in the
farthest angle of the storeroom, where two sets of battered
shells met. Something metallic glinted. Kneeling half expecting the voice
to rise again. I pressed my hand into the darkness
and felt the cool edge of a ring bound round
a key, this one larger than the brass one in
my pocket. Its teeth were old, blunted, and irregular. The
tag tied around it rattled as I was dreary, annex
hashed free, closed to see severy o riman only it
read and block capitals. I held it against my palm,
the unfamiliar wit throwing me off balance. A flash like
cut a brief, narrow path along the edge of an
exposed beam. Overhead. I squinted, uncertain. The stone above the
breaked up section was etched deeply but halphazardly. Letters overlapped,
as if a dozen hands had carved. Score were cut.
I picked out a winding, stilted ur ud, then an
abrupt break, as though the carving had stopped mid name.
Whoever had started it, intended only the first hint, trusting
recognition to whoever followed. The air in the room thickened,
and not with dust, but with the unmistakable town of Ozone,
that the scent of old electricity and machinery. The bulb
overhead flickered a last time, then fizzle to blatness, leaving
only the slim hollow of my flashlight and my shallow breath.
I retreated a half set, then another, not quite daring
to turn my back on the wall. My mind chased
and helpful po spillity shifts in foundation, a trick of
old vents, a homeless drifter, even the elaborate ghosts that
the city's sore is told. But none felt plausible, not here,
not now. In that stammering dark, I forced myself to speak,
if someone's here, or if you can hear me I've
or not. The key to my words fell flat, swallowed
by a now apparent difference in atmosphere. It was quite
a here, but not absent of sound, Rather as if
any utterance would be gathered, weighed, returned in form or
not at all. Trying to decide whether to push my
luck or retreat, I remembered the reference to annex hash
three Innikey's tack. I had seen the name on the
oldest blueprints, far from the standard traffic of either patrons
or staff, mapped in a remote corner that on my
last physical walk seemed to end blank wall beside the
periodical's annex. I should have gone straight upstairs, but the
sense that something crucial lay within my reach made caution
feel cowardly. I pocketed a larger key along side the
brass one voice shaking as a chronicle every move into
my recorder. I'm leaving the store room. Nothing else here
but ledges, reels. Another key in a note, will check blueprints.
The war sounds like voices, and the fart sight to
persist outside. The corridor was stupy with shadow. The distant
fluorescent glow from the stairs lent everything adjaundice pallor. I
crept along the wall, eyes and the pealing archival map
mounted next to an emergency exit. If a wall hid anything,
it was recess behind this in the coal of masonry
that no plane updated since the sixties had accounted for.
As I approached the supposed location of annexa's free and
eld again, tracing the marble at floor level. Opposite the wall,
a thin laddice of scuff mark's phaps from shoes or
from cart wheeled by invisible staff, smudged across the tile.
In the far corner, a metal scutch and plate concealed
yet another small key hole, nearly invisible unless you were
on your knees. I held the new key up, compared
its teeth one by one, and with what verged on hope,
worked into the slot. It resisted at first, then duck
home with a click so loud it felt like a signal.
I hesitated, listening for a response. Silence, Then from behind
the wall, the low gattural surge of breadth, either wind
racing ancient fence or debated inhalation of something not quite
ready to speak. The wall shifted minutely, No drama, just
the slackening of pressure, as if some hidden latcher pulled free.
The panel flexed, exposing an arched slice of darkness that
gaped into nothing of passage unlet there on my cheek.
Colder shopper than any ventilation dock could account for a
cascade of fear, battered my better instincts, but I flicked
the flasklight down the opening, and stepped forward, careful not
to let the slab shut behind me. The stone lip
was cold, as still, a line of condensation gathering below
my palm on the inner side. Steps led down sharply,
four maybe five, at a rough angle, ending at a
pact or of floor. Here the silence broke, distant but
growing impression of paper, shuffling of catalog cluds thrashed by
invisible hands, and from deep inside the measured rhythm of
a pen scratching slowly across ledgers, interlaced barely audible voices
a catalog to erased aanic's preserve us. I steadied myself
and moved forward the farstlight, tracing faded stripes of paint
at the base of the old corridor, the kind libraries
once used to color coat and tire rooms. The shoe
was impossible to name. Somewhere between townished copper and dried blood.
Half free down my foot struck a brittle ridge, nearly
sending me tumbling. Steadying, I glanced down. The obstacle was
a mound of torn gray paper, all the fragments stamped
with the same circular date August nineteen forty two. Not
a recent trespass, but a settling, as if time itself
had stopped to pile evidence here, outside the world's sense
of order. I eased around it, slowing my breath, and
turned a corner. The light fell on what, for a
split second I mistook for a person hunched by the
far wall. The shadow elongated. I turned hot, doubling in pace,
only to find a broken chair, piled high with bundled
in Dick's cards, some clean as bone, others very past.
Reading in the midst a single unshelved volume, Foundations of
American Municipal Law, the very book i'd plucked the nerve
from back in the reference aisle. My knees nearly buckled
as the circularity clicked into place. I set the recorder
on a ledge, forced myself to speak, low teeth chattering
the book back here, cards too. Did I bring it?
Or was it always here? I doubted my own memory,
disoriented by how perfectly my movement seemed to echo what
lay below. As I reached for the stack, the air
snapped cold, immediate and personal, like walking through a curtain
of ice water. A voice so close it had to
be inches for my ear, but so diffused as to
everywhere at once, whispered, forgotten, forget again, keep the doors closed.
My fingers coiled from the cards, each bearing not only
call numbers, but names, many unfamiliar, some half remembered. Doctor
Rubbins was repeated, written in urgent block capitals, then crossed
out by a second hand rudman request deny escalated for preservation. Breathless,
I hurried to scooped the items into my jacket, but
the shadow of movement rose again at the threshold behind
It was no trick of light. A figure lingered at
the top of the steps, linen by the weak electric
glow leaking from the corridor. I stopped pulse roaring and
watched as the figure, too tall from assess every too
acular for gen hesitated as assenting the room. A distinct
sensation spread through me, the knowledge that it was not
allowed to cross into the annex, not yet, perhaps barred
by the very secrecy of records guarded. I froze, considering
my options back truck call for help. The recorder, still running,
hissed with the static of all the breath I had
wasted since entering in a whisper. Barely more than thought,
I said, Annex unsealed, Rubbin's name erased, records shows only
gaps muster. The figure took a deliberate step forward. My
flasklight died, a battery drained, or perhaps something less honest.
I was left in a darkenss layered with the scent
of spoiled paper and warm brass, my hand groping in
the deepening black for anything solid shelving boxes, door frames.
The corridors were sigil light where it breached, caught, and
fine swirls of dust mapping currents of air disturbed. Only
moments before I knew, because stors were on their way
past logic, and because the personal myth making of fears
always more creative than facts, that turning my back would
be disastrous. I faced the darkness, and, half way between
certainty and terror, called out, what do you want? Why
keep these things from the world. The words rang off
the musty walls, gaining no answer, but the fence pressure
at my back a warning or reassurance I couldn't entangle.
A final noise, distinct crisp as the shelf, unexpected thee
were shelving broke the trance. The figure vanished, not in
a rush, but in a thinning, its presence stretched until
only absence was left. I followed, feeling my way out
of the annex, passing through currents of cold that carved
history out of air. I merged into the corridor, not
much wiser, bearing instead a new fear that the missing
and the erase in this place operated by their own logic,
a system was intricate and silent as the catalog itself.
Back top side, the regular world did not return as
easily as I expected. The shadows clung to my skin,
the unfamiliar keys branding my palm. Upstairs, the circulation computer
registered neither my overtime nor the odd books I'd carried.
When I tried to check out the ledgers, the digital
system refused the barcods, as if the items had ceased
to exist once unsealed. Missess, every passing behind my desk
for a single point, a glance more warning than acknowledgment,
had marched off before I could close the gap between us.
I took careful notes into the recorder that night, fearing
both what I'd learned and what was left and spoken.
The references had changed. The missing books now appeared to
cycle through staff hands in a rhythm. Longer than any
shift records maintained. The catalog muttered when I refreshed status
locked see archivist for future review. The rest was lost
even to the ADM and password. That night, trying to sleep,
I felt the scent of the library crawl beneath my window,
the sounds of turning pages and whispering voices rising. In
the day, the key in my pocket grew heavier, as
if it belonged somewhere even now, and not returning it
meant staying marked. Catalog observed, weighed again and again. The
next day, I resolved to trace the history proper. If
something watched from inside those bricked holes of those who
vanished did not vanish entirely. It was time to map
the unscene, to reread the building back against itself. And
if I coat to document what should never have been lost,
tomorrow I would find the blueprints that spelled out the
true dimensions of the library, no matter what the front deskinied.
Tonight I pressed stop on the record, heart drumming as
the machine went silent somewhere behind another wall. The voices
kept up, those soft, cataloging, endless, patient, hungry for the
next name to cross the secret list. A slice of
morning sun, sharp and pale, found its way through the
living room blinds while I crossed reference blueprints from the
bat had hung firelight board from the library's back drawer.
My jacket hung on the kitchen chair, Both pocketed keys
wrapped and hidden at the bottom, carefully as if they
might scorch my fingers, even through wool. Every few minutes,
I stopped to reposition the blueprints, seeking out the neat
rectangle shaded under recent construction, each border clashing with their
earlier block lines. In my note book, I sketched dimensions
and cross reference with the library's current online map. Three
rooms may be four appeared on paper, but nowhere in
physical space. I plugged in my recorder, letting the blue
indicator blow for company entry seven forty and blueprints support
the annex theory. Multiple discontinuities in the original stake design,
three major gaps. The act of recounting combe pulse made
the secrets manageable. Each where a stone atop the others
keeping panic at bay. Surveying the blueprints, I traced a
finger along overlays with the old children's reading room became
a brick hole on nearer drawings where the southeast service corridor,
once neatly squared, curved around a blank space which mismatching
every adjacent aisle. I marked each hiding geometry with color
code of FAGS on a PDF copy. Green for public
rooms now raised read for spaces that had shifted between
editions without explanation. The most significant void open behind an
L shaped wall in the sub basement, precisely atop the
stale books scented wind that cull through the corridors late
at night. Civic records online yielded little, though fire of
nineteen thirty eight explained some gaps, applausible loss of blueprints
and a convenient filter for display city histories. But more
recent events, especially in nineteen seventy six, personnel calling and
stray mentions of improper cataloging ended in bureaucratic dead ends.
The news clipping fairly legible reference to a special Committee
on Library Preservation whose mandate was to evaluate our Cavil
records for collective safety. No further details were available. I
typed in doctor Rudman's name again, hoping for a new clue.
His municipal profiles stubbornly redirected to a generic research initiative
landing page. The record had been either deleted or swept
under a mass of meaningless digital debris. In the paper files,
old committee letters appeared his signature at the bottom of
a carbon copied sead of minutes from a decade prior,
abruptly replaced afterward by nothing but formal letters and blank lines.
Giving up on digital traces, I recalled the overheard snippets
from last week, musses Sever's clip remark the real collections
not for public eye. One staff are confiding to another
by the vending machines. Or remembered a quote if you
see someone in the wrong area redirect do not explain
the chill in their voices, lingered, a warning of boundaries
I hadn't known exists, didn't tell now. Pushing my luck,
I tried to ask John about those closed wings when
I clocked him for the afternoon shift. She cut me
off force lowered. Some parts are closed for a reason.
That's why the admint staff moved upstairs after the flooding.
You're best off sticking to your roads. Don't make waves,
she'd out the desk twice in nervous habitual. Dick then
smiled as though nothing ought had passed between us, but
the warnings weren't universal. Joe henden Halt, when I asked
about an accounted rooms, he avoided my eye, offering only,
I don't look too close any more. Last one who did,
they didn't come back. As he turned, I noticed he
was stuffing a handful of cards and tone on the
script on velopindix stalk cream colored. Don't ask, he muttered,
just let sleeping things lie. That evening's routine felt walked,
every lighted, agreed, emmer, every whole way impassable, though nothing
visibly had changed. The city outside receded into a cold
blue dusk. I checked my jacket multiple times for the keys,
a talisman, and a curse, rolled into one and sat
at the terminal just inside the reference vault. My email
contained only the ordinary reminders to Talley returned DVD to
update the outdated policy printouts, but the memory of the
Wall of the Name struck through the ledgers. The impossible
logic of the hidden ANX crowded every thought. If there
was an order to this place, it wasn't the one
we displayed to the public. Some one or some circle
controlled which pieces of the city's story survive. And their
care taking now included me by accidental mistake. I packed
a spouset of batteries and the newer blueprint into my
bag along with the keys, and waited for the library
to close. Jan left early, waving with feign cheer, and
Joe vanished on some invented errand by ten the place
was hushed again. I signed myself unpatrolled and the logan
listened as the outer doors lock shut, the security system
cycling with a mechanical chime. No way up but the
staff exit and all the stacks between. Before I moved, though,
a brief surreptitious exchange caught my ear from the far
end of the lobby, muffled byunmistakable Two older staffers, likely
from administration, exchanged whispers. Their cataloging against storage. Notice goes
to council tomorrow. The council made their decision. Special Collection
must stay out of circulation. City can't handle another incident. Silence.
Then the SEV was not up for someone else can
take over. The public must never find it. A click,
their voices snapped off, the conversation ending as soon as
they sense motion nearby. I let the house settle, heart
rattling in my robes, the ordinary rules of staff hierarchy mass,
something much stricter, possibly older than the building itself. It
wasn't a leap to connect the dots. Certain room sealed
for its safety, ledgers with nanes crossed out history Beard,
along with the staff who proved too far, the city's
lost scandals, all traced back and obliprintce to one or
another improved wing, each expansion eating the story of those
who came before. The implication dawned gradually. Each missing book
was perhaps more than carelessness or accident. The missing staff
not casualties of boredom or a better opportunity, but of
an imposed ceremonial forgetting. With all daylight banish the tension
in the earth, thick and expectant ends at my back,
checked the batteries in the recorder, and set out to
follow the real map. The jagged, irregular geometry behind the catalog.
The staff elevator grown. As I pressed for the sub basement,
my reflection wopped in the scratch mirror, a clipped metallic
voice from the intercommon hond main floor oca's lower stacks.
At the lowest landing, the mechanism stuttered, releasing me into
the unofficial domain of Lost Things. A length of corridor
painted a letting go color, gray white, peeling to ochre.
The air cooler than the floor was above. I slipped
the brass key into the lock at annex hast freeze panel.
This cutcher yielded, slow but obedient, revealing the narrow slit
into darkness had found before this time. Equipped with fresh batteries,
I pressed my flashlight ahead of me, angling its beam
down the stone steps. Here the library's public face was gone.
The shells bristled with unlabeled hand bound volumes. Rows of
ledgers boxes lined the walls, all acid stained with the
marks of decades old tape. The air was damp, undercut
by the smell of rotten glue and vinegar. At the
corner of the far wall, the brick vault I had
seen emerge from shadow, its surface faintly gleaming under stray cobwebs.
My sense of the every day slept further with each step.
The room felt alive, charged by the artifacts of deliberate forgetting,
all arranged for eyes that might never see. I pressed
the recorder button voice Hush. Entry. Annex opened storage records
show ledgers not in digital catalog shells appeared to cycle
patterns and clear. The navigation was harder. Now, distances wapped,
the route behind barely resembled the way forward. I caught
myself circling. The stucks were shaping around me, impossible lines
of sight, sending me back on myself. Nearly alert, I
lined up the blueprints, using the color tape on the
floor as anchor. But the tape pealed and shifted. Several
doors that should have opened into closets or nowhere now
gaped into narrow passages, rank with old moisture, none well
listed on any map. I reached the end of one tunnel,
on sure if it was a dead end or simply
a corridor folded upon itself. The thick air vibrated just
enough that the hair at my neck prickled. Behind me.
Something shifted to gus, maybe by the movement of heavy fabric.
I spun pulse hammering. At the midpoint of the stack,
a figure emerged. They were swathed in black fabric, a
sash drawn diagonally over a dark suit, face obscured by
a crisp paper mask. Every gesture was precise, ceremonial, the
burrowing of someone used to being obeyed. A second and
then a third figure stepped into the not light, all
identically attired. The roon silence deepened until it seemed to
press on my chest. Why are you here, one asked
the voice, little close? How did you come past council doors?
My mouth was dry, found the key following what shouldn't
be missing? A fourth person joined voice, a little softer older.
Curiosity is dangerous. Curiosity build the catalog, but nearly undid
it too. They circled me, not threatening exactly, but with
the deliberation that chilled the mirror. The leader spoke some
records or casualties, others crimes. We keep the council's charge.
What we take down here, history mistakes, the lost must
remain to How many are lost? I asked, forcing my
courage to a throat thick with fear. Every phase beneath
the masks was blank, but the answer came anyway. Too many.
Each annex holds what the city cannot afford to remember.
Each name you find is both a warning and a
witness rudmind. He sought to undo the forgetting others too.
Before him. A fifth joined them, bearing a battle ledger
in a box with the city seal. We do not
choose lightly. They in tone, opening the ledger to a
page mocked by a thick red slash. My eyes made
at doctor Rudman's name, half erased, then traced underneath by
block capitals for catalog persurferb a new current past to redassembled,
a mutual calculation, the oldest mass counselor stepped close. If
you leave, you must remember nothing. If you stay, ye
take up the wrecker. Either path has its price. Thou
want to understand wire their voices in the walls, names
struck through, and rooms that don't exist. I measured pause
heavy as old bindings. When all else fails, the leader said,
we seal memory with stone and sound. The vases you
here belong to the catalog, those for whom collective forgetting
became their only safety. That echoes our penalty in our shield.
If we lose control, the city suffers in you. The
missing become guardians. The recorders keep them safe, so the
rest of us may forget. The implication staggered me. But
Rudman weares he e tried to breach what must not return.
The ark of took him as it takes any one's staff.
Patron Director who opens what's best left ormant? He is
memory now, and memory is co fire. A sudden static
rose from the walls, a hum, and then distinct syllables,
as if the building itself exhaled. Keep the wrecker, haul
the key, Do not open the doors. My panic spiked.
I tried to back away, but the figure's close ranks,
not violent but absolute. The leader place a hand, thin
gloved on my shoulder. It isn't anger or revenge. We
keep danger in trust. If the library forgets the city's office,
if you open all the rooms, something older than council
will come looking. I tried to wrench free. I don't
want to be part of this. I just want to know.
They spoke as one. The mask shifting in the lanterns
half light. If you choose knowledge, you are responsible for
forgetting Stay and help us cattalog. I'll leave, but carry
a compulsion. You may speak, but no one will believe.
You may remember, but every year more it will vanish
from your own mind, paths, faces, even your own entrant.
This is the charge of preservations or oblivion? Will you stay?
A shrieking when cut through, rattling every aisle, The ledges
fluttered as a hundred whispers fie for speech. In the confusion,
instinct overrode reason. I dashed forward, pushing past the nearest
MOUs guardian. One grab from my sleeve, I yank free, pulse,
skipping rocod a hell tide. The voices in the walls
rose to a cacophony, words blending until every phrase was
nothing but a chorus of return, the key return, Preserve, Preserve.
I crashed for a swinging panel, barely registering that it
opened for me, not for them. The corridor bent itself
into a spiral architecture, warping with every step. Names and
numbers raced past, painted and stuttered overlapping lines, marden drift,
severy rudman. Each time the paint smeared to gray ones.
They passed, erasing behind my steps. Running now, I groped
for the staff entrance, twisting up stairs that telescoped further
with every landing behind me, the masked figures measured steps faded,
replaced by something less human, an echo that didn't quite
match the footfalls, reverberating often seen doors and ducts. Time
unravel the corridors, repeated passageways, bleeding into themselves. Some doors
I tried were sealed. Others opened outward onto holes that
shouldn't exist. Thock have rooms packed within shelved ledgers, study
carrels overgrown with yellow catalog cards, stop corridors leading off
into nothingness. I doubled back, hot joy by dread, guided
only by the faintest memory of what the blueprint should be.
At the threshold of a service lift, the brass key poles,
with warmth of phantom heartpeat in my palm. In desperation,
I slammed it into a tiny lock beneath the elevator controls.
The wall panel clicked open with hand shaking oppressive button.
The lift shuttered, doors stuttering until impossibly I was on
the main floor across the marble runs. The fluorescent light
was too bright, the reader tables vacant and untouched. I
staggered toward the exit, long's aching. The main doors were
shut tight, bade scannered dead. I threw myself through the
nearest staff hallway, not carrying that I might just as
easily run in circles. Suddenly, the shouts of the council
fell away, swallowed by a new flood of voices, hundreds
of them, overlapping familiar in knot voices of the loss,
the erased, Every patron and staff are for whom the
back hawck aves were the last entry. The sound battered me,
not pure threat, but a blowing, a dissolution of everything
I'd known the world, bleeding into the library's own hope's memory.
In the surge of dread, I reached back, yanking the
recorder from my bell, and shouted, I refuse. I will
not become another catalog ghost. The tape histe static musking
my voice, followed by chorus of return the key, keep
the record safe, Do not open the doors, Do not
open the air that the last threshold What had once
been the old periodical's room a final barqueid' sto and
im play a door, its face carved by the lathe
of countless nervous hands. Words and names had been scored
and sanded away, leaving only the suggestion of language I
lock or intention. My key fit the lock, its teeth
matching a groove that didn't look designed for a standard.
Is she for a full frozen second? Every voice ceased.
The building went silent and not empty, but charged, as
if it waited to see my decision. I twisted the key,
the door swung open, leading into a chamber I'd never
seen on any map. Its size was in determined. He
could have been the space of a broom, closet, or
perhaps a small chapel. The walls were lined with moret
index cause than I had ever imagined could exist. Each
stack rose to the ceiling as surfaces marked with names
or only dates. The sound that filled the room was
not one person's voice. It was an amalgam nothing of
the living well, but instead the collected residue of every
lost memory, every vanished staffer, every patron consigned to the
library secret history. The voice it was not mine, nor
the councils, nor any I could recall. In making Life, Intoned,
you have held the record. You know the shape of forgetting,
return what is borrowed, or carry the burden home. If
you stay, you will fade, but the books will remain.
If you go, everything you love or fade. Instead of faces, memories,
touches of the real world. Choose the impulse to surrender.
Just let it take me join the cataloged forget, every vertigo,
touch night, and every question I'd asked wash over me
with surprising gentleness. At the same time, the sudden notion
of a life femptied of everything I cared about, replaced
by haunted routines and strange compulsions staggered me, stealing What
will I could? I shout it, I will not keep
your secret. I will not stay. The room darkened, index
CODs shuffling as if buffeted by wind. The amalgam of
whispers rose into a single, exhausted sigh. You have seen
what must be hidden. Go then, but you cannot remember all.
Give back the key, keep only what can be borne.
With trembling hands, I placed the brass key atop a
pile of CODs, stamped only with the word forget. As
I did, the door behind me wrenched open, the air,
pressure shifting. The council's footsteps resounded beyond the threshold, but
the ancient voice spoke above them. Let the keeper go.
I turned, bare eyed, now propelled through the narrowing gap
into the main corridor. The door slam shut just as
council hands grasped for me, the sound echoing like a
final stamp of approval. The air in the public's s
tax was freezing, the preserved refrigerated silence of pre dawn.
I stumbled toward the exit, each movement harder, as if
the very act of leaving cost me pieces of myself.
I reached the outer doors, sid blerin the glass, always
cold and clean, buckled in my vision, then cleared as
I stepped through the world outside, rushed back with the violence.
Head lights, city wind light driss a beginning on the sidewalk,
the libraries aside behind me glow brick red and impenetrable.
I walked home, not daring to look back the way
to vanish details already pressing inside my skull. The nights
afterwards were different. I played the last recording over and over, it,
each time a little less clear, the urgent whisper of return.
The key became nothing but hiss, then vanished altogether, replaced
by static. My resignation that had composed itself in fits
and starts, eventually delivered in half copy, no explanation offered.
For weeks, sleep slipped away from me, dreams littered with
a scent of mold voices beneath the wallpaper. The slap
of solidarity and cold stone rumors rippled quietly across the city.
Fire code violations, h tract failure in our cavil rooms.
The stack wings at the back were cordoned off police
state bisecting corridors were sunlight never reached. City councils should
boiler plate apologies, unforeseen repairs, a temporary closure for safety.
Friends asked if I was all right. I nodded, smiled,
said little, letting their concerns. Lip passed like so much
drift and dust. The library's public face never changed, but
I noticed the absences. The sass Servery, whose watchful eyes
attract every boundary, retired abruptly, her desk cleared overnight, Joe Vanish,
his name sprub from the payroll. The patients had none
lingered or left their routines broken. Some nights, my memories
of doctor Rudman returned with force, clear and insistent. Other
times I struggled to recall even his face, as if
it had dissolved, his static specifics about the map of
the stacks, the route to the annex, all the alternate
doors gone, replaced by blunt and certainty in a hollow ache. Sometimes,
on my way past the library for groceries, at glimpse
of face behind the glass mast obscured may be only
a trick of the evening lie. I kept walking. What
I did remember, I carried like a bruise. If you
stumble into the wrong room, if you find a key
that doesn't belong long, forget it, turn back. There are things,
even histories, meant to be preserved by erasure, kept for
reasons older than reason. Night, often night, I repeated my
own warning into my recorder, of compiling a message I
half expected no one would ever hear. I don't go
searching for lost rooms. Don't try to return what was
meant to be forgotten. If anyone ever tells your buildings
blueprints don't line up, run faster than you can think.
I never played these final notes back, leaving them trapped
on tape, evidence of a secret I barely believed. But
it was never that simple. Nothing ended completely. One night,
months after my resignation, I woke out of a dream
of endless corridor's rooms that didn't connect. Words itched in
a language I only knew in my bones. The air
was cool against my arms. At the farthest corner of
my tiny apartment, a red eyar glimitted my overcorridor, somehow
left running, its batteries not yet run dry. Curious, uneasy,
I padded barefoot to the table, lifted the recorder. My
voice first burbled and skipped hair, and drew no reference
found door one open it, and then fell into a
haze of distortion. Abruptly through the fog, a voice lag
in nothing like mine, filtered through a century of lost time.
Please return the key. I dropped the recorder, its case,
split batteries, bouncing across the hardwood from the night and
drawer where I kept spare cords. I heard the slide
of something shifting braced against the chill, heart shuddering, I
pulled open the drawer. There it was the Brasky, the
same tooth marks, the same batter attack, set atop a
neat pile of a marked index card's cars, as blank
and expectant as the night I first found the yellowed
slip in the stacks outside, in the deep silence before dawn,
I heard a fancies or slight, millions of turning pages
or the wound, chasing after empty catalog cards, each seeking
a home, a story, or a keeper who could bear
the weight of remembering what all the rest of the
city had chosen carefully compulsively to forget. I shut the
drawer softly, not quite daring to touch the key. It's
half half, expecting it might skate away beneath my trembling fingers.
The edge of the index cards pressed against one another
without friction, each one blank and sully by date or name,
and subtly iridescent under the discount's groggy glow. For a long,
motionless stretch, I just watched cold leaking up through the
bold words into my arches, the old dicks of sleepless
library shifts, returning as if I had never left. The
city was silent outside, not merely from the lateness of
the eyele, but as if it too was waiting, holding
its breath. In the stillness, I found myself scanning my
own hazy reflection in the windows black glass. Searching for
signs had cost some reversible line carrying something home that
could not belong in any apartment's calmed evenings. There was
a listless husher within the room, the same hunger for
order of an explanation that had driven me night after
night through those impossible corridors. The difference now there was
no where to file what I'd found, no staff meeting,
no chain of command, no procedural report, just me a
recorder that Brasqui and the slow synchronized events of memory
against the walls of my own mind. I hesitated, struggling
to remember how I had once felt about the library before.
The stacks then were only a place to earn a paycheck,
to pace off iOS amid the overgrown order of books
and old stores. Now every angle flicked with significance. My
thoughts kept circling, compulsive, always ending back at the same questions.
How many others had brought something home? Had stood in
this precess hush feeling The air thickened with the scent
of brittle paper, waiting for the other shoot, a council, perhaps,
where the voices from the walls to arrive. I found
myself muttering a reflex We was that only half formed
a sound? Why keep the key? Why send it back? Now?
The tape in the recorder, if it even worked tip minutely,
as if eager to trap the words before they could
drift into forgetting. Was it just compulsion or something the council,
those massed shadowed watchers had left inside me as splendor,
impossible to dig out. I forced myself to look away
to break the cycle. Water, I told myself. Water was mundane,
necessary proof against whatever spectral and reality threatened. I crossed
to the kitchen, filling a glass, feeling the slap of
cold against my palm. The act was ordinary, but my
gaze kept darting back. The drawers outlined a lowed with
phantom potential reality thinning at the corners. I stayed down
at my hand, half expecting to find lines of innk
bleeding from my finger prints. Catalog numbers inscribed a law
in the creases, but my flesh was only clammy and colorless.
A sudden noise, ASoft a hythmic tapping started in the
back of the apart meant maybe the radiator may be
something more. I froze, listening as the note repeated, quickening
then slowing until it matched the faint, impossible cadence of
card catalog draw a siding hum once twice, then bless silence.
For some reason, my mind leapt all the things that
have gone missing from my own life in the week
since the lineyard from my locker at Chipmug. I favored
emails quietly deleted from my inbooks, odd gaps in my memory,
like a story whose plot had suffered too many edits.
On impulse, I retrieved the key and cards, laying them
in careful order. Atop the desk. The keys lent match
that of the new annex locks, but its teeth had
polished bright against their age, the edges catching the lamplight
with a shimmer, almost alive, as if insisting on attention.
I turned it over, studying the faint that was pressed
nearly raced into the old tip binding around its bow.
Nothing but the word returned, and beneath that a faded
call number, zerra Removre. I found myself speaking again, as
if compelled by some invisible proctor. Entry late night, evident
of return cards, stuck blank, unused, awaiting inscription, key remains
pull to be returned. I barely reckon ignized my own voice,
pitch madewy, between exasperation and all. Then, almost against my will,
oppressed a coud flash and reach for a pen compulsion
maybe or a demand written into the fibers of the
building and now into my bones. My hand hovered, palm sweating.
What did it want to inscribe a name or to
erase it? Whose memory with this small atbind or free
would adding my own name grant absolution or only sink
me deeper? As I watched an auncers seemed to crystallize,
detached from any whisper, but echoing in the hush. The
cords went for absolution or for gill. There were the
wreck at, each one potential a place holder for all
the city would not allow itself to remember. For every
erased patron, every vanished staffer, a card waiting to be named.
The right was to risk being held, to preserve, to
be cataloged forever. A thunderclap, real thunder, for once, broke
the stillness, rattling the window glass. I started pen dropping
from my finger tips. A storm street level, and honest
at last began its march. Rain hammered the city, erasing
the outlines of street lights, sweeping dust and memory alike
off the pavement. The brask key was warm, almost pulsing
on sudden impulse. I closed my hand around it. A
wash of image is too quick for a recognition, spill
from my mind. Books set on fire, then knocked out,
file sealed, and bearer. Doctor Rudman's hands pressed flood against
Elijahs spine, missess every side glance of warning, the bright,
colorless eyes of the council peering from behind a wall
of time. A sharp, sudden, grief knife threw me for
all those loss to the catalog, their living traces erased,
survival repurpose as perservation. I set the key down and
flipped through the index cards, nearly shaking my own name.
Did it belong on? One was that the councils plan
all along to see the city with keepers, each holding
their own fragment of the impossible record, each fitted to
lose pieces of themselves here by year until their absence
grew unremarkable. In the burst of storm light, the library's
fasad bloom faint at the window, stone red and shining, impossible.
My father overlooked a parking lot, not that block, but
for just a moment the illusion hell the library, rising
and falling at the edges of the night. Then it
was gone, and my own pale face returned, drawn, And
then in the glass the words returned in a rush,
as if I were back in the stacks at midnight.
Return the key, keep the record, do not open the doors.
But this time there was another phrase, quieter, stuttered behind
the familiar refrain of signature, perhaps or benediction, preserve or perish.
I rose pushed the desk chair back, nearly knocking it
on to the floor. I wanted, suddenly, wildly to cast
the key out the window, to burn the card's dash,
to step into the hallway and pound on my neighbor's door,
begging them to wake, to break the spell with the
careless laughter of the ordinary world. But I knew, when
the memory of the Council's warnings stung sharp in my adrooms,
that the library secrets had always had a way of
finding their way home. Instead, body trembling, I picked up
the recorder, checked its tiny red light, and forced my
voice to shuddering air. This is the last entry, I said.
The key's here at the card's way. If any one
hears this, if you know the layout of your own house,
if you remember all the faces that work, count yourself lucky.
If your library is missing books, keep walking. Some part
of me, cold as that first night in the stacks,
knew I shouldn't hesitate any longer, not for my own sake,
can not for cities. I pocketed the key, gathered the
cards and the recorder, and, ignoring the scream of muscle
memory to stay, walked out into the corridor. The cities,
hum barely registered wearing batted the foyse glass the familiar
scent of wet concrete, grounding me just enough to sue
the worst of the vertigo pavements like shoes soaking. I
trudged onun block after block, guided not by any plan
but by the subtle, compulsive nudge that had over the
weeks were blazed instinct. Every street corner felt nearly tilted.
The geography of my walk to the library subtly altered.
By the time I reached the block three a M
not a so all in sight, the storm had softened
to a drizzle, wind weaving ceous patterns in the air.
The library's exterior was the same, unware or uncarrying of
trespis redstone and all the brass fixtures nearly polished, as
if for a ceremony. The maintenance entrance, one I had
never used after iris, did slightly a jar, security light humming.
It should have been locked, but as I stepped forward,
the door yielded with a low SiGe, swinging open to
reveal the just long corridors, the smell of institutional copt
in lemon oil, and theyond the prison morpled coolness of
too many books into lithospace. I hesitated on the threshold hands.
None were cold, and something like anticipation. I called out, tentative,
any one here. No answer, no echo, not even from
the smallest, dustriest corner. My footsteps sounded louder than I remembered,
each one, another tick, echoing down the history of midnight walks.
I moved through the staff corridor, the key in my
pocket nearly vibrating, now tugging at bone and intention. At
the edge of the old reference fault, the world seemed
to tolt. The corridor just ahead, which should have ended
in a lot five door, now spilled open into a short,
ragged stretch, a final reminder of all the discrepancies the
blueprints could never settle. I pressed forward, the storm pressing
at my heels from behind, and found myself in the
sub basement, once more, at the vault of ledgers and
brick and erased names. The passage was alive, Shadows pressed
together in the angles, breathing and retreating, just out of
reach of the nearest bowl. In the hush, faint whispers
straysed my path, not quite words, but a tide of intention.
The space recognized me. I realized that the building's memory
as hungry as mine. Foreclosure for the return of what
had been borrowed. I stopped in front of the panel,
with it as cutch and plate still hung, swinging slightly
on a listened screw. I took out the bras key.
It no longer felt heavy, just inevitable. My hand steady
now faded to the lock. The cylinder turned with uppersistance,
the mechanism clicking open most mooly than ever before. The
brickdon wall, which once guarded the annex, ibrated like the
echo of far off thunder or a line of patients,
finally fraying. A seam opened, the passage in side, lit
with a waxy buttery luminosity, as if lined with a
thin white gloss of old report covers, reflecting memory. I
stepped inside, carved and recorder in hand. The air was thicker, denser,
weighed down by all the words never spoken or uck out,
the names that ceased to circulate in the city's consciousness.
In that strange light, the cards felt almost waitless, each
one a blank, waiting for its story as a rasure
or its impossible return. Opposite the alcove shelf upon shelf
of ledgers and carved files rose the same cold edge
chair remained and disturbed the air about it, trembling gently
with the vibration of unseen breaths. The whir of a
ventilation found an anachronism spun up, and the entire room
scene to inhale. I felt no compulsion to sit, only
to witness and thensan like a book closing. In the
far corner. A shape stepped forward London reflected the lamplight,
too tall to be any one but a memory of
massas Sevre, or maybe doctor Rudman, or perhaps something older.
A figure sheeted than a sash of black face, still masked.
You have come back. The voice and toned. It was
not quite male or female, ancient or young, but soft,
decisive and archivist voice. Tours cannot remain open forever. Preservation
is a method, not mercy. I found myself speaking tone
small and stubborn. He sent to the home. You sent
it after me. The mass tilted, assessing, as if considering
whether to show kindness. It belongs here, so do you,
if you choose it. I shook my head. No. By
once day, no more names on your cards. The figure
looked at the recorder, then to the blunt card in
my hand. It is not a punishment. They replied so quietly.
I doubted it was for my ears alone. Some one
must keep the forgetting to know and not remember. This
is how cities survived themselves. The wind, that odd rush
of displaced their flared again. I caught for a moment
the fleeting souluits of others. Masts blowed around the edges,
hands clutching boxes, trays heavy with yet more cards, each
seemed to flicker in and out of existence. You may
leave the archive, is said, but you will return it,
or you will not be able to sleep, or eat
or love without the taste of mold and memory on
your tom sodom. Foolish tears stun my eyes. I could
not keep it, I knew, but it felt like surrender
to give it up. So simply, as if sensing the tension,
the figure stepped aside, exposing atop a low plint about it,
half broken returns lot, the kind never used in any
public facing library. Its mouth gaped in endless patience. Darkness
behind darkness. I moved forward, card and key together and
fitted them through with one shaking hand. As soon as
I did, all noise inside and out ceased. The library
heart hidden as it had always been exhaled. I turned breathless.
The masked figure had vanished, as had all the others.
The ledges seemed less substantial, the compulsion to catalog, to name,
to record, the ceaseless sacreft of minutely from my shoulders.
The rooms temperature rose a single degree, or perhaps the
chill inside me had relented behalf. I found my way
out by instinct, not by plan, corridors now finding their old,
mundane shapes. The brusque was gone, my pockets whollow, save
for the battered recorder is taped nearly done. In the
last drags of the storm, I stepped back into the world,
letting the door close behind. That night's sleep came for
the first time in months. My dreams were dull, restless,
as shuffle of cause, the flutter of library tate doctor Rudman,
watching hopeful and broken eye from behind a rolling cut.
But I work with a sense of separateness, the awareness
that whatever awaited in the spaces between stacks belonged to
the library, not to me. My days carried forward. I tried,
mostly successfully to live. I wandered city blocks, sometimes unable
to remember why. I come to a certain intersection, I
greeted old friends, sometimes groping for their names, as if
they were tucked too deep in some forbidden archive. But
the ache of compulsion, the hunger to record, to name,
to preserve, waned, and the gaps in myrical grew less urgent,
less sharp. Only rarely did to fear return a hand
brushing my shoulder on a crowded street. The echo of
cull numbers I without meaning, a box of old clippings
appearing unasked at my doorstep, and hours later vanishing again
without explanation. The library I heard, cordoned off its deepest wings.
The council, if it persisted, operated even further in the margins.
No one spoke doctor Rudman's name, not any more. Rumors
of transfers to sudden resignations trickled into silence. The collective,
forgetting so carefully administered, grew lighter, but never quite let go.
On evenings, when the wind died, the city took on
a listening posture, as if the old patterns might repeat.
I sometimes pressed record again, a nervous take, and recited
my own warning one more time, for no one but myself.
Run from hidden rooms, ignormous placed keys, let the catalog's missing,
Stay lost. I never saw the key again. The cards
remain blank. The burden or the temptation of inscription at
last passed on to others.