Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. Two forty seven a m. The
blinking red light on my phone's green is the only
color in my world, throwing little stabs of illumination upward
into my face. Fluorescent ceiling panels buzz somewhere above. Beyond them,
the fourth floor stacks browl wider and deeper than I remembered.
I hit record, my thumb shaking as if drunk, though
all I'd had to night was a cup of teppered
instant coffee. I say my name, it sounds wrong. Pull out.
This is a break off. Glance over my shoulder, mouthed,
suddenly dry. I don't even know why I'm according this.
Something's off. If any one hears this. It's early Wednesday morning,
Main Branch East reading room camera Atwolf Security over night.
My other hand rests on a heavy leather bound tom culling,
almost damp through the cloth of my sleeve. I've found
it minutes earlier. Jam half way into the book dropped
me of the magazine racks. No dust, but the pages
were yellowed and brittle at the edges. I could smell
it before I touched it a whiff of old glue
and ucoly this. It shouldn't have been there. I empted
the drop at midnight, as always, and i'd swept the
alcove at one thirty. A S two date slip was
stamped for tomorrow, but there was a damp mudge, as
if the ink had bled backward, haloing the numbers. When
I pried it open, an envelope shifted out and landed
in the carpet with a hush. Some one along looping
hand had scrolled in fading blue fountain pen. If you
lose your away, the erler caught catalog still knows the path,
not the one with the computers, the one with the
reel drawers below that. Don't let them see you counting
or moving too fast. My breath had come shallow. The
building was locked tight since ten five p m. I'd
watched the last of the cleaning crew leave Missess Blick
with her slow shuffle of exhaustion, jingling her ring of
keys on a rainbow lineyard. After I owe, the city loosens,
the light skull blue through the blackout glass. Even the
college kids give up and trudge home, And I watched
the silhouettess fade in distinct shadows before I latched the
main doors. But when you're inside, the silence is open.
You listen, always listening. There are after sounds here, the
lazy churn of pipes overhead, a distant rumbling elevator. A
word up rises and falls, as though someone had pressed
the coal button somewhere distant. In a vestibule, you could
almost regle. The air moves sometimes against the draft. It
sets to plastic dust covers and fiction shells fluttering. When
I pass a catalog station, a catch half phrases, not sounds,
a whisper close to language, but not quite arriving there.
I try every night to ignore them, but the oddities
are never just sounds. Sometimes, when I walk the stacks,
the ras I've mapped in muscle and time fill rum.
A shelf stretches where it shouldn't, or caught, A bends
more sharply. To night was worse. The aisles would dancer
crowded somehow, pressing close, reminding me of Subwa tunnels at Rushire.
Only I was a low nuttily and deniably alone. I
snapped off my flasklight to save the battery. Then inflict
it on again, nervous to lose whatever small island of
Clardia still controlled. The shelf behind me stood closer than
I'd remembered. I blink on the book where I had
someone returned it to night after midnight, when no one
could access the drop of scepstaff, and whose handwriting was this? Anyway?
That note about the early catalog itched at something old
in my chest. The air in the stacks had thickened.
I could almost haste metal. Maybe, I told myself, I'm
just tired. I misdelivered, returned some prank by one of
the student pages. I pocketed the envelope, keeping my hand
in the book, the way you might settle stone over
something you'd rather not disturb. On my way to the
security office, I tried not to look at the clocks.
They felt slightly out of time, always adding or losing
a few minutes as I passed. Still, I reasoned, if
I couldn't sleep, maybe I could at least explain this,
even if it was only to myself, If no one
else would listen, maybe a record proof I didn't imagine it.
The hall behind me stretched longer than it at when
I had entered, but had told myself that was only nerves,
and to night I thought would not be the last
strange night. At ten p m backward, it all seemed simple.
I'd begun my shift in the way I have for
six years, no more, no less. The sun had gone
down early, along dust bleeding out behind the municipal buildings,
and I pulled my baddets down into the wrist da law.
I parked under a flickering lamp, shadows crimping at the scenes.
Unlock the staff entrance with my security badge and let
the slab of marble vestibules swallow me whole. This library
is a place that forgives little and forgets less. Four
stores each debt in slabs of mid century optimism, terras
of fours, a dizzing spiral of granite steps, and the
glass at every access point blacked out after IROs by
law or perhaps by institutional inertia. The public faces broad
with its classical columns, brass framed doors, and a faintly
absurd bas relief over the entrance depicting athena blessing the
city's scholars. I've always liked it for reasons I struggled
to put into words everything had a clockwork rhythm. I
signed in my name on the Warren log book, reading
over familiar enteries, Avara's head of security, tever As day
desk and glick stodial, and then my only drew Miller,
the looping m trailing, just as it did in my
grade school notebooks. I scribbled the time nine fifty seven
p m. A little early, because someone had gone home
in a rush and left the code lock staff rooms
slightly ajar. The day's tension faded in the quiet institutional
glare of the check and count. The janitorial croup was
around for another hour or so, dragging trash cans, chatting
low in Spanish, sometimes cracking jokes about haunted plumbing or
someone's boyfriend's latest mistake. I always joined in with a smile,
though my Spanish is mostly whatever. Call from high school
enough to know how they felt about the libraries called
her crevices tonight per usual, agreeeded a mess de Lacourt
in the staff room, or I meant to. I half
remember reaching for a cup at the break table, considering
whether the tea boxes were still out, only to realize
with a faint shark that I hadn't seen de Lacourt
for weeks. I'd always liked her presence, A tall, sharp
nosed woman with oversized glasses and her rainbow scarves. She
was a fixture at the reference desk. She'd helped the
city's old's patrons track down genealogy forms or recommend true
crime novels to law students, never losing track of which
call number belonged to which edition. I shrugged off the
odd realization people rotated in and out. COVID made staff
patterns elastic. Maybe she was just on extended leave. I
sits in there, a coffee leaf through a battered paperback.
I kept behind the snack machines and waited for it
to be a decent in time to start rounds. Most
evenings are by cosmic design routine. I stride through the
half lick corridors, checking for open windows, fire doors and
latch teens trying to sneak in through the archhouse dumbwaiter,
the second floor hole's community history, with its sad parade
of microfilm readers and battered cassette tapes. I passed through
these spaces quickly, making a silent mental inventory, every book
in its place, every chair tucked, every green shady lamp unbroken.
But when I warp the periodicals, I sometimes catch my
own reflection doubled in the dark glass, the sorted by
the layers of dust and the fog of breath. On
cold nights, lights flickered at the apex of the aisles,
not quite burnt out, just flickering, always a little too slow. Summer,
around one a m. The whole library tips into an
also state the corner's shop and bend differently. The air
becomes heavy, dense with old paper and n oose and
time of overheated wiring. I used to think it was exhaustion,
a kind of drift after too many back to back
night shifts, but the feeling persists, tangible and stubborn. Whenever
I'm tempted to read too much into it, I reassure
myself it's just a building, all bricks and new wiring,
drafts in odd corners. People like Delacourt might get sentimental
about this place, but I'm here to keep order, not
to understand what makes the library humming strange frequencies. After midnight.
Still I catch myself lingering at the edges of the
main reading room, as if I might stumble on something
or someone who'd explain why they's walls hold their breath
so tightly. Once the sun goes down, I live alone.
It's by design, both the solitude and the schedule. Home
is a walk up down the block, a kitchen window
feacing some one else's alley. I never minded the quite
until I learned. There are varieties of silence, and none
so absolute as the hush that follows turning off every
public facing light at the main branch. Those quiets, those absences,
are why I sometimes find myself checking every stack, every
lock room twice. It's comfort, I tell myself in the
repetition Control weeks pile up. Life settles around the anchor
points arrival, Raymond's lord books, the low murmur of departing staff,
and yet that gap where mess de Lacourt stood her
scarves and her quick smiles starts to taste sharper, more noticeable.
Each night the echoes Lengthen one night I tucked my
bat of paperback under my arm and start another circuit,
humming the libraries, or to make a closing chime under
my breath. The system is easy to trust, a little
too easy to night terns, as all my nights dowed
into something I almost recognize, but not quite. Several days
pass after that first odd night, the one with the
book strange slips stamp from tomorrow. I replay those irores
in my head as I walk the rounds. Certain I
miss some miner explainable detail, a page missilling, a return,
a software glitch in the lug times. But on these
creeps in persist in as mildew. The first thing I
notice is a chair pale blue vinyl, tried a few
inches out from the research table in the map AlCH
of when I know I tapped it neatly on my
last pass. Another night, a door to the basement restroom
stands perfectly ajar. Even though this doors stay heavy on
their hinges. I chalk them up to air flow restless
bumps in the building's mechanical guts, though I find myself
glancing back as I walk away. The clocks, once trustworthy,
have started keeping their own obstinate schedules. I seed a
little hand for five minutes ahead in the reference wall clock,
but when I passed back a half I hour later
by my I wrist which has fallen behind. At first,
I dot the inconsistency in my log as a joke
evident for the next time overas ribs me about ghost minutes,
but it's never quite as simple as a pixels on
a digital weed. At midway through the next week, the
third four fiction corridor feels wrong under foot. I stop
floss white ankle down. The planking bends impossibly, rising in
a soft ark, only to settle back as soon as
a glance away. I'm not prone to vertigo, I convince myself.
Maybe at some relic of an old escape route would
long since walk by rain and neglect. One Thursday after
midnight has spot a bat of maintenance cause attached behind
the old staff elevators. One I'd never noticed. Nestlto mid
mops and buckets is a sheaf of yellowed registry locks,
each golled with lists of staff names and dates. Most
end with a retired followed by a half array's forwarding address,
but several are different and unsatisfying blank just the word
in no record. I leave through to the ems there
with a pit in my cut a trace de la
courtn no record. The penmanship is alldavily similar to the
note tucked into the Freten book. That same night, I
lock a crumple blueprint of the building out of the
security des drawer, printer marked and stained by years of
lost coffee rings. By flashlight, I walk the route. Something
is wrong. The second four corridor between Stacks three and
Stacks five extends farther east than the blueprint allows. A
storage clause appeers where there should be only brick. But
when I return scone swallowed by a field of undisturbed
dust heavy shelves, I begin to keep my own notes.
I use the portable radio to silence scalling margin observations
on my palm, desperate not to lose track. Each successive
night brings new oddities. The staff notes attached to the
old sign in logs, relics half tucked between notes to
the dudecimal system, and pendled in warnings about barque of
mold reference names I have never met. Please forward, request
to eat read special retrieval. I check the roster, No
ey read Albarez. The supervisor shrugs when I ask about
the odd gaps in the locks all paperwork. Miller the
city keeps terrible records. YE know how it is. He
is kind but distracted, his attention drifting even as the
words leave his mouth still. As the days stack up,
I start to believe the library is both more than
a building and less, a skeleton made of rooms, sometimes present,
sometimes not, inventing itself from the memory of night on Saturday,
I decide to settle the matter. I gather the printed
facility map and OPA and my phone. Three passes through
the reading rooms later, the evidence is undeniable. A hallway
stretches further than it ever does by daylight. A familiar
shelf leans at a sharper angle. I turn back, and
the shock to the mainstairs vanishes, replaced by a blank
wall without a door. To night, the silence is different,
a kind of waiting. My own footsteps sound far away,
muffled a multiply as I walk, book slide on the
shelves just out of view. A whiff of card among
lingers in the west wing, though no one has brewtie
in weeks. Missus Klick, coming off her shift gives me
a nervous smile. You look tired, drew too many late nights.
She means nothing by it, but the words stick. Round
two a m I pass the card catalog, the old
catalog heavy with a hundred drawers. Something compels me to
open one label for a fog that should no longer exist,
for a reference mezzanine within a fine faded handritten index cards,
each listing a book never entered into the current system.
Some have names penciled onto them. De Lacourt Glick read
a second glance at the security login entry vert in
last week, sion E read again return tape please rochelve
after ordered do not use elevator C after one a m.
The elevator of references was sealed years ago, now just
an empty shaft behind a locked door. I test the
knob cold under my hand. It won't turn. Sleep is useless. Now.
I start to leave handritton notes for myself, snapshots with
my trembling phone camera, but sometimes in the morning they're gone.
Only the odd echo of my own careful block print
remains in the grain of the wood, like a memory
pressed too hard. The books themselves stirt, behaving strangely. I
shove a volume in non fiction, but I was later
to find it in mysteries. Its spine turned out for
almost beckoning. On some nights, the stacks seemed to twist
as I passed, squeezing the light down to a whisper
before springing wide and impossible again. When I turned to
look each night, I convinced myself to keep order, books aligned,
doors locked, objects returned to their rightful slots. But I
can't help feeling the building is measuring me back, as
if the old catalogs and the hidden logs are taking
inventory not just of books, but a staff. Days and
nights blur routines, fraying at the edges and knacking. Sense
rises that certain spaces only exist when unobserved, that some
doors open on to places left off every map, Yet
a press on each rotation, Feeling more like an audition
for some role I no longer understand. Obsession creeps in
quietly like water under linoleum, A schedule extra time between
rounds to review archaus, security, footagyres and ires of digital nothing,
punctuated by the flicker of shadows and shapes at the
corners of frames. One night, scanning the overnight feeds with
tie granular focus, I spots something odd a sequence from
cameras C five just outside a locked basement archives. The
footage stutters, jumping several seconds, then resumes showing a corridor
line with five doors that don't exist in the present. Architecture.
A blurry figure lingers in the shot, indistinct and suitcase shaped.
It moves just once between walls withther is only solid
brick and daylight. I replay the clip again and again,
trying to resolve the outline. My hot start is each
time I reach that impossible moment. The next evening, I
walk the same route by day, brick and mortar yawing
in the sun. Whatever anomaly appeared the night before is vanished.
The doors are gone, the floor's ordinary, no trace on
the footage by morning is gestatic, and the loop time stump.
I stop in the staff lounge, seeking out tavas the
daytime descade. Did de Masse de Lacourt ever get back
from her leave? Tava stiffens, re arranging a stack of
return holts. She's on leave officially, should be back soon.
Admin's tight lipped, though she doesn't meet my eyes. I
press No one's heard from her. She hesitates, then shrugghs
h R handles that stuff. People come, people go, Ye
know how mane is. She gathers the holds and makes
a show sort in col numbered as, pointedly ignoring me.
I file her reaction with the others A growing list
of absences name Struck threweries from the record. That afternoon,
between lunch and fatigue, I hunt through the old blueprints
in the admin office. The records contradict each other. One
shows a warren of rooms on the third floor. Another
insists the same square footages of for structural support. No
entry in the city archives, digital and paper cups refused
to cohere, each refference in construction in different decades, each
lacking a crucial signature on the final inspection. Back in
special collections, a peculiar set of legacy card hides in
alarm drawers. I pull one labeled Basement West Archives, followed
by call numbers for books that the current database can't find.
The drawer itself squeals and protests as it is used
for decades. I photograph everything a secret to keep tucked
into my socks. My phone passwords set in you each day.
The stacks are less friendly now. Some books seem to
shift shelving ordor when I'm not looking title side by
side that shouldn't touch. At night, I hear books falling,
sometimes in distant corners, always when I'm farthest from the sound.
Each time I check, I find nothing out of place,
every volume precisely indexed as it should be. A superstition
takes route. I walk each night by a different road,
testing the shelves, a floor at the echo of my
own presence, the buildings response subtle, insistent comes in books,
display aisles, twisted and ere, the thickens or contracts around me.
I believe impossibly that the library is learning my patterns,
or worse, reacting to them. And yet every instinct in
me rebels. I need answers, need to see what's behind
these discrepances. Curiosity and dread drive me onward. I can't
let the mister eg. Thursday, the night that everything changes,
begins as all the others do. A faint drizzle is
coming down, pattering on the seal skylights. The lower vestibule
is empty save for the distance creak of missus clicksmop bucket,
echoing like the sea in the tiled corridor. My rounds
are guided by the familiar the clink of my keys,
the coal heft of my flashlight, the smooth rhythm of
checking doll latches and emergency alarms. Half Way through the
third shift, something flits across my peripheral vision. A figure
or perhaps only a deeper shadow moving through the periodicals.
I pause, heart thumping, not fear, not yet, but a
slow peaking adrenaline. The shadow pauses, too, haloed by a
wedge of silvery light leaking and from somewhere unseen. It
moves not out but away, melting into the corridor, where
by every account there is nothing but a black linoleum wall.
I hesitate only a second before following, swift and silent
breath tight in my throat. The corridor narrows, then opens.
The shelf slides, not quite visibly, but I feel the
shift is a subtletilt under my shoes. An axis panel,
always locked in flush with the wall, swings out gently
at my touch, no creak, no proutus behind it. A
steccis rises and falls in impossible directions, vanishing into dim
dust fell there. I step through the air quickens. It
is colder here but smothering, pressing close. My footfalls land
dull on the old tiles, sticky with layers of age.
The maintenance crews never scrapped the light, flickering revealed wallpaper
far all over them. Many I have seen on these walls,
wilting with the ghosts of leaves and faded flowers. The
corridor ends at a heavy door, as trim painted over
again and again, each shave receding with time for a moment.
I hesitate, but curiosity and emotion mingled with something sharp
or propels me forward inside a room much larger than
it ought to be, crowded with the detritus of decades, boxes, ledgers,
ancient staff logs, each labeled in a neat, unfamiliar skull,
though the ink and sum has run and blotted. Names,
blacked out, dates, overlapping in impossible sequences, personal belongings scattered
the shells, scarves, a broken glasses, framed cut with the
faded name de Lacott written in living script, A reference
des Badge, HA Badge, enamel chipped at one corner. Sets
atop a stack of file folders held together by ancient
rubber bands. I scan titles, finger tips, tingling, containment measures,
collection or locations, incident reports, personnel. Some are opened pages
filled with official ease, others redacted heavily with black marker
or glue. I flipped through one heart pounding staff translist,
sea arcaft, containment team levelfore A, no public access. Pages
and pages of names, many with the raised stump beside them.
In Stacaduret, the box marked recordings do not remove, lies
half open magnetic tape and filling onto the floor like
shed skin. Next to it a lager hand written in
a small, precise hand, transfer logged Miss de Laccott, witnessed
by our scribbled hurriedly in the margin. If discovered, destroy everything,
and impossible realization settles heavy and implacable. These spaces, these
days owenes must sometimes not exist unless you enter from
the inside, unless you know the way. The library somehow
is rearranging itself, locking away not only secrets but people,
our memories of people from someway deeper out of view
of voice, Quiet but clear travels through the dark. True,
it is soft, barely more than an exhale, but it
is undeniably my name. All at once, the lights died,
not in a crack of sudden thanattos, but as if
gently inhaled, leaving only a smear of darkness and the
cold certainty that I am not alone. The blackness was
honey thick, dense in my lungs and behind my eyes.
For one wild moment, sounding amidst the buried stacks in
ancient clutter. I believed I had lost even the memory
of light. My own breath sounded foreor and saw it
in wheezing out like the air was fighting to stay inside.
The flashlight, which I gripped so fiercely, must have flicked off.
My thumb found the button again, and there was nothing,
just the useless click of plastic sliding over contact points
that would not catch. The light didn't return. Somewhere beyond,
in the folds of all their inn shadows, that voice
drifted again. It drew softer now, as if the shape
of my name itself was being he sifted through the
sediment of years. I fought the primitive shudder and tried
to fix one thing, just one thing in my mind,
the weight of de Lacote badge in my palm. The
instinctive flee sparked, sudden and hot, but my legs simply
refused to move. I bent blindly, grasped for my phone phone. Yes,
it had a light, the pale ghost of his screen,
maybe even a little battery left. Once pulled in my palm,
as I found it to life, the faint blue white
glow cut pinhole through the dark. Dust glittered in it
for a second, nothing moved, and then the shadows pressed
in again, falls of blacklike curtains closing over the old
reference room. I snapped photo aft to foreto without him
in clicks and burs and the flash strobing while bouncing
off battered file cabinets and a drooping corporate littered with
yellowing memos. The badge, a blue green bar of enamel,
caught a single perfect glare, mocking my shaking hand, like
a star in a field of clouded glass. Then so
quick I nearly missed it. A figure, or rather a
flash where a figure should be caught by the phone
camera midturn, slightly hunched in the shoulder, scarf, a face,
but the features were all smudge, as if I snapped
a picture through breath on a windowpane. I moved, by
instinct or memory or fear toward the shape, my feet
sticky in layers of dust, choose biting against in scene debris.
Something soft brushed past my shoulder, weightless and transcend. For
a moment I thought I heard weeping, or the rustle
of paper cort in a draft. The phone light quivered
over a box of reel to real tapes, brown ribbons
spilt everywhere in sore re tangles. One tape stood alone,
labeled and cramped, planted capitals, incident report for A and
D laccor. I press a finger tip to the box's edge, cold,
slightly sticky with all glue. A movement behind me, A cough,
sharp and dry, echoing from a direction that shouldn't exist.
I spun phone light, lurching in circles in every direction.
The stacks circled back on themselves, impossibly recursive. A shelving
unit that led through to a wall, yet with space
beyond half lit like a phalse mirror. The air pressed harder,
invisible currents added at my knees. At the room's edge.
A desk, her reel antique, its oak swollen increase with
each was heaped with more love books desperate A step
to it, flipping a cover open, more names, most with
lines drawn savagely through them, transferred and moved off side
in no further record. One page torn half way down,
read arkaf contiment necessary scribbled underneath in the margins. Corridors
respond to, watches, do not retrace, steps, do not count doors,
order it his memory, memory safety. My stomach nodded there
in quick reminder de la Court's signature. Then de Laccort
witnessed her shoved. No further details, but margins full of
her familiar leaping script. If any one finds this, do
not linger the walls close when you remember too much.
My eyes warded, my throat was raw. Drew a single
glassy syllable, now will behind me. I should have dropped
everything and run. I didn't call it training, stubborness, or
a shameful, gnawing curiosity. Some part of me believed, truly
believe that if I walked steadily, not thinking too hard,
I could reach the original corridor, the hidden stair, the
axis panel, and escape one step at a time. I
drew out my key, ring heavy manny dupicates, jangling against
brass and worn steel counter doors. Instantly regretted it was
it four steps out, two to the left, or had
the space folded again? As I edged backward, my foot
crunched something sharp. I angled my phone, a pair of
shattered lenses, her glasses bent wire, and possibly find beneath
a thick gray carpet of dust. I squatted, examining the fragments.
The carpet had two sets of footprints, one mine one smaller, older,
more deliberate, leaning back into the box, and stacks all around,
no disturbance, no other impressions at all. My fun camera
wind low power, so I flicked it to record again,
speaking into the void, and certain even that my own
voice would hold. I listed aloud what I saw, books
on containment measures, the badge, the tapes, the badge, number
of the glasses. I described for future sense making, how
none of the walls now touched at right angles. How
the ceiling pressed lower as it moved toward what used
to be the door, a rattle behind. Then I had
books slipping from shelves. I pivoted, heart galloping as something
blocked the only exit, a shadow broader than I remember
any doorway, being a shoulder, the border of a coat,
the tail of a scarf, mangold with dust. I stopped breathing.
The figure didn't approach, it weeded somewhere in a far corner.
The building's air systems wind sharply, cycling once, like a
breath held past human comfort. I press eyeways, feeling along
the wall's uneven surface. Paper here, then brick, then polished wood,
Like the building itself couldn't choose a single skin, a
stick of half peeled from one panel. Reed did not
file reference only nineteen eighty four. I slid along until
my hand caught on something metallic, the knob of a drawer,
ancient as plate, greened with age. It gave when ippuled,
swinging open on to an impossible shaft ladder leading down
or up or sideways. I couldn't be sure my mouth
tasted metallic. The shadow moved awkwardly, almost apologetically, sidestepping to
let me through. No breath, no heat. I didn't hear words,
but a sense pressed against my skull, as if something
unspoken was being furtted directly into my head. Don't, don't,
don't turn back. But being some old animal logic, I
plunged in my knees, banged the wrongs. The smell danged
come close, as though the whole shaft had been packed
with books left to molder. The phone screen was a
gauzy oval in the black, but a single plane of light.
So long as I didn't think hard about the shape
of the tunnel, let me down a dozen rouns maybe,
and my feet found solid floor. I braced myself round me.
Shelves radiated outward, no ceiling, just dusty void, and a
single frail bulb at the center, flicking as if newly dead.
The footprints continued single file into a cauld sat bank
with cardboard gardens. Some bore city library seals decades out
of date, others simply admon. Only here the air changed,
a dry, cold eddy scented with camphor and the ghost
of cigarette smoke. I recognized Bazarli, the particular chemical tang
of the old burner's desks upstairs. The files here looked
and disturbed by hands, but shuffled by vibrations, by the
weight of time itself or something else. In quick flashes,
my own fingers flaring with white from the phones feeble light.
I leaf through old ledgers, one dated nineteen eighty one
City Council ordered emergency minutes witness withheld hull sections blacked
in marker. A yellow on below protruded marked private n
to lacourt. I ripped the clasp, forced open the contents
A note scribbled in the same blue cussive. If you've
come this far, you must forget to survive. The rooms
only return you if you're willing to leave questions buried.
They count, he remembers and punish who persists, Please do
not say. The bulb sizzled over her head, then guttered.
My phone's battery warning glade red in the shadow's edge.
Two more names, familiar from the logs, distant echoes from stubbs,
had ignorediced it out, written in fresh pen, A scraping
wh was spur closed by my ear. Now drew you
must go, not at wret not quite uply, I staggered back.
The way out was no longer where I'd enter. The
doorway had become a wall, but a narrow sliver of
cold light, barely a suggestion more felt than seen, broke
around the edge of the second shelf bank Hartsick, fighting panic,
I lunched for that gap, shouldering for a brittle lttice
of all microfilm cases. Something snagged at my ankle, a sleeve,
a scarf, a hand I kicked and tore free, barely
keeping my shoes. A single words waddled and dust trailed behind.
Forget the corridor. Spat me up out onto a narrow,
stucky soul slab concrete, this time a familiar handrail, bent
and scuffed by decades of passage. Behind me, I heard
more than I could see a rustle of forms, as
though dozens of unseen presences shifted, inching just out of reach,
not following, exactly, hurting, perhaps helping, perhaps not. Memory shimmered
had I run this way before? The maps in my pocket, misaligned, unreadable,
now seemed to pulse in anger or warning. At the
top of the stairs, a batter pushbar glimmered with exit signs,
each blanched and illegible. I pressed against it. It yielded,
after a groan of old hinges, once more a hush, deeper,
more total than any silence, yet no mechanical hum. The
library breathing slow and patient. As I stepped into the passageway,
a final voice directly inside my ear, almost choking with
sorrow or dread breed Hide your record. I stumbled, knees buckling,
and sprawled onto the stone floor of an annex. I
half recognized window as spot and lined with empty display cases.
Everything seen slightly off celt proportions not quite human scale,
round me in half seen ghosts. File drawers rattled, then
slammed chat. I pressed my back to cold marble, phones,
still clutched, heart be scraping a lawn like sampaper. The
badge still, Lacoort's badge bit into my palm. In the
static hush, Somewhere beyond the walls, a scatter of foottus receded.
I counted one too, only my own. This time, the
urge to weep nearly overwhelmed me. Slowly, I forced my
breathing back into a rhythm. The wash of his ostrin
behind my eyes. The buildings seemed to settle, or perhaps
only wait for my next move. I stared down at
my hands, blinking at what I gathered. The badge, the
tattered envelope, its message already fading. The phone screen cracked,
but still somehow recording every instinct screened at me to run,
to shed these tokens like burning coals, and never look back.
But something stubborn survived the brush with whatever bent the
library's halls out of time, out of human hands. Beneath everything,
the fatigue, the bone ache, the tangle of fear and impossibility,
was the certainty of a mystery not yet undone, a
secret written into the walls, pressed on a decade of
false renovations, half buried in rosters and badges and logs,
men for no one, and behind that the quiet age
nain struck out for garden or worse, absorbed in the dark.
Another shape lingered, not threatening, now no longer pleading, simply waiting.
I gathered what strength remained, fingering the jagged old badge
and told myself that for to night it would be
enough to have lived. That for to night at least
I would remember. But somewhere behind more walls than I
could name, the sound of pages turning, slow and deliberate
promised the story wasn't done, not for me, not for
the library, not for any one who ever dared to
keep the building secrets in their hands. The bulbs after
image still floated behind my aeliad a fading phosphine halo.
I sat with my back press to the Victrian wall, chest,
sawing for air. The annex's stone floor felt rough through
worn informed pants, grounding me in the here and now.
If I kept just one anko hand around a mess
to Lacot's badge, the cold edge of my cracked phone,
the faint captatan of blood from splitting my knuckles against marble,
maybe I could reconstruct reality moment by moment. But the
silence had shifted in the wake of the darkness, gone
almost sentient. The library felt more awake than ever, and
I was pinned beneath its attention, as if my own
breeding would beshray me further. I'd seen too much. I'd
followed the lines connecting E Ray's staff, moving walls, sealed rooms,
all the way into something the library had worked for
decades to hide. In that still post blackout pause, I
realized I was both trespasser and somehow a new entry
into old accounting ledgers, suppressing a narish to pace. I
checked my phone screen, flicks of dust, litto dis I
swiped through blurry shots evidence such as it was, ships
and impossible geometry, the edge of a scarf, a spiral
of cordsplaying from a drawer. Blotches and static marred the
video clips, my voice hissing de laccort map discrepants as
badge non nucleidean woll gone corridor moving in the photos,
the lines never ran straight, angles warped. Even the digital
clocks reflected in the glass red different times in every frame. Gradually,
the cold faded from my skin were placed with a
slow burning terror. The idea of simply getting up and
walking out, leaving through the staff entrance into the trickle
of dawn breaking over City Hall felt both possible and absurd.
That same strange memory tugged at me, the invisible presence urging, haw,
do your record. I popped my phone into a deep pocket,
swaddling it in my scarf for Renaud's dampening, and pressed
myself to standing as I crept down the annex's length.
The proportions of the room scene to relax, walls angling
back into their regulation lines, the rattling of file drawers
dying away. At the far end, a security camera's green
indicated glint at ceiling height. In ordinary life, that camera
would have caught me bumbling around in the dark, panicking
under old glass, yet thinking about the corruptive feeds and
phantom jumps had already seen as suspected. The system wouldn't
log any of this is real. Before round in the corner,
I pressed my head briefly to the cold marble, as
if listening for footsteps on a floor above. The only
reply was a distant rattle, maybe an elevator shaft or
the stacks rearranging themselves. I pushed open the axis door,
now fully sallowed again where the city issued fireplucard, and
entered the familiar, sharply lit service corridor. The instant I
stepped under the furring fluorescence, the world reasserted itself with
a vengeance. The sense of pressure, eyes pressing through the
walls the building, anticipating my steps receded, replaced by the
mundane whine, industrial lemon cleaner and the low hum of
the main electrical panel. The threshold between what was and
what shouldn't be closed behind so quickly it took my breath.
Were it not for the badge in my hand and
the ache in my legs, I could have dismissed the
whole thing as a stress induced hallucination. But my own
fear lingered, My body remembered even when my mind wanted out.
I clutched the rescued objects tighter, slipped back through a
series of often traveled hallways, and paused just outside the
night supervisor's office. The clock above the door read for
at thirty six a m. Tans tracking a timeline I
could no longer vouch for is reel. I waited, breath,
caught for the night snapped back into pace in the
world to bring its converging consequences. The remainder of the
shift played out as if through glass distant and unreal.
I ran inventory, re checked the perimeter, skibbled the necessary
incident report. By the time the first slats of grey
dawn peeled back the blackout shade along the east facing windows,
the main branch had returned to its datamritual cleaner's arriving
thermostats taking over computers blinking back online. I handed off
keys to the senior guard, muttered something about bowed wiring
and lost time, and slept up before more cautions could
catch me. Sleep was pretense. The IRO was at home,
fragmented by the echo of quietly urgent voices, the memory
of warp walls, and the servanty that I hadn't escaped,
only deferred some accounting yet to come. I walked tangled
in sweat, dump sheets, mess de Lacott's badge clenched in
a fist against my chest. A phone battery drained as
files upon review, mostly static and blank video. The following night,
when I returned to punch in for another graveyard circuit,
the library greeted me with ordinary clocks, staff chatter, and
the sluttish pulse of city HVAC. But the tension never released,
and the feeling that I was being observed, scrutinized, even
had only gotten worse. I fumbled the sign and book
at the security desk, seeing my own name looped in blue.
But somehow it looked less like my handwriting than usual
imitation perfect in all but a single misformed letter. As
I lifted my pen for the night's first entry, I hesitated.
Evidently someone or something else was keeping score. No one
mentioned theannux of the blackout or the strange shift in
the buildings are mess De Lacourt's absence was more glowering
than ever. Her cubby and touched the sack of mail
at her desk, grown even duster. The senior staff, if
they noticed the strain in my movements with the new
weariness of my walk, said nothing. For a time, I
pretended I could return to the earlier, simpler rhythm rounds
lock book's triple checkinie exits dictating incidentals quietly into my phone,
But the details rang false, like an act to missing
hues in an aging script. The night no longer felt
entirely within my control. Shadows stretched longer in the stacks,
certain closets previously reliable sometimes lock type without calls or
offered upon clots of paper with no provements. Every so
often a patron's return bookoul carrier damp's lip, the ink
fresh stemmed for tomorrow. Each time I caught a with
a vehiculate de saint glue, my hand shook. I became
obsessed with small routines, checking the integrity of floor plans,
recording the number of paces between doors, cataloging away the
morning light failed to quite illuminate the stack's farthest ranges.
On what must have been the third night after I
stealed myself and pulled up my collection of evidence photos
locks a fragment of de l'acorte's list, most of it
now showed nothing but blur and artifacting names and dates
had vanished, replaced by out of focused patches or blank
static bursts. Where I had written incident stuff annex on
my phone's memo app, the line had been replaced by
a collection of unreadable symbols. Even the most basic video,
my panicy narration in a void, had degraded into long
strings of garbled sound. Sleep, once solusive, now tease me
with shapes and sounds I couldn't explain. I'd wake with
the sensation of someone standing behind me, quiet, persistent, neither
hostile nor comforting. The library secrets, once hidden in crumbling
card catalogs now buzzed at the base of my skulf,
demanding attention. The urge to press further to uncover the
final truth became inescapable. I was already part of the
ongoing pattern, as soon to be forgotten or erase name
in the running tally, But stubborn beyond reason, I resisted.
If the corridor's measured memory, I resolved to keep as
much as I could. By the fifth night, reality began
to buckle in earnest the library, that self repairing organism
of brick and recuos and ceremony was finished pretending at normalcy.
At two eleven a m. A return cart appeared in
the stacks where none should have been, three rows south
at the reference desk, wedged awkwardly at the end of
any impossible to see from either access point. It was full,
but not with books and current rotation. Instead, string tied
bundles of oolb's lead check out slips, paperback stumped with
decades old city seals, a single battled reference guide that
I recognized at once My hands tingled. It was one
of the Derais volumes from the card catalog, draw labeled
for a I hesitated, but curiosity and dried moved me closer.
The book incredibly has slipped up into its cover, black tight,
mocking it as checked out by end de Lacoud's Special Collections.
I flipped to the back the inside cover boar lines
are tiny, leopy, scrippt. If you read this, no, you
are not alone. The building forgets, but the books. Remember
The overhead light above me sputtered, going purble at the edges.
Paulways behind began to walk the straightaways, folding slightly in
the corners of my vision. Every instant begged me to
abandon the cart, to retreat to the fixed anchor points
in the building. But I couldn't leave now, not after everything.
I slipped the guide under my arm and quietly pressed
my way deeper into the stacks. Within moments, the architecture
itself began to resist me. Rounding what should have been
a brief bend near the periodicals, I ran up against
a mirrored wall, installed ware by every plan I had
ever seen. There ought to be only more shelves. My
own reflection, frail and wide, eyed stared back out, but
behind me the image wavered, seeming to stretch off toward infinity.
The effect was disorienting, a fun house trick, until I
closed my eyes and pressed forward, blind, counting paces, marttering,
coll numbers like a prayer. Books slumped on the shelves
behind me, falling with quiet authority. Somewhere in the east corridor,
a faint scuffling echoed. I stiffened another misaligned door, of
this one pained at school has green lawn out of coats,
stood cracked open two inches. Silver light pulled beneath. I
took out my phone, the weak being jittering over the carpet.
The stacks of my back scene to ripple, as if
the air itself bore tides. A cold sweat prickled over
my scalp, and I squeeze to Luckot's badge, thumbing the
dented edge until pain steaded my heartbeat. The badger surface
danced in the uneven light. I held it up to
the old green door. Weirdly, the panel swung wider, protesting
with a rusty shriek that was too sharp tube upt
to be accidental. A joft curled around my ankles. I
stepped in this new room, no longer annex, but neither
on any library plan rose two stores lyned on all sides,
with shell so blurted with paperwork. The air tasted of
dust and decades of untouched ink. A single swinging bulb
let a desk in the sunder. As the door click
closed behind me, I realized I had crossed it to
something deeper. The silence here had massed oppressive and sticky.
My own breath felt rupy and dance, as if the
darkness had drawn the air out to measure it. On
the desk, a battered box of index cards, A hand
labeled Real labeled the meeting minute sackhof Stuff GA in
nineteen eighty eight, and another badge, this one label to
be read Special Retrieval. The lionard was faded rainbow, so
like the lacourts that my knees nearly buckled. I rivaled
the index cards with desperate, trembling finger tips. Each listed
a book title, almost all unfamiliar. Dates ran backwards out
of order, nineteen eighty six, nineteen fifty, nineteen seventy four,
sometimes repeating out of sequence at the back. One card
thicker than the others read They never let anyone leave
once they know the words were printed in a contemporary hand. Nervous,
the paynes going nearly through the paper on the courage
reverse three sets of initials. Myoma is now included. My
hands shook badly as I pocketed somewhat to my left.
A chess craped the bulb stuttered. I stared between two
battered tones. As shape stood up, thin, indistinct at the edges,
tall and draped in something like scarfs. It drew the
voice and toned unmistakable. Now I choke down panic as
the figure moved into clearer view, a mess de lac ort,
yet not quite. Her eyes seemed replaced by Hollow's hair
and wild, translucent wolves. Her outline refracted the light, as
if my brain couldn't pross her edges. Nevertheless, she tried
to smile, though it faltered, drying on her lips. You
can't stay, she said softly. They watched the ones who
tried to count the doors. I told you. She extended
a hand that trembled the records. All of this were
built to keep us here, embedded, the building at its
around those who learned too much. It's its only defense.
My voice returned in shreds. How long have you? I
faltered the lackhork glanced away, tracing spirals in mid air,
long enough to know there aren'tyears here, only cycles. A
distant crash interrupted her. The room shook, shells, vibrating like
tuning forks, books top bolt, the dust rising and twisting columns.
Temperature dropped impossibly. My breath gushed in clouds. The library
was reconfiguring again. The wall seemed to breathe. We're out
of time, the blackhart said. She beckoned, rapidly, drifting past
the back of the desk, pulling me with her eyes alone.
You have one chance. Don't look for more than you
can carry. I followed, pinned by dread and a growing
sense of urgency. At the room's back, a doughypulsed in
and out of existence, appearing only when I held the
badge to the light. As I pressed forward, De Lacot
stopped blocking the threshold. If you want to survive, every
memory you keep, every piece of the pattern is a
cost most used to forget what happens if I refuse.
She looked away, the scarves trailing over her hands leg smoke.
You become part of the library. It will erase you,
as it erased the others here or elsewhere. The only
way out is not to remember. They'll let you go
if you're willing to let the troof go too. I
hesitated the urge to ask more, rising. The air tightened
round my skull between winks. De Lacorte seemed to flicker,
sometimes herself, sometimes a blank smear of scarf and chatter.
As she stepped aside, Darkness lunged to fill the opening.
I rushed through for an instant. The passage was a
seamless white void, then a plunging shoot of card, catalog drawers, shelves, ladders,
paper folding them waves. I sprinted, pushed along by momentum,
De Lacort's voice echoing, don't stop, don't count, don't look back.
Suddenly the floor vanished underfoot. Time stretched spat me out anew.
I landed hard on my hands and knees. Carpet roughly
commercial grade. I blinked up the second floor reading room,
thoughn filtered, trangled lights, lats, painting everything in a soft yellow.
Sounds of staff arriving, someone's key rein the shriek of
a custodian's cart filtered down the corridor. I staggered upright.
The evidence in my hand's badge caught. The battered guider remained,
but the phone, slippery in my grasp, flashed a battery
warning before dying utterly. With the moments, alarm shrilled to
someone else. Salvaus spotted me on the wrong side of
a staff door. I tried to explain, it's a roomful
of faces, crowded in their features, slightly dulled. Police arrived,
trailing the whiff of aftershave and thumbal printer paper. They
pelted me with questions, what happened? What did I see?
Why was I there at that ire? I tried to
unravel the story, but every attempt cuddled inside my mouth.
I pointed at my phone, insisted those evidence, insisted I'd
found a map, a box card, files that shouldn't exist.
Olvus blinked, frowning. Should I call a supervisor, he asked, Yes,
someone has to see this. I scrawled, hands trembling to
my cash of photos. Every image was a swell of
static digital snow, odd channels of red and green, obliterating
the details. My voice in playback was a slurry of feedback.
The officers exchanged glances. Maybe you should talk to some
one about stress, Miller said one with flat professional concern.
I found the map, the one I had marked with
the impossible haulwis and nfolded it on a near by desk.
Nothing made sense. Whereats I knew I had walked reconfigured themselves,
shuffling into a standard plan already present in the libraries
or into binders. No annex, no non existing corridors, no traces.
You ought to go home. The officers, clean cut and smiling,
box me in with their bodies, already writing up their report.
Before the shift ended. Alvarez called me for quiet word
in his office. He regarded me with sadness. You're a
good guard, Drew, but you look burned out. Take some time.
If anything's still wrong here, I'll see it myself. No
one else would listen. Back in my apartment, the signs amplified.
The deposit into my bank account from the city came
through two days late. I checked the library's h R roster.
My name was omitted from the schedule. For the first
time in six years, I no longer received the weekly
email listing shift rotations, hazard warnings, or protocol updates. For
a while, I convinced myself I could let it all go.
I stessed the badge, the battered book, the handful of
evidence deep in a closet box. I deleted the corrupted memos.
I stopped pressing staff about de Lacort's whereabouts. Most days
I wandered the city, sat nursing coffee in half deserted diners,
watching the backs of my hands as if their shapes
might change too. I couldn't sleep. Paranoid took root, faces
blurred around the edges, words on signs seemed to morph
when I glanced away. The urge to return. A suzzle
pulsing cold drew me each night to the library's entrance.
I stood there, watching the lights flicker through black out glass,
certainty in doubt, sharing an equal measure. Some nights my
memory twisted, as if I myself had been partially redacted.
Names from the logs floated within reach, then slipped away,
joining to Lacord read collect the others whom no one
else cared to trace. Sometimes a word forget would have
her in my mind at the moment between waking and sleep,
urging me to let go. I couldn't Each attempt to
record my story ended the same way corrupted files. My
voice gone shut with static, the device rebuting without warning.
My scribbled notes, pinned to the door of stuff beneath
the mattress, faded at the edges until their meaning became
a picky even to me. One rainy night, after too
many sleepless ones, I found myself back on these steps,
staring at the doors, unable to remember if I came
for a final answer or to be raised for good.
The urge to walk away, the warning that survival meant
forgetting read like a script behind my eyes, but the
summons was resistible. The staff inside did not know me,
or pretended not to. Each time I announced myself, the
words failed in my mouth. The badge, when shown, prompted
only bland indifference. My identity, like my story, was gently
sluiced from every system I tried to access. Days and
nights began to fuse into one, broken only by the
autent and unfamiliar footstep behind me on the street to
book with a suspiciously fresh returned slip in my mail books,
a matter of movement just beyond the sound range of
ordinary life, I resolved if I could not prove any
of it. I could at least bear a witness, even
if only to the slow and steady disappearance of myself.
But the more I watched, the more the city and
myself we wrote. All that remained was the shape of
the library against the knight sky, the certainty that I
was not alone. Some one else somewhere had already begun
repeating the cycle. On the last night, with the moon
shop over the city, I made a final trip down
the quiet, slick streets the libraries, Solbert Rising over Civic Park.
My walk was slow, my resolve nearly spent. I the
front steps. I fished out the battered badge from my
pocket and pressed it silently to the old glass, waiting
for some ghost of recognition or reprieve. Inside. Another chef
began without me, and I waited, listening until the guards
passed overhead in the distant elevator's side, taking the weight
of secrets between floors. I stepped back, knowing for the
first time at last that the building's patience is infinite
and its memory nielde. And as I turned away, the
doors behind me lot with a chime i'd never heard before.
I walked home the badge cold in my hand, the
sound of pages turning, echoing, gentle and unending behind me,
the cold of the badge seat between my fingers. All
the way home my apartment when I let myself in
fails unfamiliar. It wasn't the clutter or the I may
bit or the slow clicking radiate at this time, but
something suppler, a sensation at the door frames leaned in
at uneasy angles, and that the shadows along my hallway
culed inward, gathering at the corners. I flicked in the
kitchen lights out of habit, only half expecting them to work.
The painless drew sharp is on my knuckles, still scrape
from the night before, and I washed them in the
cleanest water I could summon, watching the faint lines of
blood swirl away. I set the badge on the counter
for a long while, I just stared at a chipped enamel,
the ink barely illegible but undeniably real, beneath my thumb.
I pushed it next to a stack of half paid
bills and a maccadon with dried coffee, just to see
if the ordinary world would absorb it as easily as
the library absorbed names. The bat held its place, stubborn,
a blue green island anchored in the sea of domestic drift.
I stripped off my uniform, shirts, slacks, socks, each heavy
with the kind of fatigue that savars sleep. In the
bathroom mirror. My face seemed off, the eyes too, shadowed,
lines under my jaw newly carved. I tested my own name,
alouda drew mill out, listening for the shape of it.
The syllables landed lifeless, unconvincing. Later it lay on the
edge of sleep, listening for the causorous returning pages. My
body ache, with the restlessness beyond exhaustion, joins prickling with
phantom memories. I pressed my palm over my chest, feeling
the thump of my own heart, cataloging it, marking evidence
that I was still, for now intact. Morning brought no relief.
I drifted through those IROs, piecing together what was required, food,
radio bills sorded and scars gutted on the floor, and
attempt shortly to to call the h R office and
ask half to shift assignments. My call was answered by
recorded loop. The kind was served for abandoned numbers, chirping
in a monotone that the staff Rosto was unavailable. My name,
I was told, was not found in any system. I
gave up after two tries. Outside the city took on
a quality of somewhat slightly post apocalytic. Pedestrian's faces were
softened at the edges, older than I remembered, and sounds
came to me just a beatly. I Walksivic Park, keeping
a library in my periphery, refusing to look directly at it,
half fearful the building would sense me watching. The buildings
dim and hard angles blinked out of sight behind afternoon rain.
Iris stretched, I dozed in a stiff bat chair, waiting
for no particular reason. I checked my phone for messages,
expecting absurdly that m mess de Laccourt would have sent
something during the gap between realities and apology, perhaps or
warning Nothing evening and did all my best intentions. I
found myself at the library steps again, and certain if
I'd walked there, or if the city simply guided me
with invisible whoops on the out of glass, traces of
the night's condensation, like eyelashes pressed to glass court the
street on sodium light. I lingered far enough from the
entrance to avoid the camera's gaze, close enough to feel
the building's breath on the back of my neck. The
staff moving inside, so many faces, modern and unfamiliar, rounded
corners in perfect silent choreography. At one point, a night
guard not much older than me stopped to ad just
a window latch. He moved so easily through its base,
gave no sign of discomfort. He looked up, as if
sensing me, frowned, and then turned away with brisk determination.
A truck rumbled past, sending a ripple of diesel exhaust
into the night. The city, for a moment was merely
a city. Again. I turned away, walked a ragged circle
through the park, all the while clutching the staff badge
between my fingers until its edge left a red groove
in my palm. Home again, I found that the objects
I rescued from the library badge, faded envelope, mutilated catalog card,
had subtly re arranged themselves. The envelope, which had been
certain was tucked beneath the stack of receipts, now intruded
from the cutler drawer. The rebatted booksham meto a more
prominent position, and a bed size shelfs spine out like
an accusation. That night, my dreams fractured, stacks of books
wabbled on endless shelves, corridors looped in on themselves, and
the echo of a woman's voice whispered order his memory,
memory is safety. I woke with my jaw locked and
the taste of meldy on my tongue. The days blurred.
My attempts to anchor myself in the ordinary emails, errands,
idle TV failed. Even the small rituals I developed as
a guard now failed to reorder my mind. Something had
followed me out, or perhaps some part of me had
stayed behind. I began the slow work of reconstructing the evidence.
The form files at first appeared hopelessly corrupted strings of
digital snow punctuary by piercing feedback wines. But when I
played one video at one third speed, pausing and advancing
frame by frame, obscure details began to emerge. The curve
of an impossible corridor, the edge of a scarf fluttering
behind a tooth thin shape, a door vanishing between one
second and the necks. The audio sometimes carried a whisper.
I convinced myself it was de Lacurde in toning. Please
do not linger the wall's close when you remember too much.
The pattern was inconsistent but undeniable. I documented my finealings, obsessively, handwriting, careful,
indulled by my grip, bullet points, diagrums of four plans,
a catalog of unexplained anomalies. My apartment walls began to
fill up with tape, maps, call numbers, cross reference, staffless,
going back decades, all spiked with cushion marks, encircled and read.
I wore the badge around my neck at night, as
if it were shield me or mark me as someone
to be left unharmed. I took it off whenever I
left the apartment. Too many memories pressed him when no
wore it outside, and I became aware of attention in
my neck since of iz waiting to judge if I
had overstepped. Sleep came only in fitful bursts, punctuated by
waking with a sharp certainty that some one else was present,
just out of sight, moving across the threshold between living
space and memory. I waited for an intrusion, but none
ever came, only the subtle rearrangement of the objects, the
envelope drifting to the table's edge, the catalog card sliding
from the fridge to between the catch cushions. The battered
book opened to a fresh page each morning. One afternoon,
the door bell rang. No one stood outside. Only a
battered inter office envelope sat at my feet, addressed two
security returned arcoves inside a single sheet, lines blacked out
at the phrase of forgotten by design stamp repeatedly along
the bottom margin. The implication was clear and inscrutable. Something
was urging me not to resume what had started, or
perhaps urging me precisely to do so. The pattern as
much as summons as a warning. That night, the compulsion
overtook rush. Now. I searched my apartment for every scrap
of evidence that tied me back to the sires in
the library's shifting corridors. Packing the badge, a catalogs lap,
the batter book into a small backpack. I left my
phone behind, fearing its unreliability more than its loss. Outside,
the city was thick with fog. Headlights wheeled and slow.
Parabolus threw the gloom. I walked with the steadiness of
some one rehearsing a skirt. Civic plausare broad main steps,
soft gold and hailo leaking from secuity to lights overhead.
I pressed my palm flat to the bronze plaquet the vestibule.
The chill, familiar and almost pleasant, grounded me. The building
received me without produced ned staff didn't glance up. I
found myself ghosting through familiar pass reeling off coal numbers
beneath my breath, navigating by memory and the sticky cues
of fear. At the reference desk, no sign of am
to lack court, her cuby, overrun by other people's papers,
in a hollow ring where her phone had once sat.
I stole away to the stacks, guided not by reason
but that the strange density in the air, the thickening
of time as the route bent unfolded. There about the
edge of the old blueprints, contradictions, in the gap between
the fiction shells and local history, I found the first anomaly.
A set of carts, each bearing a mix of out
of print books and misfeld staff loog ledgers, stood nose
to tail, clearly blocking the normal passages between aisles. Each
boar's slip inscribed to be weeded, but the stamps didn't
match the current dear. As I examined them. A hush fell.
A sense of being watched returned stronger, this time pressing
until my scalp tingled and down my neck ran a
liquortill I turned. The air behind me was split by
a flickering and belike the stacks overhead was dying filaments
popping and steady rhythmic intervals. Something moved at the periphery, indistinct,
not a shadow, exact as shadows, I realized, had rules.
What I was seeing was a displacement, as if the
aisles themselves thin at soden angles, letting other vistas puk through.
I caught glimpses of old uniforms, arms clutching gray file boxes,
forms crossing impossibly into an out of walls. I forced
myself forward, step by deliberate step. Catalog slip raised like
a charm, the sense of being heard. It grew. The
shelves rearranged the passage, narrowing and then splitting, until once
again I was channeled toward the old dead end corridor
access panel, locked but now vibrating, humming faintly. I knew
the pattern now and placed a badge to the sea,
the wall side swinging inward revealing not the staircase but
a new passage, slick with fluorescent wash. The corridor's angles
bent in ways that made walking straight a challenge, as
if someone had stretched the building between two eprochs. There
was a wall of glass, behind which boxes of reel
to real tip bubbed and velt drafts, their labels peeling
in endless calendar cycles, voices that can beyond the glass,
indistinct conversations, arguments, laughter, weeping, all in urgent half turns,
as if the real world pressed and only occasionally to
be subscemed again by the undertow of the archive. I
pressed closer, tracing names in the glass to lack or red.
Others whose faces I could barely recall. My own name
shimmered into view briefly, then faded as a new layer
of condensations wept across a sharp rhythm built footsteps louder,
approaching from opposite ends of the hallway. I glanced back,
one passage, now ren straight, the other curved away in
a slow spiral. The lights had a flickered in time
with the footsteps, and suddenly the forms appeared, staff in
varying uniforms of the library's lawn history, blank faced and
moving with a single inexorable purpose. The features slid out
of focus as they neared, like portraits repented, every decade,
endeled by time, until only the suggestion of identity remained.
The leaf figure tall ma'am, with hair clipped short, his
badge denoting archives retrieval, held a clipboard and moved with
geometric precision. He paused in front of me, back so soon,
he said, the words flattened by a thousand repetitions. I
steadied myself, tugged at the badge around my neck. I
want to know the truth, he smiled, an organizational smile,
warm enough to almost feel genuine truth is in part
of circulation only record? Are you submitting or retrieving? I
need to see Ms de la Court, I said, my
voice stuck, vowels hitching in my throat. You're nearly you
for processing, he replied, quietly, perusing his clipboard as if
noting down a withdrawal. The echo of a rubber stamp,
phantom but resounding, landed between us. She's further in. If
you go on, you go alone, I hesitated, looking behind.
The door was gone, now replaced by shelving, wallpress, clothes, books, packs,
sore tightly. They may as well have been bricks. My
choice had already been made. In the act of returning,
I stepped forward toward the narrowing spiral, feeling each step
wedge a little more of myself into the record that
the library seemed so keen to keep. The arcout's heart
was impossibly cold. Shelves angled downward the wall, closing in
the air, sharp with the scent of ozone, and ancient
clue paper records hung from the ceiling at odd angles,
curling like dead leaves. Among them was a plack out
hand lettered, edged with wax, feding only nanes count there
in a trough, half fled by a knuckle of yellow light,
a mess to luck what waited She was faded, more
outlined than person. But when she saw me, she smiled
a melancholy gesture, waited with all the sorrow of long
stored resignation. Around her stood a semi circle of staff,
the vanish, the forgotten, each where badges with their names
just visible, just on the edge of legibility. My own
badge grew heavy as I in, and I found I
could not raise my chin to meet her gaze. She
beckoned me with a trembling hand, he returned, I hope
to her, voice caught in her hollow throat. I warned you.
I couldn't let it go, I said, horse, I needy.
I didn't know what I needed. Forgiveness, release the admission
of defeat. She nodded, her hair trailing in currents. Only
she could feel. That's the cost you're nearly written in now.
We don't leave, not fully. Our stores keep the balance
memory from memory, absence for absence. The library must keep secrets.
Those who refuse to forget are absorbed. This circle tightened
every staff member's features, flickering and tethered from their own histories.
The walls hummed, the books on closest shells whispered, their spines,
warping to accommodate new enters. De Lacourt reached from my
shoulder instead of shell. This time her touch brought weightlessness,
a temporary reprieve from gravity, a sense of being between
shells and outside time. There's one last exit, she said quietly.
It will open only if you let go leave your
memory here, as all who survived before did. The forgetting
is mercy, not a rasure. And if I can't, I said,
mouth dry, hard, terror, in between terror and the egg
of wanting to know. She looked full at me, her
gaze both gentle and implackable. You become part of us,
another page, another watcher in the stacks. I thought of
the catalog, the ledges, the unexplained lapses, the hint of
faces at the edge of every monitoring screen. I thought
of the urge to bear witness of the promise I
had made, if not allowed then silently to remember. I
thought of the way of forgetting, of the comfort of
not knowing. As the decision hung, that machinery wall, shifting,
books slamming on there own, a corps badger's glinting in
the false dawn, rumbled to a final pitch. The exit
was there, a perfect alignment of corridors and doors, sun
glinting beyond. To take it would be to forget, to
be remade, so that safety could return the burden of knowledge.
Yet at last, a ripple ran through the circle of
vanished staff, each mile, briefly a benediction or warning. Each
wore the same faint white fade at their shoulders. I
reached for the open exit. The light on my badge fluckered,
receding at my approach, My memory began sifting images, names,
the labyrinth of ledger and shell fleeching away, replaced by
a blank coal clarity. The burden dropped from my chest,
breath returned full, uneasy. The circle parted, and I slipped
through the libraries, hush closing behind me, behind the doors,
folded in seamless, a wall again, no evidence of passage.
Back in daylight outside the library's walls, the memories of
that night retreated so quickly that the ache of wanting
to remember vanish, replaced by a glassy gentleness. I walked
home with pockets empty, hands, clean the world and open surface,
with no cracks, no mysteries. Some part of me recognized
fatally that I had lost something invaluable, but the shape
of the laws eluded me, weightless when graspable. From inside
the library, the sound of pages turning persisted, slow and deliberate,
marking new entries, closing old ones, a record capped, a
secret sealed, always waiting for the next curious silhout, stepping
into darkness. And that is the end. Thank you for listening,
and I will see you in the next one.