Speaker 1: The first words I'm recording are for whoever if any
one finds this, I don't have one. Some One or
something is moving through the northern stacks outside the archive.
I lock the door behind me, slip one of the
old microphone cabinets across it, but the metal scray beckered
far too loud. This room is supposed to be sandproof,
supposed to be a hundred feet from any public entrance,
buried under tons of stone and forgotten paper. Right now
it feels like a jewelry box that might nap open
at any second, no matter how tightly I gret the
key I must bring. Not from paranoia, I wish it
were only that, but because every step I took to
get here round back at me lay it on itself.
The silence isn't safe. It predatory alert for any small trespass.
One fluorescent fixture is humming erratically above the catalog machine,
skipping in and out. Sometimes it catches on ifl like.
It'll go out for seconds at a time, then surge back,
like the shadows andselves are fiddling with the current. If
you breathe deeply here, the place is thick with the
smell of old blue and pulpink, but beneath the mustas
and iron tang a shoppage I never noticed in daylight.
The papers are greasy to the touch. The deeper I get,
the more it feels like the air has built up
its own sediment, left behind by every last book that's
died on thee shells. None of this mattered thirty minutes ago.
Then in the oldest manuscript drawer I found the card.
It battered really thinner than it should be, with the
color bloed out all the way to a pale, potty shade.
The corners have taken on a waxy softness from too
many hands. No recent cards should look like this. The
date stamped at the bottom, though Crouch is in crespread
ink last Friday, less than a week ago, around two
thirty a m. The stamp lines are perfectly forestened to
microscopically a line and touched by time. The patron's name
is in blocks grouped blocked around the edges Rachel Avery.
That's not what's wrong, though the library database lists her
status is deceased. The record is old flagged. Do not
circulate in the system with an incident marker nineteen eighty eight.
I didn't know about her until to night. But her
card's fresh, as if she'd only just checked out her
last book three decades gone. But stamped is present all
the same. I stared for a minute, thinking there had
to be an air, But the thermal slip attached light
is an eyelash, barely clipped as printed with to day's
date and my own staff tag. My thumb shakes as
I run it across a corner. There's a blot there,
A faint oily fingerprint smeared into the word avery. Not
my print. I double checked. It doesn't match the pad
of my nail or the walls of my own thumb.
I worked it on my pants, held it to the
dying ceiling light, but it doesn't fade. I cross reference
to the stamp with the one in the return tray.
The ribbon is dry, but the numbers match perfectly. The
time stamp, the ink pressure, the micro defect in the
fond extrusion there are match. The receipt machine beeps if
you try to override the system. No one's tacked it.
I'd see the ordit log trip, except it can't get
into Tonight's lock. It locks me out each time I
try from somewhere on the other side of the fire door.
I hear a scraping, like books being tugged awkwardly off
their shelves, spines dragging against the shelf. Slip. It's not
an animal, it's too methodical. A rush of three volumes
in sequence, and then nothing. Oh, maybe someone's setting a
trap to draw me out, stacking books as noise until
I lose track of place and time. The last thing
I can think to do is keep speaking. If nothing else,
maybe my voice will echo further than my body does.
If you find this tape. No, someone or something was
here with me. The doors are locked. Only my card
and richell averies should have opened them, except one of
us is dead. Oh, we're both here now in some way.
The scraping start again, closer. At this time, I have
to stop. When I first took the job at went
Up Memorial Library, I imagined had finally found what I wanted,
a santury of order. I was thirty two, less new
to the city, and desperate to ground myself somewhere solid.
Most of my adult life, i'd led a string of
half liviers, promising myself that the next place would be
the right fit. The next sorting system the perfect match
for my clamoring thoughts. The library, it's name more reminiscent
of a mausoleum than of any modern district, sat clouded
in the city's oldest administrative quarta, a block of blood
edges in ancestor, when most buildings angled for attention with
glass or neon, the wind Up wrapped itself in censures
of dark granite entrance, flanked by tarnished bronze lions and
white quartz, stepped worn down into soft dish ships by
two hundred years of careful trampling. On my first official tour,
a trailed behind mister Webber, whose shuffle reminded me of
an absent minded carriage driver, his attention constantly veering off
toward and sinned hazards. Webber was kind in a skittish way,
though he dispensed vice on a kind of roulette. This
wing find that one forbidden for no reason. He'd name
the old files are best left to gather dust. He'd murmur,
finger tips flicking as though chasing often invisible nap. Whenever
a path threatened to skirt the far East corridor. His
voice dropped so low it forced me to lean in.
On my first day running the return's cage. He left
me with a single cryptic warning. If you hear humming
after the clocks chime one, just make sure you are
not the sauce. I laughed, assuming I'd misheard, but the
look on his face gave me pause. Later he apologized,
said new cataloge is often felt spouted until they learned
the pipes and the lights in the ire. I told
myself then that I'd remember the lesson. Every old institution
grows its own erbo myths, my schedule, Sin said, into
a liturgy of small pleasures. I'd arrive an ire before
opening key and through the staff door, and take deliberate
pride in my archive kingdom, as I joke to Ava,
the Knight Janitor, with her wild, spicy stores and uncanny neck,
for appearing wherever my flashlight flackered. Sometimes she'd bring a
thermos and sit in the stairwell as our catalog damaged returns.
I like the hum of her presence, even if her
anecdot's veered strange. The clocks move differently down here, she'd say,
wiping at pins mudg as on her uniform old walls.
Get hungry for secrets hollow, they say. She'd grin at me,
eyes crinkling, but if my face turned too serious, she'd
glance away and pretend to yawn. I chalked her comments up.
The habit Alva was practical, gentle with lost things. Still,
she hated the tunnels that snake behind the stacks near
the basement. Claim they e could roam, the sound bouncing
back not quite when you expected it. By midweek, I'd
sorted hundreds of returns, though battered Barcoid's ticking a law
in the conveyor belt, each one a minor victory, another
tiny thread woven back into the library's great tapestry my realm.
I gained a peculiar satisfaction in knowing exactly where books belonged,
Tracing each unique swaja scratched to its lightest borrower, dating
the catalog until its digital skin gleamed with completeness. At midday,
the library radiated its own gravity, sun filtered reluctantly through
grimy windows in the new wing, picking up the dust
and highlighting the stark divide. One side polished the other,
stubbornly clinging to its previous century. If Frieda's cared, they said, nothing.
Some loved the alcoves above the marble rottenda, labyrinthine lined
with protruding bricks barely supporting their uneven shelves. I loved
it too, loved watching the afternoon light tangle itself in
the blueprints of the past. From time to time, oddities
made me pause the way some binding sweated stickly as
a feat seat from within above, marked on shelf by
the system, yet missing from its aisle for days, only
to reappear in the wrong way without being checked out.
Minor date errors, I told myself, system migrations or careless patrons.
A pigeon database was a mess of half closed user cards,
strange flagged incidents, and duplicated names. I spent tires merging nicknames,
concern in variants, scrubbing the record stirshine. Occasionally, as I
worked late, I heard laughter slip out from between them stacks,
never raucous, always a single sharp giggle or distant snaker,
tanned perfectly to the last sweep of the iron hand.
Weber dismissed these as pied. Settling over would raise her eyebrows,
then changed the subject, humming half remember tunes that seemed
to fill the void. The laughter left behind. Yet in
those first weeks, the world still felt rational. The soothing
shuffle of index cards, the metallic time of microfilm spools,
the crinkle of tissue paper book jackets. Under myth I'm
also ordinary, so perfectly within my power to name maintain
in the heart of the archive, the familiar texture of
paper and pays seemed eternal. I thought then that order
was the natural state of things, waiting only for a
diligent archivists to uncover it. That sense held me safe,
even when sensible caution would have told me to look
closer at the stains nobody could clean from the cellar
ledger room, or the way my own reshelving cut rolled
a little further into the dark each night before I
locked up. After every closing, I walked the perimeter, checking doors,
riding crooked frames, breathing in the faint, acidic comfort of
books as they sighed into stillness. If something more a
lurk behind those silent rose, I never let myself notice.
Not then. It was on a Thursday, nearing the end
of my month long probation, that I decided to tackle
the East Wing arcove. It was a project overdue by years.
If the low book was telling the truth. The air
in that corner smelled layered old dust, rain that never
quite left, mingled with metallic kints of rotting iron. Most
staff avoided it, but I was proud of my tenacity.
If a shelf baked resorting at minnight, I was the
one to field de call. The room was a knoll
of old tables and bulky returns carts, many piled with
books whose due dates belonged to an erarotary phones and
greening signatures. As I rolled the first car decide, I
noticed something peculiar pocket sized stack of recent returns, all
stamped at two thirteen a m. A time of night
the system was meant to be locked and stuff strictly offshift.
It was the Friday anomaly, as my brain named it.
Four volumes, one poetry, one memoir, one local sens's record,
and a brittle dog eared copy of Shirley Jackson, all
logged in on time by the machines un forgiven timestamp.
Each book's return was paired with a patron coat and
nested string of numbers left over from the library's first
digitization project. But poke through I saw something more. Nearly
all of the patron I d were tagged as inactive.
I retired all for three deceased. I recognized Rachel Avery's
name first cataloged is dead more than thirty years ago.
But there were two of those William H. Dorset d.
Nineteen seventy two and see how Huxley file flagged for
account Halt nineteen sixty Ford the newest of the returns,
though at a post attacked in its cover, carefully hand written,
it read only stack three B. She never left. The
sentence was underlined twice. There was no sign of the
author's name, just to read as connected lines scribbled across
the page margin. I set the notice eye. Feeling a
nagging prickle beneath my ribs, I decided the simplest dancer
was some boredic staff, a plain, a long prank, or
a chronically careless clock refusing to close out our dated files.
Yet when I checked against my own loggins, I found
a disturbing pattern. Every Friday for the last three months,
the set of books had been registered at precisely two
thirteen a m all to the same silent Obb's lead accounts.
No new books began at that time. Every transaction involved
a return, never a checkout, and always the name Avery
appeared somewhere in ledger, drifting like a watermark behind the text,
the phrase and the post. It gnawed at me. She
never left who I thought of first of Rachel, but
then recalled up Pagean's rarely if ever lingered this later fifield.
The east wing was supposedly used for us at storage
or emergency drills. It's only functioning lies dewy rigged from
a forgotten brake panel. There had been talk of closing
off the area for repairs after a pipe burst year's back,
but the city never funded. That afternoon, I approached ofv A,
hoping for a dose of perspective. I found her by
the North's service elevator, jobbling her supply caddy with a
stack of worn out door nuts Stack three B. She
repeated the words brittle in her mouth. That's an old part.
I thought it was woald off for what flooding or something?
I nodded. But there are logs, book returns, odd time stamps,
a couple names, keep hopping up names not supposed to
be current. Her hand hovered over the elevated button, and
the bones in her wrist flex under thinskin for a moment,
all her breezy, she have seemed to wane. I used
to clean that area years ago, she said, almost too softly.
Doors back there, germ on their own shells, move, mobs,
get stuck behind things. She shook herself, forced to laugh.
But it's useless now. Nobody should be shelving that deep anymore.
I pressed her lightly about the note, but she excused herself,
muttering about a full checklist to finish before her ship ended. Later,
in Webber's office, I raised the subject again, masking my
growing paranoia as idle curiosity about old library logistics. He
blinked rapidly, the fine white hair at his temple's prickling uprate.
Some ledges exist to keep memories, he said, fiddling with
a cracked pen lid. Others exist to bury them. Don't
go poking in the oldest ones. Ellen, let the secrets keep.
I nodded, but didn't promise the phrase. She never left.
Flooped to my head, still unsettled. I spent that evening
retracing every Friday Night's stamp in the digital lock. The
more I searched, the deeper the patter ran. The Friday returned,
stretched all the way back to the system's first barcode
migration in nineteen eighty six. Prior to that, in scattered ledges,
I found closed initials and lines through which Rachel Avery's
name kept surf saying like a splinter court. In the
heel of the archives men, several entries were missing, whole
page's blank columns race or inked over. At the time,
I assumed water damage or clerical laziness, but something felt
too methodical about the gaps. Certain nights, the security systems
video feed was listed as a corrupted or not found.
Entire VHS drawers were missing, replaced by handrid and memos
citing system upgrades. On the nights when impossible checkout occurred,
the system always showed a loss of power for at
least twenty minutes, then snapped back to life when the
clock exactly were set to two thirteen a m. Working
late became my habit. Webber signed off after six each night,
leaving me with the duplicate key in vague remind us
to a lock up tight. I buried myself in the logs,
pulling faded blueprints from the archives off limits sub basement
Bello plans mapped out the east wing with a maze
of rooms, reading corners, partial galleries, a locked founder study,
and several phases of closed stacks that on all modern
prints simply weren't there. Sections now showed a solid plaster
allegedly covered over during the nineteen sixty seven renovations. I
read these plans as if they might explain the library's living,
shifting shape. I became convinced that entire rooms had vanished,
their doors and contents subsumed behind falls walls. Several referenced
diagrams suggested fence and corridors that if Friol should have
let up behind the book lift in the westock have
a space now felled with low metal shelves, and reference
encyclopedias that nobody bothered to touch. My fascination crossed out
after IROs using my stuff access, I trailed the pattern
of the phantom checking times two thirteen a m. Every Friday.
One night, just before three, with my hot pounding in
my ears, I re endered the restricted stacks under the
guise of tracking a missing cereal. The corridor seemed different
at night. I tried mapping my route using colored tape
on the corners, but each time I circled back to
my starting point, my tape was missing or replaced with
a different color. On my third circuit, I noticed a
shelf of Friends of the Library cookbooks out of place,
sitting near the biography section where the blueprints suggested a
concealed door should be. That same night, while reviewing feeds
on the archavel's security monitor, one of a quiver of
near obsolete, green tinted screens, I caught movement in which
should have been a dead corridor. A figure shoulders hunched
too still, face obscured by a low tilt, and Profoks
carried anomo of books through a staff to all that,
according to every physical check, was completely blocked off on
both sides by shelves and loose stone. The monitor flickered again, scrambled,
and that person banished. Just as the minute counter snapped
to two footeen a m I checked a card transaction lock,
a book registered as returned against Avery's code, exactly when
the footage blurred. Sleep escaped me entirely. I began recording
regular memos, hoping to organize my thoughts before I unraveled.
The act of speaking them out granted me at first,
but as knights bled together my own voice in the
emptiness seen the poor substitute for certainty. Every morning, tiny
traces of Knight persisted, a cold sweat, phantom footsteps sitched
with echoes that wouldn't stop ringing. The library responded as
if testing my resolve. Someone rearranged the books on my
rousheving cat while I stepped away for a cup of tea.
The spines awkwardly mashed together spelled out rooms, change people too,
an accident a board page, except only two people were
left in the building that night, myself and Nova his
Warshi'd been fixing a leak in the supply closet. Once
the child's LI Library card fell from a file I
was searching. It bore Avery's block printed name, but the
front was scraped over with dozens of walled faint mark's
layer on layer of finger prints, all pressed into the cart,
as if the surface had been handled over and over
by the same relentless hand. Paranoi made me stronger, clearer.
I started at hunting obsessively for the rules underpinning the pattern.
When I flicked through the digital checkout log for Friday nights,
I saw in brutal detail how stretching back decades the
same handful of retired names kept surfacing at impossible iOS.
Sometimes a gap of a few months pass with no activity,
Then multiple returns would queue, all at once, always their
time stump, perfectly aligned to a hidden minute, never a
second before or after. By now it was obvious reach
ol Avery wasn't the only impossible borer. Files expanded. William
Dassett's name appeared every handful of years, always on a
battered copy of a nineteen sixty city directory. See Il
Huxley returned in spirits flagging books long since taken out
of rotation. Growing desperate, I double checked security logs for
those nights. They'd all been marked corrupted by whom I
couldn't learn. When Floe dug the issue for Weber, he
shouked old systems full of ghosts. We upgrade when we can.
He brushed aside my suggestion of contacting I t muttering
again about all business and funding woes. That week, I
borrowed master key under the pretense of surveying the West
Wing archives for Mold. At midnight flashlight grips so tidy
my pomiced, I traced a routed mapped where forgotten blueprint
show days stack tree beet they shouldn't exist. Corridors twisted
as I walked, seeming to lengthen then double back. Signs
pointed in circles. Once rounding a wide pillar, I found
myself facing the same reference desk could passed five minutes before.
At the pencils atop it rearranged in star shaped that
I hadn't left the men. Every so often I heard
a faint shuffling, pages flapping, then a lower metallic scrape,
as if someone moved carts just out aside. I was
sure that the stacks were empty, Yet the ethic, and
with the sense of presents just behind the next corner,
never quite letting me catch my breath or glimpse the source,
sleep vanished entirely. Members became frantic. Record after record muttered
into my phone. When the holes were empty, my mind,
once sharp, began to fray, every routurn, every stump slip,
every oddic glitch, feeding into my annoying conviction at the
library was more alive than dead. The Friday after I
found the note about Stack three B, I felt certain
it was not legend, something where someone looked beyond a boundary.
Only a few staffed aared approach, I stopped just short
of losing myself in paranoia. The next clue came from
a deep dive into the oldest catalog metadata digital fossil record,
clinging to the styles and quirks of clocks long gone.
The entries were phantom locations aligned with the set of invisible,
error prone markers in the database. Rooms listed under three
B founders reading nook or secondary gallery with fizzle out
if you tried to call them up for mapping. All
that remained was a cruey looped, tasky strain room not found.
A week later, the dam broke. I'd returned one last time.
I told myself to see if I could trace the
actual mechanism that erased rooms and people alike. It began
with a clue almost too obvious, a misshell fiction title
stamped as returned not just to day, but according to
the lock, on dozens of different dates, all in Avery's hand.
I spent an iro trace in call numbers, finding dead ends.
Seal of closets and dry wall were wining and doough
should have been near the back of the east wing
between a pair of fic encyclopedia as welded together as
a camouflage. I tugged at what I hoped was an
aunncho shelf. The wall clicked to the soft scrape i'd
come to dread. The shelf pivot it swinging outward on
hidden rollows. I'd have sworn one there a moment before.
Behind it yawned a slender doorway, nearly invisible in the dark.
I switched on my phone's flashlight and stepped inside. The
space was minne, a single bowl, still faintly glowing above
the thread birst study carol, surrounded by a ring of
old appointment pinned wise shaped to cock board. Someone had
left a battered pack of mints and a sheaf of
yellowed notebook paper in the desk. The air was thick, chemical,
as if time itself lingered here, viscous and inescapable. The
desk drawers were filled with personal effects, a fountain pen,
a student ideasue to Rachel Avery Exploration nineteen eighty nine,
several index cards and three different hands, one in large
blocking letters, spelled my own log in initial z M
C beside Avery's, as though the two of us had
been processed in the same returns for years. The library
check and slept bore the current day and my staff.
I d printed in a machine puffect strip hinned to
the corkboard beside the desk, a reading list to columns
and symbols. I didn't recognize page numbers, arcs, intersecting lines
with crypto caros and coded dates most Jude, years after
Avery's recorded death. One entry written shakily read, if you
find this, you are already keeping her place. Scattered receipts were
stamped and counter stamped Avery, replacing my initials on half,
as if someone had forged both our hands. Pocketing the
reading list, I turned to leave, but the shelf no
longer opened behind me. Where I'd entered was now a
wall of dark paneling with only a small latch, which
clicked uselessly in my grasp. Panick scratched at my throat.
For a moment, I considered screaming. Then I remembered the
insulation of the stacks, the way sounds seemed to absorb
broader than travel, Adrenaline rising, I ran my hands over
the hidden wall, searching for a seam. I'll over anything.
None revealed themselves. The desk lamp flickered, casting an uneven
egg shaped pool of light in the reading list, the
old staff badge, the codenobic, with its unreadable lists of
names and dates, several marked with the crude dex une,
matching today's patrons. A minute passed beneath the carol, I
found a bundle of loose leaf echoes, bound with faded tape.
They were internal reviewed notes, description of a ghosted returned,
recitations of how to recognize stamp errors, strange directives for
staff to ignore self resolving anomalies. I realized, shivering, that
Avery had been here, not just a memory, but a
clok like me, processing not books but ghap's absences. Some one,
I thought wildly, was updating her file with new returns.
Even now, in some columns, my staff initials appeared matched
to borrow codes, as though my hand itself had stumped
the night's transactions. Behind my head, the es seemed to ripple. Footsteps,
one set, then two, shudder down the corridor. Outside the
sealed door. The ear brightoned mechanical leaped in my chest.
I pressed my ear to the thin wood, but the
patter made little sense, slower, then rapid, then crawling away.
Once a faint voic hummed a note that lingered and
twisted into silence. With the reading list and records in hand,
I sunk on to the Carol's battered chair, shaking. Sir
Hard my Tea chatted. I realized, with sharpsik certainty that
the wayne had vanished. Rooms changed people too. The library,
I thought was never trusually mapped. I drew in a
thin breath of air, making myself examine the notes left
in the drawer. There were references in code of column
headings for a keeper's illustrations of a circle with intersecting
arrows and an underlying note repeating erasures in sure system
health do not question. Next to it a faded instruction sheet.
How to force a return through the system if a
patron couldn't be found. One ledger described the diversion process,
how only the internal review group could issue strike through,
removing a patron from public view and presumably from active memory.
The names of the reviews weren't listed, only brief colored
phrases and marks. Never a person, always a set of
initials echoed through the records. I sat very still outside.
Those same footsteps returned slower now. I slipped by phone
load to the floor, activating its audio recording app. The
microphone humms, then picked up muffled voices, clipped almost digitized
by age. The archive is still hungry. She's lasted longer
than the last one. At least they always try to
map a way out. It never works. How many left,
it doesn't matter. If the ledge is clean, we close
the loop, and when she is gone, rooms change people too.
My heart stuttered. Whoever they were reviewers keeper's ghosts? They
were closing in. I scrolled a shaky note, if I
don't return, check Avery's files. Delivered this to a web
but con sealed the envelope, mocking it with an emergency
stamp from the carrol drawer. The footsteps faded, their echoes
lingering like stains in the dark. The reading list to
departure map may be glowed faintly under the flickering light.
I lifted my phone recorded my voice once more, flat
with exhaustion. If you find this memmo, I may be
part of the system. By now, rooms change and people
due to Did anyone escape before me? I tucked the
envelope into the corner of the carrol, praying the library
would not erase all trace. Then I lapsed into silence.
The faint hum of voices and books closing in the patterns,
and the shells rearranging behind my back. I drew my
feet up on the batter chair. Niakop's rising tight under
my chair, and the muffled scrape of footsteps now a
recurring pulse outside my prison. There was no clock in
the carrol. I tried counting Beth's vetting, myself sink into
the tatter Upholsteres chemical stinc just to anchor something real.
The oppressed clothes wolf thick, and so with mildew, my
brains crumbling, picked out the little dramas littering the desk.
A snap pencil Avery's i d card, a single step
of a waxy lipsic crolling in a pengroove, as if
it had never been touched, and she left it behind.
I unfolded her reading liss again, picking apart each symbol.
There were arcs with double slashes, maybe ruts, in page
numbers written in pairs. One column alternated between to day's
date and several near future fridays, as though time itself
was being tallowed up for return. In the margin, a
circling arrow held my own initial stamp once then except
then rewritten, almost as if before i'd found this place.
Someone already knew I would. A pencil triangle pointed at
the phrase if lost, repeat once, then seek the salad shelf.
I traced the carol's surface for clues. The desk draw
glided out, reluctantly, bumping some invisible catch inside a library
gavel stamped with the Cities insignia, and beneath it a
packet of yellow in cards, some bearing just faint rectangles
of araistic A glue, others with Avery's looping print, or
impossibly my own recent handwriting letters, formed exactly as I wrote,
mighty in the morning returns. The room's boundaries pulsed. I
pressed harder at the wall where I had entered, feeling
not plaster but layer of paper, cold, lumpy, irregular against
my knuckles. It wrasped, like the skin of a century's
old book. The shells had shifted. I recognized none of
the spines visible from the carrol. Instead, a series of
door was now branched into darkness at odd angles, Their
fresholds roomed with pencil cold numbers and half raised initials.
Adrenaline returned sharper. Now. I snapped my prone's flashlight on
and placed a battered reading list in my pocket. If
Avery left hints, maybe she charted a rout out, or
at least a trail worth following the cow. Single wheat
bulb flickered overhead, then blinked out, abruptly, pitching the room
into a navy gloom, broken only by my weak led
my bred double pulse kicking hard against my throat. I
stood an inch toward the rightmo's door, kerefro not to
lose my place. With the heavy packet of evidence tupped
under my arm. At the threshold, I paused listening. The
outer footsteps had stopped. A new sound crept in the
faint siseration of pages rough in somewhere nearby a compress
papery's eye, like someone methodically turning one old folio after another.
I reached for the door knob, cold and slippery. As
I twisted it, my fingers caught a splinter chip in
the brass, and were as pressed into the grind, caught
the edge of my attention, returning complete filat risk. I
should have stepped back, retreated, but the air behind me
thick and amberbly, as if verging me onward rather than
aw The door creaked softly as it opened, revealing a
corridor that didn't match any odmapped. The stacks here re
arranged themselves in hearing bone chevrons. Books snuggled three deep
in cubby holes along the floor. The carpets squelched under foot,
sticky as if from ancients built glue or ink. Flickering
egged sign pulse weakly. Far ahead above it, a discarded
fire alarm plate hung askew, and a single piece of
book tape fluttered in the artificial breeze. The reading this
triangle arrows seemed to indicate the throat left turn, so
I ushed forward, as raking for Indeck's marks or carved initials,
anything to break out the anonymous sness. The corridor bent
took two hard turns. A half secured panel of dry
well jutted out in the gloom. I skirted it, holding
my breath at the sensation that the very walls leaned inward,
breathing bove forest and bulbs in time with the flickering
exit signed a slow a Hithwick Morse two pattern to
be random. Midway down, a pair of batterts sneak azole
canvas one brandless peeped up from behind a rotating card
of microfilm reels. My chest locked, hot battering into my ribs.
I opened my mouth to call out, but nothing escape
but air edging closer. I nudged the cup of matto.
The shoes were empty, their towns thrust forward, a glads
frayed as if abandoned midstep. Next to them, a library
card Reachel Avery's Again, or a ghosts of It floated,
puddled in a shadow, half embedded in gummy dust. I
crutched and picked it up. This one cold slick, its reverse.
I'd read Keeper's Race, but Reader's Restore. A scraping sound
bloomed behind me, a wire basket being wheeled a limestone.
I whirled, clutching the card and found only darkness pulsing
the corridor behind me. Subtly different to me, bend a
missing shelf, Their rooms change people. Two frays took on
a shape beneath the skin of the maize, alive and mutual.
Pushing ahead, I found myself at a banking of catalog drawers,
each handle labeled with a montagne. My fingers drifted along them.
September nineteen eighty eight Jean two thousand three February nineteen
seventy two. One drawer resisted. I braced u palm against
the old oak and tugged hard. The inside held not
paper slips, but dozens of pocket sized photographs, most black
and white faces blurred if features worn away by time,
except in the lower right corner, where someone huding my
own initials, and then beneath that the looping black letters
Avery a Clada interrupted my stare down the corridor. A
new edge of yellow light appeared, the kind that came
from staff offices, florestened insire shadows moved against it too,
maybe three shapes and rapid furtive motion. I held my
breath and pressed back behind the open drawer, heart leaping voses,
rose cliff fragments. She won't last, not at this threshold.
Who were late rikers will slip. We have to mark her.
Avery's case was different, exception spiral. My hands trembled through
the gap in the drawer. I spotted staff badge, a
crisp new card and boss with my name dropped among
the photos, as if I'd left it the months before.
An icicle of fear splintered in my chest. I already
mapped this route, failed return again. The voices receated. I
pocketed the badge and pressed further into the stacks, fingers
white against the spines. Walls now pulsed out words, then in,
as though drawing their next breath. I pressed against a recess,
forcing myself not to close my eyes. A faint giggle
wound its way through the stack, sauvas maybe, or a
memory of her voice trailing off into threaded, metallic groan
that sounded like a shelf shifting beneath the bearable way
Above me, something stirred, a flotto like pages ruffling overhead.
With now're left to go, I flattened the reading Less
against my chest, whispering too it as if it could
lead me free, hoping against hope that somewhere some eggs
It waited still at the words from the post. It
echered louder than any footstep. She never left. I wondered
how either she now caught with unchanging walls, my own initials,
the noose ghost. The light stammered overhead, and dark closed
and again, so absolute I could almost smell its hunger.
I moved through the new corridor, with the Readingless pressed
flat in my palm, each step giving beneath my weight
in that slow sinking way of old institutional carpet. The
next turn brought me into a vault shaped disclosure, spines
bowing over my head, the air denser than ever On instinct,
I ducked shoulders, hunching, even though nothing brushed my hair.
The walls pressed forward so close that I recognized individual
with spits of paper, torn corners, initials, and graphite. A
drip of something like candle wax crusted into a gutter.
The light was fungal, fitful, as though the bulbs drew
the current from memory alone. A chill tickled my nape,
and I realized I was bracing for the next escalation,
half expecting to see Avery a self materialize around the
end of a range of bookshelves, a polite smile, a
bundle of overduo novels clutched to her ribs. But nothing
arrived except my own distorted shadow, slanting and stretching as
the fixture over my head buzzed and waned, each foots
to roll through hollow spaces deeper than the visible floor
plant could ever contain, echoing out and back in a
cross fire of invisible passageways. I checked the coded notes
on Avery's reading lists, squinting at her Triangles and circles
matching the markings were brass shelf labels gleaned faintly in
the haze. At the next intersection, the four slope shallowly upward,
unexpected in a basement, given that everything should have leveled
out long ago. Here books were sorted not alphabetically, but
instead by year spines, none newer the nineteen ninety three.
I ran a shaky finger across the shelf marked accessions
nineteen seventy seven, nineteen eighty seven to none of which
should have survived so many purges, Yet here they'd been left.
Cover's warped labels culling. My breath, condensed in the cold,
caught silvery in the play of dying fluorescence. A door
at the corridor wass then trembled imperceptibly, as though someone
had touched a knob from the other side. Before I
could second guess myself, I moved towards buttes, making the
faintest tacky sand. I paused, listened. There was movement within
a scrape, and moderate the shadowy hush of something being
past hand to hand. I pressed a knuckle firmly to
the reading list remembered the cryptic map. If you reached
the lost office, do not speak, do not refuse. Inching forward,
I took in details. The door was a relic waist.
I pushed plates in ancient library. Stencils wore nearly illegible.
Underneath the battered window, A tape placard read reference internal
use only Avery's symbol. The circle triangle had been gouged
softly into the grain. When a lean closer, the door
gave under my hand, not pushing open, but inhaling, swinging
inward with no resistance. Rightly knife through the gloom, bleaching
my eyes. I went in with eyelids narrowed, straining for forocus.
The room within could have been an office from any
nineteen ages film, beige pained peeling in wide flat patches,
the copper hulking in the corner. A trio of battered
rolling chairs around a laminate table. Folders stacked into careful,
deliberate towers filled almost every surface, many stamped for view, complete,
others open and gaping, half crammed with returned slips. The
air smelled wrong, those and lace with cleaning fluid, thick
with something mineral. I only realized there wasn't a lone.
When a cough cut the silence. At the head of
the table, saw three figures in nondescript suit's faces blowed
by shadow edges, disintegrating at the edges where my vision
failed to resolve. Their features never quite snapped into focus,
sometimes annular, sometimes rounded, coats melting at the cuss into
the table's grain. They spoken murmurs, never raising their voices,
tapping on calculators and old check in locks. Beside them,
two standing figures salted slits into piles. One's nails were
bitten nearly to the quick. The other's gold wedding band
rotated restlessly as she worked. A third figure lingered quietly
at the the filing cabinet, his face invisible postureself familiarly
felt a lurching blink of recognition. Weber no taller, broader
in the shoulders, but his hands carried the same tire
turmo the librarian's muscle memory. I took a step backward,
but a fourth presence blocked the door. A blow person
with hair drawn tightly back, clipworred clasped to her chest.
She didn't meet my gaze. Instead, she whispered, you miss
your last meeting, Ellen, are you returning or renewing? My
feet rooted to the spot. What what is this? A
ridiculous question, but I'd lost the talent for pretense. None
of the figures at the table answered immediately. Instead, the
woman at the door motioned me in her name badge
barely lodgible read ce LH. Hoxley, the designation on the
folded corner of her badge master ghosted patron. Court had
seen on dozens of returns. Patrons can't stay past their turns,
she said, voice even and soft, as if I'd asked
about over g finds. Shelves can really for a while,
but at some point you're either lost or you were
made a keeper. At that, her eyes flicked up and
a glimpse of brightness crowling behind her pupils the same
date to cl I'd seen in the old catalog screens.
I shook my head. I don't avery her name keep surfacing.
I gestured at the notebook, my words stumbling out, the books,
the rooms that move, the arraysed patrons, Why me? She shrugged.
Every so often one of he gaps the audit. The
wreckos want to balance. They always do. If a slot's
left open, the library finds a replacement. One at the
table stowed a shadow pitch larger than his frame, folding
a batted folder shut. Rachel Avery was one of us,
He said, she made her wrecor too visible, transfer too
many gaps, She left, hints Ellen, but she also closed
a circuit. At this the figures at the table resumed
shuffling papers, speaking now in rapid clacks and sibilant warnings,
too quick for me to pass. I thought, no, I
knew the very err in the room pulls in time
with their words. I stumbled backward, almost tripping over my
own boots, but the corridor behind me had sealed. The
woman at the door moved aside just enough. Too much
knoledge can't be returned, she murmured, half to herself, half
as if ticking through a regulation. A seldom click drew
my attention to the window. Inside the pane, A mirrored
surfish showed the stacks behind me, Only now they looped
away in directions my eyes couldn't quite follow up over sideways,
as if the architecture was inverting itself. Even as I
watched list in hand, I desperately tried to match symbols
to doorways, tracking Avery's glyphs as she left a treasure
hunt to salvation. A second voice rose dry as the
pages in the older shelf returned to process. Ellen that
of the collection thans you to echo. It's your choice.
A world searching for an opening. On the desk, a
register slid half off its pad, scattering a dozen cars
onto the floor. One landed at my feat Rachel Avery's
A print faded, and beside it mine eat m C,
stamped not with today's date, but one ten years in
the future. My chest crushed with cold. The figures watched,
or seemed to you, their faces tinting with something like regret.
The archives still hungry, the woman repeated, you know too much,
you stay or reraise On impulse, I seized Rachel's card
and pressed it to Avery's reading list. The symbols danced
dimly in the sputtering fluorescent glow. I remembered a triangle circled,
then the spine with the chip corner the penciled from
her instructions. Instead of yielding, the walls now seemed to convulse,
the ceiling, groaning tiles popping in and out, as if
the library reconsidered my path with every choice. I duck
low and darted toward the exit sign its bonn. As
I neared its position, swapping from left to right and
higher to lower, my stomach swooped nau suspinning up as
the endpoints slipped from reach. One of the keeper's mail
in distinct except for a heavy gold watch, gave chase
shoes squeaking on chip flanolium. As the walls themselves bulged,
forming shelves when one had been seconds earlier. The list
averies and coded directions snapped to clarity, followed the numbers,
ignored the doors that flick could take only what you
can carry. In memory, adrenaline surging, I scanned the coal numbers.
Ninety two point one Avery stood at shoulder height, a
dust filmed shelf without any books, only a stack of
yellow returned slips in a single pen, the same brand
as mine. A crash behind me, another keeper now blocked
the leftmost door, their shadows stretching arms that stretched to
herd me back the path before me, branch shifting. If
I chose wrong, I would double back forever. I pressed
against the farther wall, ignoring in a looming shelf. My
shoulder caught the darkness tearing at my sleeve. A cart
rolled past, propelled by no visible hand, its arrangements spelled
in battered volumes, read between no returns, encouragement of fret.
I lunched after it, the cut rolling into a half
lit stairwell, stopping abruptly as the light of a flickered
into solidity. Before the keepers could close in, I squeezed
into the stairwell, the door swinging after me with the
teeth rattling slam. The geography blurred for a split second,
then snapped into new focus. A strip of tail and
a foot wide and yellowed marked a path I didn't
recall from any evacuation map. The stairwells banister wobbled in
my grip, called a steel left in winter air, and
somewhere below, a harmonic wobble like a ringing bell, suggested
that someone or something had set the steps, vibrating in anticipation.
Panick walled with calculation. I come to the reading list
Avery's lost desperate map triangle double slash exit at the
red line. Her handwriting was spiky, impatient, impossibly familiar, as
if I'd ridden it myself. The clatter of pursuit rose
behind me as printed downward, breath tearing my throat. As
the echo of fritfuls entangled in the architecture, I glimpsed
through the stable grill. Another room sat, as if from
decades ago, staff in old fashioned gray smocks, bushing carts,
a long carpet. It rolled with dust. The door at
the next landing swung wide as I arrived, opening onto
a service hall that was both familiar and changed for us,
and cones of light struggled against the haze, and a
painted and no admittance sign peeled at the edges, shifting
beneath my gaze like something alive. I stumbled out a
hot jackammering for the briefest instant I thought I'd escaped,
that ordinary rules could reassert themselves. At the end of
the passage, a staff elevator, when I remembered rarely working,
stood with its door stuck half way a jar. I
slept through, praying the machinery would remember how to behave.
The elevator's interior was cool, metallic, echoing a faded inspection
ticket read last maintained in nineteen eighty seven. Beneath someone
had stuck a library bockered, no book code, just the
initials RAW. I pressed the deep button for grand, holding
Avery's card between my knuckles. The lift move was stately reluctance,
the gears gnashing faintly, as if gnawing on their own history.
The ride up was excruciating. The little cage stopped lurch,
then finally ascended rickishing through layers of memory and architecture.
I pressed myself into the Father's corner, the cords sweating
in my palm, the readingless damp from my grip. The
doors potted half, then by degrees, and dumped me into
a cold corridor, stripped of books, led only by a
single exit sign. Standing at the end was Goldstein, the
night security guard, hands folded all cowardly in front of
his belt. His eyes tracked mine. The iris is sharpen
alertlets pressed into a single, unbroken line. He moved forward,
offering his arm as if to steady me. For a moment,
I thought hoped he might be real, a tether to
something uncomplicated. You are not supposed to be done here,
he said to an extraordinarily mild suppose to call for help. Eno.
His voice echoed weirdly in the tile, picking up a
metallic wine. I got lost. I managed to startle to
smooth the tremor in my voice. I was following, trying
to map. The rooms kept changing. There were people keepers,
I think. He nodded the gesture just a touch too slow.
A lot of stuff lose their way at night. Too
many aunty eyes, All the old bliprints bleed into each other.
He kept his tone hushed, as if citing a library regulation.
But if you walk the wrong circles for too long,
you run into old business that can be hard to undo.
I tried to step past, but he leaned in close
enough for me to see the ghost of a tier
in his left fiarlo but an old injury, the kind
security guard's collect You didn't take anything from the review
room to jew Tea asked, too interested in my answer.
I pressed the reading list into my coatslining, feeling the
outline of Avery's card and my own badge in my pocket.
My mouth dried, just found old files that I lied
not very well. Goldstein turned, motioning for me to follow
him down the slanting corridor. He never looked back, his
silhouette stiff and blurred at the edges. Under the harsh florescence.
As we walked, he dropped hints soft Pobe's disguise as
small talk. I've ever show you the s up slur.
I always thought she stuck to the main level. She
was one of the good ones. Miss her sometimes, I hesitated,
recalling ofvs warnings, doors jamming, laughy. That came too late.
She told me about the hollow walls, I said quietly.
Goldstein's had tilted incrementally clock stop for some people. But
the stacks always know your time. It pays to keep
your recors clean if you want out. He stopped beside
a battered side door leading to the staff lounge. The
corridor had slunk away, fading into a slice of darkness.
What's your plan now, he asked, voice thinning. I blinked
suddenly and certain. I just want to get out. He
watched me with a frank measured weight. Be careful not
to leave anything behind, he advised, as if it mattered
patron history. Swallow a lot, names, dates, habits, It finds room,
not much. It gives up willingly. For a sick moment,
I wondered if he'd bar my way. He motioned toward
the stairwell and I hurried past, not daring to glance
over my shoulder. The first thing that struck me outside
was the damness of the morning air, cools biting, laced
with a scent of pavement and exhaust. For a moment,
I just stood there, the city's noise deafening after so
much silence. I looked around four o'clock, the time on
my phone, blinking in an aut four fifty five a m.
And then set off for my apartment, myleg shuddery mine,
refusing to quiet inside, I shut the door and sagged
against it, sweat blooming cold under my shirt. The apartment
was nancurry, I told myself. It had always felt temporary,
a holding pattern until I decided whether the city suited me.
But to night its reticence unerved me. Something was off.
My copy of claud Atlas on the kitchen table was
now in the bedroom of rifty clock, and the waalticked backwards.
My spare keys hung in the wrong place, flipped on
their ring. A framed photo on my desk, once a
shot of myself and old friends, was now missing half
its faces, fobbed, gone flat where faces should have been.
I prowled for rooms as if they might rearrange themselves
behind my back. My heart started with every new item
that failed to settle properly in memory. I checked my
phone's call log. Nothing since midnight, no mis alerts, no
set messages. My computer's notifications were silent. The connections, once
so ordinary, now suggested a breaking or a force forgetting
Sleep darted away if I so much as pressed my
eyes closed. When bleak gray dawn muscled its way through
my blinds, I forced myself to get up brew coffee.
The taste was sirre in ways I couldn't explain. I
kept swallowing, as if consciousness alone could push away whatever
the library I had worked into my bones still unsteady.
A showered brushed my teeth, dressed out of habit, and
left for work. At the library's entrance, my badge stuck
in the scanner for the first time ever, blinking red.
The guard at reception frowned, scanning the staffless without recognition.
Do you have a work ordered? Tasked voice, polite, bored.
I offered my name. He squinted, scrolling, Sorry, nothing matching.
Maybe check with h R. I stepped aside, watching patron
shuffle through the high old doors. None looked at me directly.
The gazes drifted to my left side, skipping over me,
as if the light between us divided unevenly. Even when
I cleared my throat, no one flinched, no one paused.
I felt as though I had been were cataloged as
a mere as much a presence, and the periphery easily dismissed.
At my locker, I twisted the dial and its one
open without resistance. The shelf was empty, My extra sweater,
stashed umbrella, even the small stash of kof Drop's all gone.
Alva's locker, once beside mine, stood open, utterly bare. I
tried her number, disconnected. Not even a dial toned, just
a dull, mechanical beat, the universal mocker of an abandoned
line in the break room whereber brush passed as down,
either recognize in nor acknowledging me, treating my physical presence
as little more than the shadow left by a late
shift worker. His posture was identical to how I remembered,
but his manner had thinned remote in a way I
doubted I could have invented. Staff drifted through, glancing past
me with cheerful indifference. At no point did throat clearing
or a mumbled greeting drawn notice. I trace the edges
of my stuff badge, thumbing the corners, half hoping for
a mistake in the lamination or a clue in the
expiration date. Nothing. By mid day, my anxiety had evolved
into scraping at the inside of my head of persistence,
spiny discomfort, like static fuzzing the space between my thoughts.
Near the circulation desk, a slip of paper caught my eye.
It had been slid undo the c returned hatch, its
out shewed up, as though some one had fidgeted with
it before committing. On its narrow ruled lines, A message
hyperton read, don't forget your return date. The phrase felt surgical,
cutting through my fatigue with the precision of an order.
I turned the slip over in my hand, confirming there
was no signature, no identifying mark. My stomach twisted with
the cold threat. I stuffed it into my pocket, with
Avery's list pulse rising in my chest. For the rest
of the afternoon, I drifted half present, enamored, like a
patron searching for a but that might never have existed.
I tried the catalog system. My login failed to recognize me.
I found no record of myself in the morning's clock
and ledger. I tried to page back through transactions for
the prior week. Each time the system spat out of
permission deny. I called Weber's extension. He answered, voiced genail,
but distracted. Yes, can I help with the reference order?
I offered my name, feeling the absurdity close around my nerves. Sorry,
must be a tempt I don't remember. He hung up
with soft finality. Nothing stable remained save for the echoes
of last night's maize, the soft sliding books, the indelible
hungry stare of the keepers, apharies, and coated instructions, burning
a slow scar into my memory. It was evening before
I slipped into what I was now sure would be
my lust shift. Everyone worked around me. No one addressed
me or asked for assistance. I watched the clock drift
toward closing, then slipped through the main stacks one final time,
recording my findings to the recorder i'd kept head and
in my coat. My voice sounded raw, thinner, fainter than
I'd remembered memo for internal records. I whispered into the
mike Ellen Marie Cartwright catalogias since January Ivan covered a
recurring anomally Friday returns logged in the names of the
seas pittrons, staff records, altered or arrays hidden rooms that
loop back on themselves Rachel. Every elate staff member or
pittron still circulates. Staff who looked too lawnful out of record.
Several names lost, including recent genitorial, however not present on
current lists. Current access has been revoked. Evidence includes slips,
reading less, slash map, and audio's availlance. My badge is
now unrecognized in all systems. Weber and Goldstein unsure of
complicit or only tools will attempt to deposit files in
the main ledge of privileged endurers. If not, some one
will find this or not. I ended the recording and
placed the device deep in a forgotten shelf in reference,
praying the shelf would resist the churne of changing rooms
for just a little while. On the way out, I
checked the Westdok House one last time. The wheels of
a cart creaked in the shadows. A faint laugh too reedy.
Two shrill drifted from the basement hulk one before I
could turn. My last act before leaving was to open
the envelope I'd mail to myself in the hope that
some artifact might at last memory inside a cat showed
Avery's grip, tight, almost childlike. You can bleach a name
from paper, but the echo lingers return. What you carry
in the corner. A day to day is stamped in
crisp bread. I walked home under dirtyach sodium light, passing
through a city that seemed just one degree misaligned. Strangers
failed to meet my gaze, and shop windows reflected a
blur out where my outline should have been. To night,
the world is quiet, the city's living weight kept at
bay by one slin door. I sit at my kitchen table,
listening to the room settler around me. My reflection in
the black window is lighter, almost vaporous. I left Avery's list,
reading each cryptic mark in search of reassurance that I
haven't been wholly lost. A sharp tap a business envelope
slides under my door, my name typed and below it
shall life retain through twenty twenty four. The card inside
is rough, weathered. Its edge is softened by too many hands.
The inco navery slashell and still damp despite so much time.
It features a single return date thirteen days from now,
and a dense mirror of finger print in a pattern
that almost but not quite matches my own. I stand
and pace the apartment. The carpets weave, catching at my toes.
The little ridge is rearranged. I try to recall what's missing,
but memory sifts itself strange. In a flicker, I remember
my favorite Maga's blue, then as chits ceramic brown. The
fridge hams takes on a dying wasp rhythm and then resolves.
Anxiety propels me back toward the library, Yet I turn
its compulsion over in my mind. I walk back to
a place that will not hold my name. Instead, I
log onto the library website from my phone. I search
for Rachel, every nothing for myself. No result, yet a
new reader e slash A is stamped as eligible for
a return. A single chill breath leaks out of me.
My hand shake as I unplugged, a router of the
digital world, narrowing a ecko of thinky shuffing ripple of
the stacks, while follows I can only describe as a
soft confusion, a dropping away, a warping of what I know.
Every noise in the corridor outside my apartment feels incriminating,
the tread of shoes, the uncertain shudder of the elevator cable,
the muted voices at Odd Iyer's. I forget, briefly the
order of my own birth date. My tongue struggles over
my family's names. Perhaps Alva or some one like Kurt
once called this feeling being made an echo room scene smaller,
the window tin deeper, the claw hands reversed their circuit,
and then, just as suddenly recovered, I clutched a car,
checking it for a rasure, for proof that I remained headed.
But each time the Kish Sharborough living cut. I suppose
this is my shelf life, for the duration I can
stay visible before the library draws me back for processing,
either as a keeper or a gap. Tomorrow, I know
I'll wake and find at least one thing out of place,
one book returned, one photograph blurred, one colleague's name gone.
Even now, the night blooms with the scent of old books,
musty and mournful, as though the stacks themselves have sunk
under my skin. I record last message. My voice, tinyon playback,
seems almost not mine. If you hear this, the system
works if you remember me, return what you carry. I
finished the memo, listening to the quiet. My eyes absorbed
the dim shifting reflection in the kitchen glass. I crossed
the threshold from the living to the in between. At
some point in the night, the hallway outside murmurs with
footsteps no louder than a page turning. The card slides
beneath my door. I bend and pick it up, embossed
in black shelf life beneath the patron name Avery slash
shell in active. I drift to the window. The city
sinks toward dawn. In the building's reflection. For one thin's eye,
I coms a figure shifting among all volumes, her hand
on mine, tuck close to the spines. I go back
to the library. This time the staff entrance yawns before me,
open and expectant. My steps do not echo. The security
glass blows at my approach. I tap in, and the
returns disk flickers. I walk the back aisles. No one looks.
No one startles at the sight of me on screen
if he shows an empty corridor, though I've just walked it.
Within the archive, one shelf stands ajar on my shelf.
I know now there in a Dussu's cradle waits a crisp,
blank card stamp with both our names, Avery, slash Ellen.
For a moment, I hesitate, Then I slit the evidence
envelope inside, nestling the list, the badge, the keys that
once fit a locker. The card absorbs my warmth, as
if ingesting each token as slow comfitting. Static rises as
the old PA system hums in a hollowed up for coverhead.
I record my name one more time, into the thin
and dark. The microphone buzz is the file saves from
the stack's far end. A woman's voice, distant, lilting serve
and whispers, thank you for returning just in time. I
close my eyes. In the hush between shelves, the universe
contracts to catalog entry, its stats blinking and not for circulation.
The next chef will come, The next keeper waits. Perhaps
for a while, I'll be lost among the living, perhaps
not Somewhere. Books are being shelved, Somewhere, someone is listening,
somewhere at the return de creeps closer. Yet the moment
does not release me into oblivion, opeses. Instead, the silence
teems with expectation, A hush chin to the static last
hum of the buildings ald in too calm, each molecule
of air strong tight across the fullness of the stacks.
I realize I am waiting for something. But even as
I pause, the world around me subtly asserts its own rules.
Footsteps of familiar cadence measured echoing from the upper level,
somewhere above the mechanical fruit of the lift gulps. And
I picture the elevator, its doors breathing open and shut
as if weighing. Emission voices cull down the stairwell. Sniffers
of staff patter at the rattle of a return's cart,
But when I strain to hear it, the content eludes me.
They seem to what pass just out of step of mine.
Their presence is slipping past, never intersecting. A compression in
the air follows each, as if my being here is
a gentle distortion, scene accounted, but always slightly beside the point.
I surrender to a compulsion that tags and pulls beneath
my thoughts. My hands drift over the shelf spines reading
titles no one has bored for decades. My badge, when
I check its back, now bears a gray heap bleached
shadow across my photo, with a face fading, but the
name burned ark by time and circulation. I wander deeper
into the stack, so where that I am both searching
and being shepherded. Light from the Claire story windows throws
speckled shadows, a hedge shifting, oily mootes moving in faint wind.
That isn't there The smell, an intensifying tangle of paper, oil, distemper,
and autumn leaves baked to dust. A sense of unfinished
business accumulates before each turn. Memory rings at the air
of the present, of his laughter trailing behind a broom
bristling with static, Whereb's muttered warnings fraying in the chiller air,
gull sends even a praising stare. For a moment bitterness
we was in me, resentment at the leave taking, erasure
of the transformation of every solid thing in this place
into fluid shadow. What was it all for? I want
to ask, what does this library extract? In the tally?
The answer arrives from bidden, not as comfort, but as consent.
Every shelf, every slap, ever vanished name, each towers itself
against a ledge of memory. To remember, to map, to
resist is in a self, a form of cataloging, a
record against erasure. However brief, I cannot keep from gathering fingers,
brushing in boss call numbers, telling each ghostly mark that
could be a pass keeper's last trace. I realize with
a frisso of exhausted or that mine muscle look much
the same. I heard the building shuders, the faintest tremor
rattling the shelf below my hand. A series of fuests
and tubes stutter into sequence, down the long corridor, beyond light,
marching into the bowels of the archive. The stacks expand
corridor after corridor, and spilling toward a door invisible in daylight,
obedi to a logic I do not quite apprehend. My
feet bring me step by step to the base of
a stair, down again, and then through a narrow hallway
painted with all fire retardant signs and ancient fawn trees.
It's here, in the truest heart of the archive that
I find the review room reconstituted. It is waiting the door.
Ajar lets out the tiny as whimperer as I nudge
it open. This tin the keepers are there, not fantoms,
but as occupants bod is casting proper shadows in the
saturated light. Weber stands at the window, his hands folded
over a battered file box, gold stamp polishes a brass
nameplate in the nearest desk, his gaze distant. Two others
I do not know, one woman knitting, another straightening a
pile of juice, lips, pay me no special mind. A
hush descends, formal as any annual meeting. At first I
attempted to threaten, to demand a reversal, but A see
at last that none of them are in control. Weber
lifts his chin as I enter, his voice missing its
usual deference. It cycles, Ellen, it has always cycled. We
keep track even where we do not wish to. Our
hands only carry the records. None of us directs the pattern.
He gestures, almost an apology to the day. Square laid
out with reverent care, lies the envelope by left in
the shelf days before they have found it. The pippers,
the encoded list, my badge, all are neatly arranged as
art fact, awaiting accession, patient and seepy order. I did
as I was told by say quietly. I returned everything
that was not mine to keep Coolstein notts, carefully settling
the nameplate atop the files. Some things must pass on
allan names, numbers, sometimes even acts of hope. Otherwise something
were settles in rooms that never open, memory that dies
in the walls. There is no threat in his words.
Only attendant is born of exhaustion. Each of them, I see,
is a kind of echo, a tattered layer of intention
glued to the great thrum of the library's need. I
watch as the knitting woman tucks the end of her
third away, the simple act conveying more finality than any speech.
Why me, I ask, realizing it matters even if I
suspect the answer. Weber's mouth twists because you remembered to
leave a record, that something we need between orishas the
library opposed a true blank. Ye gave it something to
catalog yourself, your loss. Sometimes that's enough, My folks blurs.
What happens now? Colstein looks up. If you continue, you
help keep balance. Sometimes you slip back into the outside,
forgotten by all but these walls. Sometimes you are lost altogether,
another slip pasted over nothing more than avoid between Frody returns.
He glances briefly at the card's stamp. If both my
name and averies the continuity to parry, and if I refuse,
he shrugs gently. Then you one listened, not a keeper,
not even a gap in time. The library finds another,
and you become a rumor haunting the reference shells. This time,
the stillness between us is not hostile, not paralyzing. I
feel the possibility of choice. However, slight in away, the
overhead light hams, and the pages on the desk flutter
beneath invisible drafts. A distant claning breaks the spell, the
elevator summoning some one from the upper floors. The others
look up, already prepared for their part in the cycle.
Webber hands me the envelope. A transfer of custody is
sacred as any exchange. The knitting woman rises, smoothing her skirt.
She regards me with sympathy, not unlike other's old playful glint.
Add your list the main ledger ellen. She instructs, don't
keep secrets lost the sire. I take the envelope, weighing
at once more. When I open, at one final tremulous time,
I see Avery's hand is marked a new instruction in
the inner flap let rooms. Change is needed, return when cold.
They wait and speaking. As I moved to the ledger
at the desk, I lay my badge atop the register,
pen the reading list, slide the envelope beneath the glasp.
The sense of doom does not arrive, only relief, call
and subdued. For an instant, I hold the old card,
feeling the paper's fiber roughened edge, dig into my palm.
Every memory weighs upon me, the rooms, the laughter, and
the lost staff, the ways the stacks yielded and then
bent me to their design. I press my thumb to
the cart and keyp fingerprint not carrying if it's mine
or Averary's, not caring if the system reads it is
an entry or an exit. Goldstein softens we all carry
our own due dates Ellen. His expression is tired but kind,
The library is persistent but not cruel. He'll return when
needed or not. I nod. There is nothing to add,
no shapestone enough to hold the story longer. The others rise,
tiding the last drifts of paper, straightening files. As I exit,
Weber offers me a gentle, absent smile, the sort that
would outlast a hundred catalogs. The corridor outside feels lighter
than before. I understand now the act of returning, no
matter the pain, The loss of specificity is what ancors
are living to. The archive keeps, shelf and memory bound together.
It is absence, yes, but also a final gentle order.
I step from the room, envelope clasped in hand, and
the library receives me with a fresh current of air,
warm and almost frequent. The shelves are as they must be, solid,
shifting memory made material. As I cross the threshold, the
bouquet of Mustin and coenvelops me in a final bittersweet
embrace the world outside so newly and certain telts and
to focus through the old glass doors. I step outside,
bearing nothing except the car of the thinnest memory of
a voice in the stacks. The city is just waking, cold,
silver light seeping between buildings. As I move through the
empty streets, a clarity settles. I will keep cataloging in
my way. I will remember offs laughter, Golsan's warning, Weber's
absent minded care. I know now that memory is its
own return, however brief. I carry the faint print of
the archive with me, the cast texture impressed on my
skin that night, as sleep finally overtakes me. My dreams
and spool and quiet libraries, rooms larger on the inside.
Names are going from slip to slip. I do not
fear the return. When the time comes, I will answer
the call and pass between the shelves. A faint voice
will whisper thanks, and I will turn back one last
time to slop my cart where it belongs, and somewhere
quietly and without announcement, the ledger will balance, the library
will wait. Shelf life renewed.