Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it on tape. My voice always sounded
half stranded, a little hessened, like someone listening hard for
a far away signal. Even now after midnight, with the
doors locked and the lights humming tiredly against the black windows,
I could hear that under tone, scratchy and uncertain, pressed
up against the hush of the empty library night Lok
main floor, I said, forcing sheer into my whisper. As
a pressed record twelve twenty a m. First solo shift,
everything seemed standard, I lied a little into the recorder.
Standard I'd learned over my three weeks of training was
mostly a matter of paperwork, impatience, making my rounds, checking
the heavy glass doors latch behind me, enduring nobody lingered
in the long corridors after closing. Then again, most nights
until now, I'd stood watch with Goth, the previous God,
always a step behind, never leading. Tonight was different. My
shoes squeaked faintly on the tile as I pivoted, Shadows
lengthening from the racks of encyclopedias and faded local yubiks
somewhere above the ventilation found rattled for a cycle, and
fell quiet alone. For the first time. The silence felt
more complete than I expected. Too complete, maybe halfway through
my initial patrol. Bundled up in my canvas jacket against
the stubborn shoul that haunted the place, I rattled off
every little observation, just to keep myself company. South annis
locked microfilm rooms secure, no movement in the mezzanine. As
I fumbled a bit with my ring of keys, a
steel teeth clinking. When I lifted one for the reference room,
something small snout my attention appell card, poking from under
a drawer. It wasn't library issue, not the formal beige,
but a kind of yellowed and ex stock, faded at
the edges, the corners softened from handlin I bent, nudged
it free standard receipt sighs, but there was no stample
stick of odly fine blue script. As orderly as the
catalog cars had started memorizing, two columns of dates and times,
stacked with careful precision, trailing each line with the coal
numbers and cryptic titles, draw mostly from the local history
collection four point sixteen seventy one eleven thirty two pm
merges of carnevis aint nine point twelve seventy three one
ten and transit board minutes ten point five eighty went,
while three am very reclamation ledger. There were more dozens
stretching back farther than any one I'd ever heard about,
scribbled with the retired librarian's neat compulsion. In the far margin,
a single word was circled ones, as though in agitation
or emphasis. Listen. I stared at the car for a
heavy moment, index finger brushing the pencil marks. The clock
on the wall funked as it reset its mechanism. Something
about it then settled me out of place, not for
the general public, but buried here in the least disturb
of cabinet. I hesitated, then slid the card into my pocket.
I didn't know if it was meant as a prank
or a test for my supervisor, a mess Joansen liked her,
a little game for something else entirely. Whatever it was,
it felt like holding an unasked question between my fingers.
Just as I pushed the drawer close, a burst of
noise snap through the quietest shoving carts land into a
metal bookcase. The crash came from deep in the non
circulating stacks, a place nobody should have been. My pulse
polls tarred in my neck. As I pushed away from
the desk, eyes darting to the control panel by the door.
The lights overhead stuttered, faltered into a brief dimming. One
tube pistatic blue recovered. I waited, every part of me,
poised for some rational explanation to emerge. No steps followed,
no voices, just a long echo spiraling down the corridor.
Maybe a stray book had toppled from a shelf, or
maybe maybe I'd missed a cleaner. Locking up against every
rule in the manual, I called hello into the dark,
my voice too loud, blood dry by cavernous shells muted.
Silence returned, the building hummed. My thumb pressed the recorder
stop button before I headed in the direction of the sound,
every sense on edge. It wasn't the first time this
old library had startled me, but to night I felt
tagged much by whatever the card meant to send. I
tried not to think about the word circled there, but
it stayed with me. As I moved, I realized I
was holding my breath, straining to hear, not the familiar sounds,
the creak of lumber settling, the drip under the men's
room sink, but for something else, something I hadn't known
to listen for until now. What I wanted out of
this job was quiet. Maybe a little money too, but
mostly piece of place. With the world outside couldn't get
at me. That hope seemed thinner with every echo that
didn't pants, every light that flickered once more. When they'd
first hired me, I had no idea how much of
myself I'd need to leave behind at the door each shift.
A tall grass library started with the signature in a
rolled notebook, time stamped in blue. They didn't trust you
with the digital system until you durned your badge after
a month, so I had to lock every patrol, Every
chair completed in looping bulp and short hand, and nobody
but missessed Duckell and Admon seemed able to read. She'd
hand the log back every week, all my clumsy entrants
corrected in silent red pen. The library filled half a
city block, an oddity municipal ambition from the fifties, poured
concrete spine and an endless run of pastel tile. Every
corner seemed to have a secret patch of ceilings stained
by summer night nosed leak, a window bricked up from
the inside, a back staircase that didn't appear on any
of the floor plans they'd given to employees. The main entrance,
a set of double glass doors, framed and oxdized brass,
was in sit so you could see every one who
came or went before you stepped inside for us, and
shadows ran down the carpet during the day, blinking into
uneasy yellow at night. During daytime it was a place
of quiet business. Students hunched in carrolls, retirees arguing over
the best macrofilm readers, Clusters of children heroded by teachers
through the maze of shelves. Staff patrolled the public floors,
always with an armful of return books or a cleaning cut.
The main reading rooms crackled with subdued energy, the search
for knowledge or at least distraction. But come seven thirty
p m. Everything changed. The doors locked, the last of
the day's staff ducked out, except for maintenance, who swept
up At Dusken, All that restless noise collapsed into its
own wake. I tried to keep my dear's crisp and meticulous,
the way a mess Johnson coached me. I'd clock in early,
sometimes twenty minutes ahead, mostly to avoid the other income
and shift in the uncertain glances that came with being
the new guy. I'd run through the opening Chettley's double
time North emergency exit breakerm fridge fire, alarmed by the
stair will, then settle in at the tiny glass beef
in the lobby for a few measured breaths. They left
me to myself most evenings, no shortage of first detention,
though the tours. Too old for college but too young
for respect. A graduate of night jobs and part time desperation,
my last position was stocking pallets at the Hannofford war House,
which meant ires alone and a buzz in lights and
little discipline beyond moving fast and not dropping boxes. My
mother call twice a week. Any trouble yet Eli. She
didn't trust the long silences I let Bill, but here
I could preserve them for myself. The jaw on paper
was simple, secure the property, what the loops, every thirty minutes,
keep a lock. If anything seriously out of the ordinary
happened flood, fire, busted window, I was to call the
uncull manager, mister saying, and wait for further instructions. They
pressed this protocol into me with careful repetition. Don't open
doors unless you're shore tours, don't wander down to Aka
without a supervisor, and abovolve. Don't let them scare you.
I joked with the day staff about what them meant
the drunks the after I was loiterers, maybe even ghosts.
Nobody laughed hat but everyone smiled like they understood it
was better not to answer. The archive, though, was a
different matter. Donotite's bibraal staircase in the north wing passed
a crust. The fire door with private city records only
sted soled and flicking black. The sub basement shells, hell
boxes and piles of aging records, the odd artifacts, ledgers,
glass negatives, court transcripts were all supposed to be chained off.
But I had caught the cleaning subcontractor Misses crane dumping
left over mops there one night. She shrugged, apologize and
disappeared up the stairs. There were rumors maintenance gossip that
the original chief trustee, a man named Hodge, was found
in the archive dead at his desk in nineteen seventy seven,
but nobody could say of what exactly. Some of the librarians,
the younger ones, tight lipped but alerted their posts, almost
never requested material from the basement, claiming it was out
of rotation or being assessed for mauld staff existed in strata.
Misses Snidian, who'd worked downtown for forty years and now
commanded the local History of Reference desk, wielded both respect
and a kind of worry. Distance. She moved and set
patterns circling the first four reading area each morning, like
someone chasing back at title only she could see. But
lately even she had become scarce, her name rarely on
the shift lock, her desk chair always pushed in under
the batter oak. Two weeks in I realized nobody had
seen her leave at night for several days running and
mister Fisher, maintenance nightman. It pulled me aside as I
grabbed my first real solo passed key from the admin closet.
He looked me over at this man in all stained blue.
His speech bear and conspiratorial. It's a quiet job, Torris,
he muttered through his mustache. If you keep your nose
out of it, don't fix what is in yours, and
don't try making sense where folk already gave up. I grinned,
nodding along, But the last part had clung to me
where folk already gave up, Like he imagine, some umenable
argument went through the stacks. Half the library was called
in off most nights a security belt of velvet ropes
and do not enter signs. The upper reading Mazzanine, once
a popular study spot, now served as impromptu storage for
batter desks and oversized maps. Even the main floors felt
off kilder after dusk, especially after maintenance dim the remaining
overheads and all reflections pushed deeper into the glass. Night
shifts were lonely but manageable. I found a rhythm in
the patterns, full laps every thirty minutes, a quick run
up the stairwell doors checked, returned to my booth to
writ a line or two in the lock. Some nights
I scanned the parking lot for two long idling vehicles
or road delevate on ancient otie that stutted on level two.
Just for a change. I started to notice things. A
slant of whet plaster near the archive stairs, always damp
and faintly metallic, no matter how dry the week had been.
A whisper of mold from the fire doors masked each
Friday with industrial lemon, the way the day's library patrons
avoided certain carols in the local history stacks, or how
some shells bowed out as if a hidden hand kept
shuffling the weight around. Most of the habits are chalked
up to professional restlessness or paranoia new jobs. I told
myself invite the imagination. But once or twice, while adding
my signature to the hand carp at incident Ledger, I
caught messas stackhole giving me a private glance, as though
she watched for something, something she'd seen before. I didn't
realize then how much of what I'd overlooked was routine
by designed deliberate rituals to keep questions from being asked.
Or that miss blazed card and my jacket pocket would
become the first in a series of rules I didn't
get to choose. It wasn't until the third week, during
my second so low overnight that the pieces began shifting
with purpose. Around two a m. Between rounds, I pulled
a bat of print up from the reference desk. One
of the shelf order forms that told you were every
book belonded and six two hundred ten local history sub
falby light from the stairwell blood in a checkerboard across
the carpet. I checked the list against the shelves as
I passed, unsure if my grown unees was nose or
some other influence. Several books stood out this binds, thin
and worn, stamped in gold over brown cloth, didn't match
the g numbers on the shelf marker. One drary reclamation
ledger had moved half a bay over since my last check.
In another, Childhoods of Parsonsdyke was johned backwards, its bark
code hidden. My training had drilled into me that any deviation,
any foreign volume had to be flagged, logged, and replaced
by the morning shift. Carelessness, even at two a m.
Wasn't tolerated. On instinct. I reached into my pocket and
pulled the yellowed index card. I compared the dates to
the call numbers. My eyes blue from too little sleep
and too much Caien finally caught a link each date list.
It matched a recently shuffled title. The pattern was a regular,
but certain, as though someone was tracking the secret migration
of knowledge through the library's arteries. The air in the
local history I all felt heavy, then steel, like breath
that had been held too long. As I tried to
reshove one of the displaced book, something else pride at
my attention. A faint sibilance, like paper torn gently but rhythmically,
seeping in from a gap further down the rail. I waited,
expecting a draft or the wind against event, but the
noise came again, softly, light voices murmuring on the edge
of comprehension. There shouldn't have been any one in the stacks,
not at this iron, not unless someone had hidden away
during closing. My skin prickled, gooseless marching down my arms.
The whispering didn't resolve into words, only a texture of suggestion.
Fowl stretched long enough to sting the inside of my ears.
My mouth went dry. I thereforeward, trying not to knock
anything off the shelf and trace the source down the corridor.
This sound faded as I moved, a never loud, never closed,
but impossible to explain away on the end of a shelf,
topped under the binding of an old city council report,
was a slip of blue paper. It looked like a
regular check of card, stamped with the library's faded logo,
but the book listed him as spells R W T
H and Commerce eighteen o seven minus ninety Tude didn't
appear anywhere in the cattalog database. I searched the shelves twice.
It was nowhere, another perfect lyre tied back to nothing,
stamped with a date fall all older than the rest
two point nine sixty five. Swallowing. I thumb the radio
clip to my belt and mutter based to all fand
of material in sector two ten will log detail. The response,
as I expected, was silence. Nobody else patrolled these floors.
I logged the incident in my pocket notebook and told
myself again it was probably someone's archivel joke. But another
detail nickeled at the beast of my brain. One of
the security cameras in this aisle, a brush crumb device
that should have covered mantry and every motion in the
public stacks, was counted away, aimless, turning and on blinking
lens toward the blank end wall. Instead, I stood there,
surrounded by the hush, holding the blue slip between finger
and thumb, suddenly aware of the pulse in my temples.
Something was matching up the physical arrangement of the books,
the official shelving logs, and whatever code played out on
these tat of cards. They were all whispering, tucking from
the libraries, hidden understructure. As I made my way back
to the main hall, I pressed the record button on
my voice log. I tried to explain the incident for
any later audit, but my voice turned brittle. I blamed
fatigue in my official entry. In private, I wondered if
I had stumbled across something meant to remain buried, and
if so, why it still clung to these aisles waiting
for new hands. If there was a language at work
beneath the surface, I wasn't sure I wanted to learn it.
Weeks went by, marked by an increasingly feverish sense of occupation.
I began to return to the odsies again and again.
A shuffle books in the local history section, fresh shoving
in prints even when no new loans were locked, and
the disquieting discovery at some catalog numbers from the old
index card match billings for titles invisible in any modern listing.
I couldn't ignore it. I started to tie my patrols,
more carefully altering my route to catch glimpses of the
security screens before the backup foot at automatically rewound. At first,
every reaply seen normal rows of untouched bookshelves, the slow
rotations of the cleaning crew and the staff at end
of day, their routines orderly and predictable, but then pieced
together across a handful of nights connections formed as staff
member ducking furtively into the special collections room at Hires
long after closing their badge out of sight, a shadow
flickering at the base of the main staircase, vanishing just
as the time could jumps. Missesnian's name resurfaced. On the
third Thursday, Amy has Stamp appeared in the movement lock,
moving a crate to the ark of the nobody on
the morning shift for call seeing her since the previous week.
Another staffer, Rayleigh Mallory, loved a lost card and then
disappeared from the rossa for four nights straight, returning with
a mismatch in her signature, as if some one had
copied her hand poorly and forgotten how she formed her ease.
Tipping point came one evening when I caught emmess Leland,
the children's librarian, darting nevusly down the corridor marked for
special reference only on the video. She moved jerkily, her
right hand pressed to her mouth, as though reciting something
quietly to herself live. I surprised her coming around a corner,
the sleeves of her cardigan half pulled up, her eyes
wild and unblinking, MS flolland everything all right. I kept
my tone neutral clipboard in hand, desperate to give her
every reasonable out. She froze, then, as if coming awake,
smiled tightly. The line to her mouth carved deeper than
I'd noticed before, Just making sure the rare volumes are
in Orderarily nights for arranging the things people should forget.
I laugh faintly, unsure he shouldn't be down here. It's
after hours. Need me to walk you out, she seemed
to consider, then placed a brittle hand on my arm. Illy.
Her voice dropped, trembling against the tile. Don't go looking
in the low stacks, he think you want to know?
But she glanced over her shoulder down the aisle, and
then shook her head, lip trembling. Curiosity isn't always its
own reward I nodded as if I understood, but her
words felt for sounded wrong, as though delivered by some
one reeling instructions whispered by another mouth. She vanished through
the stawell before I could press her further. Later, back
in the reference section, drawn by equal pars anxiety and curiosity,
a leaf through the local history titles where the incidents
seemed to circle most often. Tucked inside the front cover
of City Grove nineteen forty five, minutes seventy eight, someone
had planted another index card. No summary, just a tight
grid of coal numbers and dates, each cross reference to
file in the city's collection of Municipal Personnel Gun Missing
nineteen fifty five nineteen eighty four. Each book was linked
to a different file corridor Beaminis four, shelf nineteen or
arc have won Sea titles, all scribbled as if some
one did not want them read aloud. The more I poked,
the less sense anything made. The digital wreckers from the
main desk's tablet circulation locks, check ins and outs video
from the last week ceased to correspond with the actual
visible status of books and files. Staff would check out
a title on the screen and then on camera walk
away empty handed, or carrying a completely different volume. In
one instance, mister Rinn's another clerk normally precise signed a
release form for Carnaby Ledgers, but in the hall was
shown taking nothing from its shelf. When I confronted him,
fumbling for casual small talk, he laughed it off, told
me the books he practically shelved themselves these days. I
tried to keep pace with the irregularities, but soon lost ground.
Each night new card appeared to sometimes filed between pages,
sometimes folded into the leaves of city records, or pushed
under my door in the booth, as if delivered by
secret cury. They all carried variations in the same threat,
references that didn't exist, books that had never been printed.
The paperwork began to number the physical evidence. One evening,
coming off Ranz, I plugged him my handheld recorder to
document the day's disturbances. The device blanked twice, once mid sentence,
emitting a groan of static loud enough that my head
friends squawked. The disturbance happened precisely as I circled Section
two hundred tent. The interference returned each time I passed
near the old city directories, or the shelf containing the
Drury recommission ledger. On the third pass, just as the
digital clock ticked at thirteen past two, the background is
resolved briefly into what sounded like voices, more accurately syllables
lay delayed overlapping. Listen. Listen. It like water trickling for pipes,
undeniable in the moment, and impossible to capture reliably on playback.
The following night, my route led to the archive door, battered,
still portal grim, with age padlock slightly skewed from where
the chain had recently been shifted. I pressed my ear
to the frame. By force of habit or incarnation, I
can't say there were voices, definite conversation, snatches of audible
English tons I recognized from meetings up stairs, but distorted
as if played backwards. The register of the voices deepened
and faded, then abruptly cut off. As I knocked. Nobody
answered my call. When I wrenched the knob, it wouldn't
budge lock from inside. It was then stirring at my
own uncertain reflection in the glass pane above a knob
that I felt panic stop pricking in my nerves. I
tried to rationalize maintenance must have held over, or maybe
library staff sometimes worked late and lied about going home
skirt city overtime procedures. Surely that explained the chronic inconsistencies,
the shuffling staff, the swap books, and the voices. Didn't
it Whatever was happening inside the archive, I began to
fear involve more than a perfection of bureaucractic delay. It
was a pattern, at once too neat and too jumbled,
tidied up just as quickly as it was disturbed and
trailed by physical evidence. Only as seemed interested in gathering.
Whoever or whatever tended the impossible index had left a
system of breadcrmbs throughout the building. My role had become
that of a milling collector, documenting each ne anomaly in
hopes that a wider logic might eventually emerge. I started
plotting things as systematically as I could each encounter, every
misplaced book, the slips of paper, the odds surveillance footage.
I loved it. All names, dates, call numbers, times of
off patent shoving, and incidents of gobbled audio taken by
my recorder, marked down to the second. My note book,
once a bare record of work completed and doors checked,
ballooned with cross roads, difference notes, arrows, and lines drawn
between incidents that now see neither random nor coincidental. The
index card from the first night took on new significance.
I compared the list of dates to every known incident
a page torn a book out of place, and soon
discovered that the interests glustered around unusual events holidays, staff absences,
power outages. The strokes that made up listen in the
margin now suggested not a warning or a command, but
a record of what to do next. Obsessed, a skired
the public records on the building and its operation. The
more I dug using the city's microfeici in the basement,
the more our tale surfaced. Rumors of a demolition halted
by a clerical error, a financial cover up in the
early seventies, and at least two documented missing persons tied
to the library, one a night watchman vanishing on his shift,
his rounds and completed the other senior clerk Huse personnel
file was removed from public access three decades after the fact.
This was more than just staff turnover. It was as
if at intervals mapped perfectly onto the calendar implied by
the scrap card. The library itself shewed up personnel and
left nothing but paperwork in their place. One night, in
a dawn, after yet another round of sleep, a sceries
and I found a partial the opened staff lock behind
the main admin office. Most nights this row of beage
lockers was empty. Only the odd sweater or sand which
contained a tumbled out windoors used open, but now a
trembling sliver of light cut across the floor. Inside, Hanging
by its faded blue lineout was Misssenien's photo badge, her
name type with the old city standard duct Taped to
the back was another card, this one stamped with a
single jagged word here pin below at a furt copied
floor plan of the library in Syre Yella. From the
overhead circled the section of the sub basement, the archive level,
which had never been part of my tour. A fat
red marker outlined, erecting the labeled access restricted by order.
I removed the lanard, trying not to crumple the brittle card.
The air in the locker seemed denser, as if it
caught at the edges of my breath, my pump sweat
against the blue plastic, the word here vibrating in my
head alongside the echo of whispered secrets I could almost
shape into words. For a long moment, I stood there,
caught between rational protocol report, the missing badge locked, the
misplaced card notify admined on my next shift, and the
gut realization that nobody would welcome news of something so
obviously not meant to be recovered. I tapped the here
card and the copied blueprint into a file folder, careful
to keep them sepparate from my official lock. When I
made my next patrol past the archive, flashlight angled low
against the battered floor tiles. The lights guttered, then steaded.
My recorder, still running in its sip sleeve, clipped my
bill to let out a stutter of static. Then, beneath
the burable, a voice muffled and coal slithered from its
tiny speaker. I stopped, heart ruching up. It spoke through
the wine and crackle. No reaeding was for now, but
the chill of certain knowledge, intimate and a nielding down Hereily,
the words died back into static. The tape rolled on
and spooling empty hiss as the ceiling lights regained their
fragile steadiness. I locked at the door, locked stolen at
the blueprint in my folder, the circle pulsing in my
mind's eye. But now it was clear that the patterns
went random. They had encoded their own system of presents
and absence, a private card catalog of people taken, and
memories were written. The artifacts, cards, slips, schedules were not
archives but destructions. My last clay thought that night was
simple electric. If any one else had heard what I
had heard, they were no longer here to warm me.
I was now the only one holding the thread, and
whatever it connected me to a script was only tightening.
I pressed record again, not expecting comfort. My own voice quivert,
security log, main, floor, time, unknown, incident report and progress.
A pause, swallowing, as if the act of description would
save me from what might come next. Behind the echo
passed the hush of books and pipes and settling dust.
The library. Weited it not for discovery, but for obedience.
The rules had changed, and the stacks were listening. I
counted the flash light as I moved, convinced that any
sudden movement in my periphery would shatter what Nerva had left.
Patterns emerged everywhere now on the old tail floor were
overlapping mop Streak's coved secret sigils into sailed dust. In
the arrangement of duplicate coal numbers on the shelf labels,
as if someone meant for hidden order to reveal itself
only under certain conditions. The silence following the static voice
pressed in familiar and yet profoundly altered, as if it
ever haunted. The archive had pressed its palm against the
glass between this world and its own. I forced myself
to remain methodical, clipboard in one hand. I started back
through the aisles, not daring to look over my shoulder
for fear I'd see a shadow in the gap of
the doors. I stopped by the new books cart and
touched since my round began, but now inexplicably a copy
of Ledges of Coloneby Since at atop the stack, its
bark could stick a half peeled as though repeatedly thumbed.
This was the same title from the first entry in
the listen card. Repressing a shiver, I thumbed its pages inside,
tucked between the table of contents and the first brittle
chapter a slip of note paper. It was lyed in
the same touchscript as the car, but with a single difference.
This time the scribble spilled over itself one day to
overlapping another. Numbers distorted, almost frantic in their density, tiny
arrows linked one year to the next, weaving in and
out of legible order. No explanation, just the same word
written again and again in a looping hand. Listen, listen
here here behind me, the air seemed to catch and settle,
as if drawn and by invisible breath. I heard a
faint shuffling, the sound of schueson laxed lonoleum. Turning beam
raised a glimpsed a figure, not one of the usual staff,
but a tall, translucent silhouette just at the edge of
the microphone room. For an instant, the silhouette flickered. It
helt lined apple, with a reflection of thousands of type
pack spines, and then it was gone. My heart beat
from the hollow rhythm in my ears. At the security desk,
I reviewed the perimeter monitors, fingers numb and stiff. On screen,
the gamma facing the lower stack stuttard advancing in dumpy increments,
six seconds clean, three of blurry motion, another five worthy
image flicker, and then blankness. I caught two figures, faces
indistinct moving along the forbidden corridor in matching blue. Linard's
shoulders slumped, walking without any obvious purpose or urgency. The
time stamp be lined with the moment I had stood
paralyzed in front of Messsenian's locker. I reached for the phone,
debating calling city security on my supervisor at home, never
mind the rules about emergencies only. Instead, caught between the
unfamiliar rules of this place and might growing compulsion to
see things through, I phoned up the maintenance extension. It
rang until the system motto disconnected. Only after setting the
hands that Dan did, I noticed that my hands had
begun to tremble the sweat from my palms, leaving prints
across the glass deftop. The building held its breath. I
forced myself to circulate, moving through the dense shelves and
Robert's step flashlights slicing the darkness every books by in
suddenly suspect. The air tasted faintly of old copper and
distant mildy. I caught myself listening, really listening, for the
textures buried in the hush, the distant sustain of a
vibrating methyl aduct. The soft page ruffle of the h
fractchist above the oka, the subtle I heavy clicks of
library clocks adjusting for losses and gains, invisible to the public,
but all consuming in the quiet. In the far corner
of the reference section, a small locked cabinet sat flush
with the wall, a relic of another error. My passkey,
intended only for daily patrols, fit the lock with a
little force inside. Instead of electrical panels or tools, rows
of faded circulation cards stood found out, six to a
row a collector's mena. Each card was stamped with a date,
and every date matched one I'd found on the original
listen card. At the back of the cabinet a least envelope,
weighted addressed in kevilprint to and night security free rears only.
Unable to help myself, I tore the envelope open inside
a cassette tape, no label, but the culling remains of
a city sticker on one side and a folded memo sheet.
When forced listen, the voice will show you who is missing.
Do not resheve alone, and no signature, just the initial
in a mark that looked disturbingly like the swell of
the library's floor layout, as seeing from above. A sound,
not footsteps, more, the gentle shifting of books, the slow
creak of overloaded joves, adjusting as if something or someone
anticipated my next action. I inserted the tape into the
battered the little player we used for citymen, dated announcement
recordings and press play. The hiss of blank tape surged,
then cleared. For a moment, nothing but silence, thin, a
low modulated handbas rising and falling, like the sound of
wind under a lock door. Layered within it, voices, dozens
of them, blended and blurred. Shovin you will see return,
and you will hear names withheld stacks. Remember the voices
sounded half familiar, warping in the back of my mind,
like the memory of distant conversation. Beneath them all something mechanical,
the click and drag of a book being slid home,
the quick scribble of pencil and card, the faintest catch
of breath held just one be too long. I snapped
the tape off, polse drumming in my jaw, fighting the
urge to drop the player and run. Instead, I forced
myself to lofe my discovery behind the words coming thicken,
and certain evidence suspected staff communication, possible warning voices on tape, instruction,
do not reshove alone, Further inquiry needivy, break in protocol,
record alteration, and staff disappearance patented. As I wrote, the
sensation of being watched sharpened, but I finished the jury
A thin to find sparking in me. A gentle knock
sounded somewhere well past the closed saxoft polite, the kind
of sound someone makes one hoping not to interrupt, I
called out voy, steadier than I fell. This areas close
to the public, identify yourself. No reply, only silence, pulling,
deliberate and thick at the edge of a light. As
the clock overhead clicked toward for, I realized how far
I'd moved from the habits of ordinary, cautious security work.
The familiar dreadmingled now is something almost exhilarating, a sense
that there was in a web spun through coal, numbers
and quiet, a logic both beyond and within reach. I'd
crossed into a different order of things, one not ruled
by employee handbooks or even by fear, but by old,
stubborn codes borne through index clouds, through forgotten whispers, through records,
not quite a raise. What I've feard mos in that
moment wasn't the strange voices or vanishing people. It was
the possibility that I was becoming shift by schiff one
more line in the hidden catalog myself. I left the
envelope and set locked in the maintenance cabinet, hands cramped
and head pounding from effort and lack of anzas. The
sun was thinning the night, draining color from every window.
I signed out on the battered ledger in blockade uneven capitals,
a pen stuttering across the damp carbon sheet in the
break room. My reflection hovered back at me from the
microwave's dark glass. The skin under my eyes had grown sallow,
flecked with grit, and my mouth looked permanently twisted, caught
between disbelief and the quiet terror of having finally seen
something you can't ignore. Stepping into the chill of the morning,
I told myself I'd sleep, a hopeful lie that failed
even as I closed the apartment door behind me. Instead,
I pored a mug of old coffee, wandered from window
to window, and rolled the notebook of notes between my hands.
Patterns everywhere each RaSE from the tape thrumbed in my
ear is adah. The only way out was drew and
to met knowing more. By m a day, my frustration
turned to habit. The room glowed with the weakful reescence.
I passed for day and out of old warehouse muscle
memory is set about sorting the evidence, the tapes, cards, slips,
and digital locks with Wi Fi sluckish and the city
libraries on nine portal. Refusing to cough up anything deeper
than recent acquisitions, I turned to the local government records instead.
It took an hour then too, but eventually I found
public meeting notes scanned and poorly accadi dating back to
the seventies, collected and fits and starts by long for
gutten clerks. My laptop screen showed the search terms flicker
and tired, Grayskille, tall Grass Library expansion, missing corruption Archive.
The consensus was a whisper of cost Overran's personnel complaints
as sudden, unexplained change to city contracts in nineteen seventy two.
There were scattered mentions of an incident in the archive
level huston language too careful to be innocent, the phrase
all night staff scheduled for review, repeated across several months,
then stopped abruptly. Each year a different chief librarian or
maintenance had signed off on round after round of emergency repairs,
always to the sub basement's record rooms, always after a
cluster of absences. There was no official resolution, only a
recussive blinking away of questions, as if each page existed
only to send the curious reader in a carefully managed circle.
Every piece of the hidden system at tall Grassamus Space
books files were drawn from public access absences that became disappearances.
Aligned to these windows. In oversize, I crossed compared dates
from the index card's time lines, and as before the
schedule of allD, it is matched not only with the
book's movement, but also with gaps in the security locks.
Every time the footage failed and NAM dropped from schedule,
the dates looped seventy one, seventy three, eighty one. Now rattled,
I returned to the list of staff who had vanished.
Each time I butt migrated through the hidden network of
the stacks, a person at security librarian Clik stopped showing
up to work. Weeks later, someone new emerged badge and
smile and voice, but glazed over, working silently with the
same jittery perfection. It explained why nobody and hadn't quite
remembered my predecessor. The records before him gone purged and
replaced with layered contradictory narratives. Restless, I rang my oldest
friend loose. My hand trembled, and the phone as it
rang ran and then picked up Illy. The voice sounded
blowd by static or maybe just distance. They didn't ex
begged you to call before dinner. Hey, I said the word.
Then look, just if you get a word voice message
from me, or if I go sign in for a while,
could you call the police. I'm working nights at Tallgrass,
and things here are messed up, like people are missing,
old records are being erased or moved. I'm starting to
think I'm next. This was quiet for a moment. Then Illy,
are you okay? Did someone for revenue? You could say that,
I whisper, glancing at the index card on the window
sill by my coffee. He just save this number. Don't
come down here though, seriously, He hesitated, then said I'm here.
Just keep your phone on all right. If you need out,
call me, even if it's the middle of the night,
take care of yourself. I ended the call, reassured and
yet not, and set my phone on the table with
the voice members up running if anything happened to night,
I wanted a record outside the library's care. Back at work,
everything felt sharp, a closer to the bone. I rig
my phone und about a digital recorder to run back
to back once had to save locally the other pair
to a barely functional cloud. Back up from the lunch room,
I pulled an old flask light, checked the batteries, ties
and stuff to come back. Screwdriver into my jacket pocket,
half for comfort, half for possible use. I tried hard
to remember what it felt like when the simple patrol
was bloke and play routined. As disk thickened, thunder tumbled
across the horizon, rattling the library's windows in their channels
to the air before the storm carried hints of ozone
and meldew of a millerprooklying tension running through every wall
and dupt. I circled the building one more time, scurping
for maintenance vans or other staff, but the parking lot
was empty. Street lights beginning to thicker, run every step
closer to the side entrance turned my mouthburter, so I slowed,
pressed my badge to the rear lock, and slipped inside.
The main lobby was draped in shadow, emergency lights burning
low and mean above the desk. The air felt rom
as if thousands of pages had soft The oxygen clean
rain battered against high windows, echoing through the upper levels,
and every draft set the book carts shivering on their wheels.
My goal was the arc of the circle room on
Thessessinians map. The schematic had no door marked there, only
a blank wall adjoining the freight elevator schaft, But rumors
from day staff, the librarian's warnings, and a blinking network
of clues whole pointed toward the spot. I moved quickly,
peraps blowed by anxiety. The only sounds were my footfalls,
the wheezing of old plumbing in the thunder that held
its south side was down. The vent chases, each corner,
each narrow stack press closer, as if the library sought
to contain me. I wanted nothing more than to pop
out the emergence, he ate it and run, But some
fundamental stubborness kept me moving through the ritual. As I
knew the archive. The lights flickered, then got it, drawing
it up all the quiet in the building by thunned
on my flasklight and pressed the backup recorder's button, watching
the little readily deflare to life. My notes said the
hidden entrance was past the close for renovation, sign ply
with panel draped and plastic sheeting, and as I peeled
it back, following the outline trace by the floor plan,
until my fingers caught the edge of a concealed door
painted over, but the sem gave under pressure a faint
pop of ancient lateral releasing, I slipped inside a world
of dark closed Immediately around me, the seacre passage stank
of damp plaster and the old glue. My footsteps blasted
cross and even tile slicking spots where second hand water
had seeped up from below. Instinct shoved me forward, hot
tripping as searching over the uneven ground. As I followed
the corridors bend around the final corner, the space wide
and abruptly into a small lock of unfinished with bookshelves
stacked haadly on all sides, leaving just enough room for
a person to stand in the center. At the air
vibrated faintly with static deet. Book was sets by an
in the page's open. Columns of annotations crowded the margins,
names and days, looping hand writing, and several hands crowded together,
as if recording attendants at an impossible meeting. Hello for
uming humpressed against my owns, half mechanical, half auditory illucination.
It seemed to roll up the spine of the library,
vibrating every shelf, every chip in the paint, and groaning
pape my floscil. I caught movement, a stack of bookshifting
manually as if being nudged by an unseen hand. Then
figures moved behind the shelves. I recognized them in a way.
Staff members whose faces had lately blurred into polite masks,
eyes bright button seen missas nullien, or at least her
outline drifted past me, whispering lines from old catalogs under
her breath. Her lips moved, but the sand swamp, repeating
broken syllables. Rochelle returned here, lessen, checkout numbers in lines.
Others followed, organizing and reorganizing the books without visible logic,
walking patterns that have lapped everyone like a dance trace
beul only if you possess the password that has passed
over me without surprise, or noticed the space's boundary. Stone
fluid walls lickered between stained concrete and endless receding stacks
are terrible, with vast and impersonal threaten to flatten meat.
I thoughtful, almost magnetized into the endless routine. Some part
of me lunch furiously for preservation. I tried to speak
the names Masses, Nullien, ms lewland Rains. Each effort flat
lined against the static bus. My flasklight trembled in my hand,
its beam jump in week. Then the pressure increased to bright,
squeezing headache that pressed memory thruss ive. What was my name?
What was I doing here? I knew only that my
hand clung to the recorder, thumb fidgeting over the record
and play buttons, as if the tiny switch might anchor
me to myself. The room pulsed, the figures circled me wordlessly,
but not silently. I could hear below the drone, the
smooth and dixon of catalog cards, the soft thud of
return books, the careful, careful arrangement of paper and draws.
I could feel the library's logic pushing into me. Sword shelf,
forget sword shell, forget. A hand brushed my sleeve. It
was cold, smaller than my own, familiar with the patient
calm of someone who would once spent days at the
reference desk. Returned. The figure murmured, face flickering between Missesinean
and someone even older, her hair and badger double image.
You belong. Don't let the stacks dry out, don't let
the pattern brick again. I wanted to scream, but my
own voice sounded like someone else's rehearse line. All at once,
the air churned, A shelving cart rattled into place, blocking
my retreat. Other figures pressed closer. I could sense myself
unraveling all's fears and routine splintering as my body move
of its own accord, sliding books onto Lige's cards into slots,
my mind receding as if watching a distant stranger. Do
not reshelve alone. I tensed every musle, so not to comply, clinging,
it said to the recorder in my palm. I pressed record.
The device's red diode flickered and burned. A cascade of
ghost voices spat back at me, merging and tumbling remember
late at this time, the voice was mind distorted, yet intent,
as if the memory of my own warning had worn
its way back through the arcad's logic. I rememberedly remember
the pressure loosened faint as a breed in space. A
pressed player on the old tape, the one from Missess
Newien's locker, and the he spled out into the alcove,
spinning up all the and quiet meanings behind the word Rachelle.
Suddenly the figures flinched, stuttering, mid sentenced shells, rippled books
he aught open, and the static of half haud voices
climbed toward a crescender. I lunged for the secret door.
Something tried to pull me back. Fingers cold and dry
on my jacket. I twisted, breaking free, bracking the recorder
and my body back through the corridor and up the
stairs into the storm wrapped main floor. I ran by
instinct as much as awareness. The library behind me. Scraat
groaned and slammed the hidden door with an impossible organic
force that rattled the cards and cables in my pocket.
When I collapsed on the sorting room floor, first light
was seeping beneath the clouds and pulling over the stacks
for long minutes. I gasped, dizzy, the world spinning as
if gravity pulse on and off, rain drumm across the sky, yelights,
and my stomach rolled. With the memory of rodigot and
static my limbs ach, I could in place the town
except by the weight of lost iyos. I barely remember
how the police arrived, though later I learned a neighbor
had seen flickering lights inside the library long after closing
in call dispatch specking a break in. The officers who
entered that morning found me somemer conscious on the floor
of the security file scattered across my chest and my
jacket damned with sweat. They asked what happened. I tried
to answer, but from my voice slooping, saying the same words,
tice always check the books, check the cards. It's all
in the stacks. Their report, I'm told, listed me is exhausted,
if possibly disoriented by chemical exposure, which offered enough plausible
deniability for city management to put the whole episode on ice.
Nobody wanted a scandal over the library, a core asset,
strategically embarrassing word get out about missing staff and secret tunnels.
I was given medical leave, bland counseling and warning. The
further attempt to accuse colleagues of tampering with evidence would
be taken seriously, But the real changes weren't bureaucratic. Once cleared,
staff moved through the holes with a robotic precision head
slightly tilted. I was glassy but bright. They spoke less
and less, their interaction shrinking to silent gestures and brief,
perfectly formed exchanges. No more gossip a bart but the
archive no more long smoky hallway breaks. When Tallgrass Library
reopened weeks later, night operations remained under review, the city
siding and building maintenance and safety updates. Nobody demanded my
badge back, but the new security guard, a matter of
fat retire re named Harry, started his first shift without
so much as a low, and me my well shrank
every night since I heard the library behind my catalog
numbers culled on the inside of my vision, even blocks
away from the old Lanstone building, the hush would sharpen
and a panic picture and it doesn't have tracked books.
Shuffling through the dark, sometimes just before sleep, words would surface,
not from within, but press from without. Shelf return listen.
My phone vibrated with phantom notifications, slacked hats on my
door impossible eys. I ignored them with equal parts relief
and horror, always expecting to open my eyes and find
the brittle, dallow cards multiplying on every available surface. They say,
you can't miss what you've never seen, But I glimpsed
the old pattern. How the city tuned its inconvenient people,
tucked them behind codes and shelving schedules, and replaced their
faces with mimics just pausible enough to pass the next audit.
I sometimes wondered if I'd resisted long enough for my
mind to snap back on its rails, or if what
resisted was simply another and another fixture, settling into the
library's slow regime. The rhythm, at least had changed. My
own rhythms quickened on outside, but slowed each time a
memory twisted, each time words in my mouth jammed up
and receded. It was weeks before I worked up the
nerve to return my security badge and recorder in person.
The day was bright, the air unseasonably warm, but the
stacks within pull shadows down even in late afternoon. I
walked up to the new guard's desk, handed over the
badge in its plastic sleeve, and set the recorder gently
atop the signing book. Howry, the new man did not
look up from his crossword Transfer of Property Elytores. I nodded,
walled on, then later back home. I entered my backpack
by habit, by the bottom of one pocket, buried under
a spiral notepeed in the batter it remains of my
last work lunch sat a fresh stack of index cards.
My fingers shook as I counted them, ten crisp and
blank except for the top card. I lifted it hard,
tripping slow, heavy strides on the top card, pending a
hand not entirely my own was a single, inarguable phrase.
Some books can't be returned, some voices can stop. I
dropped it, pulse hammering, as if the words might singe.
The apartment was quiet, windows open to the calm of
ordinary city traffic. I turned on my computer, pludded in
my own old recorder, now clean of old logs, I thought,
and click to play back the stored security locks. The
foules flickered on screens called through by date, static thickening
as I moved from one week to the next. Beneath
the ambient room hump below a hiss of rain and
battered pipes. Voices waited in whisper and saw in half
formed echo, at first only sibilants, then fragmentary syllables, my
own name buried in the mix, and just below that,
a slow convoice in monotone, cycling through a list of
called numbers, the pattern unmistakable ledges of Conna by transit
board minute Drury recommation, the next of kin file B seventeen.
I hurry my own voice, the cadence twisted by repetition
inhaling through the microphone, as if somewhere within the archive,
a faceless watcher was waiting for the pattern to renew.
It was my voice, but not it was the libraries,
continuing on whether or not I was said to listen.
I close the laptop. The room held its breath, and
I fell as if shuffled into place fancine hands. I
knew I would never shell my memories clean again. I
sat motionless, barely breeding. The overcorder's playback continued or rolling
on the current, always my voice, at first listing the familiar,
then the background, his tremor that might have been breadth
against the grill, then other sounds lighter, the flecking thud
of cards, the mechanical clutter I'd come to associate with
Shelvin in the deep ailes. But the whisper of the
voice that had called my name grew more prominent with
each passing second, freding beneath my own, like a double
exposed image. There were patterns in it two, not just
the listing of titles, but a kind of muttered cal
in response, as if one voice echoed and another answered.
I snapped the recorder, shut my hands, clammy. The new
stock of card satarayed on my lap. I shuffled them,
searching the pristine faces for a message, just blankness, page
after page, until the last, turning it over, I saw
the faintest and boss Chevron barely visible. The sword used
by the library's ancient notary press did read in letters,
so challow. I had to tell it against the lamp
purven at clause A chill ran the seam of my spine. Suddenly,
it was as if every detail of the last months
had converged upon me. The glassy eyed staff, the impossible
gaps in memory, those vanished nights when friends or routines
had flickered out like brief candle flames. My own voice
in the recorder had not simply chronicle. It had become
a key, cycling a pattern of access I hadn't known.
I provided to sleep when it came, was restless and fevered.
My dreams arranged themselves in heavy, silent corridors, stacked with
books whose titles I could never keep fixed in mind.
I heard shelving Cott's rolling ceaselessly, voices receding just out
of view, misses Knie, and sometimes in front of me,
her lips moving in private prayers, sometimes loose waving from
a far windows, if on a departing train. In these dreams,
the library never ended. The staff shifted, blong gated blood
around the edges, a slow motion dwance of ritualized repetition,
somewhere always and in its cord, weighted face down on
a rail or stepped, haunting with the certainty of a
missing word. I woke late, still drawn by daylight, having
managed a few hours and easy truce with sleep. Every
sound in my apartment seemed double trailing, a faint after image.
I opened windows, hoping the air will clear my head.
But the drone persisted rain on the metal of the
fire escape, echoing far differently than it had weeks before.
Folding the blunt cards together, I tucked them into a drawer,
as if out of sight might mean out of reach,
aware that I was lying to myself as much as
anyone loose cold at noon. You sound like you've got coal,
they said, didn't sleep sort of, I said, picking up
the edge of a post is stuck to my disk lamp.
Just needed to I don't know yet outside my head
for a while, though that library's gotten under your skin.
There was a gentle insistence and lose his tone, except
in shading into worry. He said there was a pattern.
Do you still see it? I hesitated, then said I
see it everywhere. That's the problem. I heard, only the
wind from this side of the call for a moment.
Then you don't have to be the one who solves this.
You know you're not alone in a city. Sometimes it's
okay to let something go, but I wish I could,
I admitted, press a knuckle into my forehead. But it's
like this, as this loop set running, I'm not sure
I can get off. Maybe nobody can. We sat in
silence for several long seconds, across town or across miles.
It suddenly seemed immaterial. When we said good bye, it
was with an unfinished edge, like pages left open for
annotations nobody could provide. I resolved not to go backwards,
so I cleaned to myself, repeating it like a charm.
But some subtle pressure shifted inside me, a certainty that
something a toll gras remained unresolved, and that the cards
the voice in the machine had only was treated to
lure me in again. When the city announced two days
later that the library would briefly reopen under reduced operating eyes, sighting,
staffing renewals, and partial renovations, a kind of fever to
cold the idea of leaving my pardon finished on. I
was restless, my apartment shrinking by the ire, shadows gathering
in corners that should have offered comfort. That evening, as
dusk gathered over the avenues, I couldn't help but pull
out my notebook and last shifts tatted blueprint. I stared
hard at the floor plan's circle of corner, recalling every
step through the hidden corridor, every breath of altamentt and meldia.
My hands moved over the drawing, almost unconsciously, tracing a
path from public stacks through the plouted breach. The alignment
of shells they shouldn't have fit in the space there
less than enough fingers with from the elevator was a
shape I'd overlooked, a sort of alcove carved out of
what on the city's plans offered only solid ground. I
cross checked every page of the staff log books had
managed to scan, stacking names that had vanished in the
same intervals. Books with missing cross reference cards where the
marks overlaped, I wrote beside them, entry book here gone.
Returning to tall Grass became not a choice but inevitability.
Every other direction too saturated, woul unsolved questions to permit escape.
Late one afternoon, far closer to close and in comfort,
would suggest, I made my way back. The sky was
metallic pale, with the threat of more rain and the
half light of autumn pressing against the city. I moved
quietly the way of Tresposo might, though I was armed
not with authority but with dull determination, and the batter
taper corridor battery swaped and ready, though open, A close
card folded tighten my inside pocket for lockword defense. The
parking lot was emptier than I expected. Only a handful
of cars lingered, their owners, likely making last minute returns
or burrowing into corners to meet some deadline. I skirted
the main lights, approaching the staff entrance, Surprised to find
the side door unlatched. I pressed it open and slipped inside.
The must of cleaner and ancient carpet washing over me,
the silent of the stacks, to peculiar attentive quiet of
an institution at rest, felt instantly oppressive. My steps were
absorbed by the faded blue carpet. Every half heard rustle heightened.
I made for the circulation desk, where a stack of
returned paperbacks strolled over the check and slot. No staff
in sight, I duck quickly into the shadow of the staircase,
retreacing familiar steps towards the supply closet, the battered old
cabinet where I had first played the anonymous tip left
for a night security. Something moved in the high gallery above,
a vague, its low motion more sense than seen, like
the watchful turn of unseen eyes. I swallow close in
my fists around the recorder so tidily that the edges
bit into skin. I wanted badly to find the place
chained rider's grobe of its ghostly ritual, But everything seemed
poised in blockade, as if some last performance waited just
for me to initiate. In a closet, the old cabinet
still stood, battered and faintly humming. The previous key still worked,
and as before, inside lay the orderly fan of outdated
circulation cards, their edges off from decades of oil and thumb.
But now a new envelope waited atop the pile, this
one marked only with an empty box. No name, no label,
no night security, just the check of a box drawn
in a hand trying not to tremble. I turned it
over inside a second carroard, thick as cardboard, with letters
printed in a cramp child looked script who shells alone
beneath it pencil timey a catalog number two hundred ten
be minutes forty five. I sucked in breath, chest tightening.
That was the subsection in local history at flight time,
and again in the security logs on the precise row,
where missing books and strange slip cards most often recurred.
The implication was not just that the pattern persisted, but
that someone aware and desperate had left the trail open.
I pocketed the new cloud, closed the cabinet, and shouldered
my way back into the narrow corridor flanking the archives.
The library's official lighting of the lawn jaundice fuorescents flickered
in series. Further, I moved from the public area the thinner.
The air grew every inhale, drawing the sharp chemical town
of dustue lodge of books, two lawn, and disturbed round
in the corner into two hundred ten B eight. I
paused the main stacks, ylned away in the gloom. The
air between each shelf compressed with expectation. My flashlight pressed
out to my chest for fear of leaking too much.
Light painted narrow pools ahead. I passed the wall clock,
watched the red second hand starter and jump, then stole
entirely on the minute time itself seemed to hang somewhere ahead.
The faint scrape of paper, then unmistakably the rattle of
a card against an even floor, parallel to my own
intrusive pulse. My grip tightened the card in my coat.
Who shelves alone suited for thread or warning poles were
sweat Step by step, I wewed my way down the road.
Shelf forty five mid height, midway back. The book in
the flagged position was not one I'd seen before. A
cloth pound ledger olive drab stamped in gold stuff in
dick Saarcowe rotation city records at time bine was cracked,
the til frey to soft philes. I hesitated, then pulled
a free. The shelf beneath it seemed to breathe dust,
shuddering on its surface, as if to splaced by a
moving hand. I flipped the book open inside. Instead of
city records, the pages had been overdubbed, lists of names, dates, paired,
winnings and losings, the crossing out of old signatures, newscrips
called in the margins not just librarians and security, but
maintenance clerks, two city engineers. One entry caught my eye
at the date three months prior, mashed both the disappearance
of Massesenian and my own stock. The line beneath it
freshly erased and penciled. The top and shaking script each
torus stand by. The circuit completed, the staff entered and erased,
as if each were not only catalog, but preordained phodol, don't.
A voice rasped at my shoulder. I whirled, nearly dropping
the flashlight, the beams splattering across the opposite wall. A
figure stood at the isle's end, half in shadow, but
I recognized the shade a mess Leland or someone holding
her posture made slower, her cardigan drooping at the elbows,
lip sucking in silent warning. I stepped back, nearly colliding
with the shelf behind. Why is this happening, I hissed,
Why all the rituals, the disappearances, the cards. Her eyes
met mine, hollowed by more than lack of sleep. They
keep feeding it, we reshelf, because it wakes if we don't.
No one alone, not for long. Once you hear it,
it starts with your words. The but who what is
behind it? She raised trembling fingers to her lips as
if to shush me out of habit, and then swept
her hand in a circle, down around, returning to the
starting point. Built on old ground, before the city, before
the library. A wound, the books, the papers they muffle
at Patten's safer than silence. I shook my head, struggling
to keep my focus is anyone left the real you?
A mouth twitched. Sometimes I think so, But we keep
the pattern where we become. She trailed off, Her eyes
flicked toward the book in my hand. That ledger wasn't
meant for you. You read, you join, you listen, lily, or
you shlve alone. She stepped back, melting into the dim
stacks as silently as she arrived. I look down at
the ledger, as pages fluttering, though no breeze moved, the
name shifting from side to side, as if refusing to
fe my sie. My hands prickled, nerves firing. The sharp
copper taste of fear pulled under my tongue. The card
in my pocket open it clothes felt suddenly hot. A
low resonant hum moved through the shelves, as though the
city's generators had dipped in unison. My flask lights being
danced crazily, occluded by shadow, as if the stacks themselves
had swelled and thickened in the half dark. From the
back of the aisle, a light pulse, brief and blue,
like the flick of all phosphorus screens. I followed my steps,
promture shuffling. I rounded the last bay, before the archive entrance.
The play circled. So many times in the blueprint were
hidden things waited. The plywood barricade had been drawn aside,
the step beyond plunged roughly in concrete, chipped and stained
down to a door, lawn denied me in daylight and
now slightly dar as if by invitation. I pressed my
hand to the door, feeling the oddly living quiver beneath
the cold. My lips shaped the words opened it close,
and as the phrase left me, the door yielded inside.
Light pulled only from below in a ray of reading lamps,
shroudered illuminated a human circle, heads, bad hand, straights in
index cards, and endless circular motion. The air was rank
with the compounded smell of wet paper, faded into the
sweet rod of generations of texts. At the circle's center,
a stack of the faded ledger books, all open, all
un scrabbed, with lines and crossings, a genealogy of erasure.
New hands slid cards across the covers, their motions perfectly
synchronized pass read erase shelf. One face lifted to possess
new in eyes were in silver, gazed idea's eyes for
shaking with the effort of words. Once my own illi listened,
don't let the silent win. I staggered the tape re corrider,
knocking against my rapes, accidentally hitting play. My own voice
poured out the earlier log, mixing now with fresh stattic
from the machine, multiplying discordant. The circle broke. The participants rose, wordless, converging.
I backed toward the wall. No, no, I'm not I'm
not staff, I'm not next. I won't each shell or
be shelled. They murmured, words laid in not harmony, the
same as in the tape. I squeezed the last card
vaupin a close, so hard it creased somewhere deep in
the machinery of the walls. The light shuddered, and one
by one failed. I lunged for the nearest exit, pushing
past the mess leland ar much stretched, as if for
comfort or restraint, The room's geometry twisted. A chef became
a wall, A wall receded to a doorway, another bay
elongated to infinity. With every of the heartbeat, the order
of things changed, as if the buildings patterned reasserted dominance.
Yet somewhere in the static in the course on the tape.
Another voice started to emerge, soft at first, then gaining
presents not the old echo, but loose, indistinct at the
edge of transmission. Ilately, if you're hearing this, you're not alone.
Get out if you can, don't let them of The
tape scrambled were set, but the intrusion had broken the
rhythm of a hoarded silence. A ripper moved through the
old staff missus Nian, staggering ms lullen, pausing mid movement,
and the air snapped. Clutching the recorder, I forced myself
toward a shaft of milded light. As I passed the shelves,
dozens of CODs cascadedly, swirling in downdraft, covering my feet,
each with names, each with the diatetsbroken lines of people,
half forgotten, half remembered. The pattern tremble then started to unravel,
as if finally pushed off, balanced by contradiction. Hands grabbed
for me, not violently, but beseechingly, pleading with body and gesture,
as some small pot wished desperately to be freed of
the cycle, to see their names returned to a living voice.
I cried out in confusion and fear, but pressed onward,
fighting the pull that wanted only order only to shelve
and be shelved. I tumbled through the narrow stairwell, the
door slamming behind with a shutdow that reverberated up my bones.
The storm outside held so long an abeyance unleashed. When
shrieked down the stairwalls, rattling glass and dragging spray up
past the fire door, I didn't look back. I made
for the public side, half crawling up the mainstairs, head
ducked feats, lighting as if the floor itself tried to
remember me differently. Once in the lobby, the electronic door
lock wine then gave a staggered on to the sidewalk,
ganning the empty lot. The vcant corners, the sight line
to the nearest lighted window release so overwhelming I thought
my legs might buckle. It was minutes, not seconds, before
I realized I was not alone. A figure leaned against
a bush shelter, heavily bundled but unmistakable, and bearing both
hands clutched a tape bag of battered books loose. These
on meeting, came forward, face grave but trembling, two white
a smile at oz with the weight in their eyes.
You look terrible, they said, voice close and solid, utterly,
blessedly real. I tried to assemble a joke and failed.
That place, I saw the worried s. H h, I know,
Loose said, starting me with a hand at my elbow.
I waited. I almost called the police, but something in
your last voice memo, something said not to or you hurt.
Only in the head, I tried. My vision swam the
after image of hundreds of cards fading from my mind's eye.
You heard the recorder, the voices. It's light. They take over,
make you part of their pattern. Loose was quiet. Then
some patterns you have to break, even if it hurts.
Come on, we're going. I let them steady me. Neither
of us looked back over my shoulder through the glass wall.
I saw the lights in the stacks, now flickering and bent,
weak lens, no longer marching lockstep, but spasming, uncertain. We
walked a long block in silence before I realized my
recorder was still running. Button john into place, battery, holding
on by a hair, I thumbed stop. The display glowed,
then wavered, then with a final click when dead, the
following days were fragied meetings with city officials, medical evaluation,
a parade of well meant questions and polite denials from superiors,
barely masking the wish for silence. Reports were filed. My
name etched twice in the schedule, then removed pending recovery.
No clear answers, mass Lellander and mis Esnier enlisted as
on indefinite leave. Rains now temporary supervisor signed neat regular
emails offering no apology. Buildings and routines proceed even when
the cost is a memory paid out, and disappearances, but
changes hung over tall brass. Night operations never resumed. Community
rumors swell, the talk of bad wiring, of break ins,
no mention of anything more. Staff now moved a furtive
precision lingering only long enough to shelve or stamp a slip.
Conversation paired down to nards and tea word exchanges. Some nights,
I heard the hush at my window of the distinctive
papery drug of a book's bine, the distant eye of
their pulled through a vent, and wondered what still weighted
under those stones, behind those shelves. On my third sleep
as night home. The blank stack of count again drew
me to the desk. Against my better judgment, I took
a pencil end in a cramped, shaking hand, wrote the
word listen on the top card, pressing so hard, then
print cut through to the table below. A moment passed,
nothing happened. I say, l's uncertain, then softer than size.
My phone lying beside the card resolved to life. Not
a notification, not a ring, just a slow, low memmour,
as if some call were attempting to complete itself on
the line. I unlocked it slowly. The screen flashed white
for half a second. A wallpaper background washed out, replaced
by a series of numbers, call numbers, session times, sequences
of digits I recognized from the stafflock. My thumb hovered.
I moved to power off the device, but formbidden, found
myself tracing the pad over the microphone, as if compelled
to speak into the hush. Finally, in a voice that
sounded more bored than owned, I said, I'm not yours.
The pattern's broken. The screen went black, the phone powered down.
I sat for a long time, waiting for more. In
the days that followed, a library shadow receded but its
logic held the wariness, a caution about what routine can
due to memory to people. I kept the stack of
cars locked in a desk drawer, refusing to think throw
them away, as if it would grant them new power.
But sometimes in dreams were before sleep, the pattern resumed
the same shoving rituals, the closed loop's shelve, return listen,
Mapping out each day, I clung to the presence of friends,
to the gentle insistence of the city outside my window,
determined how was more than just another name rotated in
and out of silent ledgers, Yet I knew some threads
remained loose. One evening, after the city is half had
a check in and promises of resolution, I found myself
hunched over my laptop, qued through old security recordings i'd
uploaded for evidence. The library's droning silence seemed to thicken
through my speakers. The hum and click and occasional rolling
thunder of carts fold a familiar soundtrack. And that is
the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
you in the next one.