Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. If this records, let it be
something only I will listen to later, just to hear
my own voice say that none of this ever happened.
It's almost midnight, and the boiler pipes above my head
wine whenever the temperature drops a degree. The phone doesn't
ring down. Here there's no clock, but I keep one
eye on my watch, tracking the seconds from the glow
of a reading lamp I borrowed from circulation. If a
main break of trips, I'll be in pitch dark, with
only the battery from this recorder and whatever shine I
can coax from the beam of my flashlight. I can
taste the sorrow trays of copper every time I yawn,
which is too often lately. I haven't slept a full
night in months. Every time the building creaks, my shoulders
in chire against my neck, waiting for the next sound.
In the endless hush of after IROs in the stacks,
I keep dreaming of this place. The dream is never
the same, except that I walk, sometimes crawl, for ever,
between bookshelves that growed impossibly tall, the spines so tightly
pressed together that I'd need to splinter my hand to
pull one free. I hear voices around every corner, sometimes
calling my name, sometimes weeping, sometimes just breathing, And every
time I wake, I'm sure the last syllable I heard
as sunhiw. I could into the room lately, I wake
convinced them already at work. My body planted against the
chill linoleum lamp halo trembling around my angles as if
flight itself as cronhestant to night's inventory assignment, drives me
down past the periodicals into a storage alcove fuvico. Most
of these books have spent decades in touch. Their bindings
brys shitskin. The air is dale thick with mildew and dust.
My gloves pick up flakes of old covers every time
I nudge a volume lush from its Rare crates are
stacked to shoulder height around a table scold with knife marks.
Someone used to unbox and men books here, but the
nearest repair tickets date back twenty years. My clipboard already
bears a few lists I'll never finish. The floor's bowed
in the middle, making the shells lean toward collapse. I'm
halfway through shifting a tangle of oversized ledges when I
spot it, a hulking Brandish book, wage between an almanac
and a treatise on municipal suers. The title plate is worn,
but as I reach for its fraying spine, my flaskfe
catches a cure, as flashy tack out slip poking from
between its pages, stubbornly white, even in this dimness, it
pulls away clean, as if placed hours ago, and my
heartbeat NiFe to my chest when I read the date stamp,
bold and fresh, last Tuesday. Somehow beyond all reason, the
card is immaculate, no dust, no call, perfectly flat. The
slip is filled out in a coarse, deliberate script, Eh kirk.
I'm at the name, unable to recall any Koka padron staff,
even a research of nothing. My hands tremble around the card.
The locks say this room was last opened in eighty seven,
and I have carried every key to it since I started.
As I turned the check out slip over at the
room's temperature dips, something barely audible stirs in the ceiling
or deeper behind the walls, A mechanical from or perhaps
the mere suggestion of sighing than nothing. The books in
the highest shelves seem to lean inward, the spine's crowding
my vision, as if the whole weight of the room
is hanging overhead. For my next motion, I record to details.
My own voice sounds smaller than usual. I try for
the empty time to push away the sense of being
always lightly observed, not directly, but through the pressure of
aciant pages ACKed into unreadable shape papes. I set the
book aside and close my hand over the checkout's slip,
as if keeping it for further proof that whatever is
wrong here, it is a name. Now the basement clock
jumps forward by minute, and as the pipes let off steam,
a new s island settles over the room, keen as
a blade's edge. People ask if I miss my old life,
back before the city and this job. Trouble is I
can barely remember what living without. The throb of concrete
and pipe wook sounded like my previous apartment rattled too,
but not like this building does. This place feels as
if it inhales, waits and exhales its own special brand
of dread. With every change of the air conditioning just
the act of looking for a decent cup of coffee
or a working bus line reminds me how recently I
arrived Hapoorly, the city fits newcomers. The library itself is
nowhere near as grand as it once must have been.
But what pulled me to the job three floors of
book round four below was that honcomb of possibility. The
minhole sports battered gold leaf from the intry columns, dressed
and crack stone hinting at nineteenth. That is optimism. But
step through the doors and everything beyond the circulation desk
is a descent. The corridors run in strange angles or
marked by tiny tim Placard's reference cattle log archeves with
chippin has never been standardized. At least half the signage
points to areas you can't enter at all, restricted sub basements,
transitional storage rooms whose numbers skip the normal sequences if
they are met by someone guessing. Most of my duties
are routine box new arrivals, catalog legacy materials, replenished stacks
after closing. I keep a digital log with time stamps
for everything I touch, but the staff here in sisson
duplicate paperworkink on card and form, every figure in triplicate,
retyped by hand each quarter into whatever main frame still
stirs in the silver closet. The real action, if you
can call it, that, all happens away from the public.
Maintenance on the climate control midnight inventory sweeps odd requests
to full reshelving bins left abandoned in the hallways. Lunch
are usually take in one of the study curls a
glass sided oc of ring by Encyclopedia sets that no
one seemed by the day occupy. I'd rather eat the
than in the staff room. The engine for its hums
out of sink, and there is a smell of bleach
knotted into the floor tiles. The sub basements remain out
of bounds unless someone else walks with you, a policy
repeated so often it's like a mantra. Once I pressed
for details about why, the only reply I got was
from Don, the janitor, broad chested and crackling with the
dry where of friendliness that makes former Navy men good.
At Bannter lost a cart down there. Once Dawn said,
like the half punch LINEO long juke that stops being funny.
My first week, everyone said to you, stir Clovakav's storre
to one account of the seventy e fire, except no
one would say what burned. When I asked Lena, who
processes periodicals with military efficiency, she smirked and told me
fires happen here more than you'd think it, especially on paper.
She never answered, Were I pressed for specifics? Not about
the fire, not about the car, not about why file
box sometimes appears on a desk at nine and disappears
by noon, all with the right dates but the wrong signatures.
Mess orloff. My boss keeps her handsful. She's always in motion,
tracing her finger down a page, flipping over talking points,
scanningless with both braws near her nose as a squinting
will make the digital numbers more honest. She sweeps in
for meetings but never lingers, her voice thin and precise.
Were under added next week? Do or check the locked
rooms and don't sign out keys without the book. When
I try to bring up discrepances, even to any ones
like a ledger with wrong handwriting, she told me to
focus on throughp. Gohost. Don't pay the late fees. Laughter,
flat eyes fixed to her own calendar. There's Lena, always
snapping elastic bands on periodicals, and then mister Barnard. He
used to head to Akhas before retirement. Nearly blind, Now
he walks by memory, fingers trailing the walls, navigating corridors
no one else uses. I hear him mumbling, sometimes strings
of numbers and coal signs, like he's rehearsing passwords to doors.
Nobody else remembers. I keep a list in my pocket, anomalies, books,
miss file call digit one off signatures that resemble the
dead heads from staff portraits in the founder's gallery. I
listen noises, hum's metallic ticks, the strange rise and fall
in the boiler's sognet dawn. Maybe this is how session builds,
or maybe this is just how you learn to do
your job, cataloging not just the books, but the peculiarities
of every dusty shelf and corridor's acoustic echer. Trying to sleep,
I replay these patterns behind my eyes. I wake with
Naane stuck in my mouth, but none fit that slip
of papery Kirk. Now I wrapped carefully in my wallet,
waiting for whatever puzzle it cracks open. Next. Cataloging the
mysterious book takes longer than I expect by habit. I
type Kirk into the patron database. Not. Then I try
again with alternate bowings, even wild cards, negative return. There's
no record of a current opaste Kirk, not as patron,
not on staff, not even as a visitor. In the
event locks or sign in sheets. The name sits in
abeyance in both the new and dusty ledges. I drifted
the sign and locks for the previous week. These come
from an actual guest book, a relicant imitation leather, and
there it is again, same signature in thick, unstable blueing.
Scroll for two other check cuts. Both belong to materials that,
by policy, shouldn't have left the recollection's case, let alone
passed into general circulation. The first is a mildypock directory
of vanished neighborhoods. The second and microfilm box already lobed, missing,
presumed destroyed, lonego More knots and tangles are widen the search.
I come across an ancient repair lock from nineteen eighty,
yellowed with oil ending stains. It reads like a pair
rule lists for a repair crew, each name carefully initially
that except several, including J. Marrow and E. Barris, show
up on Earler Jecket slips names that repeat cross books
but vanish from all other records after a certain date.
The list in my notebook grows. I keep a running
ghost ledger as a hidden document on the public drive. Names,
call numbers, pattern anomalies. Each time I think I have
a grasp on the number of oddities, account shifts, enteres
appear and disappear with a digital blink. Unsettlingly, I notice
another glitch. The computer system at the circulation disk will,
at odd moments, always near midnight, display strange pending transactions.
The fonder, pale gray a half to solved book titles
flickering for heartbeats before erasing themselves. When I try to
capture this green, it blanks out as quickly as it came.
The logs leave no trace. The more names are jot down,
the more the silence of the stacks begins to feel
full charge. Not with anticipation, but with a quiet labor
of hands. And scene were shuffling papers just out of view.
With evidence in hand, I decide to approach a mess
fall off about the slip. She scans it with brisk
in difference over echoes get mixed up. The entire basement's
paperwork was moved after the Early Ages floods. She says
was clipped. When I press for why the log seems
pristine compared to us cake ledges, she holds up upon
catalog in quirks nothing more. Don't get tangle trying to
solve the library. Just close out what you catalog. Her
dismissal is gentle but absolute. Later that day, it across
paths with Don in the staff corridor. I show him
my running list low enough at the passing Reford's desk
went over here. Instead of laughing off my inquiry, Don
leans in, lowering his voice. You'll see the same name
on slips for decades, if you know what to look for,
he says. He used to be Williams, and before Williams,
some one else. The old ghosts write books reappeared just
where no one left them. I once found a copy
of an old City kobook with the nineteen fifty six
slip bran new not yellowed, written in pen I used
to carry. Haven't owned that pen in twenty five years.
Sometimes it's like these things checked themselves out, honest, he shrugs,
half apologetic. Some books want to be found wanting harder answers.
I request access to last month's security logs. The official
reason a routine audit for missing returns. The night footage
from the underground stacks is pitted with gaps. Some are
noted as camera outages, boil a steam covering the lens parahip,
but a chunk of footage simply takes over itself, flicker, flash,
no timestamp, then resumes as if nothing's occur. The records
for the Rare Collection's room are even stranger. A camera
flagged damaged with a narrow code referencing file corruption, not
mechanical failure. I take the camera home. It's a clunky
tape based unit, engine and battered. Several attempts to recover
footage and in static, but the audio track, with some prodding,
reveals more faint rustling, a drawne like pages turning in
a heavy book, footsteps echoing with no certain pace, murmurs
in the language know in syllables that belong nowhere in
any chain of the known catalog. Overlaying these faint yet
persistent is a sort of childish song caught in mechanical loops,
haunting the edge of hearing. It's enough to push me
into overtime. I volunteer late, feigning a need to finish
more boxes. After ires, I walk the corridor below the
main stacks with my digital record. The air here feels
ancient and slick with cold. Walking forward is like wading
ways steep in scene resistance. The library presses from the darkness,
herding me from isle to aisle, with every echo bunce
back from distant un scene movements. My flutterly catches shadows,
some just my own, disorted, but more than once I
see their edges shift when I'm not moving without warning.
A stack of unhelved books near the fire door collapses
with a sound like a crate of bones falling. I jump.
At the bottom is a thin, battered ledger with letters
guilt into the spine, Lost Collection, nineteen seventy seven. The
book is out of protocol, not part of any run.
I'm supposed to processtinay inside entry stop predictably titles and
due dates initials in oddly familiar hand, But as the
pages advance, the handwriting gros erratic, desperate referencing a lone
signed by ghost card cross references appear in red pencil.
Materials were drawn destroyed or burned that have no match
in the digital archive. Names recurcurk among them, the last
few pages bare frantic under linings returned by night, erased
without due notice, a sea burn to destroyed, not destroyed.
I copied the dates into my note book. The boiler
rattles to the life and the waller note in the
same key as that looping melody from the audio track.
The air takes on the static charge, raising every hair
on my arms. The stacks hold their peace, waiting as
I show the ledger in return upo ground memory heavy
with un answerable questions. Morning after the Ledger discovery, I
trade sleep for newsprint. Double Loss Collection nineteen seventy seven
is only alluded to in the local papers, hushed right
ups about an unexplained closure, rumors of a minor incident
that triggered brief for renovations. This passing mentioned with fire,
but the details are art No fire department report, only
anonymous statements from library officials downplaying the scope. The entire
coverage reads curated, like a control burn of the truth
rather than the stacks. I find online scans of a
limited partial lists hundreds of missing titles. When I check
a current holding statabase. An alarming number are still present,
quietly circulating among long term patron's catalog beneath you, bark woods,
and in several cases checked out not by anyone on file,
but to names like VI, Triste nandell Mother, each matching
anomalss slip signature as I'd already copied. The rest are
noted as destroyed or cult but wreckers of their woudrol
have no proposign off. Some are referenced to handriton memos.
Others appear as recurring ghost entries in the circulation system.
I carry this Mestelina, the only processing clerk whose word
counts for anything on procedural exceptions. She regards my pile
of evidence fodcuppered names, ledger pages with a mixture of
exhaustion and alarm. Think about your career here, Elliott. You're
making yourself a problem, she says, voice low and sharp,
Her fingers hernia my print outs, before decisively pushing them
back toward me. People who chase nomalies don't last long.
That's not a threat, just an observation. This is a
place for keeping records, not digging them up. Just let
their breast strong and shaken. I clear out for the evening.
Hours later, at a change into my coat in the
staffer room, I find a slip of paper, tightly folded,
dropped into my locker. Checked the mesanine past midnight. Don't
trust the rota, no signature, just a looping dash under
the final period. My name's been whited out at the top.
For a moment, I stare at the message, acutely, aware
of the blank space all around it, as if the
air itself waits expectantly. The library hums with different energy.
Now I sense the shifting of attention, something tightening in
the routines of the people in the butchered sequence of
shift locks. Someone's watching. I sense the palpable pressure of
a record keeper lurking just out of sight, rewriting not
only events but people into their proper columns, for erasing
them should they ask too many questions. Once darkness rolls
through the nearest windows and the final patrons are alawn
this burst, I slip up to the mezzanine. Security lights
pull on the main stair, but up here shadows lay
thick between the stacks. I find a section of paneling
with the lump in the surface and gently breasts a
hatch yields quietly swinging back to reveliclesipice perhaps four feet tall,
lined with loose sheets and boxes. Inside the air tastes
of moldering paper and a cool in a way that
sinks into your bones. Files and catalog cards are tumbled everywhere,
whole shoe boxes of discarded patron records, some bearing dates
from decades past, others newer, all with redacted information. Some
have cryptic nose in margin rea I moved eighty six
transfer two point fourteen monitor check after hebron protocol. Sorting
through the piles, I recognize the same occurring names and
Co's kirk a j Merrow, obscure spellings haunted by repetitions
at the back. Then ledges crowd the space, their journals
compiled by past darkavis enters referencing and observation protocol designed
to monitors selected patrons of staff, targeting those whose behavior
flag is a barrent. The notations are clinical, but become
more desperate over time. Accidental discovery. Do not log mark
for transfer via ghost ledger ubindus flag history rewritten participant unaware.
My own recent activity is noted in a different shade
of pencil e gray approaching threshold observer port. Each action
typed into the work log as mirrored here with an
iOS my movements stalked in new real time. I almost
miss a bat of cassette under a heap of yellowing microfiche.
The label has nearly faded, but I make out Archive
Admin seventy two. I pocket it. If the croal space
feels haunted, it's not by spirits, but by the accumulation
of intentions surveilled crystallized in handwriting and paper, all of
it designed to trap a person's curios ousty until participation
becomes compulsory. Ad I notice the hatch close behind me
and stand in the mezzanine gloom. Something shifts down in
the main corridor. I hear len as clip footsteps, pause,
then resume. If she notices me, she says nothing. The
crawl spaceer follows me out coal and knowing as if
I am only the latest in a line of witnesses,
kept just close enough to the truth and yet never
far from the stack's reach. I wait until I am
safe in my apartment, door locked blends, drawn tight, before
I dare unspool the OLC set the tape worrs, hissing
and crackling, with age almost unraveling under the strain of playback.
The voices that merge unmistakably senior till liberate, measured. Each
one speaking in code were referring with chilling detachment to
the program. I lean close, hand shaking. As the details emerge.
A system that sustains itself by cultivating informants, drawing in
vulnerable staff or patrons, promising benefits in exchange for cooperation,
then binding them with implied threats embedded in the circulation
looks to send us a risk. One old man says,
voice clipped and cold. So monitoring must be continuous. Patterns
recur and those who assist vannish twice, once from roll,
then from record. A woman a mess all off or
perhaps her predecessor offers the cutprote call reads well on paper.
Best to cycle in a new signature every quarter, many hands,
one name. When the pattern is noticed, to raise it.
My skin prickles. Eh Kirk is not a person. It
is a roll in assigned signature that passes among the trusted,
each taking up the work of obsercation. Misdirection or removal
is needed. The informing mechanism is recursor. Those who see
too much are invalid. Force be turned from observers into
the observed. I scoble notes as the tape concludes with lofter,
thin hollow, followed by the same unmistakable melody mechanical unlooping,
as if played by a child's wind up to HOI
dragged under water resolute. I returned to the library. This time,
I avoid the main entrance, using the lowing dock to
slip inside. In the deserted Rare Collections room, I had
a small recorder behind a row of Latin encyclopedias and
wedge myself half into a broom closet. I wait until
the building's night shift is otherwise empty, patients thinned by adrenaline,
some IROs pass, then subtle movement. Three figures, under the
ghostly glow of emergency bulbs, faces hidden beneath herds. One
using a cane, they methodically re arrange volumes, check call
numbers against the compact lager, and begin looking phantom checkets
in the Rare Books computer, the screen flickering in the ghostly,
near invisible gray. They speak softly, their conversation clipped and urgent,
full of tangled code. Groupee is late and no new
logs in spaceline. We must close before dawn too much.
Noting the signatures which hands to night, I recognize Lena's
voice behind one mask, and the older form of mister Barnard,
moving more purposely than his usual gate suggests. The third
shadow seems anxious, hands trembling as they pass about a
blue pen identical to the signature inc on every anomalous
slip between them. Then a soft beap from my recorder,
newly imperceptible, but enough to draw stoutled silence. All heads
turn and the ethic ins every desmot visible, and the
cone of a solitary flashlight rising. My pulse prints Lena's
eyes searched, the gloom, landing briefly on the closet or
brow furrowing with something like regret. A clatter as shelves shift,
and suddenly the search is on. I sprint for the stairwell,
adrenaline trading exhaustion for jagged energy, the holes along gate
with each turn, my slippers griping smooth wax linoleum, tinny music.
The song from the tape spills through the unseen inter calm.
It's tuned, thretting through the corridors, making navigation impossible. Shadows
flicker on polished glass. The three figures joined now by
two more from a side entrance, converged from every direction,
I duck through the archives, leaping over a collapsed cart,
hot in my throat as ghosting footsteps crash closer. The
hum of the boiler gains, the musical cadence the same
as the melody from before. Cycling and looping inescapable. I
try to backtrack, but the doors, all the doors ever set,
each label, rom each passage, looping me back in on myself,
as if the stacks are subtly redirecting my path. Their
footsteps multiply. A voice of mistakably Barnard's bellows my name,
mournful and warning Linus of the wet appiers blocking the
last open hole, a face court between fatigue and pity.
There's nowhere left to run. As imes seize by arms,
I half recognize. The whirl blurs, the noise blooms into
a cacophony, until all I can hear is a song
swim coming from my head, clean as a memory and
never owned. I go under, not with a scream, but
with the sting certainty that the line between staff and
record is dissolved at last. The library is always waiting.
I know that now and to night, it has finally
noticed me. Sund and shadowed, dissolved the corridor until it
could be any hallway, damp stone, flaking paint under my
palms as I recoil against the lock fire door behind me,
footsteps slapped the linoleum, then slow, drawing close, leaning round
the corner, first breathing hard, face half lip by her
phone screen. She moves with urgency, tied to fear, gazed,
darting over my shoulder. The others close in barn out upright,
his head cocked as if sniffing from my position, something
softly muttering behind his lips. The other's faces lost behind hoods,
gestures rushed and ritual as to fan out, blocking my
only escapes. I press my back to a shelf, lungs
hitching in the sudden stillness, the melody tin bone and
skipping veelthers from above a speaker stack, tongue flickering through
a fragment of nursery ry my nearly recognize. I clamped
my hand tighter on my recorder, my fingers aslick were sweat,
the only evidence left that I might stell against all odds.
Leave some account if antakeun vellet. Lena's voice carries no malice,
only a brittle fatigue. Don't ruin what you don't yet understand.
Just give me the device. She lifts her hand, not
to threaten, but is a broken piece, palm open in
the darkness. Arnaud's siddles closer, his steps tracing an odd rhythm,
as though the music wires his movement. His cane taps
the floor, a counterpoint to the other woly leap overhead.
Something in his face cracks open. The mask of the
affable retired drops, revealing as hollowed by regret. You could
have been catalogued. Left in peace, he whispers, more to
the ear than to me. You know now you have
to choose. But chores feel ornamental. Two of the hooded figures, smaller, breathing, fast,
move forward, gripping my arms with surprising force. The other
sands sentry, silhouetted against the distant green glow of that
exits sign. Lena's fingers tremble as she extructs the recorder
from my hand. How touched gently yet final, as if
she's performed this task before and hated every repetition. It
knows to participate, Ellie Lina says, her voice almost intimate.
No one here asked for it either we inherit it
like mildew. She glances at Barnard, whose shin lows in shame.
He document, so do we. But someone must shape what
the city remembers. Someone deletes, someone signs. The pattern needs
a witness. They usher me, not roughly, but with unwavering
intent through passage. Weighs whose geometry walks with each step,
stack's crowd shells pinched together, the earthic ins to syrup,
even in panic. I catalog small details, the calcking between stones,
the scuff of shoes over patchwork tile, the way cables
dangle from open seal and tiles to vanish behind with
vineyard panels without my intervention. Doors relabel themselves as special export,
a technical annex, a whull beefery, none of which exist
on any map I've studded. We descend, then double back twice.
The rut's ensless unless you've been conditioned to navigate these
invisible knots. We hot before a battered metal door, its
surface dipple with fingerprints, mudges, and long faded stick as
its keeper beeping cryptic notes in answer to Lena's code.
The song behind us pauses as if use dropping, then
resumes louder. The space beyond is colder than the rest,
a chill that gnaws the mirror. They leave me in
a cramped room, claustrophovic lit by a naked bulb swinging
from a cord above a battered UK desk. Filing cabinets
dented and stamped with inventory dates that hop back and
forth by decades line all four walls a clatter, and
Barnard draws up about a chair opposite me. The two
hooded assistants hang back, exchanging glances. Lena hesitates the recorder,
glinting in her palm. She lays it atop the table.
It's red light now dormant. You wanted to find the
root of they, Kirk, You've been locking ghosts. That's not
the first time such a list was started, you know.
But it never ends. The observer always becomes necessary. Barnard's
voice cracks. We don't erase people. You must understand there's
a need for continuity, for the network to persist, to
shape the city's memory, authorities, auditors the public. They only
see what's left in the ledges. Someone always writes, but
someone must use what remains and what vanishes. My breath
clouds before my face and out. Even the bulb's light
seems to shiver. So you invent the checkout's love materials
that whenever hero raise pots that threaten the pattern, I reply,
my voice steadier than I feel. And when someone like
me notices, they are brought in a flicker, something like
pride crosses Lena's face. Only the determined, Only those who
cross too many columns. Most walk away when they see
a signature misspelled by shelf gun, missing you. You had
to keep asking why the network integrates the curious. Not
the content. Data raises with time, but the pattern must.
As Stewart's Barnard's hands twitch, cane rattling against his knee.
I try to resign once. It made me retire. Next
month I'll be inducted again, probably with new duties. His
eyes find mine people swimming last. It isn't just here,
eh Kirk. That's our anchor for the necessary gaps. The
prote culpridates us all a hush fALS as Lena takes
a battered ledger from the deepest drawer and opens it
to a blank page. She passes the blue pen into
my hand. You can sign on the exit line, elliot,
become a silent partner. Let the world, but forget your curiosities.
For sign on the bottom and keep chasing answers. There
is just more risk of the way your columns can
grow red. I hesitate. The pen's wage is unfamiliar with sink,
a deep, almost iridescent blue. The ledger's page is lined
with the residue of other hands and dentations still marked
from signatures, erased, layered like a palimpsist. My own name
flickers in my mind, already half absorbed into someone else's ledger.
In no third option, my voice is an echo. Lina's
mile is mournful only that you forget or become forgotten.
Your store has already begun to shift. Barnard rasps tomorrow
the staff or report uell on leave or simply gone.
He choose the next thought. The building will shuffle your files.
The ledger's physical and digital will align according to protocol.
Even your apartment may lose track of what your own,
what he borrowed. I find myself laughing a hollow rising
note that climbs until I nearly chook on. It is
this why half the city's archivists looks sleep deprived. Why
the same dozen faces suckle through every institutional staff portrait
going back fifty years, just modulated. We're all but keeping
ourselves into oblivion. Honor it actually grins, lips, pealing over
an even teeth, better vanishing into the ledger than into
the street. His glance is weighted and unspoken. Tragedy trembling there.
Lina leans forward, forced grim with complicity and comfort. The
city above isn't kind, eliot. We persist or we dissolve.
The archives have always been brigmad, if nothing else. She
opens the ledger, father inviting my signature. I grip the pen,
averting my eyes. I scribble across the witness lie, neither
at the top nor at the very bottom, but spanning both,
a line meant for loss contributors. At that moment, a
course of footsteps hammers the whole outside, urgant and practiced.
The two heard of assistants draw tight to the door,
Flashes of panic whispers seeping under the threshold. We can't
wait here, Lena's voice is stripped of constraint. Now another
record review, security, patron complaint doesn't matter. The protocol must
close before they arrive. Bonnard snatches the ledger and slides
me towards the back wall, hitting a concealed latch. A pivot,
and the filing cabinet swings open on to pure blackness.
A maintenance sunnel or on the sub basement air sharup
with the metallic tan of white concrete. The inn, he urges,
and since every other option evaporating behind that door, I follow.
Leana crowds in after the ledger, hugged tight to her chest,
reciting numbers under her breath. The tunnel is not straight.
It curves, narrows, dips in a flat lights thin beam.
Decades of short tally marks, stated notes and carved arrows
swung the wall of running inventory of every transfer gun
unlocked in official records. My sneak is slip on something sticky,
a patch of goose or bindery paste. My eyes dart
to Barnard, whose steps are sure even now? Where does
this go? A croak? My voice boxed in my echoes.
The only room the ledge is cant catalog, he says hoarsely,
for now, I try to mark passage by memory. Left
at the inverted crucifix, up at the spider web of
hastily taped ethnic cables, right with the tunnel splits by
a heap of discardive rubber stamps. Even here THISSLM taints
the silence faint and nauseating. In oscillation, we emerge in
a storage alcove. Yellow emergency illumines hum overhead, and the
room is lying floor to ceiling with carts, rills of microfilm,
and a cot layered with dust. A battered computer sit
on a wire rack beside a heavy door. His monitor
glows a sickly orange presenting a login window. Goes to
access password. Lena types rapidly, gripping the ledger under one arm,
fingers stained blue resistant cling echoes behind us, the pursuers
searching or an alarm being tested. Lean tenses, throwing her
phone and flickering through what look to be security feeds,
each distorted time skipped, people's faces blowed or replaced by
blank ovals. We're not safe here either. Lina scans the room,
grabbing a battered lock box from a shelf, passing it
to barner. The ledgers must move these records. If you'll help,
you can carry them to the city archive off site.
Bonnard a justice grip on the box, shoulders drooping. We've
done this dance, rotating evidence. There's never an end, He
turns to me, as grown clear. YE say you want exit,
but so did I. There's always another ledger, another name.
Lina's voice is in as she hands me the recorder,
her eyes lingering on the blinking red light. If you
want to warn any one, it must be physical, no digital.
The pattern hunts deeper in coat, Make a tape, hide
it in a book, anything someone will find you, or
what's left. Another echo nearer Now, a voice calls my name,
and tone softened to regret. I stiffen. You know what's coming,
Lena whispers. If you run, you'll only leap back. Your
apartment's already compromised. But if you plant your voice summer,
if you leave a trace, while sometimes the traces all
there is, I'll try. I breathe, choking down dread with
a dry swallow. Barnard presses a set of keys into
my hand. Spare a locker, basement, north wall. We'll hold
off the search ft steps tender in the whole a
key rattles the outer lock and leaning nearly sprints for
the exit. Hide now memorial collection behind the atlas of
war Losses, insert it close to shelf and go, don't
look back. My mind blanks, then spins. I move the
box in my arms, heavier than logic desk, lamp swinging
overhead in a chaos of angles and glare. The melody
in a pipe surges louder notes distorting, threatening to rupture
my skull. Barnard wheezes, pressing himself between the door and
the passage, stalling for time with an ancient mantra, lines
of catalog numbers, a prayer in reverse. I take the
North corridor, fighting the scents that each term might spit
me back at the start, the air grows colder, the
lights flicker, and time thickens. After three wrong doors, I
see the memorial collection. A wall of atlas is in
batted leather top shelf slightly gapping. I kneel, hot, pounding
and pull out the hatless of war Losses behind it
a slot with shaking hands, I slide the recorder inside
its red lights, stuttering but still alive. The swarm of keys, jingles,
footfalls can verge, and I hear Lina cry out, not
in fear, but in warning. The wall seems to shift,
a vibration in the fore, knocking my knees. As the
last flutter of red led vanishes behind leather cover and dust.
I rise, half crouched. The group runs the corner of
the pursuers, Barnard at their center, hands raised in appeasement,
as Lena tries to explain, gesturing wild and universal from mercy,
distraction of both. I stare down the length of the shelf,
at the faces watching me, now, not with malice, but
with hunger for resolution, for what the protocol demands, the
ritual of transference, with record keeping it self sacrifice. All
eyes are on me, the doors are all but closed,
the circle drawn. I take a step back, then another heartbeat,
matching the music that now polls from every vent and socket.
The light above me trembles and fades, and somewhat in
the shifting hash, it is clear the library is awake,
a living presence, shuffling its people, its columns, its ghosts
into order. Once more, the page will turn, My hand
marks it to passage. The next act weeks in the hush,
the story not yet finished, nor forgotten. A cleck and
a shout of the recorder comes to life, sound fast,
with fabric, as if pressed against my coat. It must
have survived the shuffle or bidness in the confusion, because now,
moments or hours later, it's capturing the case rattling of
my breath in this place they call the cell, though
the words never found in any library blueprint. Somewhere behind me,
heavy doors echo their disapproval, too thick for voices to
travel through anything but a whisper. I don't know how
long I've been here. The metal shelf above my head
buzzes with power, The bare bowld flickering faint, must no
code I can decipher, and yes ires. The longer I wait,
I try feebly to fix each moment, the bitter taste
of copper, the damp call that creeps even through my jacket,
the way my knees ache against a pittadle, an nullium,
four guns soft at the corners. I run through what happened,
what little I recall and flashes. The music is in
the walls, now, skipping melody like a carousel stock between notes,
sometimes far, sometimes so close. I feel it in my
molar's faces, swim up from memory, Lena looking at me,
not as an enemy, but not as a friend. Eyes
runned with exhaustion, and the strain that now makes sense,
watching my every step with the weight of someone whose
catalog too much and delete it. More Barnard, older than
any circumstance, could justify clutching the cane he once used
for guidance, now brandished as a ward, This regret in
his voice, in all of their voices, none of them
volunteered for this role. That much is clear. The others
cameos at the margins were Shadow's library forms, drawn and
erased on a whim. When the door first slammed, I
jolted up my wrist, sticky with anxiety. Failing to muster
a plan, I ran down my mental catalog, hunting for
objects I could weaponize. Pens, a folding chair at the
heavy ledge is still in my back, all useless. The
only thing they left was my old recorder, mistaken for
a scrap. I clung to it, turning the tape over
and over. Maybe they thought it already full. Maybe they
wanted it here, a new account for a shelf for
forbidden testimony. Now all that's left is this narrowing present,
and the certainty of being watched his events. Set in
the door was sloths, too narrow for a finger, but
wide enough for the music to creep in, first the
single melodic phrase, then the refrain, unlinding so slowly it
makes my skin crawl. I start talking. I narrate because
it's one thing the building hasn't taken, not yet. I
want some one some day, if some future exception is permitted,
to hear that it was all real. There are stores
sunk deep as the footings in this place. Every one
leaves its mark. I try not to cry, and mostly succeed.
A coil of fear tightens every minute I sit here.
There feels crowded with anticipation. Behind the notes, I pick
up sons of coat, tap pages, turning a coff muffled
by two doors, occasionally footsteps, never approaching, only treading the
same endless loop, as though to remind me how close
to Wall's logic now runs to the edge. But I
keep recording. I catalog everything, even if the lodger claims
me is its next signature. I'll write myself into the cracks.
If anyone finds this, I hope you listen harder than
I did at dawn, or what passes for it in
a place without sunlight. The door unlocks with a heavy gasp,
hindus scraping like overdew wheels. A figure stands there, framed
by hallog enough to glow. Lena, her features pinched with
second hand shame. She doesn't meet my gaze. Here, free
to go. There's been a correction, administrative, not personal. Don't
make it otherwise. Her teeth catch her lower lip, as
if weighing every syllable for regret. I rise, taking the
silence as permission. My legs shake more from adrenaline and exhaustion.
I keep the recorder in my grip, uncertain if I
am allowed such a souvenir. She steps aside as I
stumble into the corridor, which seems subtly different. The wall
scots rearrange the light's temperature, more blue than gold. Back
to work, Lena murmurs so quietly. I am sure if
she means to day Wherever she hands me a yuki
kad it surface to pristine, the label printed in the
unmistakable blue of ledgers, transformed by command, no explanation, just
a necessity. I thank her, A brittle echo of my
old manners. She nods, already calculating her next move. The
others avoid my eyes as I return. The atmosphere is stickened.
Every greeting and the break room stops to moment my
foot crosses. I try to track the air of a
new routine, but my own memories refuse to settle. Dawn
Usually the soul of Bluntcia slides a page from the
Lost Ledger into my palm. As he pushes his past,
he barely whispers, keep away from Index seventeen, be locked
for a reason before the door swings back. When I
get home that night, nothing is where I left it.
The shelving has reshuffled books I half remember lowaning out.
Now I'll keep my pride of place. The spines immaculate
and humming with the studied romness name plits inside a
marked property of memorial collection, some with penciled notes and
a script I want to call my own, but can't.
I open a favorite, the Philosophy volume and find a
checker slippedated with a current week, signed with my own
careful print. My stomach twists, Did I do this my
own pen Habit is it that I never form my
zeros that way? Visions come in the shower at the
cool slipper scalded porcelain, the half formed sense of being watched.
I close my eyes and sea again the ledger of
the protocol, the shifting network of erasure and induction. Sleep
brings dreams more circular than before. I walk the stacks,
loging titles that sprout and vanish beneath my hand, Signatures
multiply a course checkouts, and a dozen darkings. At work,
even the lights betray me now, the ancient fluorescent stutter
in sync with the music in my head, the same
looping to you now clearer on rainy days, I flush
when I realize I've begun humming it aloud. My computer
at the staff desk mutters its own digital version, air
tones that drift into the refrain. If I leave the
screen lock too long. I steel myself to avoid seventeen B,
but resolve by some wild compulsion to know who, if
anyone watches there. Later, when patrons have thinned and staffs
retreated to counting, IROs until close. I notice an unfamiliar
figure at the age of reference. Tall feature, indistinct, court, tailored,
all wrong for the seasons damp. This figure spends too
long with the cart, fingers grazing spines without apparent logic,
pausing often to scribble on slips pulled from a bout
of brown wallet. The visitor is the first I've not
seen at morning shift changes, which are now scrutinized by
security with unusual vigor. That features slipped from mind even
as I watch. Hair color refuses to stick, and every
time I turn away for an instant, some part of
their attire has changed about a missing, a color reversed,
a new stain bloomed on a cuff. PARANOI mounts all
the while staff interaction continues to dwindle. Lina spends her
days beneath the pale halo in her processing cubicle, training
two new assistants whose faces slide past me in the hallway,
eyes glazed, movements mediculous as soldiers on drill. Barnard is
nowhere to be found dawn, braver than most circulates, always
watching the exits. Each morning, I check the bulletin board
with hesitation. My own assigned route varies, now block letting
swap for handwritten amendments. Each new correction is in that
blue ink day slip and double I lose time, find
myself catalog in the same show twice or three times,
always with some slight difference. A book misplaced, a signature
that appears and disappears, a checkout log that resets is
attesting me for persistence. My dream's tone feverish. Sometimes I
am following the looping corridor. Other times and guide in
a procession of hooded figures deeper into the boiler, the
air growing colder as the music walps into deliberate words
I can quite catch. Every morning feels polluted by memory,
as if every surface bears the condensed breath of a
thousand anxious narrators before me. Strange activity accumulates in the
every day. I find my own handwriting neat disciplined. On
checkouts of books. I don't recall selecting the looping song
and is embedded in machines. Now the self check burns
it through the card readout. The boiler hums the refrain
each time. The thermostat runs after sundown as the public thins,
I see the phantom checkouts with mountain clarity. Sometimes a
figure of always indistinct slides a book on to the
returns cart, signing quickly before vanishing into corners of the library,
where the floor plant's ques and light never quite reaches.
One night, ritual overtakes habit and I stalked a visitor
from a distance, tracking them towards the forbidden seventeen B.
I slipped the Keydon gave me from my pocket. Pulse
thrubbing in my ears, I hesitated the threshold, press flat
to the corridor wall. The lock heals with a soft click.
Adrenaline blurs my thoughts. I ease the heavy door open,
stepping into cold so severe it burns. Air shop with
the tang of ancient inc No windows, just banks of shelving,
violin cabinet pulging with yellow folders, and a hastily arranged
table under a drooping lamp. A monitor ancient but functional,
flickers orange at the back. I reach for its power
button when the door shutters, and with a metallic grown
swing shut the click of a lock clearly electronic, not
possible to force. I entrapped candle, much real dropping casts
elongated shadows, eliminating stocks of ledgers and microfilm reels. Some
folders are marked confidential memorial division, others as it protecoll
pending implementation. My own name appears on the first index.
I check elliot gray status, integration, observed behaviors, catalogging, breach pattern, identification, witness, suitability,
role to be determined. My beath catches in my throw.
I flip further and fine variations of this form, each
stamped with the blue Kirk signature. The exit memorialization pattern
transfer all category is assigned to staff dating back decade
a lat'swork of ghost names and twined like IVY, I
discover case notes confessions from archivists desperate to expose the process.
Each ending mid sentence. This place does not forget, but
it does erase one ends another. To resist is to
be drawn thicker into the network memory is currency documentation
debt I searched through their exit protocol. It details the
creation of ghost patients, fabricated identity slept into the public database,
then adopted by reel staff voluntary or otherwise. To keep
the cycle fluid, the accountability diffused. Each assignment is flagged
with references to margin AIA, subtle threats and the unending
production of new anomalies. To chase ires slip pasted inside
the freezing room, I keep moving to stay warm. Flipping
reels snapping photographs on a country band phone, but the
screen glitches out every five minutes, pixel swimming faces, blurred
metaitator replaced by question marks. I realize with awful clerity
that my inclusion is not accidental. Nine cycle. Every kirk
is simply the next person who saw too much, the
next whose persistence force the pattern to adapt. There have
been so many over the years, each consumed by the
ledgers and replaced only after their exit from ricor a
decisive keystruck on the computer. My entire employment history appears,
each action logged, each unexplained deviation flagged in blue at
the point I access the first go slip. A new
entry flash is a memory compromised trajectory managed paranoise bikes.
I searched the routine and find myself at the center
of every escalation, every breach, every attempt at whistleblowing, mirrored
and nullified by protocol clarity becomes a curse. In this maze,
intent is as real. As I listened for voices, expecting rescue,
Lena Dawn, even Barnard with his tired patients. What I
hear instead is the psalm seeping through the events with
unbearable clarity. The electronic clock releases with a clack. The
door jaws open, drawing a wind that snufts the candle.
I swing my back over my shoulder fisted around my notes,
and slip into the corridor. The stax twists, lengthening until
my familiar map superimposes itself atop and familiar geomogies. I
try to retrace the route to the stacks, heart led
by the residance of the melody, my own foot prints
nearly swallowed by a new procession of shadowy figures converging
from all sides. I am swept along, compelled by a
force of flattens descent deeper into the labyrinth. Light strobe
in time with the melody, and all sense of progress decays.
Every corner reveals new faces, sometimes blood, sometimes zeroly, overfamiliar,
as if the library itself is projecting memory on to
every passing staff member. We halt in a cold, rotten too,
a nexus of corridors that shouldn't overlap, floatiles marbled within stains,
and rheses as packed with volumes older than the city outside.
The music fed is outward, and the group forms a
rough circle around me. Barnard stands at the center, face
ashen but commanding now, while Lina sits quietly by his side,
eyes ruined with acceptance and fear. A ritual unfolds. Hindid
figures advance, bearing books, recorders, and ledgers like relics. The
same batter, blue pen changes hands. I see for the
first time, not just librarians and clerks, but the entire
after i R's population, the invisible custodians, letterers, fundation staff,
cycling endlessly for induction and forgetting, always feeding the living mechanism.
My gaze locks onto a new hire, a young page
whose name I faintly recall from an on boarding emaia.
They look terrified as the pen is pressed into their hand.
The ledger's page leafed open, two cut protocol cycle initiation.
Barnard intones the formula low and sad sign remember witness rewrite.
The melody rises until it becomes nearly unbearable. I make
an anchor out of my own struggle, step forward and
try to intercede. It's just a cycle, you don't have to.
I break off as Lena's hand catches my wrist. Her
grip is gentle but insistent. We all said that once
she murmurs, it's easier if ye don't fight the clipboard.
Some one must keep recording, or the pattern fragments and
what's left is worse. The page hesitates, then scrolls their name.
With that, the room seems to tilt, a new tension
in the song, a note of acceptance, then release. Whilenard
approaches his voice clear for the first time I can remember,
there is no resistance, only variance. You can keep your notes.
We only ask that you move the mechanism forward, preserve continuity,
shield a pattern from order. The cissy is built on
what it cannot bear to recollect. He clasps a hand
on my shoulder. I tried to break it, so did she.
Every time the networker shuffles, some one disappears, and the
books return, new slips and fresh inc Sometimes we even
risky fragments, hide them for a future reader. Sometimes that's
all hope means. The others gathered round and in one movement,
unguided and never forced, but never allowed to stray to
a work table where a cut of battered books awaits.
The blue pen now in my hand hovers over a
fresh slip. The latter's page is blank, save for a notation.
In that slanted, jagged script e gray pending integration. I
think of the recorder hidden in atlas of war losses,
a wedge of hope, my only possible escape to document
and hide, and hope for a breach in the pattern.
I excuse myself to the returned desk. The group allows it,
knowing escape is impossible or a necessary. My agency now
limited to the acts of witness and collusion upon my recorder.
Click to a fresh side and begin narrating. As I
shuffle the next batter bekin to place. The ritual has ended,
the cycle resumed time fraze. After that, I remember vaguely,
hands on my shoulders guiding me through corridors now longer
and more convoluted than ever wereoutes, pleading into each other
with dream logic. I am left in a room that
a froz feels and familiar sposs furnishings. A batter desk,
whilst thick with archivalus stated back decades, the window is false,
the air moved only by the ancient boiler, which now
pulses the melodies so softly as to be almost companionable.
A week may be three flickers by marked only by
the turning of ledgers. I sometimes glimpse the new page
now bleary eye processing slaps lips, whis spring the cold.
The shape of the stuff changes subtly, familiar, Their faces replaced,
its tasks rotate. Lina is less visible now on leave,
her name removed from digital directories, but scribbled in pencil
on the margin of a supply manifest. Barnard shuffles past
with keys jangling, sometimes lucid, sometimes babbling only snippets of
old protocols. Dawn avoids me now as darting, uncertain if
his friend or fellow agent. The public service desk never
discusses me. If I am reference, it is as a
temporary absence, an employment pause, or most often a missing
name in the spreadsheet, a line vanished to adjustment. Yet
the song does not depart. It moves, faint but unbroken,
a thread in the warp of the building. Colleagues step carefully,
some with practiced resignation, others with gilt knotted into their posture.
The machinery of selection, erasure, and integration continues, grinding undiminished.
I try to hear more times to reach the memorial collection,
each time finding the path blocked to cart a maintenance
and progress sign lights failed for lack of replacement bulbs.
My attempts grow more desperate and til dawn passes in
the stairwell, catching my eye with a warning tublunt for
the others as not to bush. Every shelf's got two sides.
A nod uncertain if he pities me or fears what
I become every few days forms cross my disk of
process and signed a mandate in a palliative bou I
become adept at the language of consent, buried in bureaucratic phrasing,
nimble with a blue and quin call for I determined
to slate messages between the lines when I can. At night,
the interval between waking and sleep shells itself ever shorter.
Sometimes I wake and fine strange note penciled in my margins,
as if a sleep walker is desperate to send warnings
to a future self. Other times nightmare's call us into
archival logic lists of my name on every line, each
followed by task. I don't recall completing the psalm lingers,
but its urgency ebbs. The library has moved me into
its coal steady machinery. My participation is both engine and asset.
My raisure is on hold, conditional on my perpetuation of
the protocol. I had what I can't, record what possible,
and trust that not every trace will be stuffed the
first time. Now and again, a supervisor in a sharp
sioux visits eir face both alien and transmissive, glancing down
at manifests only the inner ship can read. The city
outside is a rumor. The library never closes, only redefines
who we are. Hope grows faint but not extinct. The
ledgers will always leave a gap. And if I have
to settle for surviving in the margins, well, at least
I can still write week's feather by light dust remoted
sunlight from inside. Life reverts to routine. As the city
shakes off another of its endless rains. I move from
shelf to shelf, binding loose ends, pressing call numbers into
neat rows, all the while taking inventorial faces that are
not quite new, yet not quite remember. The cyclist turned again.
Occasionally a fresh arrival is escorted or caught a through orientation,
A younger face peering up at the lightwells with a
mixture of hope and uncertainty. The name mumbled and corrected
twice in the introductions, as if the staff can quite
decide what version will last. I see the way their
eyes snag on doors. They are told not to open
the locks. No one expects to survive a full order.
One afternoon, the last of the late sun, Filtering through
the battered glass, I slip a fragment of my narrative,
a single page maculate buttonsigned into the hollow of an atlas,
just outside the memorial stacks, hoping for Chuster intervene one
more time before the pattern blows again. Nearly a month
since my return, Whispers in the staff room crosstress close
enough to overhear anxiety. Similar warnings phrase this camaraderie, but
no one names the process. Even the boiler now runnings
merely hums the refrain, and I can't quite decide if
I take comfort in its persistence or ache with loss
for what else it conceals. For those who watch closely,
the shifting glances among workers are more than gossip. They
are the silent warnings of the network, wordlessly passing the
commission of observation and erasure, inviting the ext reluttancecribe into complicity.
Staff avoid the gaze of the administrators and small blazers,
their posture hinting at knowledge and tired. Except its an
ecal measure. The library appears and changed to the casual
observer routine's titan repairs, dragon and the stax seem, if anything,
even more labyrinthine than before. On return, books are resignedly
written off forms, processed, incident locks, closed with the same
blue signature, now familiar and faceless as the spines themselves.
Then in the deepest layers of the stacks, the song
is clearest, a fresh face page, new enough to radiate
both in it and confusion. Shepherds are cut down along
thus charged corridor. Chills creak under the slow wait of
time as she gently withdraws a thick atlas and notes
a flutter inside a pristine check AT's slip, crisp and
white mark with bold blue he gray dated to day sunrise.
She turns the slip over her fingers, tracing the careful penmanship,
and a chill raises her spine. She opens the book
to its heart. A handwritten note marked in the margin
stares up in that same queer blue watch. The Ledgers
don't look away for an instant. The air thickens the
melody until now the faintest of ghosts in the vent
work resolves a wavering phrase that grows to fill the
rowel spiraling up through the pipes, the shaking of every shelf.
The girl listens on, comprehending, yet so tain she is
not alone. As she cradles the book, the walls seem
to lean closer, the hush, full and expectant closer. Now
the boiler sings a loop. Every row, every atlas, every
ledger breeds memory. The sequence expands, the protocol prosists, and
within the dense thicket of forgotten paper, the library draws another.
Watch a close each page, each witness, each mark and blue,
insuring that for as long as anyone cares to look,
the stacks will never ever truly be empty. As the
new page clutched the atlas, her bread stills cold blooming
across her cheeks in their moving soub basement are the
warning watched. The ledges don't look away, throbbed in her
mind with an uncanny, carty scold and bluingk that seemed
almost alive. Edges fithering with the letters pressed deep into
the paved grain, The weight of the book forced her
to kneel, spine pressed to the narrow shelf as she
balanced the volume across her thighs, hard accelerating in her chest.
A click echoed near the end of the corridor, not
close yet urgent enough to jowel her upright, scattering a
rain of fine dust from the atlas's fore edge. Somewhere
behind the stacks of cut squeaked wheels misaligned, the rubber
catching and slipping in a rhythm that mimic the lull
of the melody and the pipes above. She froze, knuckles
whitening around the ledges heavy cover. Another page clarer, one
of Lena's recent hires, appeared, Her face flushed from the
climb down the stairs. He still shelving, she whispered, Were
it almost eaten by the hush? She eyed the book
in the new page's hands, brow furrowing momentarily, I thought
that one missing before shift, she said, nodding at the atlas.
Her voice shook, nearly lost to the distant syrupe lue
music thrumming through the bed above them. The new page, hurry, deslide,
the check out, slip back between atlas leaves, words burning
into her palm just logging these. Someone left his slip,
but she hesitated, unsure how much to admit. In her
first weeks oversharing airrs cost confidences that lingered unspoken ever since.
Clara's eyes darted to the shelf. She lowered her voice further.
If you find anything off, put it back as you
found it. Sometimes a mess, all one's books checked out
only on paper. Sometimes it's not worth it to ask.
Stuff gets shuffled. She trailed off, catching a muted footfall
from deeper in the corridor. The cat's wheels trembled as
the weight of hidden watches, and forward with the music,
a single tolling notes swelling in the vent. The boiler
hissed life behind a sagging placo wall, as tunadrift warped
almost beyond recognition, repeating the bones of a lullaby that
refused resolution. Unnerved, the new page gathered herself and said
the atlas back, edged first into the gap on the
top shelf, handshaking just enough to make the cover knock
once against wood. She looked up into Clara's guarded gaze.
Did you've ever see things down here? For hear anything?
The question barely passed her lips before embarrassment threatened to
choke her. Not things chlora deflected, moving her cart farther
down the rouse, speaking to the shadows, but sometimes the returns,
desk clocks, check outs. No one remembers. Slipsy can't trace.
The others told me to let it lie. Her tongue
was unhelpful by design, but her quickening steps betrayed anxiety,
the kind that lines a mouth with bitterness of her
secrets learned to sue. They finished, were shelling in silence
around them. The chill deepened, and even the light seemed
to stutter her in time with the music's repetition. Before
they returned to the main workroom, the new page rosus
one last frit of glance backward to the crack between shelf,
showing only impenetrable shadow and lying at her feet single
loose cattle or card memorial collection transfer date recent to
day's blank, hatredly gray. The space next to her return
by it was left open, a blue line running off
into the margin. A shiver passed through her, sharper than
the coal that evening. As the page clocked out and
crossed the marble tiled foy toward the staff fixit, she
brushed past On, who offered a tight, readable smile, his
eyes flickinged to liberate to the rolled sleeves of her sweater,
then down, as if recognizing or expecting a mark. The
other clocks, faces, at once familiar and shifting with some
traceable melancholy, clustered in memoring pairs, breaking apart the instant.
The boiler chirked again, and the intercomfuzzed with brief, tuneless
feedback against the doors. A new staff bull of sin
had been posted. All collections. Inventory managers were to report
anomalies to process in only under line twice in the
too familiar blue. As she slipped into a coat and
slung her battered bag over one arm, the page turned
to the shadowed rows of the old main hall. The
music drifted, now not only from ventwork, but blossomed through
the speakers behind the information desk so softly most staff
must have accepted it as the machinery's endless harmony. Light
flickered along this taccess. One by one, the security desk's
monitors were set by scrolling blue across the screens. She
heard her own breath quicken, the note of fatigu from
a day spent not just shelving materials, but navigating on
spoken corridors older than any mappath. When she reached her building,
rain beating on her hair, she found her paper files, shift, slips,
and borre books had been reorganized, neat but with odd
gaps in the handwriting where names should sit. Places she'd
written her own initials hastily or with flourish showed new notations,
bracketed queries in another pen. The blue ink's presence alive
within her paperwork throbbed Delhi from inside her bag. Exhaustion
pressed down on her chest. As she tried to sleep.
The dreams came not with clarity, but with Patten's corridors,
circled herself within voices muted beneath the end of the
secat of the library song. She woke again and again,
caught between the knowledge that she was WoT, but that
part of her wanted to watch back, hungry for a
glimpse of a truth that would allow her to settle
the ledger inside her own mind. She returned the next morning,
prepared to lock her IROs and finish out her rotation,
but the library's interior had shifted again, light penetrating differently
through the high barred windows, call numbers changing sequence between
yesterday and to day. The day clerk at the desk,
Lorna was different to peripheral figure now pressed into central rolls,
her eyes sunken and gaze verted as she handed over
the day's assignments. Morning stack rotation watched friedems marked with blue.
Lorna said for his flat the words thudding between them
emergency ball tests. Later dawn says not to stay two
lown in spae special collections, reports of humidity shifts. She
didn't say mold or flooding. Those words were always missing,
like a photograph intentionally csisted before storage. As she worked
the new page noticed more regularities. Some returns arrived with
both old and new slept handwriting molded by hands that
knew too well how to disguise their intent. Occasionally, her
notes scrolled in the ledgers would catch her eye. References
to pending witnesses a routine motivation, clerk rotation slashy gray.
Sometimes files included in complete histories, as th gaps had
been intentionally seated into place, erasure formalized as a function
rather than a failure. By late afternoon, with public iris
nearly over, it the chill, and the lower stacks grew insistent,
almost pulsing. Twice she encountered Elliott Gray's name, once beside
a signature block on a staff incident report with explanation
was left blank, and again in a return slip tucked
into an ancient battered encyclopedia. Both occasions made her fingers
hitch compelled towards secrecy. On the third round to the
returns cut, she held discoff of friotsteps, echoing unusually loud,
a man's silhou at a custodian broad in the shoulders
emerged round a blind corner bucket to mob in hand.
Don inclined his head, mouth said into a careful eye,
and gazed, never quite meeting hers. She hesitated, letting the
silence settle, Searching for words. Did mister Gray come back,
she whispered. Don's eyes darted once to the far wall,
then returned to her face, softening not all the way,
he murmured, Some people just get integrated, like the system expects.
He set the mob aside, nearer than the professional distance
usually allowed, and pressed a folded digch of paper into
her palm. You see something, don't be the only one
to lock it. His thumb traced the blue and corny,
a short stroke but deliberate enough to make a heart shudder.
Hide a copy marked the slit. Pass it quiet. She nodded,
tucking the paper into her pocket without unfolding it in view.
Don was gone before she could thank him. Fitsteps swallowed
by the drone of the boiler in the utility hall.
The music thickened, rising and falling within every mechanical breath,
Now so intimate, she fell sure it timed itself to
the pace of her own heart. The page finished her assignmentless,
slipping return books on to carts with growing precision, Conscious
that any out of place slip, any note, might be
more trapped than rescue. She circled the memorial collection one
last time before closing, brushing her finger tips along the
rowse searching for any sign the slit, the note, or
even the ledger itself might have changed. Nothing obvious revealed itself.
The atlas she handled was gone, replaced by a near identical,
but the blue signed slip was nowhere to be seen.
That night brought no solace. The dreams arrived in circling
pattern's altered shelves, piles of files, whose decks moved under scrutiny,
faces behind staffaude, warping in and out of recognition, the
melodies pulling across every surface, like an apocryphal memory, not
quite toe but insistent, just beneath consciousness. As we wore on,
changes unfolded quietly but inexorably. The old hands a mess,
all off, stern and calculating, appeared less often, her presence
subtly erased in the logs. Notes now signed by proxies
were simply marked reviewed slash arcavone. Lena's absence persisted, the
office left tidy than she remembered, but empty, as if
history itself simply decided she had gone on leave. The
only evidence of long service was a single battered mug
left on a shelf, processing as forever fading from day use.
The new page found herself taking on od assignments, updating
coal numbers in the index, were labeling periodicals, correcting and
silently accepting, and normalies locked by others. Every act required
her signature in blew at first as wavered, but with
practice the distinct shape of the require of loop shaped
itself to the pattern prescribed by protocol. Even as she
burned in sight with a neat document to confess, to
resist the silent undertow One evening, deep in the stacks,
the music changed. Instead of the same skipping tune, it
resolved briefly into new notes, discordant but triumphant, a signal
that brought with it a different trimmer in the air,
a shifting of presences. The lights glowed a cleaner gold,
the air less, suffocating, a release within the confines. A
battered old radio left beside the break room sink sputtered
to life of its own. Accord static yielded to a
fragment of voice, unmistakable in tambre. Some records never close.
Watched the ledges don't look away. The words landed like thunder,
all the more inn settling for their calm, staff froze,
as if the message reached through to each memory at once.
The music returned lay on layer until the air was
thick with its pressure. In the day days that followed,
the routines accepted these new ruptures, staff moving with the
greater sense of caution of fatigue, but with new pages inducted.
The process continued onward. Files changed hands, books cycled through
each time brokelyn for a moment before the signatures began
again to crewe their familiar weight. One morning, as a
week sun shutter through the rippled window glass, the new
page re entered the memorial collection alone, intent on tracing
the slit that started it all. She found no sign
of the warning left before, just a single and touched
ladger blanks, save for a marginal note and blue to
witnesses to be written, hide yourself well. She lingered there,
allowing the silent vigilance of the place to settle over her.
Beyond her view, the stacks unspoiled endlessly, each shadow hiding
a dozen stores, each raw a possibility for a rasure,
or if they permitted, for survival, always documented, always on
the edge. She returned to her cart, resolved she would
develop her own code, her own method of leaving traces
for those yet to come. Each time she processed a
return that smelled of meldew at midnight, she would slip
the stop of bluelin cards somewhere no cleaning shift ever reached.
Each time she found a slit that did not match
the record of above it, she would quietly copy the details,
making a second ledger within the recesses of her memory.
When the protocol could only hope to her base outside.
The city brooded in rain. The world of ledgers and
lives above as heedless of the shifts in the stacks
as they were of the pattern's persistence below. But inside
the cycle endured. New witnesses found their way in frawn
by compulsion or chance, stumbling over old warnings or into
the arms of the watchers. As the library rearranged its
own stores to match the needs of erasure and survival,
the closing eyec cast the main hole into half shadow again.
The new page, lingering by the book returned shoot fingers,
tracing the carved initials of a hundred vanished predecessors. She
pressed her palm softly to the spine of a battered atlas,
careful to leave no more than a whisper behind. As
the lights dimmed and the melody sang low in the pipes,
an idea half formed burned in her mind that nothing
in the stacks was ever truly gone, so long as
someone kept the ledges open, so long as someone watched
each book, each signature, each lingering, marginal note, served as
a bread cromb, sometimes for the next watcher, sometimes simply
to remind the pattern that for all its hunger, something
human still pushed back, even if phony. With the line
of blue in the dark, she gathered her back coat,
called a high letting the hush enveloper. Footsteps echoed at
her back, slow and careful, pausing behind doors marked with code.
She now understood us both warning and invitation. The door
groaned as she pushed out into the night air, the
damp city street, pressing him with a certainty that within
the stacks the melody would continue inlessly, rehearsing itself, endlessly, seeking, endlessly,
recording the living shape of curiosity and fair. Inside the library,
behind locked gates and cold marble, Sulton Ladg's breathed in concert.
The last light flickered, and from deep within the res
a hundred blue slip shuffle quietly carried on the air,
waiting always for the next time, the next watcher, the
next page to turn. And that is the end. Thank
you for listening, and I will see you in the
next one.