Speaker 1: The city looked different at night, or perhaps the fog
made it feel so. I parked outside the main branch,
twin pools of yellow from the street lights, losing themselves
in the swell of mist. My breath, the only warmth
in the stillness, caught on the air as I unlocked
the staff boer even the taxis, perpetual fixtures along the
boulevard during daylight had vanished. Only the libraries, hulking facade,
granite press mute by time waited for me. I'd agreed
to the night shift for the solitude, more than the pay.
After years treating crowds at a kind of skin rash,
A place like this, sir cavernous, so anonymous, sounded like
living inside a clothes book. The city library by day
sparkled with hadis and institution, but at night it belonged
to a different calendar. This was my third week, and
none of the iris felt familiar. Yet. Past the empty
security desk, all light faded into half shadder. The main
reading hole yawned into darkness. Tables aligned as if awaiting
a ghostly assembly. Whorescence blinked overhead always could always flickering,
as if uncertain whether to admit me. At night, the
fabric of the place changed. A coppice didn't just muff
a sound, they smothered it. I would walk twenty paces
and barely hear my shoes. The echo of the heavy
entry door had barely died before the chill wrapped itself
around my neck. There was nothing wrong with the heating,
not technically, but there in a far wing, the oldest
section pressed tight against the original foundation. I always felt
as though I svaporated from the stone density sliding up
into my bones. Routine insisted I drew a full circuit.
Upon arrival, I clipped my badge, sled the ring of
keys into my pocket, and turned on the recorded up
on my phone. Out of Habit nineteen fifty two. Starting
initial sweep, I listened to the mechanical cheer in my
own voice, before shivering at its hollow pitch. It was
when I came to the study carols, a row of
ancient beoose so long the north wall that the routine frayed.
One carol, wedged against a window, opaque with condensation, was
occupied by a single but atted book. No slip of
paper reserved it, yet some one had left it open.
A spy arched like a swiman gasping for breath, a
tide I recognized only faintly a Pecuo European Pamphlets nineteen
eighteen twenty three. Closer look revealed what sent the first
pimperk of anxiety under my roops. The date's slip, nearly
rubbed white listed. Its last boros d have was in
fat seventy three. The scanning system I double checked still
had it marked out, no return date. No modern barcode
some one forty nine years ago had been responsible for this,
Yet here it was inches from my hand. It wasn't
just how the book was old. Two kinds of handwriting
laced the margins, one faded and leaping, swept along the
outer edge of the essay on Romanian Resistance press, another
pen press Deep Road Russia over the first, different in
different hand a sharper slant. At first it seemed to
be comments murmured to the text to no one, until
as I turned a page, sentences crossed from margin to margin,
the old answering the new, and the new answering back.
Most chilling was a line in bluing jannd into the
lower corner. If you see this checked the archaves at
two thirteen. After a quick scan, my own nev suddenly
raw a snatch of photo of the page. Then, because
I couldn't help myself, I set the phone to record
and whispered the details, every piece of evidence burned into
my mind by the silence all around, the brittle air,
the ancient thust, the memory of a page in Law
and Vanish, and the book that did not belong to
the present, of the past. This is a sort of truce,
I realized that one keeps with a NUTI mental agreement
to expect the unexpected, but nothing truly impossible. Standing in
the half dark with that open book, I felt for
the first time that I might have broken the truce.
Two fours up, the automatic lights in the stats hum
lazily to life, and then out again. The empty carols
watched through foudy glass. My voice in the audio log trembled.
I forced myself to finish the sweep. For most of
my doubt life, I craved these boundaries, mine, not theirs,
ordered not wild libraries, and force order were so, I believed,
I told myself. A for garden book was just an oddity,
a mislaid thing in the system. Always on the verge
of falling apart. I would not let it mean more
than that. But as I returned to the work desk,
the echo of a voice mine others, or that the
memory itself seemed to linger behind me, weighing every step.
It was it was to be a quiet job. When
dawn came and I left the building, the fog outside
had thin, but the chill from the library followed me home.
Strange the things one wants to believe about silence astros.
Most people i'd met believe that working nights in a
library meant peace, symmetry, and perhaps a little boredom. What
they didn't realize, what I hadn't considered upon signing the
letter of appointment was how peculiar an elastic time became
when your only company was the clock, the shelves, and
a ghost of old readers. I came to the city
six weeks ago after my contract teaching at a community
college lapsed. The classifieds were mainly full of retail and
delivery gigs. A library stood out as an anachronism, and
somehow so did I. My application referenced an affection for
rare books, an eye for detail, and a solitary bent.
Mess Krell, the head librarian, had laughed at the last phrase.
When we first met. I think you'll find plenty of solitude,
she said with the ryarch of her brew. At night,
it's rather a different world. It was not an exaggeration.
By day, the library did its best impression of relevant
students hunched over laptops, retirees methodically combing microfilm, the soft
storm of shuffled papers and bootstrapped conversations and corners. The
lobby spilled diludent light, the polished barass and marble, a
deliberate overture pecivic virtue. But at six in the evening,
the ties went out, one by one. The cleaners, the volunteers,
the day staff nodded their way to the exits. An
hour or later, even the heating vents seemed to slow,
as if the pipes themselves recognized abandonment. On my first
morning orientation, A mess Kraw handed me a thick ring
of keys and a fire scarred not book labeled Night
Alogy property of A Evans date nineteen eighty five. He
all followed a checklist every two eyos to ignore most
of the old staff notes in there. We've kept the tradition,
but updated procedures elsewhere. Her smile, brief and apologetic, suggested
that I'd soon be writing my own nocturnal thoughts in
its pages. That first afternoon in the staff room, I
was introduced to the teen Lucy, a night old grad student,
handled digital archival work three nights a week for extra cash.
Mister Malick, a man with a gentle voice in a
nervous habit of straightening his tie, managed the arkhaus and
technical services. Each When they learned I was joining the
night' shift, rotation pause before responding, as if recalling a
memory they'd struggled to name. Try not to let your
mind wander in the stacks, Lucy told me, grinning, easy
to get lost. Mister Malick only said, you never get
used to the ticking. Ms Crow ran through the library's
geography as though revealing a map to a secret garden.
There was the main reading room, where the ceilings sore.
Two stores in the Chinde live flickered when elevators moved overhead.
The labyrinthine stacks spread over three floors to the east,
a tangle of duy numbers and whispering paper. Westwood, the
archives in the restricted materials room with climate control too
coal for comfort. The forbiddence of basement, she explained, was
strictly off limits, used years ago for disasters storage, but
now sealed for safety reasons. Best not to fuss with
all doors, she told me, keys go missing down there.
It was not the first time I noticed the library
sense of weight, not just in books, but in time.
The hand off procedures was supposed to be about safety.
Each night' shift, arrival and departure recorded in triplicate, a
ritual of initials and times. I found the old logs
in the staff roar sometimes that a columns for nights
daff didn't match anyone's signature. Time slipped ahead or lagged behind,
rectangles of white out covered and new ink, just bureaucracy,
Lizzie said when I flagged it. Everyone writes their own time,
but the clock in the foye is always off. Three
weeks in I'd adopted my own routine. I took the
first round at the IIRO, circling every corner as instructed
the east wing, where history and geography congregated, Felt told us.
There I recorded my voice memo, cataloging nothing more severe
than a squeaky door or burned out bulb nineteen forty five,
stacked a clear new patron magazine moved to table. The
hollow reassurance of a broadcast into silence became embarrassingly A
comfort with the iro was to fill. I sometimes wandered
the upper floors, seiled except for reference. Staff had a
smell that reminded me of universities in late September, sharp,
almost bitter, with all glue, a promise of secrets in
the dark. The true maize, though, was the basement level.
Two twisting stores of arcueve shell's press so close only
one person could walk between them. Must Staff left that
wing to mister Malick. I lingered outside the lock sub
bass door and once found the handle cold to the touch,
my own reflection ghosting back in the old metal plate.
The lost and found drawn in the tiny security cubby
became oddly a locus of curiosity, mostly accumulated pencils, buttoners,
bus passes. One night, rummaging for an emergency USB drive,
I found a faded badge labeled Evans a A, dated
in penciled numerals nineteen eighty three. The badge was the
same style as mine, though heavier, almost brittle. I put
it back, not exactly afraid, but nearly aware of the
libraries lays what gets found and what days lost. Time
itself had started to slip. The antique clock in the
main hole would advance seven minutes twice each night, but
never at the same time. My watch, a brand new
one a gift from an old friend, would to sink
from my phone, so that sometimes there'd be half an
hour behind, and sometimes ahead, though only in a building.
Mister Malik shrugged when I mentioned it. Old building, magnetic
fields or ghosts, if you ask Lucy. As each evening
shift ended, I checked out, initialed the log, and said
good night to the emptiness. Each night, the darkness fells
a little thicker. That first book, the one from nineteen
seventy three, remained at the back of my mind. I'd
returned it to the main desk as instructive, but it
vanished before morning. When I mentioned it ter mess Cral
the next week, she gave a tight, distracted smile. Old
Inventory moved some mysterious ways, she said almost to herself.
It wasn't reassuring, but neither did it feel important enough
to dwell on until the strangeness returned. And the story
started to overlap assarisk. It was the third Tuesday of
November when the pattern broke again, as violently subtle as before.
I came in just before ten, routine straight themselves over me, badge, flashlight,
round log and keys warmed by my palm. The fog
outside had barely lifted, plastered tight against the main glass
doors at the Eastmuth's study. Alcove I found it a
hard back volume of City Census Recos nineteen thirty seven edition,
leaning off the edge of the table as a shove
from above. I scanned a slip Audi half orsin March
nineteen seventy four, forty eight years prior. No record of
return recently flagged in the system is missing. Two sets
of marginally ran through the book, the fur a neat
pial hand crispin fountain pen tracing statistical oddities in blocky cursive.
The second again recent someone annotating over the first vast judiary,
the letters leaning forward as if running from themselves, the
dialogue between hands. If it was that spiral from trivia
in to code double checked the West Tax ten nineteen
fourteen twenty one, seventeen thirteen, wrote the old inc The
new hand replied along the gutter, he saw it too,
Why didn't you warn any one? A few pages deeper,
a sharper message leapt cross the bottom margin. Were you
here too? I felt sick at the question, though there
was no one to whom it might apply. Not any more,
I skioed the electronic registry at the circulation desk. Eighteen
books lost seen between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen ninety
four marked missing a night inventory foreshad that same lost
up patron six had notes supposedly returned after ires no
record in registry. A mystery box checked left empty for explanation.
I loved my finds with as much clinical detail as possible.
My voice, now used to the echo, sounded steadied. My
hands felt sack and normally census recos two hands pattern
resembles previous discovery margins, discuss internal procedures, coded references to
locations and times, possible co or instructions. The silence deepened
after midnight. I was logging the lost chef count when
a faint noise drifted down from the east stacks. Not
a crash, nor the insistent howl of a misplaced cart,
more like deliberate movement, the thurdive glide of steps stopping presuming.
I held my breath, round file in hand and waited.
The ceiling above me thrunned with the vibration of something shifting,
books being replaced or removed. A single thud, the bristles
of the dust mop and the corner trembled. I clambered
up the main steck, as heart shoving against my chest,
and peered between the rows. Not then, only the oppressive
stillness of knowledge waiting to be remembered. I stood very still,
letting my eyes adjust, shells grown minutely as they settled. Then,
as I moved along a corridor, a paperback slid free
from a tight shelf and landed at my feets. Cover
printed in cheerful block letters a title about urban ecology. Inside,
written in the same recent hand were the words two
sets of ice, don't get caught alone. I ran fingers
over the spine, unsure what command the warning was intended,
May bee none, maybe all of it. Back at the
staff room, I washed my hands with stinging pin industrial soap.
On my way out, I paused by the reading room's threshold.
I stared up at the ornate ceiling acanthus leaves twining
through plaster, a lattice work or relic of a much
older city. My reflection shifted in the glass momentarily for
a second. Two faces loomed, then faded. At two thirteen
a m my phone vibrated with the calendar alert I
hadn't set. I cleared it with nervous hands. I returned
the following afternoon to check the missing book registry. Three
new gaps, my sign off note staff must never let
patents go unremarked, and I recording them of being recorded myself.
It seemed a joke in the moment, but its echo
kept me awake through the next day's sleep. Asterisk. The
hollow in my chest grew with every oddity. If before
I'd embraced routine to muffle doubt, now each heavy became
an antage and something to be cataloged controlled. I dug
through the staff locks after the Thursday shift, entering the
cramped office at the back of the stacks of space
crammed with old coffee mugs, a dying ferren and incident
file stacked in precarious piles. The file labeled incidents like
boor brittle pages, most yellowed, others wrinkled by damp mimos,
danced around something no one named. Staff evans rotated responsibilities.
He filed TWELVEB sub basement restricted for the quarter malfunction
in lights. Report to Archives A. Herrid Scroult two thirteen.
Remember the hand off never alone, rotate according to order.
I took the clues to mister Malick the next evening.
Do night logs seem off to you? I asked? He
did not meet my eyes. Instead, he fiddled with a
set of transverse lips, sighing. I try not to look
at locks longer than necessary. Best not to chase your
own tail at night. Lucy I found in the archives
headphones on, bent over a sheaf of microphone. Something about
her posture made me pause. Ann slat on the table,
eyes unfocused, brocking ever so slightly in her seat. Only
when I touched her arm did she twitch, blink, and
look at me as if surfacing from deep water. Sorry,
she muttered, voice, then just lost track. Before she left
for the night, I ask ever notice anything strange during inventory?
She esitated, then shook her head. This just night. The
mind placed tricks. After she'd gone, I noted the time
two seven a m. The silence carried an extra weight.
Over the next nights, more displaced books emerge. Each redual
marginalia initials matching all staff rosters, now annotated over by
neo hands, sometimes the referenced shift change the rotation or
once remember our deal. If you listen, I will too.
Some scrolls were panicked nearly illegible. But don't go to
this abasement during shift change, one warned another. If it's missing,
check agreement, avoid corridor B after moonrise return All correspondents
never break the loop. The librarians blueprint and covered behind
a false back in a drawer, an old architect plan.
Legs of masking tape disintegrating at the edges offer more confusion.
Red and blue route swung through the stacks, looping and
relinking at odd angles at x marks over certain shelves.
The word agreement stood in pen soil underline three times
where the basement should be mated. Only scribbles the care
of left scratched by franticand a side note, perhaps in
the same old hand, read no one alone beyond this
point A flate wait for escort. One night, disturbed by
the persistent sense of being watched, I requested access to
archive security tapes. The camera's analog and position to deter
the f had been digitalized only five years prior, but
the old tapes remained in the back room. I queued
up a reel from November nineteen eighty seven. The grains
so thick the faces blurred into mottel dovels. Still, the
pattern leapt out. Every night at two thirteen a m.
One or more staff, some whose faces match faded photos
in the staff lunch, made the same ruth through the
stacks clockwork, each in turn pause at pre mark shells,
hands hovering, sometimes writing, sometimes placing or retrieving a slim
battered volume. Then, in a single instance from nineteen ninety three,
the staff members simply vanished from one frame to the next,
gone as if they had never been there. When I
press Malick about it, he murmured must be tape damage,
but avoided the break room for a week thereafter. Each
time I set my phone's voice recorder, my memoirs became
less structured. Routurn sensus records misplace again, knew margin always returned.
The correspondence staff, seemingly unaware. Compulsion memory gap, must check
basement roads, the urge to walk the blueprints marked pass here. Often.
I found myself moving, almost unknowing, towards some point in
the library, compeltoratory steps from the old video hands, searching
for a book I hadn't intended to find. The ritual
I realize was not just historical, it was ongoing. Late
on a Friday, two days after my discovery of the
annotated blueprint, I heard shuffling in the archives. I hurried
down the back stair. Lucy stood in the file room,
facing a shelf of box newspapers, moving except for a
tremor in her right hand. I called out. She did
not answer. Her eyes when she turned were open but blank,
as if hewing a dream I couldn't see. I later
asked if she had been working late in the basement.
She looked at me with bafflement, certain she'd gone home.
I ears early the clues started accelerating. Books missing from
lock display cases, registry interras, aistal repla with strange clusters
of letters. One night, minutes after two thirteen, I found
a battered, leather bound copy of Modern Hematicics, the only
volume always locked, propped open on my desk. The sign
out ladger was missing. In its place, only an old
meldewed index guard. No one else on shift admitted touching it.
That same night, I played back part of the oldest
surviving cassette tape, labeled Agreement nineteen seventy seven. A first
only static, then the faintest pressure of voices, distant, one
saying don't forget the walk bright it always write it
to the That night, to security footage cycled again. This
time my own figure traced the route north stacks east,
reading room down into the basement, hand drifting across yellowed spines,
then pausing, writing in margin after margin. Back in the
staff room, I washed my face at the sink. The
mirror glimmered with condensation, two faces hovering over my left shoulder,
indistinct gone. When I looked directly, the urge to check
the sub basement polesed in my chest. It was almost
two thirteen. I gathered my phone, flashlight and the battered
notebook from the lost and found. I stood before the
sub basement or keys shaking in my fist, and as always,
the clock in my pocket. The wall clock and my
phone refused to agree, but I watched the digit slip
to two thirteen. The lock always jammed before released with
a low metallic sigh asterisk. The stair was slick with condensation,
the air pressing down so thick at scraped my lands.
My flashlight cast a feeble tunnel of blue along concrete,
each step coiling loath and seemed possible in so old
a building. There were no proper lights, only brooke and
pipes glimmering with what looked like frost. The corridor's branch narrowed,
twisted angles or shot. My sense of balance folded at
each intersection, feigned outlines of shoe prints decades thick, glimmered
in the dust. At last, I found the sealed door,
boarded plastered with layers of stickers, warning placards yellowing to translucency.
Did not enter staff only emergency orders nineteen seventy seven prison.
Something I muchest resisted opening it, but the compulsion that
had built over endless shifts carried me forward. Inside I
found a heap of long missing library books that covers cracked,
some gaping open in submission, margins fought with lines and dates.
I recognized the two hands, thin dozens, more ring swelling
words over woods. Whole conversations ruptured and resumed over years
one lace blade battered in water, marked on its last page.
In a trembling hand, I heard the voice. Did you listen?
Among the mound faded plastic badges Evans dor sy Lie,
each rusted three years of damp, A thumb sized taper
cold to marked agreement nineteen seventy seven. I shivered at
something sticky against my hand and saw it was merely
melt the glue remnants of a label. As I traced
the margins in one trembling book, a whisper started fettering.
At the edge of hearing. Not language, not a first,
more pressure like syllables, building just with aught, leaves off,
footsteps impossibly distant encircle me in the tight corridor. I
pressed record on my phone, but the screen flicker, recording
hissing static before dying. My flashlight to you sputtered, been
tunneling off into nothing. If you are listening, do not forget.
I tried to speak, but my breath folded in on
its elf. The darkness thickened, compressing history and presence, the
old agree moments, the books, the worn dam ritchell suddenly
collesced as horror and understanding forced on your body, not
your mind. The library existed in the bargain of return
and forgetting. I saw for a moment all the shapes
that haunted memory, compelled by books, clocks, and the unyielding
ire behind me, the stair grown as if bearing the
weight of all the years since the first pact, My world,
neat and ordered only hours ago, shifted beneath my feet.
The library had never been kept, or tended or mastered,
not by any one alive. Each of us, night after
night was merely a page written over margin against margin,
and the cycle assents was hungry for its next annotation.
As my flasklight gave up total darkas surged in and
the footsteps returned in, neither retreating nor advancing, only circling, circling,
waiting for me to decide on the next entry. I
realized there was no true routine, nor only the compulsion
of whatever haunted this place, and I had just added
my name to its register. I sucked a breath through
my teeth, bracing for a presence that never quite materialized,
only gathered in the motionless dark as a density of dread.
The sub basement's air was clammy and ancient, humming, just
beneath perception. If I listened hard, a rhythm like a
conversation at the next table over muffled and cyclic, or
seemed pulse from behind the decaying walls. I ran, trembling
finger tips across the heap of books, feeling old grit
and softness where years of handling had worn the covers
to swayed. Several volumes bristled with slips of paper. Catalog
cards for golden memos, all signed out, ledger's palumps sted
with dozens of initials all overlapping. Some names I recognized
from the staff roster memorialized in the entry, where others
faded to the point of a legibility, whispered of staff
rotations lost to recollection. A draft curled beneath the door
I just entered, lifting a wisp of dust into my lungs.
I stifled a cough and crouch to examine the cassette recorder.
My phone, having died without cause, might as well have
been a lump of glass. Now. The tape inside the
ancient machine was wound nearly to the end, but I
pressed the play button and was rewarded with a soft pop.
The spoiling ticks so magnified by silence it sounded like
a heart beat hiss, and then a voice mail tremulous
but practiced in an acadence official documentation. All parts present
agreement to be sealed right in margin when possible, or return.
All board volumes rotate responsibilities from evans to light in
two cycles. If the pattern fails, the compulsion resumes. We
accept flatter a shuffle, voices overlapping so faint that I
had to hold the recorder to my ear. Never break
the loop. If you must listen, remember the hand off.
A sudden metallic click, A doll shifting somewhere beyond the concrete,
odd enough to jolt me upright and into crouch. Behind
a shelving unit warped by years of neglect, I barely
dare breathe. The footsteps of ave echoed briefly, a creak
in the jorists. My flashlight guttered, briefly, reigniting as my
hand tightened reflexively around its grip. Pulling a book randomly
from the heap, I opened it to its midpoint. On
the curling page, A message angled across the gutter and
sharp hurried ink. The library feeds on routine. If you deviate,
you recall. If you recall it notices. I climbed the flask,
slight between my teeth might cut clenching. These notes not
warnings left for posterity, but for other staff for themselves.
I traced a line of notations back by initials el, Evans,
td alj Kraal, then most recent a shaky lushad Bee,
dated only a week before I'd started half open to
find evidence of a purely human mania's some covert game
or coldish and joker. I scanned more of the books,
but everything pointed outward, away from the staff and towards
something in the fabric of the building itself. Fittsteps slooped
through the pass, urged by routine, underwridden by dear so old,
almost no one physically was left to remember its origin.
The urge to fill in a margin myself was overpowering
anything just to leave a mark, join the circuit, and
somehow relieve a pressure building inside my skull. Instead, I
yanked my hand back, stumbling up against the shelving as
sadden cold my asmosin to form in the tight corridor,
and from overhead another shudder, as if someone or something
heavy it dropped on to the floor above the sensation
pressed me down until panic forced me forward. I bolted out,
clutching the tape, shoving a momful of books back into
my satchel. The stairwell at my back felt endless, stretching
away with the geometry I couldn't remember, descending each step
moan like a warning, yet thinning so quickly it could
barely keep my balance. At the landing, a fluorescent fixture
vibrated into life and then instantly fizzed out. In its
after blow, A reflection flickered up from a pane of
gloss in the security cubicle, and not my own phase,
but several silhoueites dumbled into one, as if the angles
of time inside the sub basement had cost too many
shadows for a single body to contain. My wristwards spawn
second hand skating, erratic praats, stuffering at every thirteenth tick,
I pressed the back of my hand to my chest,
as if to restored a heart that threatened to break
into rom rhythm. Noise behind the locked doors rolled like water,
footsteps of voices I couldn't be sure, and then receded.
A shape pressed against the rippled glass of the old
lost and fan drawer then faded As I blinked, my
nerves strung titus wires seemed to vibrate with each and
Herd's hand. I merged at last into the reading room,
drenched in my own sweat despite the cold. The library
under a lit and still gave no indication something unseen
spun just beneath its orderly surface. I tore off my badge,
listening as blood pounded in my ears. But the compulsion
of the urge to complete the circuit, to annotate, to
participate persisted. Whatever bargain my predecessors had struck, it had
not been kept perfectly. What if every night shift worker
left a mark trying to satisfy the library or whatever
ham wanted its margins, yet never quite remembered doing it
was the breeding crown for these cycles, simply forgetting, not remembering,
and the rituals we performed to comfort ourselves in the dark.
A wave of exhaustion rolled over me. I set my
satchel in the reading desk, shivering, and splayed out the
books and tape on the bonesht wood. The emptiness pressed
in so absolute that for a moment I doubted I'd
ever left the sub basement, that perhaps the entire sequence
had been spilt inside my own mind, another echo in
a closed system, but evidence clustered in the desk before me,
books freshly scold with recent ink library caused. Bearing my
own initial in hand, I did not consciously remember. The
tape recorder's tiny speaker still hissed, cycling a stretch of
static that only occasionally resolved into half formed words. I
found myself reaching for the log book. I opened its
back page, intending to note the bizarre events and official context,
but my hand, shaking hovered over the line, unable to begin.
The weight of all those prior injuries. The decades of
repetition bound my fingers. If the patent fails, the compulsion resumes,
then what was worse? Breaking that pattern or sinking my
own memory into the same rut carved by generations before me.
A sudden clatter from the direction of the stack jerked
me operate, a cart left neatly aligned, end of shift,
now rolled by itself, the pressure of its rotation to
even to be a natural slide. For the first time,
my instinct was not simply to check for intruders, but
to record. I fumbled with the phone, saw only the
dead screen, and switched back to the batter taped device,
jamming the record button down. The red dot glowed against
my palm as I moved cautiously toward the sound. Lights
flickered in a staccato pattern, each once snapping on just
in advance of my step, as if something anticipated my passage.
I edged along the encyclopedia row, breath coming and clip size.
A book tumble from the shelf ahead, landing open side down.
Page displayed a tink was still wet. A single line
not addressed to any personal passtaff, but to me, unmistakably
by name or return the correspondence. You are part of
the pattern. Now break only with company, my blood chill tyes.
I looked back, half expecting Lucie or mister Malick to
be standing there, caught by the same compulsion, but there
was no one. Still, the impression of others hovered up
my shoulder, as if the library itself pressed forward to observe.
I retreated to the starf lounge, pulse skipping, and tried
to steady myself with an instant coffee that tasted only
of card board and memory. In the lounger's age, floral
silence oppressed my forehead to the bat of vending machine,
feeling the cold metal against my skin. The world narrowed
to three sensations, hard hammering, the vibration of the tape
as it finished its bull, and a muffled scrape of
another set of footsteps in the hallway. I squeezed my
ice shirt, picturing the blueprint with its slipping lines. The
marked ex were shells converged in impossible angles. The urge
to walk those lines, to mark the junction, add my
own cryptic initials, just as so many before me had done,
was nearly irresistible. The last message replayed in my mind
a few recall it notices. I realized dimly that my
own awareness might be the thing that invited the cycle
to restart. If knowledge of the pattern itself was dangerous,
perhaps the ritual was meant less as appeasement and more
as forgetting an agreement to remember only what was necessary
for the routine to function. Across the table, the nightlarks,
heavy binding lay half unfastened, a penrolled into the curl
of a spine. Anchored to its last entry were three
fresh check out's lips, all blank but for a looping scroll,
and not mine, nor any Handah recognized as staff and
yet familiar enough to twist my stomach. You read, you write,
you remember, Continue The rotation movement flickered in the window
of the reflection cast by overhead bulbs. Showed not only
my own steeped frame, but a palest alwit standing behind me,
just out of focus, a voice not heard but felt
coiled until my thoughts tight as a tourniquet. Shove the evidence,
keep the bargain, or let the pattern raw out In
the corridor, another book crash from its shelf, then another,
an echo of motions I'd seen in the arch cavil
footage on winding all round me. In real time. The
lights buzzed overhead, looping irregularly. The old analog clock on
the lunge wall was set itself with a high pitch,
ping to precisely two thirteen. I stepped out, compelled toward
the swirling hush of the upper stacks. If I'd been
able to resist, I could not have told you how
My hand shook, not with coal, but with the bone
deep recognition, as if my body knew what memory refused
to see. With each depth, the distance between the present
and all its layered past collapsed. The books, arrayed in
their precise unc Hanny order, waited for hands to move them,
or for me to write my own memory into their margins,
ensuring the cycle would always have a next page and
next singular evening, endlessly annotating itself. I didn't trust myself
to speak, because I feared what voice might answer. Instead,
I pressed the nearest foling back into a sempty slot,
feeling the snap of its re entry echoed through shelf
and fore and are above the door. The security camera's
light flickered somewhere in the darkness beyond. I imagined the
next night, already unfurling, drawing another footstep, another round, another margin,
written by hands that trembled exactly as mine did. Now,
something in the angel hungry hush waited for me to
do what all the others had, to become merely an
entry in someone else's future margin. And so I found
myself returning to the pattern, unable to distinguish between compulsion
and my own will, stealing myself for the night, yet unspule,
haunted already by the knowledge that I, like all the rest,
would forget what I had almost uncovered before morning edged
the city back to daylight. I didn't sleep not properly
when I reached home that morning, but only scraps of
unconsciousness snapped through with images of shifting corridors, books, breathing softly,
and a voice, sometimes mine, sometimes bored, reciting something about
cycles and bargains. The phone charger on my bedside table
refused to revive the dead device, and the cassettates has
replayed in the back of my mind, cycling half hordable
instructions at the border of understanding. When a lave airystale,
it felt as if the bed itself drifted, pushing me
gently but persistently toward a memory of Forta's mother. While
late afternoon the rain came, a nervous drizzle that couldn't
quite make up its mind. I sat in the kitchen
with the blueprints moors beneath the coffee mug, tracing those looping,
nonsensical routes, the excess of a certain shelves, the marked
intersection where the sub basement line seemed not into a single,
dense gribble. I saw my own warp mapped in the
lines drawn decade before my arrival. Cost the margins. I
began to see a pattern, less geometrical and compulsive, a path,
always returning to itself, always enclosing the same ground, always
setting up the next traveler. The libraries panic had come
to rest in my muscles, itching for motion, and by
dusk I found myself walking up my flat and heading
back through rains fares to the branch. The city swallowed
itself at night, but the library's lovely architectural book stood
and changed, as if waiting for my return. Inside, I
tried to compose myself in the break room. The staff launch,
usually clouded with the smell of for heated fruit and
chiba freshener, felt colder rour. Every surface seemed to have
pulled back from my touch. No radio played, no harm
from vending machines. My hand hovered over the battered agreement
nineteen seventy seven tape, the blueprints, and the night logs.
I assembled them at the ancient breakroom table, spreading their
materials out layering observation on top of speculation. The annotated books,
marked with a sick variety of pen and pencil, were
sorted by year, then by hand. The staff schedules previous
decades logs, all showing signatures, but in patterns too regular
to be true, as if the same hands returned every cycle,
but the names rotated forward. Every detail was measured against
a single rigid time two thirteen A m always that
ire and the footage in the logs. In the frantic
marginal notes, I made a crue time line, working backward
from the current week to the first incident of the
earl is staff note, naming a rotation of responsibility bear
it deep. In the late seventy zinc recorded an audio
note needing the formality the evidence, attempting to reconstruct the
schedule of incidents in this in Books two thirteen as
a focal point, stuff lost time vanished books recurrents of
dual handwriting theory as force or compulsion requiring ritual action,
possibly as containment. My throat felt dry, the word containment
prickling against the inside of my mouth. Finally, I loaded
the nineteen seventy seven coscent I turned a tip over
in my palm, first weigh in the physical object. If
felt heavier than memory, saturated with the left of veresciue
or forgotten voices in the silence, the speaker's cautious cadences
sounded grave, resigned. All part is present, agreenin' to be sealed.
Always write in the margin, never break the loop, rotate responsibilities.
Now on closo listening, I caught something new beneath the
official almost legalistic language. Edges of strain bled through around
the word shadow between shelves, a murmur overlapped, like someone
whispering beneath their breath. It consumes of left to wander,
patent to stains binds. The exact phrases ran together with
tip hiss, but they thumped in my chest with threatening conviction.
I ruan scribbled every fraugment, echer extract over an intent,
hush someone intoned, passage must be circled, return all correspondents.
Order begins and ends within the margin. It was a ritual,
I now realized, and one that did not want to
be breached. The marginal warnings never break the loop ere returned.
The correspondents won't reminders or superstitions. They were steps, almost instructions.
Staff rotated so fatigue would never let any one person
remember too much, and the books themselves, tantamount to relics,
became the circuit breaker. At burying evidence, carrying the cycle,
I filled my own margin with a hypothesis staff compelled
to repeat cycle anchored by annotated books, librarieself subject to
a supernatural pact entity, a force bound in nineteen seventy seven,
sustained by routine, contagious fire, memory, and handwriting. Anniversary of
the agreement approach is likely at two thirteen. Curiosity and
dread poalt equally. I ran the figures tomorrow night. By
the irregular rhythm of staff rotations recorded would mark exactly
forty five years since the original agreement was made. I
allowed my eyes to close for a moment. The room
slipped sideways, and I saw with frigid clarity, the edges
of the library bending under a nameable pressure. If I
listened too closely, I worried I'd begin to interpret everything,
the shuffle of a chair, the rattle of the storage door,
the faint music in a pipe as a sign that
something in a peripheral expected obedience. There was no longer
a chance to believe this was just structural audity or
work plays fol core. The cycle would demand action tomorrow night,
what kind I had yet to learn. When the day
staff arrived in the morning, I watched them from the
window as one might watch actors move in a play.
Whose ending was already written. Mess crowdslipped her coat brisk
and polite, but her gaze ticked away from mine. When
we exchanged good mornings, Malick struggled with the new Kikut's braf, furrowing,
you are right, he asked, tone too casual, as if
borrowing someone else's concern. Lucy joined her voice at a distance,
muttering about coffee while carrying a thick fold of digitized
incident files. I watched the three of them interact shifts
of volap with no real care words offered and would
drawn Mid's sentence. The slips in memory were there, Lucy
hesitating before picking up a return book. Malick forgetting the
combination to the supply closet he d opened daily for years,
something among the suppressed recal distributing the weight of memory
so within that no one person carried the pain. The
institution protected itself by way of the cycle, its compulsion distributed,
never fully known, always half in shadow. All day, I
turned over one question. If the cycle required participants and
relied on forgetting as its preservative, could breaking it mean
unleashing what the bargain had kept up by If anertation
hand off and walking the shelf bound route preserved the
fragile line between order and something uncataloged what happened if
I refused. By the time evening returned, the libraries edifa
shimmered with attentions so palpable I felt it in my teeth,
and as the city darkened, I gathered my armory pen note,
bad cassette recorder, charged phone, the bad oblueprint. I requested
access to the microfilm readers, ostensibly to double checked shift locks.
Then signed had a set of library cameras, small and
battery powered, kept for insurance against attempted theft. This time
I approached Nifel as a participant, not an outside observer,
not to rebel yet, but to record. My plan was simple.
I would chart every minute and write down and on tape.
I would watch the staff in real time and on camera,
aiming to see what happened at the edge of recal,
especially at the cycle's pivot IRA. If the entity or
compulsion tract awareness, then perhaps with the right evidence, it
could be named or at least recognized. Midnight silence felt alive.
The library's geometry was at first and changed, but as
I moved through the silent corridors, setting up hidden cameras,
one in the west stacks, another above the sub basement
stair a third with a wide view of the main hall.
I could not shake sensation at the angles were wrong.
Rutside walked for weeks, and no abruptly doubled back on themselves.
The eggs from the archives sometimes reappeared two corners behind
where it should have been. Light from the stairwells reached
farther and then seemed to freeze amid air, more shadow
than elimination. I checked the time, one twenty four. My
heart pounded out the increments. A slow winding fuse wore
the drudid dio. The blueprint spread on the staff lunch
table began to vibrate atop the weak come of the
vending machine. My fingers, tracing the excess again and again,
felt the tension beneath every coal of drawn line. A
sudden sense of pressure pulled the roo of my mind,
the same urge to rise, to walk, to move through
the corridors, and the order dictated by all those long
venished hands room by room, A boxed the event's surveillance tape,
rolling notebook open my own mind, resisting the urge to
surrender to the padden. I found Lucy in the reference office,
finger to study with olding from cataloging physical clouds. You're
working late, I said, my own voice, harsh in the
enforced hush. She blinked, couldn't sleep, was sure I had
something to do here. She looked at her hands, as
if doubting their ownership. Do you ever feel like you're
forgetting something the moment you remember it? I nodded and
let her be a scent of jeck coiling tider Wilex's
officed do stood a jar inside the faint glow from
a death stop lamp. Has Cot neatly folded over the
back of the single chair. On his note pad lay
a list of book titles, most of them already familiar
as vanish volumes. Along the bottom of his page, in
an unsteady hand, someone had written at two thirteen, Always
returned the route, Never break the corner's chain. I left
a camera on the entry shelf and crossed myself without thinking.
Minutes ticked by, or perhaps only second clocks everywhere disagreed,
a ballot of second hand spinning out of sync. Something
in the ventilation urged their back and forth, as if
an invisible tide poles below the floor. I strapped the
note to my chest in the phone in hand, where
I could reach his record button by reflex. Each wind
assured nothing but my own reflection and the city's light,
leaking and fainted glasses between breakers of rain and fog.
Somewhere in the stacks, the cart rolled. I heard the
hush over drawer sliding open, faintly electric. My mind floated
from station to station until with a snap, the library's
light pitched out, casting every room in Sepia. I startled,
gripping the note bed. A soundless current now drove the air,
a heaviness, neither thunder nor harm, but a kind of absence,
density made material. I gathered my kit and moved, driven
by the patterns undertoe, and went a minute and ira
hands met an agreement tooth. Atteen exactly, something shifted and
the pattern took over. My feet turned of their own accord,
falling and locksed up with an invisible metronome. The blueprint
mapped in marker across my vision synchronized with the real
corridors of paper and shelving. I walked the north stacks,
touching certain books, volumes marked with marginalia, the spines still
warm from prior hands. Then turned west, pausing at the
shelf I recognized only from the blueprint's cryptic X, and
found myself scribbling a message in the margin of an
encyclopediascdded since the ninders, faint footsteps echoed elsewhere several sets,
all keeping time. As I rounded the art stacks, Malick
appeared at the corridor's end, eyes half littered, mouth working
as if chewing a thought in his hands, hung an
annotated book, pages split open at the midpoint without words.
We turned the same corner at the same moment, converging
as if moved by a single hand footstep circle from
the south, a rhythm now undeniable, not only matching but
guiding our involuntary circuit. Lucy's form joined from the annex,
clutching a volume, handraton nearly full the last page, trembling
in her grip. None of us spoke our route can
joined blindly, almost mathematically. We paused at every marked shelf
in concert, pausing, annotating as one, then moving on. As
we entered the landing that led to the sub basement stair,
the lights faded behind us, layer by layer until Only
the pale radiance from emergency exit signs remained warped in
the their own after image. We descended every passage narrower.
The air pressed against our faces, as if to slow us.
At the base, the sill door already swinging a jar.
The heaps have discarded annotated volumes. Weited and resigned disarray.
Malok's hand hovered over the pile, his lips moving in
a silent prayer on memory. Lucy opened her volume and
began to read monotone, beholding her voice, joined by whispers
rising from the books, themselves, voices neither hers nor any
recognized as loving. Threaded the air, forming a braid of
half lost language. It pattern binds or pattern breaks, fulfilled
by return air punished by recoll. An indistinct presence materialized
between the stacks. It was nothing so obvious as former
movement in the dust, a bending of shadow when light
refused to cooperate, as flickered in its direction, but focus failed,
as if the shape presided one degree outside visibility. The
pages rustled, as if fagitated by wind. Pins in our
hands drifted of their own accord marginally appeared in real time,
my handwriting Malik sloopy script, Lucy's cramped letters, and four
fresh hand overlaying, all possibly fast, responding to an anticipating
each of our lines, as if already knowing them. My
arm strained, resisting, but they urged to write to record.
Overwhelmed personal will, I scrolled in a book without choosing
the words, as if my wrist obeyed a magnetic dictate.
If you can read this, you're already inside. We became
vessels for the ritual. The presents thickened fully asserted of
no a lambent density, more felt than seen, swelling between us, words, phrases,
command stream from it into our hands, through pen onto paper.
Something in the tapes in the books, in the circuitry
of recon forgetting channeled our bodies as conduits. Lucimowned softly,
fighting tears as her hand juck through page after page.
Malick ground clutching his badge, swept, beating his forehead, and
a cold. In time, the voices from the books grew clearer,
manifesting is a chorus. The packtnger's new hands remember only
as much as is permitted. Ritual sustains margin between hunger
and recal. If the circuit lapses, the shadow will wander.
If the margin is broken, all shall be read and deviired.
The images came not in visuals, but sensations layered over memory,
A huddle of terrified staff in nineteen seventy seven, binding
together not with hope but with desperate resignation. The entity
was drawn from some chasm of silence, contained for endless
reputation and the careful destruction of personal recollection. Only as
long as the pattern rotated, as long as new staff
replaced the old, and margin after margin absorbed memory, could
the library remain untouched. Malick asped, what if we refuse?
His voice broke the ham A precious squeezed tighter, The
space contracted, the books trembled. I felt, for an instant,
the fracturing of a membrane, the edges of reality buckling.
The compulsion redoubled, closer to pain. Now. Lisie clamped her
mouth shut, refusing to read further. The presence recoiled briefly,
like a cat struck for one suspended terrible moment. The
cycle stutter, the voices fractured, a cold that felt colder
than usual, Sweat froux my vision by furcated, reality and
memory unfurling. Into haandem. I saw the earlier rotations, Evans lied, crell,
living out their circuits, each believing briefly that they could rebel,
but before beings moved back into place by a niche
or exhaustion from some unmutable In a margin, I've found
myself writing a single desperate line, breaking with every repetitive instinct.
If you can read this, you're already inside the room
or whatever delimited it vibrated, as if in fury. The
presence thickened, then splintered into a kaleidoscope of Vignette's staff,
running books, flying, open eyes, rolling up as the library
itself bloated with uncontainable memory. Chaos wrestled briefly against ritual knowledge.
Fleeting and volatile threatened to leak beyond the cordoned walls
of the library and into the city outside. Aslamed the
book shut, lucy trembling dropped, tosted the floor. Malick Letter's
annotating can fall, as if the force driving it had
finally given up. The presence retracted all at once, like
water sucking back from a beach, but parting message half
thought was not forgiving. The next margin will be yours
for a brief, frozen instant. The three of us stared
at one another, wild eyed and ensure. Then the lights flickered,
emergency backuppined and snapped, and reality mundane sleep starved and
battered a spell back into awareness. I reeled, hot, slamming
as the library's geometry were set, corridors unfolded in the
proper alignment. Light spotted back to life, and cold concrete
settled into plain bality. My pen slipped from my clumsy fingers. Malick,
scrubbing at his face, muttered, what was that? He swayed
and sat, bones drained, Lucy's hands quaked, her skin gon
pealel's milk. We rose, stunned, and staggered out of the
sub basement, as if climbing from a heavy grave. No
one spoke on the way back up. The pounding in
my years was loud as any speech. In the reading room,
nothing looked disturbed. The books in our arms vanished, returned,
not checked out, shelved, not gone. The digital clock in
the entry blank three two. The compulsion for now sapped away,
leaving only the absence where it had ruled. Morning staff trickled,
and as if nothing had happened, Malick and Lucy wore
the existence of fresh fatigue, but asked no questions. If
I press their faces clouded with uncertainty, did I imagine
the night shattering events? A hollow, in complete sense of
closure hovered. My memory shattered, then we forged, felt not
quite My own. Images swept past too quickly to claim
shadow blooming between stacks, the incorrupting and resolving around my wrist.
The soap basement's hunger cut off midward. The compulsion remained
as a bruise, pressing gently with each breath, a faint
outline nobody else acknowledged. I drifted through the rest of
my shift, half waking, afraid to open any volume, only
to find new handwriting that betrayed more than it admitted.
The circuit was weaker, but not gone. My badge was missing.
A new one, forged in the same brittle plastic as
those I had uncovered in the sub basement, turned up
in the Lost and Found drawer. My namemage from the
curling label dated with to day's day, as if I
too had just joined the invisible line of Knight stewarts.
On a hunch, I checked the main desk. The security
footage from the previous night now showed my figure indistinguishable
except in posture, making the same looping round, trailing disjointed
fragments of annotation from shelf to shelf, a ghost like
all the others, repeating back what must always have been repeated. Malick,
cordial enough avoided crossing my path for several days. Lucy
listless creeded me with a smile, just a few degrees
off from her usual rough week. Hah, she said, as
effects plain an eternity. A stack of annotated books landed
on my desk, with a cryptic note in neither my
own hand nor any one I recognized, always returned, don't
be late. New writing in the south stacks, the cycles
engine idled in the background, waiting expectant. Day's war passed,
nights seemed longer, and the city's perimeter shrank closer when
Darkas pressed at the library walls, I saw subtle strange changes.
Were the ordinary world now misaligned with memory. Corridors that
once bent gently now strained as if at growing paines.
Crystal globes atop banister swirled with an all slick gleam,
always refracting the wrong angle. At least once a night
a stale led me up to a landing, as war
hadn't existed the previous week. The chill from the sub
basement led through every floor board. Even on warm days.
Luzzie lost track of routine, sometimes pausing me task to
search her pockets for objects she never carried. Malax E
mails were polite, informative, but ended with non secretars don't
walk alone after inventory irrelevant to the message. It had
as if a background process ran beneath every communication. My
own memory, once sharp, now lagged at the edges, staff meetings, drifted,
clipped by our jumpson ReCl Last night I found my
own penmanship looping in a margin, had no recollection of writing,
failed to recal correct in the next cycle. One night
in the lost and found the avant's badge had vanished
in its place my new one, no sign any one
had been there. On a desperate impulse, I tried to
logic my way, free mapping every sighting, every misalignment, every
skip beat. The more I tracked, the less reliable my
senses became. The margins of the library, annotated into exhaustion,
seemed to correct themselves faster than I could catch the error.
It wasn't only staff whose paterns shifted, the public who
began to mirror the cycle of peculiar rhythm. Certain regulars
hestating before entering the whist stacks, children nervously leaving behind
doggyed picture books, Volunteers signed uncertainly as they marked next
week shifts, as if without knowing why the tide had
drawn them two into the undertoe of the loop. On
my final recorded audio note, I documented the subtle, reparable
misalignment that had begun to effect the library's very bones.
In the archhouse stacks had bunched up along the wrong vectors.
Two corridors now emptied into the same room, violating architectural sense.
Our chawls issued from beneath closed doors without draft the
old stair will sometimes disgorge me into a hallway or
floor off where I had intended. Careful inspection proved nothing
to a second look, but the memory lingered, pressing against
my doubt. Sharper for being ignored. Flipping through one of
the once missing books, I found a page annotated just
that morning, not by my hand, or Malick's or Lucy's,
but by a different, anonymous script. Thank you for keeping
the cycle for now, but you must not forget. Next
time brings some one else. I heard it then, pressing
at the edge of hearing a faint static, like the
final seconds on a dying tape. Voices layered behind the fuzz,
one of them culling up my name, and other reciting
fractions of the ritual always returned, always with company, margin
upon margin. The night pressed close. Every sound ran truer
than its origin. I turned off the recorder, concentration beating
on my brow. My name echoed again, swallowed by the
hum behind me. Footsteps padded against the old herd was soft,
measured perfectly in step of mine. The library doors were
locked for the evening, the security desk vacant. By all logic.
I was alone. But as I spun hot thumping pen
trembling in my fingers, I saw my own reflection glimmering
in the main holl's glass, and behind me, cast taller
and thinner than it should have been. A single patient,
so allow wed and distinguishable from the library's night itself.
A page sumhat fluttered open. My own voice seemed to
answer itself in the dark. Even as I record this,
the footsteps approach steady and inevitable, as if the next
annotation has already begun and my margin is only waiting
for the pen. I will finish this note now before memory.
Phrase again. If you are reading, if you are listening,
remember the bargain, return what you find, never break the loop,
and never, under any circumstances, come alone. The footsteps behind
me stopped, not abruptly, but with a soft, conservational reluctance,
as if ever or whatever followed had simply decided to
listen instead. I willed myself not to turn my chest
height shallow, breast, hissing through clenched teeth. I reached for
the stuff badge at my collar. It was heavier than
the one I'd started with, chill biting through my shirt,
even its texture had changed, slicker edges dulled by unseen handling.
I thence. I carried across the dark, not focal, but
more felt than heard, an exhalation displaced by centuries thick
with the tang of iron and old glue. Resolve gathered
in my jaw, anchoring me enough to shuffle forward into
the ghost light filtering from the main desk. I gripped
my note pad like pre beads, some rubbian edge rarer.
It occurred to me forcibly that the ritual didn't care
what I believed, It only cared what I did. I
snapped on my phone again. The battery register showed eighty
one percent, though I remembered it died just minutes before.
The record light flickered uncertainly, then held steady. A heavy
air swelled up, pushing at the walls, the ceiling, the
felted hush draping every surface. Then down the corridor a whisper,
not speech, but the intention of speech, gathering behind a
strain of books. To the left, Lucy, My own voice
startled me high and uneven. A shape pressed itself into
sight through the arch to the reference room. Lucy, her
hail loose, as wide and reflective as bottle glass, lipped
parting a round words. She mount but did not speak.
She shimmered with confusion. Aye A left. I think she
gripped the door for him, knuckles goum white. But I
kept walking, and I was here again. The lights behind
her bloomed and shrank, pulses of gold, forcing small shadows
to lurch over her features. She started toward me, pausing
at the firshold as if afraid to break an invisible
wire strung through the air. We have to catalog, she whispered,
but at once she hesitated, We have to finish. The
footsteps were seated not down a hallway, but up somewhere
above us, as if another paratrail threw the sealed up
of floors. I nod did for us, both compelled forward
by an instinct neither of us could name. Through the
nearest winter, the city outside had faded behind a veil
thickened out than fog and Milkkeap's curity not one I recognized.
I glanced at my phone, seeking the camera feet. The
screen displayed the main stacks, a familiar column of shadow
and shelf. But there was something wrong. The arrangement was
not as I remembered, bookcases running on different xes, doors
open into blank walls. Lucy peered over my shoulder, hands trembling.
Is that live? It's from the east hall, I said,
But I don't none of this. The sentence canceled itself,
forded by the evidence on the screen. In the footage,
books drifted off shelves and ate it, falling gently to
the carpet, then sliding out a frame, as if carried
by invisible hands. A sudden resolve crystallized behind Lucy's exhaustion.
I don't want to be the one left, she said,
her voice sharp and small. They always pick someone in
the tapes. There's always some one lagging behind. I tried
to reason, but certainty eluded me. None of it makes sense.
If we finished the loop, maybe maybe it rests just
for the night. Do you remember, she faltered, Do you
remember what we did before? Was it always this way?
I shook my head when I try its lips, My
hand curled tight. Heerr around the page in my notebook,
the recent gold margin echoing up through my palm. If
you can read this, you're already in sighed. Lucy fished
about a badge from her pocket. Her thumb ran over,
obscuring the initials ah Evans, the one I'd found weeks
before and lost, and found now inexplicably in her grasp.
She stared at it, then pressed it into my hand.
That keeps turning up, she said, quietly. Can you keep
it for me? Awhile, maybe that's how how we make
a pass to night. It's only a badge. No, A,
I don't believe that she broke in and not any more.
We drifted down the corridor together, drawn not by fear exactly,
but by a tug, subtle as sleep, toward the heart
of the routine. As we reached the intersection of free
hole was the point marked extend the blueprint, where every
route conversed in the false geometry. I heard footsteps again.
This time I didn't freeze. Instead, I turned sharply, expecting
something monstrous or impossible. What I found was Malik, or
rather Malik is. The library now made him older by
years in the space of a knight. The faint luster
of certainty scraped away tie not a clumsily his as caught.
Iro is both grateful and its steady. We can't let
its bread, he said, voice sand papered. If we keep walking,
if we split up it. His gaze flickered to Lucy,
then down the impossibly long corridor. You need to finish
the route, both of you. In his hand an annotated book,
the same census records from nights before, Margin's fat with
tangled dialog. He pressed it to his ribs like a shield.
Lucy bristled, resisting, We're not giving it anyone, not this time.
Melick's shoulders slumped every time someone tries to stop it,
the rough bends, people vanish off camera or come back wrong.
I've seen the footage. I think I can't remember whose
face half the time, but there's always one left circling.
I finally voiced what all three of us felt. What
if we walk it together, if it always chooses the
one alone, what if we don't split? He met my eyes,
nodding and certain but willing. The footsteps are buf faded,
replaced by soft murmurings from the sub basement, like page
a shuffle or jacket wrote against the shells lucy bit help.
Then we risk it, watching us finish what it wants completion.
We say together, I said, ignoring the tremor rising in
my gut, no matter what, annote. Yes, but no one alone,
Not for a second. We moved as a trio, passing
under Crack's gonces, the hush around us deepening, not with silence,
but with an expectancy so complete a masty venorn'sieties. In
a cataloging room, a book lay open, title faded to
a legibility. The last margin was a new hand of
fourth set of notes, tense and upright, interspersed with the
phrase all pages must be read before the ire or
the IRA repeats. I looked at the digital clock two
nine four minutes. Then everything pivoted again. Malick, cradling the book,
not to frous to write. I took the pen and
scribble What happens if we refused the final annotation. Lucy,
pressing her palm to the page, scrolled her own trembling line,
We remember together where we break. The air thickened for
the first time. The compulsion roared, visible as a disortion
in the overhead light, like wolf shivering over hot metal.
The shadows around us teased with faces, the suggestion of
hands hugging at sleeves and hair. My phone, forgotten in
my pocket, vibrated. The display showed only numbers, flickering so
quickly as to be unreadable except for the frozen time.
Two thirteen From all corners, stack stairwell closed our cavroom.
The library's bones creaked in sympathetic chorus. The footsteps now converged,
the course of voices rising in intefinal waves, not words,
but syllables, echo, answer reply. Lucy's voice rose high and thin.
The IRO this is it, We have to choose. Malick's
hand shook. I grant his rich no one is singled out.
We finished the loop together right, but stay. The light
folded the reference rooms doors land of its own accord.
A brittle wind circled, impossibly cold around our shoes, somewhere
of fluorescent two burths, raining sparks. We pressed our backs
to one another as the entire library appeared to breathe.
The stacks bound toward us in the periphery of vision
crossed the reading room. A blur resolved. A shadow, barely
man shaped, more intention than form, emerged from where the
blue prints marked the circuit's center. Its presence pressed down,
multiplying itself in the reflections of every polished surface. The
annotated books began to flutter, pages riffled by an invisible tide. Maelek,
steadying his breath, forced the census book open to a
new page, dragging pen through shaking fingers. Let's finish this, then,
he breathed. Each of us picked up a pen, mind blue, Lucy's, black, Mallek's,
a stub of pencil gnawed down to the feral. We wrote,
slow than compulsion demanded, but together, hands of a lapping
on the margins. The tension blistered, as if the library
itself stretched with our refusal to break the chain. Remember
together a rote refuse forgetting. Lucy annotated, under mine bind
a pattern by consent, not compulsion. Malk added the presence
howl forceless, a wireless screech, thy shoved. Eare hard enough
to sting our ears in that cyclone of absence. We
pressed our hands to the page, finishing the margin with
the same words, each letter written by all three. We
are here. We remember the book snapshot with such force
that Lucy yupped, Malik flinched, and I nearly dropped my pen.
The humming vacuum in the corridor suddenly receded. The footsteps
that had circled for iris stuttered, then faded entirely, replaced
by absolute quiet. For a breathless instant time revt to normal.
No force, chicks or surges, no memory slept, only three
exhausted people and the gnawing echo of their own words.
Lucy dropped her pen, stunned. I remember it now, she said,
force quiet, all of it, the roud, the hand offs,
losing myself in the shells here after a year, I
shouldn't be able to, but I do. Malick's waighed, knuckling
his forehead. We finished it, but not as it wanted.
Will that hold suddenly uncertain? I flipped open the census book.
The page we had just marked now carried a fourth line,
unknown to any of us. When the pattern is remembered,
the cycle is seen. Seeing his entry, I snapped the
book shut, biting back panic. Lucy stared at me, vear
raw anon us is it over? I braced us. We
broke its method, at least for tonight. But a deeper
intuition polls beneath that surface certainty. I knew the cycle
could adapt, might recall before renewing itself. Memory alone was
not necessarily freedom. Outside, the fog had vanished. The city's
hard light hummed against the glass. The walls no longer
whispered the angles of the corridors. For the first time
since my arrival, resolved sanely, we sat all three in
the staff lounge, staring at the shut cover of the
census book as if it might erupt. With newhorns, breath
came easier, the vending machines hum became the dominant sound.
Lucy stepped her water, seeming to grow more solid with
each swallow. Malick's hand, though and steady, lost its trimmer.
At last, Gee, remember, he asked quietly, how it started?
At least this time? Lucy answered yes, I remember you
handing me the census book. I remember being scared. Her
voice stuttered. This time, I choose to remember. We lingered
until the first commuter buses rattle passed in a gray
of early morning. I collected the annotated books and set
them in a new stack, corde wrapped tight each when
a b walk against silent erasure. Before we left, I
checked a loss and found my badge, Lucy's, and the
old Evans. Take all home together keys a line, a
neat row where none had existed the day before. Malik
opened the night lock. On the final page, he wrote,
without compulsion or haste, remembered together, broke the loop, Let
history hold. Lucy nodded, backing away as the daylight pressed
to new clean windows. I lingered, staring down at the
tapes books and my note had filled with whirrs, and
knew I have recount again and again, if only to
hold onto the fragile collective memory. That evening, before locking up,
I made my final audio note. The urge to disappear
into routine was present in ac like a lost tooth,
but something in the act of share recollection pressed back
against it. The main floor was geometry, once a writing lattice,
now lay plain and bright. Scuff marks on the tile
drew no patterns. The clock match my phone. The staff
laughed together the jerk I had already heard. Lucy and
malk both repeated their stories to me, piece by piece,
as if we were learning this new memory together. Yet
beneath the ordinary, subtle warning line had been scrolled in
a book I had never touched. Neither Lucy nor mal
acclaimed nor belonged to the collection at all. The slight
green library volume no spine, label, stamped only with the
date three days. Hence the margin written in the familiar
upright hand remembrances its own kind of entry. If the
pattern must return shoes together, that final night's sleep came easily.
In dreams, the library was empty, dows why all lights on,
no footsteps, no circulating shadows, But on the cusp of waking,
a single long echo trailed up behind the hush of
a page being turned, a pen pausing above white, and
the faint ascents at the edge of hearing of other
hands waiting, always waiting for the next set of memories
to be written down. The cycle, I realized was not gone,
only change, waiting to see if collective memory cot told
where individual forgetting had always failed. As I left the
building the next day, city entangling at my collar, I
pressed my badge tight in my fist. A last look
back showed only some a stone to pause at the
threshold where uncertainty once vested. For the time being, The
library belonged to its books, its staff, its notes, and
as the living custodians of what could be remembered. But
I would always check the margins, always, just in case
my own hand or a stranger's should one night begin
a new annotation were not written in fear, but in
warning or in hope.