The Patron Who Never Left

President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in

Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop

them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let

voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections.

Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. But now we're customizing this ad for

your morning commute to wake you up. Which could help your driving? Science says that stimulating

the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets

wetter as it dries? What is keys but can't open locks? If you don't want to hear the answers,

turn off this Liberty Mutual ad now. 12 months, a towel, piano. Enjoy being fully alert.

Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty

The first words I'm recording are for whoever if anyone finds this. I don't have one.

Someone or something is moving through the northern stacks outside the archive.

A lot the door behind me slip one of the old microphone cabinets across it but the metal

scurry beckered far too loud. This room is supposed to be soundproof. Supposed to be a hundred

feet from any public entrance, buried under tons of stone and forgotten paper. Right now it feels

like a jewelry box that might snap open at any second, no matter how tightly I grit the key.

I'm whispering not from paranoia, I wish it were only that but because every step I took to get

here round back at me, layered on itself. The silence isn't safe, it's predatory,

alert for any small trespass. One fluorescent fixture is humming erratically above the catalog

machine, skipping in and out. Sometimes it catches on a flicker to go out for seconds at a time,

then surge back like the shadows and cells are fiddling with the current. If you breathe deeply

here, the place is thick with the smell of old glue and pulping but beneath the musters and iron

tank, a sharp edge I never noticed in daylight. The papers are greasy to the touch. The deeper I get,

the more it feels like the air is built up its own sediment left behind by every last book that

stood on these shelves. None of this mattered 30 minutes ago. Then, in the oldest manuscript drawer,

I found the card. It's battered, really thinner than it should be with the colour

bled out all the way to pale potty shade. The coroners have taken on a waxy softness from too many

hands. No recent cards should look like this. The date stamped at the bottom though, crutches and

crisp red ink, last Friday. Less than a week ago, around 2.30 am. The stamp lines are perfectly

fluorescent microscopically aligned and touched by time. The patron's name is in blocks grouped

blocked around the edges' Rachel Avery. That's not what's wrong though. The library database lists

her status as deceased. The record is old, flagged to do not circulate in the system with an incident

marker in 1988. I didn't know about her until tonight. But her card is fresh, as if she'd only

just check out her last book three decades con but stamped as present all the same. I stared for a

minute, thinking there had to be an error, but the thermal slip attached light is an eyelash,

barely clipped as printed with today's date and my own staff tag. My thumb shakes as I

run it across the corner. There's a blot there of faint, oily fingerprint smeared into the word

Avery. Not my print, I double checked. It doesn't match the part of my nail or the walls of my own

thumb. I worked it on my pants held it to the dying ceiling light, but it doesn't fade.

Across reference to the stamp with the one in the return tree, the ribbon is dry, but the number

is matched perfectly. The time stamp, the ink pressure, the micro-defix and the fond extrusion

there are match. There is seat machine beeps if you try to override the system. No one's hacked it,

I'd see the audit log trip acceptor can't get into tonight's log. It locks me out each time I try.

From somewhere on the other side of the fire door, I hear a scraping like books being tugged

awkwardly off their shelves, spines dragging against the shelf slip. It's not an animal.

It's too methodical, a rush of three volumes in sequence, and then nothing. Or maybe someone

setting a trap to draw me out stacking books as noise until I lose track of place and time.

The last thing I can think to do is keep speaking. If nothing else, maybe my voice will echo further

than my body does. If you find this tape, know someone or something was here with me. The doors

are locked. Only my card and Rachel Avery's should have opened them. Except one of us is dead.

I'll wear both here, now, in some way. The scraping start again, closer at this time.

I have to stop. When I first took the job at Winfurt Memorial Library, I imagined I'd finally found

what I wanted a Santeria border. I was 32, less new to the city and desperate to ground myself

somewhere solid. Most of my adult life, I'd led a string of half-lived years promising myself

that the next place would be the right fit, the next sorting system the perfect match for my

clamoring thoughts. The library, it's name or reminiscent of a morselium than of any modern

district sat clouded in the city's oldest administrative quarter, a block of blowed edges and

Manchester. When most buildings angled for attention with glass or neon, a Winfurt prepped itself

in sensors of dark granite, it's entrance flanked by tarnished bronze lions and white quartz

stepped worn down into soft dish-ships by 200 years of careful trampling. On my first official

tour, a trail behind Mr. Weber, whose shuffle reminded me of an absent-minded carriage driver,

his attention constantly veering off toward unseen hazards. Weber was kind, in a skittish way,

though he dispensed advice on a kind of roulette, this wing fine, that one forbidden for no reason,

he'd name. The old files are best left together dust, he'd murmur fingertips flicking

zoe chasing often invisible net. Whenever a path threatened to scoot the far east corridor,

his voice dropped so low it forced me to lean in. On my first day running the returns cage,

he left me with a single, cryptic warning, if you hear humming after the clock's chime one,

just make sure you're not the source. I laughed, assuming I'd miss her, but the look on his face

gave me poles. Later, he apologized, said new catalogers often felt spooked until they learned

the pipes and the lights on the iron. I told myself then that I'd remember the lesson,

every old institution grows its own airbomeths. My schedule soon settled into a liturgy of small

pleasures. I'd arrive an hour before opening, keying through the staff door, and take deliberate

pride in my archive kingdom as I joked to offer, the night janitor with her wild, spicy stores,

an uncanny knack for appearing wherever my flashlight flickered. Sometimes she'd bring a thermos

and sit in the stairwell as a recatalogged damage returns. I liked the hum of her presence,

even if her anecdotes veered strange. The clocks we've differently down here,

should say, wiping at pits mudge us on her uniform. Old walls get hungry for secrets, hollow,

they say. She'd grin at me, eyes crinkling, but if my face turned too serious, she'd glance away

and pretend to yawn. I chalked her comments up to habit. Ava was practical gentle with lost things.

Still, she hated the tunnels that snaked behind the stacks knew the basement claimed

there could a wrong, the sound bouncing back not quite when you expected it.

I midweek, I'd sought a hundreds of returns, though battered barcodes ticking along the conveyor

belt, each one a minor victory, another tiny thread woven back into the library's great tapestry.

My realm. I gained a peculiar satisfaction in knowing exactly where books belonged,

tracing each unique swage of scratch to its latest borrower,

updating the catalog until its digital skin gleaned with completeness.

At midday, the library radiated its own gravity. Sun filtered reluctantly through grimy windows

in the new wing, picking up the dust and highlighting the stock divide one side polished,

the other stubbornly clinging to its previous century. If readers cared, they said nothing.

Some loved the alcoves above the marble rotunda, labyrinthine, lined with protruding

bricks barely supporting their uneven shells. I loved it too loved watching the afternoon

light angle itself in the blueprints of the past. From time to time, oddities made me pause the

way some binding sweated sticklit as a feet seat from within above marked on shelf by the system,

yet missing from its alpha days, only to reappear in the wrong way without being checkeder.

Minor date errors, I told myself system agressions, or careless patrons.

A pigeon database was a mess of half-closed user cards, strange flagged incidents,

and duplicated names. I spent Iowa's merging nicknames in surname variants

scrubbing the records to a shine. Occasionally, as I worked late, I heard laughter slip out

from between the stacks never raucous, always a single sharp giggle or distance nicotine perfectly

to the last sweep of the iron hand. Weber dismissed the ease as pite-settling.

Other would raise her eyebrows, then change the subject, humming half-remembered tunes

that seemed to fill the void the laughter left behind. Yet, in those first weeks,

the world still felt rational. The soothing shuffle of index cards, the metallic

tan of microfilm spools, the crinkle of tissue-pader book jackets under my thumb also ordinary,

so perfectly within my powder name and tame. In the heart of the archive, the familiar texture

of paper and paste-seemed eternal. I thought, then, that order was the natural state of things,

waiting only for a diligent archivist to uncover it. That sense held me safe,

even when sensible caution would have told me to look closer at the stains nobody could

clean from the cell or ledger room, or the way my own reach shelving cart rolled a little further

into the dark each night before I locked up. After every closing, I walked the perimeter,

checking doors, writing crooked frames, breathing in the faint acidic comfort of books as they

sighed into stillness. If something more lurk behind those silent rows, I never let myself notice.

Not then. It was on a Thursday, nearing the end of my month-long probation that I decided to

tackle the East Wing Archive. It was a project overdue by years, if the logbook was telling the truth.

The air in that corner smelled layered old dust, rain that never quite left mingled with metallic

hints of rotting iron. Most staff avoided it, but I was proud of my tenacity. If a shelf-baked

resorting at midnight, I was the one to fill the call. The room was a gnar of old tables and bulky

returns carts, many piled with books whose due dates belonged to an air of rotary phones and

greening signatures. As I rolled the first cart aside, I noticed something peculiar,

a pocket-sized stack of recent returns, all stomped at 2.30am. A time of night the system was

meant to be locked and stuff-strictly off-shift. It was the Friday anomaly as my brain named it.

Four volumes, one poetry, one memoir, one local census record, and a brittle dog-eared copy

of Shirley Jackson. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to

steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more

years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level

playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st.

Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance, but now we're customizing this ad for

your morning commute to wake you up. Which could help your driving? Science says that stimulating

the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets wetter

as it dries? What is keys but can't open locks? If you don't want to hear the answers,

turn off this Liberty Mutual ad now. 12 months, a towel, piano, enjoy being fully alert.

All logged in on time by the machines I'm forgiven time stamp.

Each book's return was paired with a patron code-annested string of numbers left over from

the library's first digitization project, but poking through, I saw something more nearly all

of the patron ID were tagged as inactive, I retired, over three deceased. I recognized Rachel

Avery's name first, catalogued as dead more than 30 years ago, but there were two others,

William H. Dorset D, 1972, and see how Huxley filed flagged for account halt 1964.

The newest of the returns, though, had a post-attacked in its cover.

Carefully handwritten, it read only, stack 3B, she never left. Sentence was underlined twice.

There was no sign of the author's name, just read as connected lines scribbled across the page

margin. I set the notice eye, feeling a nagging prick underneath my ribs. I decided the simplest

answer was some board ecstaffer playing a long prank, or a chronically careless cloak refusing

to close out our dated files. Yet when I checked against my own logins, I found a disturbing pattern

every Friday for the last three months the set of books had been registered at precisely 2.30am,

all to the same silent, obsolete accounts. No new books began at that time, every transaction

involved a return never check out. And always, the name Avery appeared somewhere in the ledger,

drifting like a watermark behind a text. The phrase on the post it nodded at me. She never left.

Who? I thought I first of racial, but then recalled that pageant rarely, if ever,

linger this late or far field. The east wing was supposed to be used for outside storage or

emergency drills, it's only functioning like jury rigged from a forgotten breaker panel.

There had been talk of closing off the area for repairs after a pipe burst years back,

but the city never funded it. That afternoon, I approached Alva, hoping for a dose of perspective.

I found her by the north service elevator, juggling her supply caddy with a stack of worn-out

dolmats. Stack 3B, she repeated the words brittle in her mouth. That's an old part, I thought it was

walled off for what, flooding or something. I nodded. But there are logs, book returns, all time stamps

for a couple names keep popping up, names not supposed to be current. Her hand hovered over the

elevated button and the bones in her wrist flex on the thin skin. For a moment all her breezy,

she was seen to wane. I used to clean that area years ago, she said almost too softly.

Doors back the jump on their own, shells move, mobs get stuck behind things. She shook herself

forced a laugh. But it's useless now, nobody should be shelving that deep anymore.

I pressed her lightly about the note, but she excused herself, muttering about a full checklist

to finish before her shift ended. Later, in Webber's office, I raised the subject again,

masking my growing paranoia as idle curiosity about old library logistics. He blinked rapidly the

fine white hair at his temple's prickling upright. Some ledges exist to keep memories. He said,

Fiddling with a cracked pen lid. Others exist to bury them, don't go poking in the oldest

ones Ellen, let their secrets keep. I nodded, but didn't promise. The phrase she never left

looped in my head. Still unsettled, I spent that evening retracing every Friday night stamp in the

digital log. The more I searched the deeper the pattern ran. The Friday returned stretched all the

way back to the system's first barcode migration in 1986. Prior to that, in scattered ledges,

I found clustered initials and lines through which Rachel Avery's name kept surfacing,

like a splinter caught in the heel of the archives memory. Several entries were missing

whole pages blank, columns are race or inked over. At the time, I assumed water damage or

claucal laziness, but something felt too methodical about the gaps. Certain nights the security

system's video feed was listed as a corrupted or not found. Entire VHS drawers were missing,

replaced by handwritten memosighting system upgrades. On the nights when impossible check out

a code, the system always showed a loss of power for at least 20 minutes, then snapped back to

life with the clock exactly reset to 2.13 a.m. Working late became my habit. Web assigned off after

six each night, leaving me with the duplicate key and vague reminders to a lock-up tight. I buried

myself in the logs, pulling faded blueprints from the archives off-limits sub-basement.

Bella plans mapped out the east wing with a miz of rooms reading corners, partial galleries,

a locked found with study, and several phases of closed stacks that, on all modern prints,

simply weren't there. Sections now showed a solid placer allegedly covered over during

the 1967 renovations. I read these plans as if they might explain the library's living

shifting shape. I became convinced that entire rooms had vanished, their doors and contents

subsumed behind false walls. Several reference diagrams suggested vents and corridors that,

if real, should have let up behind the book-lift in the worst archive of space now

filled with low-metal shelves and reference encyclopedias that nobody bothered to touch.

My fascination crecidote after hours. Using my stuff-axis, I trailed the pattern of a phantom

check-in-times 2.13 a.m. every Friday. One night, just before three, with my hot pounding in my

eyes, I re-ended a restricted stacks under the guise of tracking a missing serial. The corridors

seemed different at night. I tried mapping my route using color tape on the corners,

but each time I circled back to my starting point, my tape was missing or replaced with a different

color. On my third circuit, I noticed a shelf of friends with the library cookbooks,

out of place, sitting near the biography section where the blueprint suggested a concealed door

should be. That same night, while reviewing feeds on the archival's security monitor,

one of a quiver of near obsolete, green-tinted screens I caught movement in what should have been

a dead corridor. A figure shoulder is hunched to stale, face obscured by a low tilt and

perfokes carried an arm-load of books through a staff door that, according to every physical

check, was completely blocked off on both sides by shelves and loosedown. The monitor flickered

again, scrambled, and that person banished just as the minute countersnapped to 2.14am.

I checked a card transaction lock, a book registered as a return against Avery's code,

exactly when the footage blurred. Sleep escaped me entirely. I began recording regular memos,

hoping to organize my thoughts before I am ravled. The act of speaking them out-granted me at first,

but as nights bled together, my own voice in the emptiness seemed a poor substitute for certainty.

Every morning, tiny traces of night-versisted a cold sweat, phantom footsteps hitched with

echoes that wouldn't stop ringing. The library responded, as if testing my resolve.

Someone rearranged the books on my reshielding cart while I stepped away for a cup of tea.

The spines awkwardly mashed together, spelled out, rooms change, people too. An accident, a board

page? Except only two people were left in the building at night, myself and Ava,

his worst she'd been fixing a leak in the supply closet. Once the child's library card fell

from a file I was searching. It bore Avery's blot printed name, but the front was scraped over

with dozens of walled faint marks layer on layer of fingerprints, all pressed into the card as if

the surface had been handled over and over by the same, relentless hand. Paranoia made me stronger,

clearer. I started hunting obsessively for the rules underpinning the pattern.

When I flick through the digital checkout log for Friday nights, I saw in brutal detail how,

stretching back decades, the same handful of retired names kept surfacing at impossible layers.

Sometimes a gap of a few months passed with no activity, then multiple returns were

cue all at once, always that time stamp of it they aligned to the hidden minute, never a second

before or after. By now, it was obvious Rachel Avery wasn't the only impossible borrower.

Files expanded, William Dorset's name appeared every handful of years, always on a battered copy

of a 196 to city directory. See, I'll Huxley returned in spurt, flagging books long since

taken out of rotation. Growing desperate, I double-check security logs for those nights.

They'd all been marked corrupted by whom I couldn't learn. When I flagged the issue for Weber,

he shogged, old systems full of ghosts, we upgrade when we can. He brushed aside my suggestion of

contacting IT, muttering again about all business and funding was. That week, a borrowed

a master key under the pretense of surveying the West Wing archives for mold. At midnight,

flashlight groups of tidy my pomect at least aroused a routed map to where forgotten blueprints

showed a stacked 3B that shouldn't exist. Corridors twisted as I walked, seeming to lengthen

then double back. Science pointed in circles. Once, rounding a wide pillar, I found myself facing

the same reference desk I'd passed five minutes before at the pencils atop it rearranged in a star

shape that I hadn't left them in. Every so often, I heard a faint shuffling pages flapping,

then a lower metallic scrape, as if someone moved carts just out of sight. I was sure that the

stacks were empty, yet the air thickened with a sense of presence just behind the next corner,

never quite letting me catch my breath or glimpse the source. Sleep vanished entirely.

Members became frantic, record after record muttered into my phone when the holes were empty.

My mind, one sharp, began to fray, every return, every stunt slip, every audit glitch

feeding into my annoying conviction at the library was more alive than dead. The friday after I

found the note about stack 3B, I felt certain it was not legend. Something, where someone,

looked beyond a boundary on me a few staff dared approach. I stopped just short of losing myself

in paranoia. The next clue came from a deep dive into the oldest catalog metadata digital

fossil record clinging to the styles and quirks of clicks long gone. The entries for phantom locations

aligned with a set of invisible aeropron markers in the database. Rooms listed under 3B,

founders reading nook, or secondary gallery with fizzle out if you tried to call them up for mapping,

all that remained was a cruby loop tasky strain, room not found. A week later the dam broke.

President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in

Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them.

By voting yes, by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let

voters decide not politicians. Vote yes, by April 21st. Paid for five Virginians for fair elections.

Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance, but now we're customizing this ad for

your morning commute to wake you up, which could help your driving. Science says that stimulating

the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets wetter

as it dries? What is keys but can't open locks? If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off

this Liberty Mutual ad now. Twelve months, a towel, piano, enjoy being fully alert.

I returned one last time. I told myself to see if I could trace the actual mechanism that

erased rooms and people alike. It began with a clue almost too obvious, a misshell,

fiction title, stamped as returned not just today, but according to the lock on dozens of different

dates, all in every's hand. I spent an iratrice in column numbers finding dead ends,

sealed closets, and dry all where windows should have been. Near the back of the east wing,

between a pair of thick and cyclopedies welded together as a camouflage, I toughed it what I hope

was in an anchor shelf. The wall clicked to the soft scrape outcounter dread. The shelf pivoted,

swinging outward on hidden rollers I'd have sworn one there a moment before. Behind it,

Yolanda slender doorway, nearly invisible in the dark. I switched on my phone's flashlight

and stepped inside. The space was mini, a single bowl, still faintly glowing about a

threadburst study carol, surrounded by a ring of old pointment pinned by shape to cockboard.

Someone had left a battered pack of mints and a sheath of yellow notebook paper in the desk.

The air was thick, chemical, as if time itself lingered here, viscous and inescapable.

The desk drawers were filled with personal effects of phantom pen, a student idea shoot

to Rachel Avery exploration in 1989, civil index cards, and three different hands.

One, in large blocky letters, spelled my own login initialsy, empty, beside Avery's,

as though the two of us had been processed in the same returns for years.

The library check and slip bore the current date, and my staff ID printed in a machine perfect

strip. Pinned to the corkboard beside the desk, a reading list of columns and symbols I didn't

recognize page numbers, arcs, intersecting lines with cryptic arrows and coded dates most

two years after Avery's recorded death. One entry, written shakily, read, if you find this,

you're already keeping a place. Scat odors seats were stumped and counter-stamped,

Avery replacing my initials on half, as if someone had forged both our hands.

Pocked in the reading list, I turned to leave, but the shelf no longer opened behind me.

Where I entered was now a wall of dark paneling with only a small latch, which clicked

juicelessly in my grasp. Pinex crouched at my throat. For a moment I considered screaming

then I remembered the insulation of the stacks, the way sound seemed to absorb rather than travel.

A journal in rising, I ran my hands over the hidden wall, searching for a seam, I'll

lover anything. None revealed themselves. The desk lamp flickered, casting an uneven

egg-shaped pool of light in the reading list, the old staff badge, the codenobic with its

unreadable lists of names and dates civil marked with the crudex, none matching today's patrons.

A minute passed. Beneath the carol, I found a bundle of loose leaf records bound with faded tape.

They were internal reviewed notes description of a ghosted return,

recitations of how to recognise stamp errors, strange directors for staff to ignore

self-resolving anomalies. I realised, shivering, that Avery had been here, not just a memory but

a cloak like me, processing not books but gaps absences. Someone, I thought wildly,

was updating her file with new returns even now. In some columns, my staff initials appeared,

matched to borough codes, as though my hand itself had stumped the night-strung sections.

Behind my head, they seemed to ripple. Footsteps one set, then two shuttered down the corridor

outside the sealed door. The air, bright and mechanical, leapt in my chest. I pressed my ear

to the thin moat, but the pattern made little sense slower, then rapid, then crawling away.

Once a faint voice hummed a note that lingered and twisted into silence.

With a reading list and records in hand, I sunk onto the carol's battered chair, shaking

so hard my tea-chatted. I realised with sharps its certainty that the way in had vanished.

Rooms changed people too. The library, I thought, was never truly mapped. I drew in a thin breath

of air, making myself examine the notes left in the drawer. There were references and code

of column headings for rekeepers, illustrations of a circle within dissecting arrows,

and an underlying note, repeating erasure's ensure system health, do not question.

Next to it, a faded instruction sheet had a force to return through the system of

a patron couldn't be found. One ledger described the dev version process. I only

the internal review group could issue a strike through removing a patron from public view and,

presumably from active memory. The names of the reviewers weren't listed,

only brief covered phrases and mocks never a person, always a set of initials echoed through

the records. I sat very still. Outside, those same footsteps returned slower now.

I slipped by phone load to the floor, activating its audio recording app. The microphone hummed,

then picked up muffled voices clipped, almost digitized by age. The archive is still hungry,

she's lasted longer than the last one, at least. They always try to map away out, it never works.

How many left? It doesn't matter if the ledgers clean, we close the loop.

Amun she's gone? Rooms changed people too. My heart stuttered. Whoever they were reviewers,

keepers, ghosts, they were closing in. I scrolled shaky note if I don't return and check Avery's

files, deliver this to a web and sealed the envelope, mucking it with an emergency stamp from the

Carol drawer. The footsteps faded, the echoes lingering like stains in the dark. The reading list to

departure map may be gloat faintly under the flickering light. I left it my phone, recorded my

voice once more, flat with exhaustion. If you find this memo, I may be part of the system by now,

rooms change, and people due to, did anyone escape before me. I tucked the envelope into the corner

of the Carol, praying the library would not erase all trees. Then I lapsed into silence,

the faint hammer voices and books closing in, the patterns and shelves rearranging behind my back.

I drew my feet up on the batter-chair, kneecaps rising tight under my chin, the muffles

scrape of footsteps now recurring pulse outside my prison. There was no clock in the Carol.

I tried counting breaths, vetting myself sink into the tattered upholstries,

chemical stink just to anchor something real. The oppressed clothes, wolf-thick and sire with

mildew. My brains crumbling, picked out the little dramas littering the desk, a snap pencil,

Avery's ID card, a single stub of a wax who leaps a crulling and a pen groove as if it had never

been touched and she'd left it behind. I unfolded her reading-less again, picking apart each

symbol. There were arcs with double slashes, maybe routes, and page numbers written in pairs.

One column alternated between today's date and several near future friday's, as though time

itself was being tallied up for return. In the margin, a circling arrow held my own initial

stamp once, then exit, then rewritten almost as if, before I'd found this place, someone already

knew I would. A pencil triangle pointed at the phrase, if lost, repeat once, then seek the silage

off. I traced the Carol's surface for clues. The desk draw glided out reluctantly, bumping some

invisible catch. Inside, a library gavel, stamped with the cities in signature, and beneath it,

a packet of yellow encods, some bearing just faint rectangles of a wrist ticker glue,

others with avaries looping printore, and possibly, my own recent handwriting,

let us formed exactly as I wrote my ID in the morning returns log.

The room's boundary is pulsed. I pressed harder at the wall where I'd entered,

feeling not plaster but lay of paper-cold, lumpy, irregular. Against my knuckles, it rasped,

like the skin of a centurus old book. The shells had shifted, I recognized none of the spines

visible from the Carol. Instead, a series of doors now branched into darkness at odd angles,

their thresholds roomed with pencil, coal numbers, and half erased initials. A journal in return,

sharper now. I snapped my phone's flashlight on and placed the battered reading list in my pocket.

If every left hints, maybe she charted a route out or at least a trail worth following.

The cowl single weak bulb flickered overhead, then blinked out abruptly, pitching the room into

a navy gloom broken only by my weak LED. My brat double, pulse kicking hard against my throat.

I stood an inch toward the rightmost door, careful not to lose my place with the heavy

packet of evidence tucked into my arm. At the threshold, I paused listening. The outer foot

stout had stopped. A new sound crept in, the faint saturation of pages riffing somewhere nearby,

a compress, papyrus eye, like someone methodically turning one old folio after another.

I reached for the door knob, cold and slippery. As I twisted it, my fingers caught a splinter chip

into brass, and were as pressed into the grind caught the edge of my attention, returning complete

filer brisk. I should have stepped back, retreated, but the air behind me thickening verbally,

has efferging me on with rather than ow. The door creaks softly as it opened, revealing a corridor

that didn't match any ad-mapped stacks here rearranged themselves in having bone chevrons.

Books nuggle three deep in cubby holes along the floor. The carpet squelched underfoot,

sticky as if from ancient spilled glue or ink. Flickering exit signed pulse, weekly far-head

above it, a discarded fire alarm plate hung a skew, and a single piece of book tape fluttered

in the artificial breeze. The readingless triangle arrows seemed to indicate the throat left turn,

so I edge forward, eyes raking for index marks or carved initials, anything to break out the

anonymous inus. The corridor bent took two hard turns. A half-secured panel of drywall jutted out

in the gloom. I scurried it, hold in my breath at the sensation that the very walls leaned inward,

breathing. Above, forest and bolstent time with the flickering exit sign a slow, a hific morse,

too patterned to be random. Midway down, a pair of battered sneak-as-all,

canvas, one brandless peeped up from behind a rotating card of microfilm reels.

My chest locked, hot battering into my ribs. I opened my mouth to call out, but nothing

has gait but air. Edge and closer, I nudged the cup of mature. The shoes were empty,

their towns thrust forward, it glets freight, as if abandoned mid-step. Next to them,

a library card reach a lavery is again, or a ghost of a flow to puddle in a shed of half-embedded

and gummy dust. I crouched and picked it up. This one called slick. It's reverse-eyed

read, keep his erase, but readers restore. It's scraping sound-bloom behind me at a wire basket

being wheeled a long stone. I rolled clutching the card and found only darkness pulsing,

the corridor behind me subtly different in the bend, a missing shelf. Their rooms changed,

people too phrased, took on a shape beneath the skin of the maze, alive and mutable.

Pushing ahead, I found myself at a banking of catalogue drawers, each handle labeled with a

month and year. My fingers drifted along them, September 1988, June 2003, February 1972.

One drawer resisted. I brazed a palm against the old oak and tugged hard.

The inside held not paper slips, but dozens of pocket-sized photographs, most black and light.

Thesis Blur, their features worn away by time except in the lower right corner,

with someone hitting my own initials, and then beneath that the looping black letters,

Avery, a cladder interrupted my stare. Down the corridor, a new edge of yellow light appeared,

the con that came from staff offices, fluorescent and sire. Shadows moved against it, too,

maybe three shapes and wrap a furtive motion. I held my breath and pressed back behind the open

drawer, hot leaping. Voices rose, cliff fragments. She won't last, not at this threshold.

Brilliant, records will slip. We have to marker.

Avery's case was different, exception spiral. My hands trembled. Through the gap in a drawer,

I spotted staff badge, a crisp new card embossed with my name, dropped among the photos as if

I'd left it their months before. An eye-scull of fear splintered in my chest.

Had I already mapped this route, failed. Return again. The voices receded.

I pocketed the badge and pressed further into the stacks, fingers wide against the spines.

Walls now pulse outwards, then in, as they're drawing their next breath.

I pressed against a recess, forcing myself not to close my eyes.

A faint giggle wound its way through the stack solvers. Maybe, or a memory of her voice trailing

off into threaded, metallic groan that sounded like a shelf-shifting beneath them bearable way.

Above me, something stirred aflado like pages ruffling overhead.

With nowhere left to go, I flattened the reading list against my chest,

whispering to it as if it could lead me free, hoping against hope that somewhere some exit waited.

Still, the words from the posted echoed louder than any footstep she never left.

I wondered am I there she now? Caught within changing walls, my own initials the news ghost.

The light stammered overhead and dark closed in again, so absolutely I could almost smell its hunger.

I moved through the new corridor with the reading list pressed flat in my palm,

each step giving beneath my weight in that slow sinking way of old institutional carpet.

The next turn brought me into a vault-shaped enclosure, spines bowing over my head their

denser than ever. On instinct, I ducked, shoulder's hunching even though nothing brushed my hair.

The walls pressed forward so close that I recognized individual wasps of paper-tollen corners,

initials and graphite, a drip of something like candle waxed crusted into a gutter.

The light was fungal, fiftful, as though the bulbs drew the current from memory alone.

A chill tickle my nape, and I realized I was bracing for the next escalation,

half expecting to see every herself materialize around the end of a range of bookshelves,

a polite smile, a bundle of overdue novels clutched to her ribs.

But nothing arrived except my own distorted shadow,

slanting and stretching as the fixture over my head burst and waned.

Each foots to parole through hollow spaces deeper than the visible floor plan could ever contain,

echoing out and back in a crossfire of invisible passageways.

I checked the coded notes on Avery's reading list, quinting at her triangles and circles,

matching the markings where brass shelf labels gleaned faintly in the haze.

At the next intersection, the floor slowed shallowly upward unexpected an abacement,

given that everything should have leveled out long ago.

Here, books were sorted not alphabetically but instead by year,

the spines noneeworthy in 1993.

I ran a shaky finger across a shelf marked accessions,

1977, 1987, and none of which should have survived so many purges,

yet here they'd been left, covers warped, labels curling.

My breath condensed in the cold caught silvery in the play of dying fluorescence.

Adore, the corridors intrimpled and perceptibly, as though someone had touched a knob from the other side.

Before I could second guess myself, I moved towards butte making the faintest tacky sound.

I paused, listened.

Though as movement within, as grape and mudder,

the shadowy hush of something being passed hand to hand.

I pressed a knuckle for me to the reading list, remember the cryptic map,

if you reached the lost office, to not speak, to not refuse.

Inching forward, I took in details.

The door was a relic, waste-hype-washed plates and ancient library stencils worn nearly

illegible. Underneath the battered window, a taped plackard read, reference internal use only.

Avery's symbol to circle triangle had been gouged softly into the grain.

When I leaned closer, the door gave under my hand not pushing open,

but inhaling, swinging inward with no resistance.

Bright light knifed through the gloom, bleaching my eyes.

I went in with Isla's narrowed, straining for focus.

The room within could have been an office from any 19-ages film,

beige-pained peeling and wide flat patches, the copper hulking in the corner,

a trio of battered rolling chairs around a laminate table.

Folded as stacked into kephal, deliberate towers filled almost every surface,

many stamped for view complete, others open and gaping, half-crowned with return slips.

The air smelled wrong, osun-laced with cleaning fluid, thick with something mineral.

I only realised there was to loan when a cough cut the silence.

At the head of the table saw three figures in nondescript suits faces blowed by shadow,

edges disintegrating at the edges where my vision failed to resolve.

Their features never quite snapped into focus, sometimes annular, sometimes rounded,

coats melting at the cuss into the table's grain.

The spoken murmurs never raising their voices, tapping on calculators and all check-in logs.

Beside them two standing figures sorted slits into piles.

One's nails were bitten nearly to the quick,

the other's gold wedding band rotated restlessly as she worked.

A third figure lingered quietly at the filing cabinet his face invisible,

posture so familiar I felt a lurching blink of recognition, Weber.

Noah Taller, broader in the shoulders, put his hands carried the same tire trimmer,

the librarian's muscle memory.

I took a step backward, but a fourth presence blocked the door a blow person with hair drawn

tightly back, clipboard clasped to her chest. She didn't meet my gaze.

President Barack Obama.

Virginia, we are counting on you.

Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election

and wield unchecked power for two more years.

But you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st.

Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians.

Vote yes by April 21st.

Paid for by Virginians for fair elections.

Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance,

but now we're customizing this ad for your morning commute to wake you up.

Which could help your driving?

Science says that stimulating the brain increases alertness.

So here's a pop quiz.

How many months have 28 days?

What gets wetter as it dries?

What is keys but can't open locks?

If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off this Liberty Mutual ad now.

12 months, a towel, piano.

Enjoy being fully alert.

Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty.

Instead, she whispered, you missed your last meeting, Ellen.

Are you returning or renewing?

My feet rooted to the spot.

What what is this?

A ridiculous question, but I'd lost the talent for pretence.

None of the figures are the table answered immediately.

Instead, the woman at the door motion me in.

Her name badge, barely logical, read CLH Huxley.

The designation on the folded corner of her badge master ghosted,

page encoded, seen on dozens of returns.

Patrons can't stay past their term, she said,

voice even and soft as if I'd asked about overdue fines.

Shelvas can really for a while, but at some point,

you're either lost, or you're made a keeper.

At that, her eyes flicked up, and a glimpse to brightness crawling behind her pupils,

the same date glint I'd seen in the old catalog screens.

I shoot my head.

I don't have her, her name keeps surfacing.

I gestured at the notebook, my words humbling out,

the books, the rooms that move, the erase patrons, why me?

She shrugged.

Every so often, one of he gaps the audit,

the records want to balance they always do.

If a slot's left open, the library finds a replacement.

One at the table stood, a shadow pitch larger than his frame,

folding a battered folder shut.

Rachel Avery was one of us, he said.

She made her record too visible, transfer her too many gaps,

she left hints, Ellen, but she also closed a circuit.

At this, the figures at the table was yum shuffling papers,

speaking now in rapid clocks and simple warnings too quick for me to pass.

I thought to know, I knew the very air in the room pulls in time with the words.

I stumbled backward, almost tripping over my own boots,

but the corridor behind me had sealed.

The woman at the door moved aside just enough.

Too much knowledge can't be returned, she murmured,

half to herself, half as if ticking through a regulation.

A sudden click drew my attention to the window inside the pain,

a mirrored surface showed the stacks behind me,

only now they lived away in directions my eyes couldn't quite follow up,

over sideways, as if the architecture was inverting itself even as I watched.

List in hand, I desperately tried to match symbols to doorways,

tracking Avery's glyphs as she'd left a treasure hunt to salvation.

A second-voice rose, dry as the pages in the older shelf,

returned to process Ellen that are the collection then's you to echo.

It's your choice.

I whirled, searching for an opening.

On the desk, a register slid half off its pad,

scattering it doesn't cause onto the floor.

One landed at my feet Rachel Avery's, a print faded, and beside it,

mine, eat MC, stumped not with today's date but one ten years in the future.

My chest crushed with cold.

The figures watched, or seemed to you,

their faces tinting with something like regret.

The archives still hungry, the woman repeated.

You know too much, you stay, or re-raise.

On impulse, I seized Rachel's card and pressed it to Avery's reading list.

The symbols danced dimly in the sputter and fluorescent glow.

I remembered a triangle, circle, then the spine with the chip corner,

the penciled arrow from her instructions.

Instead of yielding, the walls now seem to convulse,

the ceiling groaning, tiles popping in and out as if the library

reconsidered my path with every choice.

I ducked low and darted toward the exit sign.

It spun as I neared, its position swapping from left to right and higher to lower.

My stomach swooped, nor suspending up as the end point slipped from reach.

One of the keepers' mail, in a stink except for a heavy gold watch gave chase,

shoe squeaking on Chaplinolium as the walls themselves bulged,

forming shelves were none and been seconds earlier.

The list Avery's encoded directions snapped to clarity,

followed the numbers, ignore the doors that flick atick only what you can carry in memory.

Adrenaline surging, I scanned the call numbers.

92.1 Avery stood at shoulder height, a dust-film shelf without any books,

only a stack of yellow returns slits in a single pen, the same brand as mine.

It crashed behind me.

Another keeper now blocked the leftmost door,

their shadows stretching, arms upstretched to herd me back.

The path before me branch, shifting if I chose wrong, I would double back forever.

I pressed against the father wall, ignoring the looming shelf.

My shoulder caught the darkness tearing at my sleeve.

The cart rolled past, propelled by no visible hand.

Its arrangements belled in battered volumes, read between, no returns.

Encouragement, I fret.

I lunged after it, the cart rolling into a half-lit stairwell,

stopping abruptly as the light of a flickered into solidity.

Before the keepers could close in, I squeezed into the stairwell,

the door swinging after me with a teeth rattling slam.

The geography blurred for a split second that then snapped into new focus.

A strip of talent afoot, wide and yellowed, marked a path I didn't recall from any evacuation map.

The stairwell's banister wobbled in my grip, called a steel-left and winter air,

and somewhere below, a harmonic wobble like a ringing bell suggested that someone

or something had set the steps vibrating in anticipation.

Hanik Ward with calculation.

I come to the reading list, Avery's last desperate map.

Triangle, double slash, I exit at the red line how handwriting was sparky and patient

and possibly familiar as if I'd written it myself.

The clatter of pursuit rose behind me, as printed downward, breath tearing my fruit,

as the echo of fruit falls entangled in the architecture.

I glimpsed through the stairwell, grill another room, set as if from decades ago,

staff in old-fashioned grey smogs-bushing carts along copper that rolled with dust.

The door at the next landing swung wide as I arrived,

opening onto a service hall that was both familiar and changed,

for us in cones of light struggled against the haze,

and a painted and no admit and signed peeled at the edges,

shifting beneath my gaze like something alive.

It stumbled out a hot jackhammering.

For the briefest instant, I thought I'd escaped that ordinary rules could reassert themselves.

At the end of the passage, a staff elevator when I remembered rarely working

stood with its door-stock halfway jar.

I slept through, praying the machinery would remember how to behave.

The elevator's interior was cool, metallic, echoing.

Affaited inspection ticket-read, last maintained in 1987.

Beneath someone had stuck a library barcode, just the initials raw.

I pressed the deep button for ground holding Avery's card between my knuckles.

The lift move was stately reluctance, the gears gnashing faintly,

as if knowing on their own history.

The ride-up was excruciating.

The little cage stopped, lurched, then finally ascended,

ricocheting through layers of memory and architecture.

I pressed myself into the father's corner,

the card sweating in my palm, the reading list damped from my grip.

The door's parted half, then by degrees and dumped me into a cold corridor stripped of books,

let only by a single exit sign.

Standing at the end was goldstein, the night security guard,

hands folded awkwardly in front of his belt.

His eyes tracked mine, the iris's sharpener lit pressed into a single unbroken line.

He moved forward, offering his arm as if to steady me.

For a moment I thought, hoped he might be real a tether to something uncomplicated.

You're not supposed to be down here, he said ton extraordinarily mild.

Supposed to call for help, you know.

His voice echoed weirdly in the tile, picking up a metallic wine.

I got lost, I managed to startle to smooth the tremor in my voice.

I was following trying to map the room's kept changing, there were people keepers, I think.

He nodded the gesture just to touch too slow.

A lot of stuff lose their way at night, too many anti-Ios all the old blueprints bleed into each other.

He kept his tone hush as if reciting a library regulation.

But if you walk the wrong circles for too long, you run into old business that can be hard to undo.

I tried to step past, but he leaned in close enough for me to see the ghost of a tier in his left

earlobe and old injury, the kind security guards collect.

You didn't take anything from the review room to you, he asked too interested in my answer.

I pressed the reading list into my coat's lining,

feeling the outline of Avery's card and my own badge in my pocket.

My maftride.

Just found all files that lied, not very well.

Goldstein turned, motioning for me to follow him down the slanting corridor.

He never looked back, his silhouette stiffened blurred at the edges under the harsh fluorescence.

As we walked, he dropped his soft probes disguised as small talk.

I've ever showed you the subsiler, I always thought she stuck to the main level,

she was one of a good ones, miss her sometimes.

I hesitated or calling office warnings, stores jamming, laugh for that came too late.

She told me about the hollow walls I sit quietly. Goldstein's head tilted incrementally.

Clock stopped for some people, but the stacks always know your time, it pays to keep your

records clean if you want out. He stopped beside a battered side door leading to the staff lounge.

The corridor heads slunk away, fading into a slice of darkness.

What's your plan now? He asked, voice thinning. I blinked suddenly uncertain.

I just want to get out. He watched me with a frank, measured weight.

Be careful not to leave anything behind, he advised as if it mattered.

Patron history swallow a lot to names, dates habits that find room, not much it gives up willingly.

For a sick moment I wondered if he'd bar my way. He motioned toward the stairwell and I heard

passed, not daring to glance over my shoulder. The first thing that struck me outside was the

dumbness of the morning air-cool, biting, laced with the scent of pavement and exhaust.

For a moment I just stood there, the city's noise deafening after so much silence.

I looked around for a clock, the time on my phone blinking in at 4.55 am, and then set off for my

apartment, my luxury, mind refusing to quiet. Inside, I shut the door and sagged against it,

sweat blooming cold and near my shirt. The apartment was an anchor, I told myself.

It had always felt temporary a holding pattern until I decided whether the city suited me but

tonight, its reticence, and nerve me. Something was off, my copy of Cloud Atlas on the kitchen table

was now in the bedroom, I've rifted clock on the wall-ticked backwards. My spare keys hung

in the wrong place, flipped on their ring, a frame photo on my desk, once a shot of myself and

old friends, was now missing half its faces, fogged on flat where faces should have been.

I prouled for rooms as if they might rearrange themselves behind my back.

My heart started with every new item that failed to settle properly in memory.

I checked my phone's call log, nothing since midnight, no miss alerts, no sent messages.

My computer's notifications were silent. The connections,

once so ordinary, now suggested a breaking or a force for getting.

Sleeped out of the way if I so much has pressed my eyes closed. When bleakery don't muscleed

its way through my blinds, I forced myself to get up, brew coffee. The taste was sire and

ways I couldn't explain, I kept swallowing, as if consciousness alone could push away whatever

the library had worked into my bones. Still on steady, I showered brush my teeth, dressed out of

habit, and left for work. At the library's entrance, my badge stuck in the scanner for the first

time ever, blinking red. The guard at reception frowns, getting the stuffless without recognition.

Do you have a work order? Tias was polite, bored. I offered my name. He squinted, scrolling.

Sorry, nothing matching, maybe check with HR. I stepped aside,

watching patron shuffle through the high old doors. None looked at me directly, the gaze

is drifted to my left side, skipping over me as if the light between us divided unevenly.

Even when I cleared my throat, no one flinch, no one paused. I felt as though I'd been

recatalogged as a mere smudger presence on the periphery, easily dismissed. At my locker,

I twisted the dial, and it's one open without resistance. The shelf was empty. My extra sweater,

stashed umbrella, even the small stash of culture I've sold gone. Alpha's locker, once beside mine,

stood open, utterly bare. I tried her number. Disconnected. Not even a dial, toned just a dial,

mechanical beep, the universal marker of an abandoned line. In the break room,

with a brushed past, eyes down, either recognizing or acknowledging me, treating my physical

presence as little more than the shadow left by a late shift worker. His posture was identical to

how I remembered, but his manner had thinned, remote in a way I doubt it could have invented.

Staff drifted through, glancing past me with cheerful indifference. At no point did throat clearing,

or mumble greeting drawn nervous. I traced the edges of my stuffed badge,

thumbing the corners, half-hoping for a mistake in the lamination or clue in the expiration date.

Nothing. By midday, mind's idea devolved into scraping at the inside of my head a persistent,

spiney discomfort like static fuzz in the space between my thoughts. Near the circulation desk,

a slip of paper caught my eye. It had been slid under the book return hatch,

its edge chewed up as though someone had fidgeted with it before committing. On its narrow

road lines, a messaged hybriton, read, don't forget your return date. The phrase felt surgical,

cutting through my fatigue with the precision of an order. I turned the slip over in my hand,

confirming there was no signature, no identifying mark. My stomach twisted with a cold thrill.

I stuffed it into my pocket with avery's list, pulsed rising in my chest.

For the rest of the afternoon, I drifted half-present, and I'm bored,

like a patron searching for a book that might never have existed. I tried the catalog system,

my login failed to recognize me, I found no record of myself in the morning's clock in ledger.

I tried to page back through transactions for the prior week each time the system spat out a

permission to die. I called Weber's extension. He answered, voice genial, but distracted.

Yes, can I help with a reference order? I offered my name, feeling the absurdity close around my

nerves. Sorry, must be a temp I don't remember. He hung up with soft finality. Nothing stable remained,

safe for the echoes of lost nights maize the soft sliding books, the indelible, hungry stare of

the keepers, avery's encoded instructions burning a slow scar into my memory.

President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats

in congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop

them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let

voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections.

Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance, but now we're customizing this ad for

your morning commute to wake you up. Which could help your driving? Science says that stimulating

the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets wetter

as it dries? What is keys but can't open locks? If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off

this Liberty Mutual ad now. 12 months at towel. Piano. Enjoy being fully alert.

Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty. It was evening before I slipped into what I was now sure would be

my last shift. Everyone worked around me. No one addressed me or asked for assistance.

I watched the clock drift toward closing, then slipped through the main stacked one final time,

recording my findings into the recorder I'd kept hidden in my coat.

My voice sounded raw, thinner, fainted than I'd remembered. Memo for internal records,

I whispered into the mic, Ellen Marie Cartwright, catalogous since January,

I've uncovered a recurring anomaly Friday returns logged in the names of the cease-patrons,

staff records, Altadorees, hidden rooms that loop back on themselves. Rachel,

every late staff member or patron still circulates, staff who look too long fall out of record,

several names lost, including recent genitorial, Ava. Not present on current lists,

current access has been revoked. Evidence includes slips, reading lists slash map,

and audio surveillance. My badge is now unrecognised in all systems,

Weber and Goldstein unsure of complicit, or only tools will attempt to deposit files in

the main ledger of privileged endures, if not someone will find this or not.

I ended the recording and placed the device deep in a forgotten shelf in reference,

praying the shelf would resist the churn of changing rooms for just a little while.

On the way out, I checked the West Arcos one last time. The wheels of a cart creaked in the shadows.

A faint laugh too reedy, too shrill drifted from the basement hall come before I could turn.

My last act before leaving was to open the envelope I'd mailed to myself in the hope that some

ought if I might at last memory. Inside, a couch showed Avery's gripped tight, almost childlike,

you can bleach a name from paper, but the echo lingers return what you carry.

In the corner, a date today is stamped in crisp red. I walked home under dirty sodium light,

passing through a city that seemed just one degree misaligned. Strangers failed to meet my gaze,

and shop windows reflected a blur of where my outline should have been.

Tonight, the world is quiet, the city's living weight kept at bay by one slender.

I sit at my kitchen table listening to the room settle around me.

My reflection in the black windows lighter, almost faporous. I left Avery's list,

reading each cryptic mark in search of reassurance that I haven't been wholly lost.

A sharp tap of business envelope slides under my door.

My name typed, and below it, shelf life routine through 2024.

The card inside is rough, whether it's edges often by too many hands,

ink on Avery's slasher and still damped despite so much time.

It features a single return date, 13 days from now, and a dense mirror fingerprint,

in a pattern that almost but not quite matches my own. I stand and piss the apartment,

the carpets weave catching at my toes, the little ridges rearranged.

I tried to recall what's missing, but memory sifts itself strange.

In a flicker, I remember my favourite muggers blue, then as chit ceramic brown.

The fridge arms takes on a dying wasp rhythm, and then resolves.

Anxiety propels me back toward the library, yet I turn this compulsion over in my mind,

while I walk back to a place that will not hold my name. Instead, I log onto the library website

for my phone. I search for Rachel every nothing, for myself no result.

Get a new reader, e-slash-a is stamped as eligible for return.

A single chill breath leaks out of me. My handshake has unplugged the router of the digital

world narrowing an echo of thinking, shoving ripple of the stacks. While follows, I can only

describe as a soft confusion to drop in a way, a warping of what I know. Every noise and a corridor

outside my apartment feels incriminating, the tread of shoes, the uncertain shutter of the

elevator cable, the muted voices at odd-ears. I forget, briefly, the order of my own birth date.

My tongue struggles over my family's names. Perhaps Alva, or someone like her,

once called this feeling being made an echo. Room scenes muller, the window ten deeper,

the claw cans reverse their circuit, and then, just as suddenly, recovered.

I clutched a card checking it for a razor, for proof that I remained tethered. But each time,

the English Sharper living cut. I suppose this is my shelf life of the duration I can stay

visible before the library draws me back for processing, either as a keeper or a gap.

Tomorrow, I know, I'll wake and find at least one thing out of place, one book returned,

one photograph blurred, one colleague's name gone. Even now, the night blooms with the

scent of old books, musty and mournful, as though the stacks themselves have sunk under my skin.

I record last message. My voice tinny on playback seems almost not mine,

if you hear this, the system works, if you remember me, return what you carry.

I finish the memo listening to the quiet. My eyes absorb the dim, shifting reflection in the

kitchen glass. Across the threshold from the living to the in-between. At some point in the night,

the hallway outside murmurs with footsteps no louder than a page turning. The card slides beneath

my door. I bent and pick it up, embossed in black shelf life. Beneath the patron name,

Avery's last shell in active. I drift to the window. The city sinks to ward dawn.

In the building's reflection, for one thins eye, I glimpse a figure shifting among

old volumes her hand, or mine tucked close to the spines. I go back to the library.

This time, the staff entrance yawns before me, open and expectant. My steps do not echo.

The security glass blows at my approach. I tap in and it returns disc flickers.

I walk the back aisles. No one looks. No one startles at the sight of me. On screen,

the feed shows an empty corridor, though I just walked it. Within the archive, one shelf stands

a jaw in my shelf, I know now. There, in a dustless cradle, waits a crisp blank card,

stamp with both our names, Avery's last shell in. For a moment, I hesitate, then isolate the

evidence on the lube inside, nestling the list, the badge, the keys that once fit a locker.

The card absorbs my warmth as if ingesting each token. A slow, comforting static rises as the old

PA system hums in a hollowed up for cover head. I record my name one more time into the thinning dark.

The microphone buzzes the file saves. From the stack's far end, a woman's voice distant

lulting, servant whispers, thank you for returning, just in time. I close my eyes.

In the hush between shells, the universe contracts to cattle or gentry it starts blinking in

not for circulation. The next chef will come, the next keeper waits. Perhaps for a while I'll be

lost among the living. Perhaps not. Somewhere books are being shelved. Somewhere someone is listening.

Somewhere at the return day creeps closer. Yet the moment does not release me into oblivion of

peace. Instead, the silence teams with expectation a hushed into the static glazed

hum of the buildings altered to calm, each molecule of air strung tied across to funness of the stacks.

I realize I'm waiting for something, but even as I pause, the world around me subtly asserts

its own rules. Footsteps are familiar cadence, measured, echoing from the upper level.

Somewhere above, the mechanical fruit of the lift gulps, and I picture the elevator,

it stoves breathing open and shut as if weighing a mission. Voices curl down the stairwell,

snippets of stuff patter at the rattle of a return's cart. But when I strain to hear,

the contender loads me. They seem to walk past just out of step of mind, their presence is slipping

past, never into a section. A compression in the air follows each, as if my being here is a gentle

distortion scene accounted, but always slightly beside the point. I surrender to a compulsion that

tugs and pulls beneath my thoughts. My hands drift over the shelf spines, reading titles no one

is bored for decades. My badge, when I check its back, now bears a gray, heat bleeds shadow across

my photo of the face fading but the name burned dark by time and circulation. I wander deeper into

the stacks, aware that I am both searching and being shepherded. Light from the claristery windows

throw speckled shadows ahead shifting, oily moats moving in faint wind that isn't there.

The smell, an intensifying tangle of paper oil, distemper, an autumn leaves baked to dust.

A sense of unfinished business accumulates before each turn. Memory rings at the edge of the present,

offers laughter trailing behind a broom bristling with static, web as martyred warnings fraying in

the chill at air, goes sense even appraising stare. For a moment, bitterness wells in me resentment

at the leave-taking, erasure, the transformation of every solid thing in this place into food shadow.

What was it all for? I want to ask. What does this library extract in the tally?

The answer arrives, ambitious, not as comfort but as consent. Every shelf, every slap,

every vanished name each tally is itself against a ledge of memory. To remember to map to

resist is in a self-aform of cataloging, a record against erasure, however brief. I cannot

keep from gathering fingers brushing embossed call numbers telling each ghost the mark that could

be a past keepers last trace. I realise, with a frisove exhausted all, that my muscle look much the

same. I heard the building shut as the faintest tremor rattling the shelf below my hand.

A series of fluorescent tubes stutter into sequence down the lawn corridor beyond,

light marching into the bowels of the archive. The stacks expand, corridor after corridor and

spilling toward a door invisible in daylight. Obedient to a logic I do not quite apprehend,

my feet bring me, step by step, to the base of a stair, down again, and then through a narrow

hallway painted with all fire-retired signs and ancient phone trees. It's here, in the truest

heart of the archive, that I find a review room reconstituted. It is waiting. The door, a jar,

lets out the tine as whimper as I nudge it open. This tine the keepers are there and not as

fountains, but as occupants, bod as casting proper shadows in the saturated light. Where bestans

at the window, his hands folded over a battered file box, gold stem polishes a brass

nameplate in the nearest desk, his gaze distanced. Two others, I do not know one woman knitting,

another straightening a pile of juice lips pay me no special mind. Ahush to send,

formal as any annual meeting. A first I attempted to threaten to demand a reversal.

But as he, at last, that none of them are in control. Where belifts his chin as I enter,

his voice missing its usual deference. It cycles, Ellen. It has always cycled, we keep track,

even where we do not wish to, our hands only carry the records none of us directs the pattern.

He desks is almost an apology to the desk where I laid out with Reverend Carlyze,

the envelope I left in the shelf days before. They have found it. The papers, the encoded list,

my badge, all are neatly arranged as artifacts await in accession, patient in CPU order.

I did as I was told by say quietly. I returned everything that was not mine to keep.

Bullstein knots carefully settling the nameplate atop the files. Some things must pass on,

Ellen, names, numbers, sometimes even act of hope, otherwise something were settles in,

rooms that never open, memory that dies in the walls. There is no threat in his words,

only attend in his born of exhaustion. Each of them, I see, is a kind of echo,

a touted layer of intention glued to the great thrum of the library's need.

I watch as the knitting woman tucks the end of her third away, the simple act conveying

while finality than any speech. Why me? I ask realizing it matters even if I suspect the answer.

Webber's mouth twists. Because you remembered to leave a record that something we need between

erasures, the library opposes a true blank, he gave it something to catalog yourself, your loss,

sometimes that's enough. My focusplers. What happens now? Bullstein looks up. If you continue,

you help keep balance, sometimes you slip back into the outside, forgotten by all but these walls,

sometimes you lost all together, another slip pissed it over, nothing more than avoid between

Friday returns. He glances briefly at the card stamp with both my name and avery's the continuity

to parry. And if I refuse, he shrugs gently. Then you unlisted, not a keeper, not even a gap,

in time, the library finds another and you become a rumor haunting the reference shells.

This time, the stillness between us is not hostile, not paralyzing. I feel the possibility of choice,

however slight, in a way the overhead light hums and the pages on the desk flutter beneath invisible

drafts. A distant clang breaks the spell the elevator, summoning someone from the upper floors.

The others look up, already prepared for their part in the cycle. Weber hands me the envelope

transfer of custody as sacred as any exchange. The knitting woman rises, smoothing her skirt.

She regards me with sympathy not unlike of his old playful glint. Agile list to the main ledger,

Ellen, she instructs. Don't keep secrets lost, this sire. I take the envelope, weighing it once more.

When I open at one final, tremulous time I see Avery's hand has marked a new instruction in the inner

flap, let rooms change as needed, return when cold. They wait and speaking as I move to the ledger

at the desk. I lay my badge atop the register, append the reading list, slide the envelope beneath

the glass. The sense of doom does not arrive, only relief, cold and subdued. For an instant,

I hold the old card, filling the papers fiber rough and edge dig into my palm. Every memory

weighs upon me the rooms, the laughter and the lost staff, the ways the stacks yielded and then

bent me to their design. I press my thumb to the cards and key finger print, not carrying

if it's mine or Avery's, not carrying if the system reads it as an entry or an exit. Goldstein

softens. We all carry our own due dates, Ellen. His expression is tired but kind. The library is

persistent, but not cruel, you'll return when needed or not. I nod. There is nothing to add.

No shapes don't enough to hold the story longer. The others rise tidying the last

drifts of paper, straightening files. As I exit, Weber offers me a gentle, absent smile,

the sort that would last a hundred catalogues. The corridor outside feels lighter than before.

I understand now the act of returning an armata the paint, the loss of specificity as

what anchors the living to the archive keeps shelf and memory bound together. It is absence,

yes, but also a final gentle order. I step from the room, envelope clasped in hand,

and the library receives me with a fresh current of air, warm and almost frequent. The shelves

are as they must be, solid as shifting, memory made material. As I cross the threshold,

the bouquet of mustard and envelops me in a final bittersweet embrace.

The world outside is so newly inserted and tilts and to focus through the old glass doors.

A step outside, bearing nothing except the car of the thinnest memory of a voice in the stacks.

The city is just waking, cold silver light seeping between buildings. As I move through the

empty streets, a clarity settles. I will keep cataloguing, in my way, I will remember

office laughter, goal signs warning, Weber's absent-minded care. I know now that memories

its own return however brief. I carry the faint print of the archive with me, the cast texture

impressed on my skin. That night, a sleep finally overtakes me, my dreams and spool and quiet

libraries rooms larger on the inside, names are going from slip to slip. I do not fear the return.

When the time comes, I will answer the call and pass between the shelves. A faint voice will whisper

thanks and I will turn back, one last time to slot my car at where it belongs. And somewhere

quietly and without announcement, the ledger will balance. The library will wait.

Choff life renewed.

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