Night Librarian in the Lower Stacks
Kenny asks me to retrieve books from the lower stacks and it dawns on me that he’s scared, he’s really scared.
Kenny won’t shut up about how there’s ghosts in the lower stacks, how there are going to be hands that come out of old dusty books with odd pictures on the covers, how someone is going to call his name between the metal shelves, how he’ll turn off the lights and someone will come rushing down the long hallway toward him before he can shut the elevator door, and I don’t believe in ghosts and I don’t really even believe that Kenny believes in ghosts, the man probably just watches too many horror movies, but then Kenny asks me to retrieve books from the lower stacks and it dawns on me that he’s scared, he’s really scared, and when he says he’ll freak out if I’m not back in five minutes then I remember that Kenny has been working here for twenty years and that I have been working here for three months and that maybe, just maybe, he knows something I don’t about the lower stacks, that something lives down there, lurks down there, between the shelves, and then suddenly I remember what books are in the lower stacks, the beginning of the Library of Congress classification system alphabet, the As Bs Cs Ds Es Fs and Gs, and I know those call numbers because I know that’s where the books on religion are, the books labeled B, if we have books on ghosts that’s where they’re located, the lower stacks, and I wonder if somewhere down there is a dusty old book on magick with an odd picture on the cover and a hand inside reaching, reaching, reaching for the next patron to dare to take it off the shelf, and I force myself not to think about it as I wheel my book cart through the lower stacks to get the books for Kenny, but I realize how deeply, deeply alone I am down here, so far from humankind, it’s the second night of the fall semester and there’s not a soul in the
library except the undead kind, maybe, according to Kenny, and I don’t believe in ghosts but now I believe that Kenny believes in ghosts and that’s enough to spook me into grabbing the books quickly, and the book cart squeaks in protest and the shelves clang against the spines of the books and I pray to the books labeled B that I make it out of here in time to tell Kenny that ghosts aren’t real.
Erica Leslie Weidner is based, in New Jersey, and based in New Jersey, and she is the founder and editor-in-chief of underscore_magazine, and when she's not writing, she's at her day job, sometimes at night, doing badass librarian stuff.
