The Haunted Spines Library

Welcome to the Sunday tour of The Haunted Spines Library. The tour is an hour long and will include an oral history of the library including the massacre, the discovery of the mass grave, and the multiple sightings throughout history. The left-wing of the library, where the most sightings have occurred, has recently been renovated following an incident with a fire extinguisher and is once again a part of the tour. We request that you stay with the group at all times and not touch any of the books on the shelves. The tour will end at the library gift shop. Now, if you will all follow me, our tour begins in the right-wing…

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I’d spent the night researching the rich, dark history of the library and every minute on the tour made me regret it. Nothing the tour guide was saying was new to me and I felt she was leaving out the more colorful details to safeguard people’s sensitivities. The rest of the group was so mesmerized by the (incomplete) history she was recounting that it was easy for me to slip away.

I made my way to the left-wing, the fiction wing. It was the last stop on the tour so I’d be safe from them for a while. The ground floor had recently been opened to the public again following renovations due to an incident involving a fire extinguisher wielding student who had come looking for a new Sarah J. Maas novel but found someone else.

The library was said to be the house of fifteen ghosts, including three cats and a wraith, but the left-wing was only ever haunted by one. Patrons described her as a young girl, probably in her twenties, with a high ponytail. Nobody knew who she was.

I zigzagged through the bookcases on the ground floor until I reached the spiral staircase in the back. I began climbing and noticed a gradual change in temperature with each step.

The first-floor was dedicated mostly to horror. I started down the center aisle and it was near the fifth row that I felt it – a gentle humming in the air. I looked to my left and saw a pair of feet dangling. Looking up I saw they belonged to a girl sitting atop a bookcase. It was her!

“How did you get up there?” My flat tone was a surprise in and of itself. I blinked and she was gone, and I felt my heart sink. And then jump to my throat when she appeared in front of me, trailing wisps of smoke.

“Up where?” Her voice was honey, her tone playful. She began walking away from me, caressing spines as she went, icey fractals forming and fading in the wake of her touch. “You’ve strayed from the tour group. You shouldn’t have done that.”

Her tone was still playful. I followed her to a reading corner. She plopped down in an armchair and she began reading. Where had the book even come from?

“Are you going to stand there and gawk at me all day?”

“You’re not real.” It came out of my stupid mouth before I could stop myself.

She lowered her book, raised one eyebrow and I felt the ice drip from her tongue as she bit out, “I beg your pardon?”

None of the articles had prepared me for this.

“Take a seat and let me clarify something,” she gestured to the armchair beside hers. I wasn’t sure about it but her tone brokered no questions. So I sat down slowly, her eyes boring through me the whole time.

She handed me the book she was reading. A collection of H.P. Lovecraft. “Would I be able to do that if I wasn’t real?” Her tone was playful again.

“I guess not.” There were too many questions running through my mind, so I started with the safest one, “How long have you been here?”

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She knew so much about the library and everything that happened there. By the time I bade her goodbye it was almost closing time and my tour group had long since departed.

I was new to the city and but my old library pass worked and I visited the library every week, and eventually every other day. She was something else, and none of the girls my friends tried to hook me up with were quite that easy to talk to.

She never did tell me her name. I asked her once and she disappeared for two weeks. I asked her again and she just smiled at me and began talking about a book she had begun reading for the 75th time. But she had never asked me for my name either. When I tried telling her that first day, she had simply said names weren’t necessary.

My frequent library visits had become something of a joke among my colleagues at work. I had never mentioned her to anyone though. I wasn’t ashamed of her, but I didn’t think anyone would believe me – let alone believe me when I told them I think I was falling in love with a ghost.

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“You look despondent,” she mused, “Did something happen at your place of work?”

It was a bit over a year since I had come to this town and taken that library tour. “I hate my job,” it felt good to finally say it out loud. “It is not rewarding in any way – not financially, especially not intellectually.”

She listened silently and I marveled at how easily I could confide in her.

“I wish I could just live here. With these books. And with you. Forever.”

Something shifted in her expression. She got up from her armchair and kneeled in front of me, taking my hands in hers. Her face almost touched mine and I could feel her icey breath on my lips.

“Tell me your name,” she whispered.

I did. And I was hers forever.

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