I work at the New York Public Library Main Branch. 5th avenue and 42nd street. You know, the one with the lions. Technically, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, but most of us call it Sasbee. This is what happened to me, not long ago. I’m writing it down in case someone else trips over the same…phenomenon, yeah, let’s call it a phenomenon, in the future.
I’m a booktrain engineer. If you’re new here, you probably don’t know what that is. We’ve got this miniature automated trolley system, real Mr. Rogers vibe, that carries books from the new underground stacks buried beneath Bryant Park over to the Rose Reading Room. The trolleys run through the old abandoned central stacks just below the reading room, then rise vertically (the carts have gimbaled hoppers so the books don’t fall out) up to the waiting librarians.
I’ve loved books ever since I was a kid, but as an engineer I’d be the first to admit I’m not a regular library type. Having to deal with all these librarians and curators can be trying at times. I mean, sure, nice people, smart, learned, but still…I don’t know. From a different world than me.
At the time of the event, I’d been managing the booktrains for almost a year, and I thought I’d figured out all the failure modes. Usually the problem was obvious, and usually I was one of the first to know there was a problem, too. There was only one looping track, after all, so if any car got stuck, the whole system would stop working until the jam was cleared. Any fault like that would instantly page my phone. So I was surprised to hear that there’d been book delivery failures lately. According to the booktrain management console, everything was running perfectly.
Mx Sofia Benítez was the librarian responsible for the Rose Reading Room and its book services. I’d never had anything to do with her before because I reported to the director of operations. When I sent her email asking for a meeting, she invited me to stop by her office.
After saying hello, I sat down in the visitor’s chair in her office. Her old wooden desk was pristine, a perfectly centered ivory-white laptop the only item on the surface. I’d discovered librarian offices ranged from exquisite to horrible rat’s nests. This was one of the fussy ones.
“It must be a fault in your system,” said Benítez, a sharp-featured woman in her 40s.
I didn’t like the way she said “your”, as if she’d have preferred her staff to carry books up through a hundred meters of underground tunnels by hand, but whatever.
“What makes you say that?” I asked. “I mean…the trains are running. It looks like the problem is in your catalog system, or else it’s with the librarians themselves.”
And yeah, that was a mistake. She drew herself up like she was being attacked, which I honestly didn’t mean to do. I can be pretty stupid sometimes, talking to people.
“Sorry,” I told her hastily. “I only meant to say I haven’t noticed any mechanical faults. But tell me more about the problem and I’ll look into it.”
That worked as a sort of half-assed apology, and she relaxed a little.
“We’ve verified the delivery failures,” she said. “Several of the books in question were definitely picked from the shelves in the underground Milstein stacks. And they were definitely put on the train, too. We have confirmation from multiple librarians whose books weren’t delivered. They just…never showed up at the reading room.”
“Okay. How many books are we talking about, exactly?”
Benítez looked pained. “Not that many. Nine so far. But even one missing is strange. Where could they go? It’s quite disturbing.”
“I can imagine. Did you check the access tunnel? Or the bottom floor of the central stacks at the elevator shaft? I’ve never seen it happen, but I guess books could have fallen out of the hopper somewhere along the way to the reading room.”
“Yes, we checked. But with no success. And here’s the thing I really don’t understand. Since this problem started, one book a day has gone missing. Nine days, nine books.”
“Okay, that’s seriously weird. I’m not saying it’s absolutely impossible for this to be a problem in the booktrain system, with books getting lost somewhere you didn’t think to check. Stranger things have happened. But….”
I changed my voice to be flat, soft, and neutral in tone. “Well, I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error.”
Her eyes lit up. Benítez mimicked my tone, completing HAL 9000’s line from 2001. “This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.”
We beamed at one another, sharing an old-movie-reference moment, and like that the meeting turned from a confrontation into collaboration without either of us having to say anything more.
“Seriously, though,” she said, “I hope you’re not suggesting the booktrain control system has become self-aware?”
“Ha,” I said. “Not likely. No AI involved. But the thing is, from my end it looks like everything’s working great. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to bother some of your librarians tomorrow, watching them do their jobs and tracking individual trainloads to see if the problem will appear while I’m present. It could be my…technical perspective adds something you’ve overlooked.”
“Hm. Possible. But how about this: why don’t you work as a librarian tomorrow? You’ll learn our methods and procedures way better that way than from looking over people’s shoulders. Of course, you can take whatever time off you need to track the trains.”
I could have said I didn’t have the time or made up some other bullshit reason why not, but the truth was I had a lot of freedom at work. The director of operations was strictly nontechnical, and he left me pretty much alone so long as the trains kept rolling. Even putting aside the connection I’d made with the associate director over 2001, it wasn’t that bad an idea.
So I said, “Sure. I’ll start tomorrow morning. Maybe I’ll dress up like a librarian on Halloween. Horn-rimmed glasses and tweed with elbow patches.”
She laughed and we parted as friends.
The team of expert librarians who staff the Milstein stacks under Bryant Park often handle more than 5,000 book orders a day. As for me…well, I managed 24. Still, it was kind of interesting. I liked the way the climate-controlled cleanliness of the stacks clashed with the musty funk of the older books. But all my book picks arrived safely at their destination. Which I guess shouldn’t have been surprising considering only one a day was going missing.
I even stuck a GoPro camera on a car and watched it trundling merrily along on its way for a couple of trips. No problems, and no hints of anything like a track obstruction anywhere. The transition from horizontal to vertical travel at the central stacks elevator shaft was smooth and clean, and the gimbals worked as designed, keeping the book hoppers perfectly aligned.
But at last a delivery failure was reported. It was getting on toward the end of the evening shift and I was thinking about wrapping it up for the day.
Senior librarian Jenna Liu, a woman with a kindly face and her iron-gray hair pulled straight back in a ponytail, was plainly terribly upset when she reported the missing book. I couldn’t imagine anyone less likely than her to be a thief or a prankster, however. She’d been with the library for decades, and though she was very nervous around me, I read it as wounded pride that one of her picks had been the book to get lost. We sat down together in the little cafeteria break room in the stacks, which the librarians took pains to maintain in a state of absolute cleanliness.
“Please don’t be upset,” I told her. “I gather this has been happening a lot lately. No one will think it’s your fault.”
“I suppose,” she said in a small voice. “It’s just…this is the first time it’s happened to me, and I was hoping it wouldn’t happen at all. Stupid of me, but….”
“You make it sound almost like you’re expecting books to get lost.”
“I—nothing! Please! I…I misspoke.”
I realized I’d messed up again, shouldn’t have said what I did because I’d made her think I was suspecting her or something when honestly I wasn’t. I still wanted to ask her more questions, but she was so upset that I couldn’t bear to. The whole team gave me dirty looks when we emerged from the break room. Obviously Mx Liu was well-loved here, which made anything deliberate on her part even less likely.
So I braced the chief Milstein librarian, a big, balding man named Kohut who was in charge of the stacks but below Benítez in the regular library hierarchy.
He was extremely reluctant to say anything, and I had to combine an abject apology for upsetting Mx Liu with a threat to tell Benítez about the incident to get him to open up.
“It’s just an idiotic superstition,” he said at last. “I’m ashamed it still gets any circulation here.”
“Okay. So it’s nothing, but now you have to explain.”
“I suppose. This goes back to the 20th century. Back when the central stacks had all the books. None of us were here then, not even Mx Liu, but I guess people have been repeating the story over the years. Supposedly the central stacks are haunted, see? Every once in a while, books start going missing, and then it stops and nothing happens for years and years. But when it’s happening, you don’t want to go near the central stacks if you can avoid it, and if you have to, you don’t go alone. And no one goes in there after dark. See, that’s when all the delivery failures have happened this last week or so. After dark.”
“That’s it? Seems kind of…abstract for a spooky story. No more details than that?”
He flushed. “Not that I know of. There must be someone who knows more. But I doubt you’ll get anything out of any of my people. You’re not a librarian, after all. And everyone loves our Jenna so much they’re pissed off at you now.”
I told Kohut, “Of course, the booktrain tracks run right through the central stacks to get to the reading room level. I’ve been there myself doing maintenance. Nothing bad ever happened to me.”
“Of course it didn’t. Like I said, it mostly doesn’t happen at all. But this is just your first year, so naturally you’re not aware of it. Last time was supposedly before I signed on, back before the Milstein stacks went live.”
“Wait. Are you saying you actually believe in this stuff?”
He flinched a little. “Of course not. Like I said, it’s just a stupid old story. Nothing to it.”
“So you wouldn’t mind taking a tour of the place with me? I’m sure the Milstein chief librarian doesn’t have to get permission from anyone.”
“I’d love to,” he said forcefully, “I really would. But I’ve got to wrap up the week’s paperwork and report yet another missing book, and then I have to hurry home because I promised my kids we’d go bowling….”
“Sure. I understand.” I might have let the faintest bit of sarcasm into my voice. It was obvious I wasn’t going to get any more help from him. At the stroke of 8:00 PM, when the library officially closed and most of the remaining librarian staff were finishing up their various chores prior to going home, I opened the Authorized Personnel Only door that gave access to the old central stacks beneath the reading room and strode boldly inside. I mean, Benítez said they’d checked the stacks for lost books, but maybe they hadn’t looked in every possible place a book could have fallen, maybe there was some kind of intermittent track obstruction I’d missed before. Yeah, not very likely, but I had a mystery to solve and for my own peace of mind I wanted to make sure I’d covered all the bases.
They hadn’t splurged on new lighting after they took the books away, because the central stacks were now no more than an enormous storeroom for the rest of the library, a place to stash stuff that shouldn’t be thrown away but was unlikely to be needed any time soon. But even so, the space was reasonably well lit with old-style industrial fluorescents deployed from the ceiling.
Seven levels of hundred-year-old steel bookcases were layered on top of one another here. A certain amount of clutter occupied some of the floorspace, mostly old furniture, lamps, bookcases, stuff like that. The place gave an impression of solidity, the geometric steel structure of the stacks supporting the reading room above the ceiling instead of girders. The center of the space featured an elevator shaft that opened up into Sasbee’s third floor. All the elevator machinery had been gutted long ago and today it served the booktrains, which turned vertically 90 degrees at the ground level of the stacks and carried books up the shaft to the reading room.
I’d been through here several times over the last year, freeing up the odd stuck car and doing regular maintenance on the tracks. Never gave the place much thought before, and never noticed anything particularly strange either.
This time, though, I couldn’t help but feel a bit creeped out by the huge, complicated space. Anything could be hiding there. It seemed colder than I remembered it from previous visits, and my footsteps caused weird echoes off all the steel. I started at the lowest level. It was perfectly safe, really, but that didn’t stop me feeling like I was the stupidest member of the cast in a horror movie, with an alien monster or a possessed serial killer or something like that watching my every move. When the last train of the day returned from the main building on the tracks above my head, the unexpected sound almost made me jump out of my shoes. At least no one was there to see me freaking out over one of my own machines.
When I got to the base of the old elevator shaft, it was obvious no lost books were here. And yet that was the only place where books that had somehow fallen from the train could reasonably be expected to be found. Or was it?
The room’s ceiling was seventy feet above my head. I looked up and saw the booktrain tracks running vertically up toward the reading room. It seemed unlikely, but it was at least conceivable that some mechanical glitch of the gimbaled hopper could knock a book out in such a way that it had enough horizontal velocity to land on one of the intermediate levels. I’d have to check each floor, which would be a pain, clanking around on the stairs by the wall and picking my way through the clutter back to the central shaft each time. But unlikely as my scenario might be, I knew that having thought of the possibility I’d have to check it out or else I’d never be able to say for sure there was no problem with my trains.
That was when the lights went out. The whole place blacked out with that loud bamf you get when someone throws a knife switch in a gym or a factory and a whole bunch of fluorescents blink off all at once. I looked up. The LEDs that were integrated into the booktrain track were still lit, so the whole library hadn’t lost power; it was just the regular room lights. I spent a good five seconds panicking before I calmed down, at last understanding what was going on.
Now it was clear to me someone was pulling a prank, setting aside a book every day to support this ghost story thing, and maybe punishing me with the blackout for upsetting poor Mx Liu before. Well, fuck ’em, I thought. No need even to waste time looking for the power room, which had to be down here somewhere, to flip the switch or reset the breaker or whatever needed doing. I took out my phone, turned on flashlight mode. It was easily bright enough for me to move around without fear of tripping over anything or falling down any stairs, and I’d be able to see anyone hiding nearby pretty clearly too. It would be tough for them to move around without making noise.
I’d already checked the lowest level, the base of the shaft. Now I wasn’t looking for fallen books anymore, but for whoever had been here with me, and maybe still was. Up to level one: nothing. Two: nothing. Three: zip, nada, zilch. Four was the middle story. It was colder than ever here. I almost missed it, but as I turned to head back to the stairs I saw a faint gleam coming from one of the stacks units on the far side of the shaft. It wasn’t a reflection either, but something flickering. A candle flame, perhaps.
I was working my way around the shaft toward the light when I felt the coldness intensify and everything went dark: the flickering light, my phone, the dim illumination from the tracks overhead, everything. But in retrospect, maybe it was just me who went out instead.
I woke up in almost complete darkness, thinking that I had somehow fallen out of bed because I was lying on the floor. But that flicker wasn’t a nightlight, it was—oh yeah. I got to my feet, feeling wobbly but in no pain. For a moment I thought maybe someone sapped me, but my head would hurt if I’d been hit, wouldn’t it? I didn’t know what had happened to me, but I knew where I was. I checked my phone which I’d dropped, luckily without breaking the glass. Flashlight mode had turned itself off, but the phone still had plenty of charge. I’d been out for hours; it was past eleven, approaching midnight.
And then it hit me. Okay, maybe some human knocked me out somehow, but maybe it really was something supernatural or unknown. And now it seemed like I was okay, but was I really? Was something just messing with me, was it waiting for me to wake up, would it come back and do something worse? It was like this whole yawning abyss of horrible possibilities opened up all around me and this little area of steel-case structure I’d woken up in was the only spot of stability, and it wasn’t safe at all….I just sat there, frozen for maybe a whole minute, unable to think or do anything. It was like when you wake up from a dream and it feels like you’re falling, my problem being that I had no idea what was possible or impossible anymore.
And then the philosophical horror or whatever it was faded, and I came back to myself. You have no idea how good that felt. Not that I wasn’t still freaked out, but I was back in the world again and I could do stuff if I wanted to. So I got up and looked around.
Each of the steel shelving cells in the central stacks had a sort of stepped buttress-like element on one side which contributed to distributing the weight of the levels above. That’s where that flickering light was coming from; not from a candle but an old fluorescent lamp unit that had either leaked gas over the years or else whose ballast had gone flaky. It might once have been one of the units suspended from the ceiling, but now it was propped up in a sort of cubby within one of the steel rack cells. The hidden, cramped little space would never have been visible with the room lit normally, but now the lamp flickering in the darkness gave it away. A book was open just by the lamp. No one else seemed to be around, so I took a look. A 1932 volume of the annual Chronicles of the New York State Public Service Commission. Not exactly compelling reading. From the label and RFID tag I saw it was from the Milstein stacks, no doubt one of the lost books we were looking for. And on sticking my head in the cubby, I found the other missing books neatly stacked, a varied assortment ranging from novels to essay collections to other bound editions of public records chronicles.
Well, yay. Mission accomplished. Someone really had been up here all this time, plucking the occasional book from a passing train and bringing it here to the cubby. But I found no other traces of human activity apart from the books and the old light. No food wrappers, no waste, no bedding, nothing. A couple of hours ago this find would have supported my prankster theory, but I wasn’t so sure anymore….
I put my hand on the open book, the chronicles, and suddenly I felt that uncanny coldness from before, and my vision started to darken. Like okay, I didn’t want to believe in ghosts or whatever, but that didn’t mean I was a complete idiot, either. Honestly, I was terrified, coming up with all kinds of horrible imaginary notions of what could be about to happen to me, but then I thought, hey, it’s stealing books. It’s a reader, whatever it is. And that thought calmed me down.
“Wait, please!” I said. “I don’t mean any harm.”
I don’t know if I was heard and understood, but I stayed conscious anyway. I had the feeling that something was right there behind me, and I also had the sense it would be a bad idea to turn and look. Not necessarily because I’d see something horrible, but more like because whatever it was couldn’t exist if I was looking at it, so if I turned, I’d be abusing its… hospitality, let’s say. Because I sure hoped it was hospitable.
Now I was sure it was a real thing. Ghost or cosmic horror from another dimension or immaterial space alien or whatever the hell it was, it must not have a lot of other resources if it had to steal books from the library, of all places. Like maybe it could only do its thing for a few days once every decade or two, maybe it was stuck in the central stacks, a sad place that hadn’t had any books in it for years and years, maybe at other times it was stranded somewhere even lonelier than the central stacks….I guess I was sympathizing instead of being as afraid as I should have been. That’s when I had the idea.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t know who or what you are, and I don’t need to know, either. But if what you want is books to read, I can help you out there, and without messing up my trains, too. Can you give me a few minutes? I just need to go to my office, and I’ll be right back, I promise.”
For a moment I felt the chill again, but then it withdrew. “Back soon,” I said, and I got out of there, but like I promised I returned. It was just before midnight when I put my e-reader and a charger down on the step next to the book.
“See,” I said, powering up the tablet, “it’s already got a hundred books loaded.”
The coldness was right behind me now, like the thing was looking over my shoulder. I showed it how to turn pages, how to get back to the book download list, and all that stuff. It was obviously pretty smart, though, an avid reader who also knew how to work the breakers in a power room: kind of like me, come to think of it. I didn’t worry that it might not understand.
“The tablet’s on the network, see? Wi-fi works fine in here, and I promise I’ll load a bunch more books, too, so you’ll never run out of things to read. You won’t have to grab anything from the trains anymore, okay? And you can read it anywhere, it’s backlit, so you won’t need that horrible old fluorescent, either.”
A wave of coldness and something like a faint cool touch on my shoulder, and it was gone. I left the tablet behind, and I didn’t look back on my way out.
Next day, I don’t mind saying I was a little leery of making my entrance to the central stacks, because I’d had time to imagine all kinds of horrible things instead of the friendly ghost or lonely alien that I hoped it was. But the tablet and charger had vanished, and the fluorescent light was propped up against the wall, unplugged. I loaded the lost books onto a library dolly and wheeled it back to the Milstein stacks. I guess the librarians must have assumed I found them fallen from the booktrain, but I didn’t say anything then except to nod to Mx Liu, who smiled back at me as if she had some idea what I’d done.
(Later on, I told Benítez what happened, and kind of to my surprise she believed me. None of her people had ever told her the ghost story, they hadn’t dared. Between the two of us we decided to keep it secret because come on, but I’m writing this story down, just in case someone else needs to know. If you get my job or Benítez’s you’ll receive this in email. Pass it on, okay?)
Of course, the book losses stopped. They probably would have stopped soon anyway, given the periodic nature of the…phenomenon, but every day after that another book in my online account was marked “read”, and so I made sure that there was always a comfortable TBR list for whoever it was…whatever it was. I thought it was the least I could do for a fellow reader.
Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist. He has published over 50 science fiction and fantasy short stories. His noir urban fantasy series starting with The Demons of Wall Street has just added a new volume, The Demons of Montmartre. Pronouns: he/him
Translunar Travelers Lounge 