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fandomweekly2025-10-25 02:08 pm
badly_knitted) wrote in fandomweekly2025-10-25 02:08 pm
Entry tags:
[#279] The Village Library (Original)
Theme Prompt: #279 – Haunted Library
Title: The Village Library
Fandom: Original.
Rating/Warnings: PG / None
Bonus: No
Word Count: 1000
Summary: It’s a lovely little village library, and a valuable local resource for all residents, including those in the cemetery next door.
The village library was a charming place, housed in what had once been an inn, and though it wasn’t overly large, those who ran it had always prided themselves on having an excellent range of both fiction and reference books, in both the children’s and adult’s sections. There had been LPs and videotapes back in the day, although now it was CDs and DVDs, with a small section devoted to computer games.
There were three computers for the public to use, printers and photocopiers available… in short, everything the village’s residents needed, within reason, so that they seldom had to travel to one of larger branches in the nearest town.
The library saw plenty of use during opening hours, people were in and out all day, borrowing and returning books or what have you, looking up information, printing out schoolwork and resumes, doing their homework at the tables, or sometimes just sitting in one of the comfy chairs, tucked away in a corner, reading. It was a resource the entire village was proud of, especially since the fundraiser they’d run five years ago in order to keep the place open after budget cuts had meant it would have to be closed. It was THEIR library now, largely funded by donations, and every person in the village, from the youngest to the oldest, felt that they owned a small piece of it.
But when the doors were closed at night, after all the lights were turned out and the janitor along with the last of the library staff had left, locking the doors behind them, the cosy little library became a very different place. Then, the shadows between the shelves became blacker, shifting and stirring as if in a non-existent breeze. The temperature dropped sharply, and sometimes shreds of vapour seemed to drift through the shafts of moonlight steaming in through the high windows.
And always, there was a soft rustling, a quiet murmuring, as of voices just at the edge of hearing. A sense of unseen movement, drifting through the interconnected rooms, up and down the staircases, even among the stacks in the basement, where the rarer volumes were stored and the new books were processed before being added to the library’s inventory.
No one knew any of this, of course, although sometimes, on arrival in the morning, one of the staff members would find chairs out of place, books left on the tables, doors open that should have been closed, or a strange, unexplainable chill in the air.
Old Alice Emery, the library’s first librarian, could have explained it all, if anyone had ever bothered asking her, but nobody had, and Alice had passed away the previous year at the age of a hundred and three. They’d buried her in the cemetery next door to the library, and after that… Well, she’d gone back to work. The library had been her life before she’d been forced into retirement at eighty-five, but she’d worked there for sixty-seven years, and some habits were hard to break.
She wasn’t the only one; being dead could be a bit boring, and anyone with an ounce of brains was aware of the benefits of keeping up to date with what was happening, out in the world as well as in the village itself. Modern literature could be quite informative, as well as diverting. Alice herself was currently writing a novel, the file hidden on one of the computers, although her friend Beatrice preferred to spend her nights watching cat videos on YouTube.
Young Brendan, who’d crashed his motorcycle on the bridge in nineteen sixty-eight, coming home from a gig, liked to watch music videos and criticise modern bands, while Cheryl would spend hours poring over knitting patterns and bemoaning the fact that she could no longer knit. Alice had suggested she take over the body of one of the old ladies who sometimes came in to quietly knit and chat, but Cheryl said it wasn’t the same.
Ronald was the biggest problem, he’d been a bit of a lech in life, and he really hadn’t changed much. How his wife had put up with him, Alice couldn’t begin to imagine; he’d had so many affairs, and even now, he was still hitting on every woman he considered attractive enough. Not that any of the living objects of his rampant desires noticed, him being dead and all, but Alice considered it unseemly behaviour anyway.
As for the twins, they spent more time squabbling over books than reading them, and often put them back in the wrong places, which was worse in some ways than not putting them back at all. How was anyone supposed to find them if they were on the wrong shelf?
Oh well, just like when she was alive, a librarian’s work was never done. There were always books to shelve, and things to tidy, and the current library staff really needed to do better with the filing. Did nobody know the alphabet these days? As for their spelling, well, the less said about THAT the better. Literacy in the modern world was not what it had been in her time. The misuse of the apostrophe had driven her to distraction even before her death.
“Tessa, dear, please don’t do that to the books; you’ll break the spines. And don’t fold the corners of pages either, there’s a dear. Other people want to read these books too.”
“Sorry, Miss Alice.” The insubstantial nineteen-year-old girl blushed prettily. Poor dear; she’d lived such a sheltered life, before being killed in a car accident back in the forties. What she must think of the modern romance novel she was reading, Alice couldn’t begin to guess. That one was quite raunchy; Alice had read it herself. Still, it wasn’t her job to tell anyone what they could or couldn’t read, she’d never held with that kind of censorship. To each their own, dead or alive.
The stories she could tell, if she could find a publisher!
The End
There were three computers for the public to use, printers and photocopiers available… in short, everything the village’s residents needed, within reason, so that they seldom had to travel to one of larger branches in the nearest town.
The library saw plenty of use during opening hours, people were in and out all day, borrowing and returning books or what have you, looking up information, printing out schoolwork and resumes, doing their homework at the tables, or sometimes just sitting in one of the comfy chairs, tucked away in a corner, reading. It was a resource the entire village was proud of, especially since the fundraiser they’d run five years ago in order to keep the place open after budget cuts had meant it would have to be closed. It was THEIR library now, largely funded by donations, and every person in the village, from the youngest to the oldest, felt that they owned a small piece of it.
But when the doors were closed at night, after all the lights were turned out and the janitor along with the last of the library staff had left, locking the doors behind them, the cosy little library became a very different place. Then, the shadows between the shelves became blacker, shifting and stirring as if in a non-existent breeze. The temperature dropped sharply, and sometimes shreds of vapour seemed to drift through the shafts of moonlight steaming in through the high windows.
And always, there was a soft rustling, a quiet murmuring, as of voices just at the edge of hearing. A sense of unseen movement, drifting through the interconnected rooms, up and down the staircases, even among the stacks in the basement, where the rarer volumes were stored and the new books were processed before being added to the library’s inventory.
No one knew any of this, of course, although sometimes, on arrival in the morning, one of the staff members would find chairs out of place, books left on the tables, doors open that should have been closed, or a strange, unexplainable chill in the air.
Old Alice Emery, the library’s first librarian, could have explained it all, if anyone had ever bothered asking her, but nobody had, and Alice had passed away the previous year at the age of a hundred and three. They’d buried her in the cemetery next door to the library, and after that… Well, she’d gone back to work. The library had been her life before she’d been forced into retirement at eighty-five, but she’d worked there for sixty-seven years, and some habits were hard to break.
She wasn’t the only one; being dead could be a bit boring, and anyone with an ounce of brains was aware of the benefits of keeping up to date with what was happening, out in the world as well as in the village itself. Modern literature could be quite informative, as well as diverting. Alice herself was currently writing a novel, the file hidden on one of the computers, although her friend Beatrice preferred to spend her nights watching cat videos on YouTube.
Young Brendan, who’d crashed his motorcycle on the bridge in nineteen sixty-eight, coming home from a gig, liked to watch music videos and criticise modern bands, while Cheryl would spend hours poring over knitting patterns and bemoaning the fact that she could no longer knit. Alice had suggested she take over the body of one of the old ladies who sometimes came in to quietly knit and chat, but Cheryl said it wasn’t the same.
Ronald was the biggest problem, he’d been a bit of a lech in life, and he really hadn’t changed much. How his wife had put up with him, Alice couldn’t begin to imagine; he’d had so many affairs, and even now, he was still hitting on every woman he considered attractive enough. Not that any of the living objects of his rampant desires noticed, him being dead and all, but Alice considered it unseemly behaviour anyway.
As for the twins, they spent more time squabbling over books than reading them, and often put them back in the wrong places, which was worse in some ways than not putting them back at all. How was anyone supposed to find them if they were on the wrong shelf?
Oh well, just like when she was alive, a librarian’s work was never done. There were always books to shelve, and things to tidy, and the current library staff really needed to do better with the filing. Did nobody know the alphabet these days? As for their spelling, well, the less said about THAT the better. Literacy in the modern world was not what it had been in her time. The misuse of the apostrophe had driven her to distraction even before her death.
“Tessa, dear, please don’t do that to the books; you’ll break the spines. And don’t fold the corners of pages either, there’s a dear. Other people want to read these books too.”
“Sorry, Miss Alice.” The insubstantial nineteen-year-old girl blushed prettily. Poor dear; she’d lived such a sheltered life, before being killed in a car accident back in the forties. What she must think of the modern romance novel she was reading, Alice couldn’t begin to guess. That one was quite raunchy; Alice had read it herself. Still, it wasn’t her job to tell anyone what they could or couldn’t read, she’d never held with that kind of censorship. To each their own, dead or alive.
The stories she could tell, if she could find a publisher!
The End
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