In a place as…unique as the Night Library, there are bound to occasionally be hazards to the general public. Our Rules (read about them here if you’re just stumbling across this series) are only given to staff; we don’t attach a copy to every patron registration form we hand out for a multitude of reasons, and I think I can speak for all of us when I say the most prominent of those is that we simply don’t need to. Sure, there’s the fact that no one would believe the Rules in the first place, or that if they did, it would likely incite mass panic. But we haven’t really come across either of those issues in a serious capacity, because the Rules generally seem to only regard our staff.
Something about signing off on a job offer here commits us to the Library in a way that means we’re no longer blind to what’s going on behind the curtain, so to speak. I’ve tried to ask Matt if he knows why that is on plenty of occasions, but he’s pretty dodgy about it, so I’ve come to terms with the idea of never getting an answer. It’s just the way things are. As long as our patrons aren’t affected, the technicalities don’t really matter.
However, as with any rule, there are exceptions.
The particular exception that brought about today’s story is what I like to refer to as the revival clause.
I learned about it in an innocent enough way; we have a regular patron named Dorris—or Dory if you’re familiar with her, which we all are—who Matt pointed out to me within my first few months of work.
“See her?” he asked one night, tapping my shoulder with his knuckle to get my attention.
I was checking in a stack of books I’d just brought back to the desk from being mended and I raised my head, following his line of sight to the front door where a woman was entering in a wheelchair, an oxygen mask secured to her face. I nodded a confirmation.
“Keep an eye on her,” he told me. “If you…see anything today—or if anybody does—so does she. She’s a special case. Try to make sure nothing happens.”
I furrowed my brow, confused. “What do you mean? Did she, like, used to work here or something?”
Matt shook his head, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “No. She had a heart attack last year that, uh. It killed her. Clinically. They were able to bring her back after a minute or so, but it changed something.”
I set my books down, turning to face Matt. “Changed something how?”
“We hadn’t seen her in a few months. We knew something had to be wrong; her health’s always been bad, so we thought life had finally just given up on her. But then she came back. Told us what had happened. We didn’t think anything of it at first, and then one Saturday she was on her way out and started screaming. I ran up to the vestibule, and there was Della, mopping the floors. With…you know.”
“Her cleaning solution?” I supplied, confused.
“Yeah.” Matt cleared his throat. “So when Dory went into hysterics about ‘all that blood’, I… I knew something wasn’t right.”
I blinked. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you saying it doesn’t look like that to everyone? I thought that was one of the normal rules, like the—the Windex thing, or the parking lot. Does that mean it is blood? Is it blood, Matt?”
For a moment, Matt was quiet. “I guess you were gonna find out eventually,” he said, voice gruff.
I could feel that my eyes were wide, but I wasn’t quite sure how to remind them that they didn’t operate on a hand crank. “Where the hell does it come from?” I stage-whispered, and then, when a second, arguably more horrific thought came to mind, “Why is she mopping our floors with it?”
Matt waved a hand dismissively. “Not issues you need to concern yourself with. I’m gonna step out for a smoke. Just watch her.”
Now, when I said my introduction to the revival clause was innocent, I meant that it consisted of nothing more than a conversation. I was mildly traumatized, sure, but nothing happened to Dory that day as a result of it.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s never caused anyone harm.
Last year, as I was in the back reattaching a book’s hinge, Wiley knocked on the doorframe of my ‘office,’ for lack of a better term. “Hey,” they said. “Just wanted to give you a heads up that la Mujer de Luto is here, so. Stay out of nonfic tonight.”
I wiped the binding glue off my fingers onto a cloth and swiveled my chair around. “Sounds good. Everybody okay?”
“Yeah. Hugo already left for the night so I think it’s just me, you, and Matt here. I’m working on installing some new barcode scanners and then I’m heading out, too.”
“Cool,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.”
They offered me a two-fingered salute as they departed.
I’d seen her before, the Mourning Woman. The situation had only ever progressed as far as offering my sympathy; she’d never beckoned me over to her or tried to follow me, so aside from feeling slightly on edge I wasn’t greatly impeded upon by Wiley’s warning. I simply hollered over my shoulder for Matt to let me know if he needed help on circ and kept working.
Hours passed. Several. So many that I’d mostly forgotten to be on alert by the time I made my way out of my cave and set off into the stacks, still just aware enough not to venture into nonfiction.
I was shelving some Douglas Adams books I’d just finished repairing (I’ve seriously debated trying to contact Macmillan to ask if they can please find some way to carry out their personal vendetta against the guy besides binding every one of his novels like dogshit) and I distinctly felt eyes boring into the back of my head.
When I spun around to discover who they belonged to, I was met with a girl. I instantly recognized her although I didn’t know her by name; she frequented the Library during the week and had mentioned to me before that she liked to come in after she got off work at the hospital to decompress.
“Oh, hey, I didn’t hear you come up behind me,” I told her. “What can I do for you?”
She took a step toward me. The motion was jerky, as though she was reluctant, and it encouraged her thick, pen-straight hair to envelop her brown shoulders like a curtain. She mumbled something, too low for me to hear.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t catch that.”
One of her arms gripped the other, and it looked like she was trying to hold herself still. Again, she mumbled something unintelligible under her breath.
“Are you alright?” I asked.
This time, when she spoke, I heard her. “Uno para la tristeza.”
Unease began a slow creep over me. “I, um. I don’t speak Spanish,” I said. This had never come up in conversation between us before given that she’d never spoken Spanish to me, but I attempted to hold onto hope that she had some reason unbeknownst to me to believe that I might.
“Uno para la tristeza,” she repeated. “Dos para la alegría.”
“Are you…counting something?” It was true that I didn’t speak Spanish, but I’d taken a couple of semesters of it in high school and paid enough attention to pick up on the most basic words and phrases. But one for and two for what?
At the speed of ‘02 dial-up, my brain allowed a memory to filter through.
“Tristeza,” my freshman Spanish teacher had said, contorting his mouth into an overly-dramatic frown. “My little trick for remembering this word is that it sounds like tryst, which is something people are often sad to find that their partners are having behind their backs. Tristeza. Sadness. Sorrow.”
Uno para la tristeza. One for sorrow.
On autopilot, though I hadn’t heard it in probably two decades, my mind filled in the next line of the old magpie nursery rhyme. Two for joy.
The girl stood before me, trembling. Waiting.
“Three for a girl,” I continued aloud, though every fiber of my being was sounding alarms against my doing so.
Desperately, she reached out to me. “Cuatro para un niño,” she recited.
I took her hand in both of mine. “Five for silver.”
“Seis para el oro.”
“Seven for a secret,” I finished, “never to be told.”
“Do you know my secret, Adam?”
Instantly, I went cold.
But I did know. I did. “You’ve died before,” I guessed. “Haven’t you?”
The girl slumped, an expression of relieved surrender overtaking her.
Her eyes began to well with blood.
“No.” I held fast to her wrist. “No, no, stay with me. Do not move, okay? Don’t move. Matt?”
“I have to go now,” she said. “I have to go with her.”
“Matt!”
It was too late.
Before Matt would have had so much as a chance to intervene, the Mourning Woman was there, blocking the exit directly next to us at the end of the row. The veil that typically shrouded her face consisted of thin, loose-knit lace which only clearly exposed her eyes, but it was lifted now, and her cheeks were streaked with dried, brown-red trails, lashes matted and heavy. Necrosis had eaten holes through her lips, and her long, yellowed teeth peeked through in several places, spittle stringing between them as her swollen tongue parted them to speak.
“Vienes,” she rasped, raising one gnarled, crooked finger to the girl’s chest.
The girl strained against my grip, releasing a shuddering sob.
“Come on,” I said, tugging desperately at her arm. “This way.”
She didn’t budge. It was as though her feet were cemented to the floor. “It’s okay,” she told me. “Let go.”
I refused, clamping down even tighter.
La Mujer de Luto glided toward me and I sucked a breath in, squeezing my eyelids shut and stifling a gag at the scent of her putrid flesh.
The last thing I felt before losing consciousness was the brush of her ice-cold, ragged nails against my forehead.
When I came to, I was lying on the floor in the breakroom. Matt was standing at the counter pouring coffee into his signature mug (World’s Best Grandma; he found it in a cabinet when he bought the building), and when he saw that I was awake he held it up to me in a cheers motion.
“Hey, slugger,” he said. “How ya feelin’?”
I pushed myself up onto my elbows and assessed. My head was pounding, my mouth incredibly dry, but otherwise I wasn’t much worse for wear. “Okay,” I answered.
“Okay,” he echoed. “Gonna quit on me?”
I blew a huff of laughter out my nose. “Nah. I don’t think so.”
“Good. Then go home. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
Over the following weeks, missing posters began cropping up around town.
They depicted the girl from the Library, of course. Her name was Meena Alkhaldi. She was a twenty-three year old medical student at the local university. Her parents’ contact information was listed below her photograph, as well as a sizable reward for her safe return.
Every time I saw one my stomach flipped.
I debated calling them on several occasions, just to try and offer them some kind of closure, but what could I have said? “Stop looking for your daughter, she’s been taken by what I’d guess is probably the spirit of a dead woman to god-knows-where and she’s never coming back”? So I never did.
The months passed and eventually the posters became fewer and further between. But I never forgot her face.
To this day, damn near every time I close my eyes, I see hers glazing over with blood. I hear her silently pleading with me both to help her and to set her free. I try to tell myself it wasn’t my fault, that these things are never in our control. But on the worst nights, when I can’t sleep without her watery voice resonating throughout my entire head, begging me to let the Mourning Woman take her, I wonder if there was something more I could’ve done.
I wonder if I could have saved her.