Hey, everybody. Sorry it’s been a while; I’ve been dealing with some stuff. But welcome if you’re new and welcome back if you’re not. I’m Adam, and I work at the Night Library, where we follow a list of some completely mundane and some slightly more unusual rules to ensure that things run as smoothly as possible. If you’re just happening across this series for the first time, you probably want to start here, and if you’re almost-but-not-quite caught up, this is our previous installment.
In today’s post, I wanted to tell y’all about the first time I went upstairs.
As unbelievable as it sounds, it was literally a dark and stormy night. And also a Friday the 13th. In October. Under a full moon.
Nah, I’m just kidding. It really was storming, though. But it was late spring, and the rain was nice and light and even a little unseasonably warm. Kind of made for the perfect cozy library aesthetic atmosphere, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I was pretty well caught up on the books that needed repairing for the moment, so our cataloger Alice had asked me if I had time to pull a list of materials for her that she’d accidentally only saved brief records for.
Nothing out of the ordinary had gone on so far during the evening. It had been quiet, mostly. We’d signed up a couple of new patrons (which, by the way, you can do online now since it’s been so highly requested—here’s the link) and helped an elderly couple print out some shipping labels earlier in the shift, but basically everyone had cleared out by midnight.
I was pulling from near the section Horace was shelving in and we were making idle conversation—by which I mean I was talking at him and he was grunting in response—but in the midst of a sentence, I stopped. Above us, something had cut me off.
Thump. Screeech! Thump.
“What the…? Horace, did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Horace asked absently, eyes still locked mechanically on the task before him.
“Upstairs,” I insisted. “I swear to god something just—”
Thump. Screeech! Thump.
“That! You had to hear that.”
Slowly, Horace looked up at me. I’d never seen an expression on his face quite like the one he wore in that moment. It conveyed a litany of emotions ranging from fear to frustration to desperation, and he shook his head in a singular, pointed motion. “No,” he said. “No, I didn’t hear anything. Neither did you. And if you did, it’s just the ducts.”
“But—”
“No, Adam,” he pleaded. “There’s nothing up there. You know that. Just ignore it.”
“Okay,” I conceded. “Sorry. You’re right. I know.”
The sound didn’t stop for at least half an hour. If anything, it grew louder and more persistent, though that may have just been my brain’s progressive inability to block it out. But I did my best, and eventually it did cease.
Once we’d had ten or so minutes of consistent quiet, Horace’s giant shoulders visibly relaxed. “Do you have anything coming out of repair that needs to be shelved?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “You’ve gotten them all, I think.”
“Then I’m going home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you then,” I agreed.
He left.
Once I’d finished pulling Alice’s books (there were a lot; I probably looked like a grandfather, the way I had to inch the cart across the floor) I took them back to her desk, playfully bumping into the back of her wheelchair with the truck.
“I’m filing for workers’ comp,” she threatened, not bothering to turn around. “Thanks, nerd.”
“Anytime,” I told her. “Except when I have something better to do.”
She still didn’t turn, just leaned her head back so far it looked like she was being exorcized. “Did you hear the, uh…ruckus?” she asked, gesturing with a glance to the ceiling. “Up there?”
There was a stepstool tucked behind the filing cabinet next to me and I pulled it out, sitting down atop it and scooting it closer to her. “Okay, yes,” I whispered, although to my knowledge there was no one else in the back office. “But Horace wouldn’t talk about it. Which I know is a Rule, that there’s nothing upstairs or whatever, but…”
“But there obviously is?” Alice finished. “Yeah. Sounded pretty fucky, whatever it was.”
“Have you ever been up there?” I asked.
“Nah.” Alice righted herself, pushing off one side of her desk and then the other to swivel her chair back and forth. “This bad boy can climb a set of stairs like a champ, but it’s not too quick on the uptake and I’m not willing to gamble on how fast I could make it back down if something was after me. Besides, personal code of conduct is to leave well enough alone in this place. Maybe that’s why it’s easier for me to talk about it all. ‘Cause I’m just guessing at what’s going on.”
“Wait, all of it? You’ve never seen anything?”
“Not nothing,” Alice clarified. “But not much. I’ve never seen the pool or gone upstairs or tried to figure out any of the mystery keys that just appear on the ring sometimes. Nothing avoidable. I’ve been here a long time. Almost as long as Matt. He’s done a lot to…to protect me. I mean, he does whatever he can to keep us all safe, obviously. But when I started here it was just the two of us, and there was a lot he was still figuring out, which meant it was especially dangerous. If some new weird shit came up, Matt explored it. Alone. A lot of times that meant he got hurt. But I never did, and that was one hundred percent thanks to him. So it would just kind of feel like slapping him in the face not to take any precaution he offered me, if that makes sense.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Thump. Screeech! Thump.
The sound emanated from above us once again, but this time, it was immediately followed by something else.
A paralyzing, gut-wrenching scream.
I jumped. Alice did, too, hand to her chest. “Jesus H,” she breathed. “Where’s Matt? Is he still here?”
“I-I don’t know,” I managed. “I think so, somewhere. Is this—is it not something you’ve ever heard before?”
“No,” Alice admitted, leaning down to unlock her chair’s brake. “I’m gonna go look for him. You just…don’t do anything stupid.”
Now, I’m not sure if you’ve gathered yet from the first couple entries of this series, but telling me not to do anything stupid is kind of like taking a salt shaker to a slug and telling it not to die.
In my defense, I’m (almost) never just charging straight at something I know might get me maimed or killed without a decent enough reason that I deem the odds acceptable. And in this situation, I genuinely did intend to keep myself planted firmly on the stepstool and wait for Alice to return, hopefully with Matt in tow.
But then the sound came again. And following it, another scream. This one broke off into a sob, and directly afterward, the first audible words.
“Help! Can anyone hear me? Please, help me!”
I froze. And listened. And waited.
Thump. Screeech! Thump.
“Please, god, please! Somebody help me, it’s—!”
Screeeeeeeeech!
Silence.
Quieter than dead air. The absence of sound. My own breathing, quick and shallow, was the only noise that existed. There was no electricity humming. No air flowing through the vents. Absolutely nothing.
That, somehow, was worse than the screaming. It was an infinitely less alive sound, which made it infinitely more chilling, and I physically could not sit idly with it in anticipation.
So I got up.
Should it have been to look for Alice and Matt? Probably, yes. But there’s something about a certain level of adrenaline that impairs logic and reason. So what did I do?
You guessed it.
I’d been in our mechanical room plenty of times before; that’s where we store donated books until Alice can get to them to catalog them, and it’s also where Della keeps her cleaning supplies, which we all need access to from time to time. But I’d never gone up the stairs.
First time for everything, is what I figured.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make my presence known or not, so I kept my mouth shut, tiptoeing up each step and making sure not to scuff my shoes along the grip on the edges.
It felt like it took ages to reach the top, as cautious as I was being, but I got there eventually, and when I did, I didn’t see anything.
I mean, I could see. The lights were on (if dim; some of them looked as though they meant to be fluorescing but had burned out at some point in the likely distant past) but nothing appeared to be amiss. There were totes and boxes stacked precariously atop one another in the center of the floor, and to the sides were all the HVAC machines, their green sensors tinting the room in a strange hue.
Tentatively, I made a lap around the perimeter. Nothing stirred. Nothing made a peep. I knew, rationally, that I should cut my losses (or my wins, depending on how you look at it) and get back to the safety of the office before anything had a chance to rear its ugly head, but I also knew what I’d heard, and I wasn’t about to be gaslit by whatever had lured me up there in the first place.
There was nowhere to hide on the outskirts, but I sized up the mound of miscellaneous objects in the middle of the floor. There could be something under the boxes. In them, maybe. I walked slowly over, taking a breath to steel myself, and toed the outer edge of the pyramid, jumping reflexively back in anticipation.
But I didn’t need to, it seemed. I apparently hadn’t upset the balance. The mound remained intact and undisturbed.
Feeling slightly braver, I stepped forward and kicked it again, this time with enough force to rattle it all the way to the top but not so much as to knock anything over.
Still, once it had settled, nothing emerged.
Something did, however, fall from the fucking ceiling.
If you’ve ever seen a horror movie where the big-bad-creepy-crawly is lurking above the protagonist’s head and wished you could scream at them to just look up already, rest assured that I have, too. You probably tell yourself that you’d never be so oblivious or unobservant, that you would check every inch of your surroundings, overhead included and possibly prioritized. I know, because I always told myself the same.
The thing is, in real-life scenarios, you just don’t anticipate an animatronic velociraptor-pterodactyl hybrid swooping down and entrapping you in its enormous, goo-covered wings.
Reading that back, it sounds kind of hilarious. So for the sake of the atmosphere, just understand that it absolutely was not.
I’d barely caught a glimpse of it before I was completely enveloped in warm, sticky blackness, but what little I had seen was nearly enough to send me straight out of consciousness. I knew if I was going to, you know, not pass out, I needed to slow my breathing, stop thrashing fruitlessly around, and gather whatever information I possibly could from my current position.
Its grip on me was tight but not so much so that I felt suffocated, which gave me a glimmer of hope that perhaps whatever it was, it didn’t plan to constrict me to death. I was crushed against its body, which my cheek registered as hot metal of some sort, but when I wiggled my fingertips against what I could reach of its wings, they felt leathery and soft, almost like a tanned cow’s hide.
Quickly, I learned the source of the thumping and screeching that had given the thing away. Every step it took, jostling me from side to side, resulted in a resounding thud, and between each footfall, its tail scraped tinnily across the concrete floor. I wanted to cover my ears, but my arms were pinned to my sides, so I settled for gritting my teeth instead.
We made several passes back and forth from one end of the room to the other, and I realized at some point that it was beginning to grow agitated. It was huffing great breaths out its nose, stomping harder and harder, swinging its tail more and more frenetically. I was still far too shaken to use rational thought no matter how hard I tried, but I did eventually come to surmise that it may have been angry it couldn’t fly while holding me captive.
So I did the only thing I could. I waited it out.
I was, of course, desperately wondering where Matt was. Maybe he’d left without telling us, I reckoned, and Alice hadn’t been able to find him after all. Maybe she’d tried to call him and he hadn’t answered, so she’d had no choice but to leave me to my own devices; she certainly shouldn’t risk coming to look for me alone if there was a chance she wouldn’t be able to get away quickly enough to save herself.
The mechanical dinosaur bird dragged me over the length of the space for what could have been minutes or hours or days for all I knew, and by the time it finally slowed to a stop, I felt delirious.
The wet, sloughing sound its wings made as it unwound them from around my body made my stomach turn, and just as I tried to remind myself to be grateful that at least the slime coating me from head to toe was odorless, the thing opened its mouth.
The stench that emanated from it was unlike anything I had (or have to this day, honestly) ever experienced. It was worse than death. Worse than rot. Worse than decay. Worse than a combination of every disgusting aroma I’d ever been subjected to at once. It knocked me flat on my ass, which turned out to be a damn shame for me, because once I’d landed, I couldn’t unglue myself from the floor. I was forced to take in its full form now, and my brain refused to process any of what it was seeing, catapulting me instantly into a state of derealization. It had to be at least seven feet tall, with a wingspan twice as long, and I could see clearly that the bronze making up its abdomen, head, and legs had begun to oxidize, giving the effect of flaking skin. Its wings resembled bat’s wings, and as it stretched them, each individual vein they contained was exposed by the light behind them.
It was just going to eat me right there. I was fairly sure of that now, even as badly as it had clearly wanted to savor me on the ceiling instead (for which there was a reason, but that’s…well. Another story for another time). It craned its long neck down, reminiscent of that of a large desk lamp’s, and stopped short only inches from my face.
Its mouth was still open, but what I saw inside gave me pause. It was another beak. This one was smaller, but it was behind the creature’s jagged teeth, in the place where I would’ve expected to see a uvula in a human. Slowly, it began to creak open as well.
Past its exterior, I could barely make out what looked to be a small, round speaker; the type that might have been found in an old school intercom system.
To my horror, it began to crackle to life.
“Help!” it pleaded, deafeningly loud. “Can anyone hear me?”
I felt my blood turn to ice as it began to scream. And scream. And scream.
It was taunting me. That was all there was to it. It was solidifying what I’d really already known: there had never been a person in danger. It had cast its hook, and I’d taken the bait.
Its viscous, stringy saliva dripped onto my head and shoulders, and I was entirely powerless to stop it, no matter how hard I fought to move. I clamped my teeth together, forcing back wave after wave of nausea.
I’d always expected that, if I was of sound enough mind to be aware at my time of death, I would have at least one profound thought. But in that moment, nothing but pure, white panic filled my mind. I was terrified, simply and truly. There was no room for anything else.
A thin, black tongue rolled out of its mouth, the texture similar to a cat’s, with sharp, angled barbs pointing toward its throat. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Couldn’t even close my eyes. I needed to fully experience the last moments of my life, whatever they might entail.
I instinctually believed, when I first heard the pop!, that the creature’s head had exploded of its own volition. I couldn’t quite see what was going on, as I was too busy blinking blood (at least, that’s what I assume it was) out of my eyes. But then there was silence save for the sound of wires short-circuiting, and then Matt was speaking, as close to frantic as I’d ever heard him, yelling out imperatively that I respond if I could.
My lips were covered in blood, too, so I hummed in response, not willing to test what might happen if I were to accidentally ingest it.
“Fuck,” Matt said when he reached me, kneeling and pulling the sleeve of his shirt down over his hand to wipe off my mouth and eyes. “Are you hurt?” he asked, and then amended, “Bad?”
I coughed, shaking my head. “No. I’m fine. Just…stuck. What did you do?”
“Shot the bastard,” he told me, unsheathing the knife hooked to his belt and beginning to work at the goo cementing me to the floor. “Sometimes the solution’s easier than you expect.”
Once he’d cut me out of confinement, he helped me to my feet, giving me a good once-over to make sure I hadn’t sustained any injuries I was in too much shock to feel yet. This was a particularly easy feat given that if any of my own blood had been displaced, it would have been red, contrasting starkly with the muddied green of the monster’s.
“Thanks,” I said. “I, uh. Thanks.”
“Don’t come up here again,” he told me. “The Rules exist for a reason.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just…thought someone was in trouble.”
“If you ever think someone’s in trouble, come find me. I’ll handle it.”
We trudged back downstairs, my feet squelching every time they made contact with the ground. I didn’t ask if Matt had a plan for the creature’s body. I didn’t ask if he’d known how to kill it because he’d run into one before. I didn’t ask if I was fired.
Back at the desk, Alice told me she wanted to punch me but it wasn’t worth getting “that nasty shit” all over her hand, which I thought was fair on both accounts. She also told me it had taken her a while to track Matt down (he’d been outside in the storage shed) and then reminded Matt that she had explicitly instructed me not to do anything stupid while she was gone, which I corroborated. If anyone was going to be in trouble, it had better be me.
But I wasn’t. Matt sent me home to clean myself up and get some rest, both of which I did. When I showed up for work the next night, it was as though nothing had ever happened. We never spoke of it.
I fully intended, after that night, to heed Matt’s warning to never set foot upstairs again. Truly, I did. And I did heed it.
Until about a week ago.
But I think I’ve given you enough to digest for now, and there’s something to the belief that you shouldn’t pry at a fresh cut, so.