After that day in the library, I had been on edge, not knowing what it was that spoke to me or what I could do to help. How could I help someone, or “something” that I couldn’t see. After all the research I’d done, I still had no idea what I could do. Finally, after months, I got an email from one of the experts I reached out to. They wanted to know more about my experiences and since I now had more, I poured everything out into the email. How I felt I was going crazy and how no one in my life believed me. I ended with a question. “How can I help them when I can’t even see them?” With that, I sent the email off.
Another few months went by before I heard back again, and the response was one word, “Listen.” I could do that, but still no advice on how to get all of this to stop, which is the original reason I reached out. My response this time was “Ok, I can listen to this one, but after that, how do I get it to stop?” I hit send and a few moments later got a notification that the email address I was sending to does not exist. What? They had just emailed me, how can their email address not exist? I checked the recipient email just in case something got messed up with the spelling, but nothing had changed because this was one email thread. I copied the email address and put it into a new thread and typed out a new email, apologizing that we didn’t have our thread as something was happening with my computer or my system and then typed out what I was trying to ask. Send. Another notification that the email address did not exist. What was happening?
I didn’t want to spend anymore time on it, it was late and I had school in the morning, my question of how to make it stop would have to continue to go unanswered for now. I couldn’t sleep though, I was thinking about what to do. I hadn’t been back to the library after that day but was thinking that maybe I should go back to see if that entity would talk to me again. After a while, I drifted off to sleep, but it wasn’t a deep sleep because if I let myself sink too deep, I would dream and the dreams were always of a man that I had never met before. My alarm went off way too soon, but I got myself up and ready. I needed to go to the library after school, I needed to see if I could try to find whatever was trying to contact me before.
School seemed to drag that day, but as soon as the last bell rang, I was out the door and making my way to the library. Once I got there, I noticed way more people there than there usually had been. I walked up to the front desk and the librarian looked at me with a smile, asking me where I had been the last few months. I told her I had just simply been busy and then asked her why there were so many people there today.
“Oh, you haven’t heard?” She asked me, tilting her head to the side.
“Heard what? Like I said, I’ve been busy…I…“ I stopped as someone walked up to the front desk next to me. Taken aback, I realized that it was the man that had been invading my dreams.
After seeing the man at the library, I left and chose to stay away. I still didn’t know who he was and I still didn’t know what the librarian had been talking about that day as nothing had seemed to change in my small town, other than this man being around as no one had seen him before. People also just kept flooding to the library that I now avoided with my life. Since I saw this man in person, he stopped invading my dreams, but I still couldn’t get his face out of my head. He looked old enough to be my father but young enough to be my brother at the same time, his eyes were dark and soulful, his hair was jet black and just the right amount of messy with a few streaks of gray spiraling through it. It’s like his face was burned in my memory.
I now had more questions than answers and was out of places to look. I wasn’t sleeping and couldn’t eat, I was just obsessed with trying to figure out what was going on. My family didn’t notice anything different, and if they did, they didn’t say anything. It actually seemed like they were happy that I had fully secluded myself and they didn’t have to include me in their adventures anymore. Day after day, I would come home and head straight to my room, scrolling websites and searching through the entire internet to find something, anything that could give me answers, but I was just looking through all the same websites now. I was still as concentrated on reading them as I was the first time I came across them, thinking that maybe I had missed something the first…dozen times I read them. Still nothing new, and after dozens, maybe hundreds of emails out to experts, even novices, in the paranormal and supernatural fields with no responses, I knew what I had to do. I had to return to the library, I had to find out what the librarian was going to tell me that day, and I had to see if I could find this man again to figure out who he was and what he wanted.
At some point, I must have drifted off, because the next thing I remember was waking up to my alarm for school going off. Even though I hadn’t been sleeping, I still kept my alarm set because I tended to get lost in my researching and lost track of time, causing me to be late a few times. I got myself ready and headed out the door. When I got to the intersection where I would walk straight to school, this time, I chose to head straight to the library. At this time of day, no one would be there, right? It would be easier to talk to the librarian to see what she had been trying to say to be a few weeks ago. I walked through the doors and it was completely empty, the librarian wasn’t at the front desk to greet me like usual and there was an eerie silence. I decided to wait for a few moments to see if the librarian maybe was in the back room, I even rang the bell she had sitting on the desk. Nothing. She didn’t come out and there was no sound at all.
Having seen enough horror movies and done enough research to know better, I knew I should have just left and headed to school late, but curiosity got the best of me and I started toward the back of the building. Through all the old stacks, I got to the old books that were covered in dust, the parts of the library that no one came to anymore. I made it to the back room where the librarian often disappeared, only to find her glasses that usually hung from her neck sitting on the desk and her water bottle laying on the floor on its side, leaking a little and causing a small puddle where it was. I didn’t know what happened here, but this was enough to make me want to get out of there, except where the door used to be was now a solid wall and there was no way out of that room.