The library that ate people

 

Experimental Short Story Series #48
Title: The Library That Ate People
By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA)

In the town of Dunmere—where fog sat like a cat on windowsills and clocks ran a few minutes late, always—stood a library no one remembered building.

It wasn’t on the map.

No one paid the librarian.

Yet it was always there.

Nestled between a shuttered bakery and a silent watch shop, it loomed taller on some days than others. Its bricks seemed to rearrange when no one was looking. Children dared each other to touch the lion-headed doorknob. Most didn’t. Those who did… changed.

They said the books whispered.

Not pages rustling—no, actual voices. Some sighed with longing. Others chuckled darkly. A few screamed. The townsfolk pretended not to hear, but everyone knew someone who had gone in and hadn’t come out quite the same. Some never came out at all.

And still… it called.

One rainy Thursday, Eliza Quinn stepped through the heavy doors. A girl with tangled hair and a head full of why. She was thirteen, armed with a flashlight, a sandwich, and far too much curiosity.

The library greeted her.

Not with silence, but with breath. Every wall exhaled. The air thickened like soup. Shelves leaned in, almost expectant. The light bulbs flickered to her pulse.

She wandered.

Books shifted when she wasn’t looking. Titles changed languages. A copy of Little Women morphed into Les Filles Perdues before her eyes. She opened a dusty tome and read: “She is reading this right now.”

Eliza froze.

The page turned itself.

“And now she knows it’s too late to leave.”

The doors were gone.

She ran. Up staircases that weren’t there before. Through aisles that curved in impossible loops. Past encyclopedias of events that hadn’t happened yet.

The librarian appeared then.

He was tall. Thin. Wearing a coat stitched from parchment and quills for fingers. No face—just a void that smelled of old ink and moonlight. He didn’t speak. He offered her a book.

It was blank.

She took the pen from his sleeve and began to write.

Years passed.

Eliza's story became part of the collection.

Her mother swears she just “left town.”

But some nights, if you press your ear to the library’s back wall, you can hear a girl reading aloud from a book that keeps writing itself.

Why We Tell These Stories
This 48th entry in our Experimental Short Story Series reminds us: books don’t always wait to be read. Sometimes, they read you. And some stories… bite back.

Stay with us as we near our 60th tale. These stories—surreal, speculative, and stitched with wonder—are building toward something extraordinary. A printed collection that will bring the worlds we’ve conjured to your shelves and hearts.

Until then:

Read. Reflect. Return.
Because the next door—or book—may have your name on it.

Visit: farazparvez1.blogspot.com


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