Eliah never planned to leave the city. But the burnout came swift and silent, like rust in the pipes of a house you don’t know is crumbling. One day she was logging archival metadata for another forgotten manuscript, and the next she was standing in her shower, fully clothed, unable to remember why she’d walked in.
So she did what every overworked archivist dreams of: she disappeared into a forgotten village to catalog someone else’s dust.
The letter came from a lawyer with a name too smooth to trust. Her great-uncle, a man she’d never met, had passed away, leaving behind a library housed in a crumbling manor outside a near-ghost town called Mehrauli Ridge.
She didn’t ask questions. She packed her camera, her gloves, and her solitude, and took the next train.
The manor groaned under memory. Doors creaked open before she touched them. Moths scattered like secrets. Every step on the wooden floors echoed like a question. The library on the third floor was a cathedral of silence — tall arched ceilings, wall-to-wall shelves that smelled of paper and smoke, and windows that had long forgotten how to open.
It was perfect.
For the first week, Eliah lost herself in the monotony she’d come for. Cataloging. Sorting. Reading notes left behind in old books: grocery lists, names, a single pressed daisy. She was starting to forget her city life, her blinking inbox, her ex who still haunted her Spotify algorithm. Until she found the ledger.
It was leather-bound, heavy as regret, with no title and no author. The spine was stamped with an ouroboros, faint and cracked. The pages were thick, uneven, and filled not just with prose but with marginalia — scribbles, diagrams, warnings, questions. Different inks. Different hands. Some neat and scholarly. Others frantic, looping, panicked.
In the middle of the book, a sentence had been underlined in red:
"The key is hidden where words forget themselves."
Below it, someone had written in pencil: Mezzanine. Behind the false folios.
She had to reread it twice. She had been through every room on the plans, and no mezzanine had been listed. But her curiosity flared to life like dry tinder. She spent the next day pacing the library’s upper levels, examining the shelves with her gloved fingers.
It was near the west window that she found a seam in the wood — a faint outline between two heavy shelves. She pressed. Something gave.
A panel clicked inward, and a hidden staircase unfolded like a sigh.
She climbed.
The mezzanine was a narrow gallery, curving in a half-circle above the main floor. Every inch of its shelves was lined with books — mostly decorative, leather spines gilded in gold leaf, some titles painted on. She tapped them.
Most didn’t move. But the third volume on the left did.
It clicked. The entire row of spines pushed inward, revealing a small compartment behind the wall.
Inside was a sealed envelope and a brass key with the initials E.M. engraved.
The envelope read: To the One Who Still Believes.
Hands trembling, Eliah opened it.
"If you have found this, it means the Library is choosing again. My name is Elias Mehra. You are my blood, and this place is yours now. But the Library is not what it seems. It never was.
The books shift. They listen. They remember. And some of them lie.
The key opens the Cabinet of Not-Yet. Inside is a book you must never read entirely. Only skim. Only question. If you read it all, it will begin."
Eliah stared at the page. The paper was brittle, the words slanted and ink-blurred by time. It had to be a prank. A long-dead eccentric great-uncle playing games.
But the letter smelled fresh.
She found the Cabinet two days later, buried behind towers of crumbling newspapers and brittle sea logs in the basement. The lock was old. The key fit.
Inside, a single book.
Velvet-bound, the color of dried blood. No title.
She opened it. The pages fluttered to the middle.
"Eliah Arrives at the Library."
The text described her: the train journey, the cracked leather suitcase, the scent of her shampoo.
She shut the book, hard. Her hands shook.
The next day, the book had moved. It sat on her desk chair. Open. Same page.
She stored it in a locked drawer.
It reappeared on her pillow.
She began writing in the margins.
Who are you?
The next morning, a reply.
"You, if you stay."
Her days became rituals. Cataloging by day. Watching by night. The book moved. Its words changed. It began to include things she had not done — yet. Arguments she hadn’t had. Memories she didn’t remember.
Some were benign. Others — darker. One night, she read:
"Eliah weeps over the name she used to have. The name the Library erased."
She had to read it ten times before she noticed: she couldn’t remember her full name.
Not really.
She looked at old IDs. Her email. Nothing felt quite real anymore.
Then the book wrote:
**"You have always been here. This is your first time reading it."
She tried to leave the manor.
Packed her bag. Booked a cab. But the roads were closed — flash floods, a landslide, something with the bridges. The driver never arrived.
The next morning, she read:
"She will try again tomorrow. She always does."
She didn’t remember trying before.
She called her friend, Priya. The line crackled. Her voice sounded far away.
"Eliah? I thought you were dead."
"What? No. I’m in Mehrauli Ridge. Sorting some family stuff. Can you come get me?"
"Mehrauli Ridge doesn’t exist anymore. It was abandoned. Flooded. Years ago."
The call dropped.
She tried again. The phone number was no longer in service.
She stared at the book. It stared back.
She scrawled in the margin: What do you want from me?
The reply came slowly, letter by letter, like ink bleeding through from another world.
"To be finished. To be remembered. To be real."
Then: "Burn me. If you can."
She tried.
She tore out pages. They regenerated. She doused it in lighter fluid. The flames died before they touched the cover. She buried it beneath stone.
The next day it sat on her breakfast table, steaming mug beside it.
The townspeople were no help. The ones who still lived nearby never approached the house. When she walked to the edge of the village, people turned their eyes away.
Only one old woman — stooped, blind in one eye — spoke to her.
"You’ve been in that house a long time, girl."
"A few weeks. Maybe a month."
The woman shook her head.
"You look just like the last one. The librarian. Before the Library took him."
"My great-uncle? Elias?"
"Names change. Places forget. Books remember."
Eliah left shaken. Her reflection in the windows looked… thinner. Paler. Off.
One day, she woke to find herself written in second person:
You walk the halls, forgetting your name. You check the locks, forgetting the light. You write in the margins, but the margins write back.
She didn’t remember falling asleep.
She didn’t remember waking up.
Only the turning of pages.
In the end, she made a choice. Or perhaps the book made it for her.
She carried the velvet volume up the stairs to the mezzanine. Every step pulsed underfoot. The air buzzed.
She placed it on the floor, surrounding it with the other volumes from the hidden shelf — the false folios, the forgotten words.
She struck a match.
This time, the fire caught.
It didn’t roar. It whispered.
The flames curled around the book, licking the pages as though reading them one last time. The ink turned to smoke. The margins crumbled. The names vanished.
The house didn’t burn. Only the book. And when it was gone, the air tasted clean.
Eliah walked outside.
The sun was rising.
She looked at her reflection in the window of the abandoned post office.
It smiled back.
And for the first time in years, she said her name aloud. Whole. Certain.
Eliah Mehra.
She remembered.
React
