A Late Night at the Library (1,008 words)

It was three in the morning, and I still hadn’t finished writing my final paper, which was due tomorrow, and was all that could save me from failing this class. Looking around the library, I saw that most students had left. It was just one other student and I. My nightly companion sat with his back to me at a desk against the farther wall of the room, head bent low over his work, pencil scratching away steadily and purposefully.

The desks and tables around me were covered with trash, scrunched up paper, and spilt coffee. Everyone who had been working this night had successfully completed their assignments, had prosecuted their missions with success, I thought bitterly: why didn’t I seem to get anything done?

I glanced over at the diligent black-haired one, whose face I couldn’t see, and the knowledge that I wasn’t alone in my lucubrations gave me a little more strength than I otherwise would have had, and I returned to my work inspirited. I threw words into the air, and watched as other words and concepts condensed on them like clouds on a nucleus, and graciously inundated my meager paper.

However, by four o’clock I had barely put a thousand three hundred words down. My head felt heavy and my eyes burned. My neck was sore, and each jittery beat of my heart caused me to start, and break into a sweat. There was no way I could write another twenty-seven hundred words on the contributions of Petrarch to setting the temper of the Italian Renaissance by nine A. M. I was already as verbose in what I had written as any human being could possibly be, and had extracted every bit of information I could gather from the volumes that lay open around me like gutted beasts.

Maybe I was predestined to fail this course, and stay back in college for another year at great personal expense. Maybe my options at this point were sleep or death. 

I looked up, and saw that my silent companion in these difficult times was still at his desk, stiffly scratching away at the same sheet of paper as he had been an hour ago, head bent with concentration. The long black locks that hung about his face made it impossible for me to get a glimpse of his visage from where I sat, even when I leant as far as I could one way or the other.

The monotony of his scratching was disconcerting in a way that I couldn’t really define. I stood up to get a better look at the scholar’s work, and to my shock saw that the sheet of paper under his white hand was completely black. His pencil had been reduced to a stump from friction alone, and bits of graphite and wood were strewn across his desk like sawdust.

I wasn’t sure whether the nausea I felt at that moment was the result of tiredness; but as I stood staring at the student, I became conscious that the low rasping sounds that I had previously mistaken—had subconsciously mistaken—for wind blowing against the great mullioned windows of the library were the student’s sepulchral breaths.

Lord have mercy!

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on their end, and a wave of panic ran down my body like an electric current. I suddenly became paralyzed with a fear such as I had never known before. My vision was reduced to pinpricks in which I could just behold the terrible being directly in front of me. Everything else was black. My ears began ringing with the breathing, the scratching, and the deafening silence, which seemed to be growing the louder with every minute that passed, as if foreboding some cataclysm.

Could this thing before me be the apparition of a student who had died at this university many decades ago, and had come back to complete some unfinished business—a final paper, perhaps? Or was he perhaps something infinitely more terrible that had oozed out onto this earth from the fathomless depths of space and time?

In response to my panicked internal questions, my legs began to move of their own accord. It was as if the floor of the library had suddenly tilted precipitously in the direction of that preternatural creature, whose entire being was surrounded by an aura of malevolence.

Between sleep and death, I would have chosen death at that moment.

My inexorable steps took me right up to that diabolical thing in its wooden chair. I could smell the brimstone in his hair, and see the black veins bulge against the cadaverous skin.

My mind was blank with terror as I stared at the back of that terrible head.

Then, without the intervening passage of any length of time, the head turned toward me, and I screamed.

Or I thought I had screamed, but I didn’t feel any vibrations in my throat. Then I realized that it wasn’t I who had screamed at all.

I blinked, and my vision returned to normal. Silence crept back into the hall from the shadows. How singular, I thought, as I felt my heart beating away at a normal pace, and that my breathing was tranquil.

I raised an eyebrow when I looked down at my hands, for they were red with blood; and the body of the black-haired student lay slumped over on the desk, not a twitch in his muscles, a huge gaping hole in his back. His heart lay immobile at my feet, drained of all blood.

I wiped my hands on his shirt, and pulled out of the sheets of paper he had been scratching on from under his dead hands. To my surprise it was precisely the assignment I had spent hours trying to complete in vain.

I put it in my backpack without another thought, and left my own incomplete assignment under his head. It was far more believable, in any case, that his paper should have been unfinished when he was killed.