Safekeeping

by Samuel Hayden

It is dark outside the library, and there is no one else here. 

Five nights a week, I put on the frumpy jacket, and the badge that reads “University Security.” It is closing time when I arrive, and, as if summoned by the shuffling sounds of students headed home for the night, dusk descends, diluting the sky. Once sounds have shuffled off, there are only my feet pattering, pacing from floor to floor, watching nothing, slowly, all the night long.  

With a flick of the light switch, the staff room comes to life in a boorish fluorescence, and I blink to make it look right. There is a couch, upon which I’ve taken many a nap, a fridge that hums to itself, and the dying, cat-in-a-bag sound of the coffee machine spitting out its brew. Once I’ve got some in my travel mug, and once it is exactly the right shade of caramel brown, I secure the bottom floor, double checking that the doors are locked and that the windows are closed, even though they always are. I wander up to the fifth level of the library, stopping on each floor along the way to check the windows, and the higher I go, the further away the world becomes.  

By the time I reach the top, it is as though I am no longer the nighttime security guard for a university library, but a penitentiary watchman, a thousand ladder rungs above the world, with nothing to see, and nothing to see me back. Still, I take my time with the windows, because once they are confirmed secure, there is just about nothing left for me to do. 

According to a plaque on the third floor, the library was built in 1904, and refurbished during the 70s. Its walls are a diagonal brickwork pattern, like chalky red steps on top of steps, white columns keep the carpeted floors where they should be, and spiral staircases snake up on either end of the building. It’s old, musky, but during the nighttime especially, when it is empty and lit only by the warm light of the chandeliers, it’s charming. At the center of each floor is a balcony that overlooks the floors below, and from the fifth it is like standing at the top edge of a cored apple, and I can almost see the entire library at once, aside from what is beneath my feet. And, I suppose, aside from what is behind me.  

But I know what’s there. 

On each floor of the library are those dizzying collections of things I’d never heard of: postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-this-and-thatism. I usually walk right past them, but every once in a while a spine will stand out at me. A few nights ago, while pacing through the English Lit section, I happened upon a book titled Monsters in Literature, Fifth Edition. It was late in the night, or early I guess, four in the morning, and I picked it up with the half-hearted hope that it might be interesting enough to keep me awake. After a quick flip through, I could see that the book was a literary take on monsters and their place in culture. Dracula’s fangs were sex and zombies were consumerism or something like that. But that’s not what interested me.  

Along the margins, in hard-pressed pencil, on every page, were little annotations, words and sentences underlined, some underlined twice, and corners folded over in such quantities that the folds must have lost their use. Scribbles next to Frankenstein’s monster, circles around the Invisible Man, notes and notes on Cthulhu and its call, and I was enamored entirely.  

This book is a life, I thought. To someone, somewhere, the contents of this book are a career now, a purpose, and in it are the things they talk about at the dinner table and think about as they go to bed, and, who knows? Maybe they talk about it in lectures or on book tours or on TV. And here it was, in my hands. Around me were the windows, those large black mouths with street lamps for teeth, and suddenly I felt as bad as I’d ever felt in my life. I put the book back on the shelf, pushing it deep behind the other books, and I went down to the staff room and drank coffee and thought until the morning came. 

Besides the book, I’d say that’s most nights, more or less. Watching over nothing much, protecting it from no one at all. For the sake of safekeeping.  

But . . . 

What was that? 

I am on the fifth floor, double checking the last of the windows and looking out at the university campus and thinking about how much bigger it is than I’d expected it to be when I arrived for my first day on the job. In the daytime, students crowd the courtyards and find shade beneath the big umbrella trees. There are fountains peppered with wishes, and food courts selling organic kombucha and people going places. But I can’t see any of that now, slathered as it is in the vacant nighttime dark. I stand a thousand ladder rungs above the world, with only the books for company and bored, bored, bored, but… 

A lurch in my stomach. My nerve capsizes and sinks low into my abdomen.  

I heard something. From the gut of the deep down stillness of the library, robbed of its tongue by the nighttime, where silence is sovereign and nothingness slithers through the cracks of the walls with a deafening hiss, suddenly, from somewhere below, I swear I heard it. A creak, then a slam, a single, impossible thud that reverberates and spiders up my vertebrae. 

The unmistakable sound of a door  

slamming  

shut. 

A million thoughts at once.  

A ghost. A demon.  A madman on the loose, having smashed a window, is hidden in the shadows of the library, and probably more than one, one to slam the door and another to quietly creep up behind me while I wonder what that sound was—I spin around and feel silly.  

I didn’t hear a window shatter. 

A draft, I think. A cross breeze. Had I left the staff-room door open? That must be it. And an open window somewhere blew it shut.  

But I checked the windows. Could I have missed one?  

I listen closely to the returning quiet for any signs of adulteration, but there is no sound. A shiver buoys between my shoulder blades and, against my volition, prompted by either the uniform, the badge, or a plain disregard for my own well-being, I think a terrible, stupid, ugly, awful, capitulating thought: I’d better go check it out. 

I take the spiral stairs down on the west side of the library with an acute awareness of the sound of my steps. I scan each floor as I pass for signs of trespassing, as if, with Sherlockian insight, I might spot an awry fleck of dead skin or a piece of fabric snagged on a window sill and call Scotland Yard in from the wings. The fourth, third, second floor unsullied, I am back on the ground floor and I find myself headed for the staff room.  

I could’ve easily left the door open without thinking, and maybe an air conditioner came to life and did some strange dance with the door and shut it and that could be it. I do not hear any more noise, and at a glance I cannot see that any windows have been left open. As I corner in on the staff room, my confidence is recovering, snapping to life like the chemicals in a glowstick, and that nervous balloon in my diaphragm is releasing, releasing, releasing until— 

At the periphery of the door, my hand only inches from the handle, there is  

a bump in the night.  

Fear staggers me a few paces backwards as I try to comprehend what is happening before me. My travel mug slips from my hand and falls to the carpeted floor where coffee and cream swell out in streams and stains and somehow, some impossible how, from beyond the staff room door there is a thud, then another, and before I can think, the door is  

shaking, 

shuddering,  

thwacking in the rapture of an onslaught of thick, booming pounds, so gargantuan that they seem to come from not only the door but from above, below and behind me. My heart is beating hard, maybe harder than it ever has, but its cries only fall into the lub dub thumping that emanates from behind the door. 

It is dark outside the library.  

And there is something else here. 

I am running without thinking, retreating up the stairs. The booming sound follows, but with every floor I ascend, it becomes that little more distant and by the fifth floor I am able to think with some clarity. The windows watch with interest and I look back at them. It was stupid to run back up here, I see that now. I should’ve ran out the front door, far from here, home, under the sheets, cowering, sure, but safe. The thudding persists and in the reflection of the fifth floor window I can see that I am flush and frazzled. Is this me, I wonder. Here? Now? I should’ve been here years ago. In daytime, with the people going places. And I can’t decide what I hate more: the mirror mirrors on the wall, or the visions they show me. And it is just then, as I am deciding what the worst thing is, as the door booms in the backdrop, and as my reflection looks back at me with every morsel of the disdain that I have for it, that I see something else. I see it even though it cannot be. 

Behind me the books have changed. Row upon row, ream upon ream, every book that was once there is gone, and in their place sits one volume again and again, like dominoes tottering onto one another. In the reflection, I study the words on their spines, each one stabbing out with gold text on black, and I have seen them before.  

Monsters in Literature, Fifth Edition. 

A thousand ladder rungs above the world and a thousand escaped madmen to restock a thousand library shelves and the books are motionless, but only so as to gain the element of surprise before the death lunge, clasping their pages to my jugular so I die right here and now, with so many things left undone. 

But it isn’t the books that attack. It is that feeling again, that sour feeling from the other night, and it reaches for my throat and I wipe something wet from my face and I wonder if it is red.  

Monster in Literature, Fifth Edition, witnesses but doesn’t say a word: someone else speaks for it now. On book tours. On TV. Not that I would hear it speak anyways because the feeling is even louder than the booming downstairs.  

Louder than the beating of my chest. 

Louder than the thousand times I have felt it before, and it is blaring in my ears and echoing and it says if only, if only, if only. 

Something inside of me stops. Like cogs catching, it is instant, that moment of haunted-house clarity where, once scared, once screamed, once panting and pink-faced and pissed-stained, there is that moment of acquiescence when nothing this place can offer is any worse than what I’ve already seen. It can hurt me, badly, maybe even kill me, but it cannot do worse than it already has. For a moment, louder than anything, is the sadness that this thought brings me. Then, all at once: Silence. 

The booming stops. The feeling pulses, but only in overtone, and the quiet is almost nauseating. I listen closely, but all there is is the quiet zip of library lips and nighttime spilling in through those gawking maws on the walls. Light lingers, but it is stale, insipid, like it would rather be anywhere else in the world than here,  

here, where night in and night out, it alone illuminates those great, smothering walls and shelves and books that are so much more accomplished and realized than it will ever be.  

And for the first time in the longest while, I am certain: there is something for me to do here after all. 

The windows watch.  

The books watch.  

I watch myself descend the stairs and approach the staff room door and put my hand on the handle and draw the door open and step a wide step back. 

It is dark outside the library. If only… 

And something steps out. 

Saliva splashes to the ground in a garbling growl as its gigantic shadow outpours and overcasts and I crank my neck high, high, higher and I still cannot see the top. Bristling fur, blood-red eyes, and fangs to cut open the crust of the earth itself. From the room it shuffles out: Frankenstein’s monster, the Invisible Man, organic kombucha, Cthulhu, ghosts, demons, loose madmen, book tours, what lingers in the dark, fluorescent light bulbs, redrum, the coffee machine, the windows, and worst of all, ugly, hungry, 

failure. 

The darkness overcomes me. I stand a thousand ladder rungs away from anyone to hear me scream.  So I do not. Instead, I smile a wide, grateful smile, because finally,  

finally, 

I have found something worth watching over. 

---

Sam is a second-year undergraduate in the English program at the University of Alberta. He was born and raised in Red Deer, but spent several years living and working in Vancouver before moving to Edmonton to pursue his studies. He enjoys reading, running, playing guitar, and spending time with his family. At no point has he ever worked as a nighttime security guard.