September 24 – 11:00 PM CDT

The library’s oldest wing didn’t even show up on the online map. Darius only found it because he needed silence—real silence—not the buzzing fluorescents and TikTok whispers of the modern student lounge. He found the stairs behind a book return cart marked DO NOT MOVE, and followed them down to where the stone walls still bore soot from the coal furnace days.

The door had no lock, just a heavy brass knob cold to the touch.

Down there, the air had a different density—thick with mildew and old paper. The stacks were arranged like a maze, the shelves crammed with books in colors no modern printer would dare replicate: sickly greens, jaundiced yellows, bloated reds. He passed alcoves lined with cracked leaded glass, and then saw the row of study carrels.

There were eight. Seven had chairs. One didn’t.

The eighth carrel had no dust on it. The seat had been neatly tucked in. A brass placard above it read RESERVED. Beneath it, carved directly into the oak desktop in a faded, jittery script:

DARIUS M. GALLAGHER

He stepped back so hard he knocked over a chair behind him.

He hadn’t told anyone his middle name.

He hadn’t told anyone he was looking for a place to study alone.

And he sure as hell hadn’t been down here before.

But something about the desk tugged at him. Not with fear—at first—but familiarity, like déjà vu. Like finding an old backpack in the back of a closet and instinctively reaching into the pocket where you kept your calculator.

So, he sat.

That night, he studied Macroeconomics: Crisis and Recovery, a class he’d been failing. He opened to Chapter 11—barely glanced at it—blinked once, and then recited the page aloud.

Word for word.

By memory.

He kept coming back.

It became an addiction. One chapter became three. Three chapters became entire textbooks. He stopped using flashcards. He started sleeping less, eating less. It didn’t matter. Everything he read stuck. He could see paragraphs in his mind’s eye. When his classmates struggled over multiple choice questions, Darius could feel the weight of the correct answer.

But the more he used the carrel, the more things began to… slant.

He woke up once with his hand bleeding, his palm pressed against the carved name as if in reverence. He remembered none of it.

Another night, he glanced up at the far wall and saw it breathing. Slowly. Like a sleeping animal. When he blinked, it was stone again.

Then there were the whispers.

At first, they came from the vents.

Then, from the shelves.

Finally, they came from under the desk.

One night, he leaned down and saw scratch marks under the seat—hundreds of them, like tally marks. But not in any recognizable pattern. They resembled runes. Symbols. Equations. And at the center, carved in the deepest groove:

“THE MIND IS A MAP. WE ARE THE CARTOGRAPHERS.”

That’s when he knew he had to stop. But stopping proved harder than starting.

He tried studying elsewhere—his dorm, a café, even the church basement across from campus. But he couldn’t focus. The words swam. Concepts slid away. His mind had become… dependent.

Worse, the world outside the carrel began changing. People spoke in loops. His professors’ eyes glinted with something metallic under the fluorescents. His TA said, “You’re making excellent progress, Darius. But you left something unfinished.” When he asked what, she blinked slowly and said, “The desk is still hungry.”

Then he remembered a lecture from early in the semester—a guest speaker from the university archives. She’d spoken about primary sources—how everything started with the first text. “You can’t kill a myth,” she’d said, “but you can strangle the first lie.”

He went back to the old wing.

This time, he brought bolt cutters.

In the restricted area—Special Collections, behind a cage of brittle iron bars—he found it. A single manuscript bound in brown leather with the same rune carved on its spine as the one under the desk. It had no title.

Inside were pages and pages of ink-scrawled text… written in his own handwriting.

None of it made sense. Words overlapped. Letters twisted into symbols. Every page ended the same way:

“The mind is a map. We are the cartographers.”

He doused it in rubbing alcohol from the library’s first aid kit. It burned quietly. No alarms.

When he returned to the carrel, it was gone. The desk. The nameplate. The whole alcove. In its place: just a blank stone wall.

The next night, Darius took his exam.

He passed.

Just barely.

Now, sometimes, when he closes his eyes to sleep, he still sees the paragraph formations—like ants crawling across a blank page. He wonders if the desk ever really existed, or if he just found a way to access something older.

But every now and then, in the library’s new wing, he notices someone studying a little too hard. Memorizing too quickly. And when he hears a whisper from under the desk, he doesn’t lean down.

He just walks away.