I work at the Night Library. Sometimes we get strange donations.
Channel: Scary Stories
Date: 29/11/2022

I work at the Night Library. Sometimes we get strange donations.

Hello again, everyone. I apologized at the beginning of the last post for taking so long to update and then took incrementally longer this time, so I’m sorry-*er* now. There’s been A Lot, capital A, capital Lot, going on lately, and while I will get to that at some point in the near future, it isn’t what today’s story is going to focus on.

When I said before that we’ll take anything anyone’s willing to donate to our abysmally slim excuse for a collection, I meant *anything.*

If you don’t remember that (and you probably don’t, considering that it’s been approximately one thousand years), it was back in our very first installment, which you can read [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/x87lru/i_work_at_the_night_library_we_operate_under_an/) if you have no idea who I am or what I’m talking about. If you *do* know both of these things but you aren’t sure if you’re totally caught up, [here's the most recent part of the saga](https://www.reddit.com/r/scarystories/comments/y6lnhg/i_work_at_the_night_library_installment_5_heres/).

Anyway, somebody brought in a totally customized (like, personalized to them—it made no sense to us) Cards Against Humanity deck recently and it started up a conversation about some of the most off the wall donations we’ve ever received, which reminded me of something that happened a while ago that I feel like is definitely worthy of a post. 

It was a Thursday night. The entire crew was working, which is rare, but happens every once in a while when we’ve been busy enough that we’ve all got something to do. I watched from my “office” as somebody struggled to open the front door, Jenny rushing out from behind the desk to help a second before the effort would’ve been wasted. She used her foot as a doorstop and ushered in a man who was precariously balancing a tall stack of large, cardboard boxes in his arms.

“—can just set them down right here on the desk,” I heard Jenny telling him as they drew nearer. “We sure appreciate it!”

The man eased the boxes down, straightening them to ensure that they wouldn’t fall, and literally tipped his literal hat before turning to leave.

“Donations?” I asked, poking my head around the corner.

“Yup,” Jenny confirmed, popping her gum. “Wanna help me take ‘em to Alice?”

I obliged, hoisting a couple of the boxes off the counter and following Jenny’s lead back toward the unmistakable sound of Alice’s nails clicking against her keyboard.

“Presents,” Jenny announced, dropping her boxes with a *thunk* and leaning back against the wall, arms crossed over her chest. “Can we get a live unpackaging?”

“Thank you,” Alice said, accepting my boxes and placing them to her other side. Then, to Jenny, “Sure, but it’ll probably be boring. They’re heavy. Bet they’re textbooks or something.”

This is the part in the movie where the narrator cuts in and is like, *“They were* not, *in fact, textbooks.”* I wish a real-time narrator could’ve cut in right then and told *us* that, but apparently that’s not how life works, so. We opened them.

The first one, in all fairness, was unassuming. It was full of books on astrology, dreams, tarot reading, etcetera, etcetera. Very new-age mysticism, which is popular enough that even with a collection as limited as ours we have a small section for it. After that, though, shit got weird.

The next box also contained books, but they had no jackets and no titles, just identical leather binding.

“What the hell?” Jenny said, leaning over Alice to pick one up. When she flipped it open, we were met with a cover page filled with someone’s messy, inked scrawl. 

At first, I thought I couldn’t decipher it just because the handwriting was such a wreck, but I quickly realized that, while they might resemble familiar letters, the markings on the page didn’t belong anywhere in the English alphabet. I scanned the entire page, eyes looking to zero in on something they could make sense of, and just when I was about to call it quits, I landed on the very last line.

*“By my mind and by my spirit,”* I read aloud. “The fuck is this?”

Jenny snatched another book from the box and flipped back the cover to reveal a remarkably similar display to that of the one I held. Not identical—the penmanship didn’t match perfectly and a slightly smaller expanse of the page was taken up—but it was covered in the same symbols and ended in the same sign-off.

“How many of them are there?” 

Alice sifted through them and then, after a moment, reported, “Seven, including those two.”

Upon closer inspection, we discovered that, while several of the tomes had what looked to be a few pages torn out in the front, they were mostly undisturbed. There was no writing or marking of any kind past the flyleaf. Reluctantly, given that there wasn’t much else to explore without the ability to understand the glyphs, we set that box aside and moved on to the next.

At first glance, it looked to be filled with