Echoes of Time

A loud crash jolts Emily out of her slumber. Her foggy sleep-addled brain takes in her surroundings in confusion. Her physics textbook lay open on the desk in front of her, with a pool of drool where she had fallen asleep. Her cubicle against the back wall of the university library is dark; the fluorescent light panel above her is burnt out and the next closest light several feet in front is flickering ominously as if it is about to burn out as well.

Before she had succumbed to sleep, the sunlight had streamed in through the windows along the walls adjacent to her desk. Now through the window, she sees only a tiny sliver of a moon high in the pitch-black night sky. 

A deafening bang echoes a second time through the dim library. This time she jolts out of her chair in surprise, nearly knocking it over. She stumbles out of her cubicle and looks across the long room to see the rows of long, wooden tables stretching to the library entrance are all empty. Even the reception desk at the front holds only a small lamp casting a pale, yellow light on the empty chair. There is no one else here.

A third bang sounds to her right towards the rows of bookshelves. She is still disoriented from the abrupt wakeup, but that doesn’t explain why she is walking straight towards the noise. Something doesn’t feel right and she surely should be getting out of this place, but she feels drawn towards it like a moth to flame. 

She passes rows of books deeper into the library and the banging sound continues to echo down the halls toward her. She notices vaguely that the sounds are at regular intervals; approximately every 10 seconds. 

Another bang sounds, closer now as she feels the floor shake below her feet and a shiver runs up her spine. The next bang cuts off abruptly and the library cascades into an eerie silence. The bookshelves around her are all jammed full of old textbooks and lined with a thick layer of dust, except one small section at the bottom of the shelf was entirely free of books and dust, as if it had been cleaned recently. There is a tiny latch in the corner of the shelf that glows a brilliant white in the dark of the hall. She flips it open without a thought and that section of the bookshelf springs off the wall, revealing a small door. 

She hesitates for a moment - this must be dangerous. She has always been a curious person; driven to knowledge and truth. She is in her final year towards obtaining her undergraduate physics degree and she knows already she won’t be satisfied until she has achieved her masters as well. She consistently works long nights in the library; well past when most other students have gone to sleep, or more likely to the local pub across the street. 

She considers all the rumors she’s heard about the library in the past that she had disregarded. She’s a science major after all - she only believes in things that logically make sense. All the whispered tales of strange occurrences seem only like stories told to scare the young, naive first-year students. Her roommate, Chloe, is the superstitious type, and each year tells anyone who will listen, tales about students hearing suspicious noises and even screams late at night. Emily has never believed her - she assumed Chloe just did it to entice fearful first-year students to clear out of her favorite study spaces. Although come to think of it she had never seen Chloe stay in the library late into the night. But Chloe, like her, just scoffs at the more far-fetched stories of magic or ghosts that the more gullible students like to spread.

She knows she’ll never be able to concentrate again while studying here unless she learns the mystery of the banging noises and the strange door. Surely there is a logical, scientific reason behind the noises.

The door is barely 4 feet tall and opens with a loud screech as the bottom of the door drags against the concrete. She has to crouch to pass through the narrow passage. Ahead of her is a small, sparsely furnished room. There is a small metal desk shoved against the wall with a wooden stool that lays on the floor on its side. A simple white clock is fixed against the wall above the desk. Most notably there is writing etched into the wall opposite her in red ink which reads “Turn Around.” There is something familiar about the words. 

Emily trembles as a jolt of fear runs through her. She spins around ready to race out of the room when she feels a gust of wind blow through the room and the door slams shut. She paws anxiously at the outline of the door, but there is no knob or any kind of indent to push it back open. 

“Help!!” She screams and pounds her fists against the door frame. No one comes. The library had been empty when she woke up. She may just have to wait till morning when the library fills again with students. Someone would hear her eventually. 

In frustration, she pounds the door with one last fierce strike and pain shoots up through her knuckles where they connected with the harsh concrete. She looks down to see that she has bashed the skin off in her frenzied call for help. The floor below where she stands catches her eye - there is blood on the floor. She inspects her knuckles again but they are not bleeding. Wait … the blood on the floor looks dry. Was that someone else’s blood? The dark red splotches are sporadically scattered in a dripping pattern as if someone else had been roughly trying to escape this room. 

With more than a little trepidation she turns to examine the rest of the room. There had been very little light in the hall outside, but the frame of the door glows a brilliant white, similar to the latch outside the room, casting just enough light into the room to see her surroundings. The room is barely tall enough for her to stand in at her modest height, and if she extends her arms she’d just be able to reach either wall with her fingertips. 

The clock on the wall reads 11:50 but the second hand is stuck. The battery had likely died at some point and she couldn’t be sure of the time. 

She had also missed a few small other details of the room in her initial search: a red pen atop the desk and a scrap of crumpled paper on the floor. She steps around the stool to examine the desk. Under the red pen is a series of short, vertical red lines on the desktop. She scans the lines, unsure what they mean, and counts 32. 

As she steps forward to examine the lines more closely, her shoe lands on something small and solid. She bends over and picks up a tube of lip chap that was hiding in the shadows just under the desk. That’s strange - she has the same lip chap. She reaches into her pocket where she usually keeps it but there is nothing there. She must have dropped it while she was pounding on the door.

She turns to look at the table. Wait a second … that looks like her pen. But that couldn’t be, she didn’t bring it in here with her. Sure enough, the cap is bitten just as she does when she gets stressed out while studying. That has to be a coincidence. 

Then her eyes are drawn again to the scratchy, ominous message on the opposite wall and recognition hits her: that is her writing. She starts to tremble as fear and confusion rock through her body. There is no denying it now - she has been here before. But why couldn’t she remember? There must be some explanation. 

Normally her mind can come up with some logical explanation for any mysterious phenomena. Those ghost stories her grandma used to tell her always had some greater reason: the noises in the attic were due to a problematic, pesky mouse; the picture book that was in the wrong place was just due to her grandpa's poor memory. There is always an explanation. Her mind whirs but comes up empty. 

She again spies the marks on the desk. They look like a sort of tally. Questions flood her mind. Had she made those marks? She had clearly been here before but when? How many times? When did she bring the pen in here? On a whim, she marks one more line next to the existing series of lines bringing the count up to 33.

Then she sees the ball of paper on the floor and nearly pounces on it in her desperate hope for enlightenment. It reads only “Break the Loop” in tightly scrawled cursive. What loop? This is not her handwriting so she hasn’t been the only one in this room. That gives her a momentary glimmer of hope, as somehow this other person had been able to escape. Somehow, she would be able to get out of this. 

She paces the room for what feels like hours unable to decipher the meaning of all this. It must be getting close to morning. The motionless clock seems to mock her with its never ending moment in time. Surely students would start to fill the library shortly and she could escape. She could think it all over from the comfort of her room. 

Her thoughts are interrupted by a deafening bang sound that reverberates throughout the tiny room, causing the desk to shake and the pen to roll to the floor. The glowing light around the door frame flickers twice then goes out; the room descends into stifling blackness. 

Suddenly she feels like she is hyperventilating; her skin feels warm and clammy. The room feels like it is spinning; although it is hard to tell in the darkness. Another loud bang echoes around the room, this time causing her to fall to the floor. A loud buzzing fills her head and her breath continues to come in quick gasps. She feels herself slowly losing consciousness. 

***

Emily wakes with a start to a loud crash. She sleepily takes in the dark room around her and the physics textbook lying open on the desk in front of her. She has fallen asleep in the library. But what was that loud crashing noise? She looks around the dark room in confusion.

Bang! She glances down at her phone next to her elbow before getting to her feet to go investigate. It reads 11:50 PM.