The Reading Room

The flyer wasn’t flashy.

No bold fonts, no Instagram handle, no QR code. Just yellow paper, sun-faded and stapled crookedly to the community board outside the library. I almost didn’t see it.

But the word “book” always catches my eye.

I stood there longer than I meant to, rereading the lines.

THE READING ROOM

A book club for those who like to lose themselves in fiction.

Weekly meetings. No phones. No recordings.

Thursdays at 6 p.m.

Downstairs reading room, Eastern District Library.

New members welcome.

(We know you’ll find us.)

There were no tear-off tabs. Just that last line — casual, eerie, too confident.

I didn’t take a picture of it. I didn’t need to.

I remembered every word.

I’d only been in the city a month.

My sister and I moved here after the thing no one talks about. She called it a “fresh start,” like changing cities made everything before it evaporate. She worked weird hours at the hospital. I walked to school alone, ate dinner in silence, and read until my eyes burned.

Books didn’t ask questions. Books didn’t forget your birthday. Books didn’t fall asleep with the TV blaring.

So when I saw the flyer, I guess it felt like an invitation.

The Eastern District Library was a relic.

Concrete and red brick, long hallways with corners that turned too sharply, and a smell that sat somewhere between old paper and musty carpet. The front entrance was locked after 5 p.m., but a side door near the alley had been left ajar.

Inside, it was quiet. Too quiet. Like the kind of silence that pressed against your ears.

I found the stairwell easily. The flyer said “downstairs,” but there were no signs. Just a half-lit hallway, a thick door, and a brass plate that read READING ROOM in flaking paint.

I hesitated.

Then I pushed the door open.

The room was colder than the rest of the building.

Twelve mismatched chairs in a circle. One lamp in the corner. No table. No snacks. No welcome sign. No books.

A few people had already arrived — mostly adults, except for one girl around my age with dark braids and chipped black nail polish. She didn’t look up. None of them did. They were all staring at the center of the circle like they were waiting for something to materialize.

A man in a blazer — maybe mid-forties, neat beard, eyes too sharp — stood and smiled when he saw me.

“Nico,” he said. “Glad you made it.”

I froze.

“I… didn’t give my name.”

The man shrugged. “Of course you did. Just not out loud.”

He gestured to a seat.

I sat down.

They went around the circle, one by one.

Names, favorite authors. One woman said Shirley Jackson. Another, Lovecraft. The girl with the black nails said she didn’t read horror, but she liked books that felt haunted.

When it was my turn, I just said, “I like books where the setting’s the main character.”

Someone nodded.

Someone else whispered, “He’ll fit.”

Then the man in the blazer — who never gave his name — asked the question.

“What do you remember from last week’s book?”

People answered one by one. Descriptions. Fragments. A boy walking into a mirror. A dog that could talk, but only at night. A neighborhood that disappeared off all maps after a girl went missing.

But they weren’t describing the same story.

Each person gave a different version. Different plot. Different ending. Same title, though.

The Hollow Pages.

I kept quiet.

Eventually the man turned to me. “And what did you think, Nico?”

I blinked. “I didn’t read it. I just got the flyer this week.”

He smiled again. “Yes. That’s right.”

And then, somehow, they moved on. Like my answer had passed some invisible test.

He handed out next week’s title.

There were no books. Just a slip of paper with two words handwritten in red ink:

“Dead Language.”

No author. No publisher. No page count.

I slipped mine in my pocket and left without saying goodbye.

That night, I dreamed in words.

Not pictures. Words. Lines of text scrolling across the inside of my skull — some typed, some scrawled, some carved deep into wood. And over and over again, a whisper:

“If you read it, it remembers you.”

I didn’t try to find Dead Language.

There was no point. It wasn’t real. Not in any catalog, not in any database, not even in the dusty corners of secondhand forums. I searched every site I could think of and came up empty. But the slip of paper still sat in my pocket like a splinter I couldn’t dig out.

That night, something strange happened.

When I opened the book I was actually reading — House of Leaves, a battered old copy I’d already half-finished — it wasn’t the same.

The text had shifted.

It still looked like the same book. Same cover. Same worn corners and annotations in blue pen. But when I started reading, I found new paragraphs I hadn’t seen before. Lines that didn’t match the plot. A page in the middle printed entirely in another language — one I didn’t recognize.

Not a known language. Not Latin. Not Cyrillic. Not anything.

It looked like shapes carved into wet bark.

I blinked. Turned the page. The next one was blank.

I closed the book.

It whispered when I did. Just for a second.

At school the next day, people acted like I’d always been there.

Not just since I moved. Always.

A girl I didn’t know waved at me like we were friends. My name was listed on the cast sheet for a play I never auditioned for. One teacher asked how my brother was doing.

I don’t have a brother.

And then there was my locker. Number 412.

I swear it used to stick at the hinge — I had to jiggle it every time. But that day it opened smoothly, revealing a book inside I hadn’t put there.

Not just a book. Dead Language.

No title on the spine. No ISBN. No publishing details. Just a plain black cover and yellowed pages that crackled when I touched them.

Inside, the first line read:

This story is written by those who dream in words they’ve never learned.

The chapters weren’t really chapters. They were… entries. But not like a journal. More like transcriptions.

Descriptions of events that hadn’t happened. People I hadn’t met. Places I almost recognized.

And one passage — underlined in faint pencil — chilled me:

The new reader sees only what the story wants them to see. He thinks he is safe because he observes. But he was written in long before he arrived.

I closed the book and left it in my locker.

That night, it was beside my bed.

Thursday came.

I told myself I wasn’t going back.

I even walked past the library twice. But on the third pass, the door was open. Not just ajar — wide open. Like it was waiting for me.

Inside, the same too-quiet silence.

Downstairs, the circle of chairs.

Same people. Same lamp in the corner. Same girl with black nails, now reading a book that had no visible title.

The man in the blazer smiled when I entered.

“Welcome back, Nico.”

I didn’t remember giving him my name.

Again.

We didn’t discuss Dead Language.

Not directly.

Instead, they all spoke in metaphors.

One woman said it reminded her of that feeling when you wake up knowing you’ve forgotten something important. Another described it as a map with no landmarks, only roads. The girl with the black nails said it felt like a bruise on the inside of her head.

When it was my turn, I hesitated. Then said, “I think the book reads you.”

The man in the blazer nodded. “Exactly.”

Then he looked directly at me. “Would you like to write the next one?”

I didn’t say yes.

I didn’t say anything.

He handed me a slip of paper anyway.

This one was darker than before. As if the ink bled through from some other page.

The title: All of This Was Imagined.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next day, I found it again. In my backpack. Slipped between my notebooks. The first page written in my own handwriting.

But I hadn’t written it.

He steps into the library again, even though he said he wouldn’t. He tells himself it’s just a room. Just a group of readers. But the truth itches under his skin, already seeded. The reading room isn’t a place. It’s a threshold. And once you pass through... the story begins to write you back.

By the third meeting, I knew I couldn’t stop.

Even when I told myself I wouldn’t go — even when I left my backpack at home and deleted the calendar reminder I never set — I ended up there. Not like I was possessed. Just… like it was the only thing that made sense.

Like reading a book that already knew your favorite part.

The library wasn’t always the same.

One week the stairwell had sixteen steps. The next, twenty. The bulbs flickered at different intervals. The air smelled sometimes of ink, sometimes of something else — like soil, or old breath, or melted plastic.

The man in the blazer never aged, never blinked too much, never stumbled over his words.

Once, I tried to ask where he was from.

He just smiled and said, “I’m not from. I’m between.”

The story I was supposed to write — All of This Was Imagined — grew on its own.

Every time I opened my notebook, more lines were there. Pages I didn’t remember writing, but they were in my voice. My style. My turns of phrase. But darker.

Colder.

More certain.

It started as fiction. A boy joins a book club that slowly bends the world around him. But the names started matching real people. Real places. Real moments I hadn’t told anyone about — not even my sister.

It mentioned things I hadn’t lived. Yet.

And it always ended the same way:

He turns the final page and understands.

The story never needed a reader.

It needed a witness.

I tried to leave.

Halfway through a meeting, I stood up. Said I didn’t feel well. No one stopped me.

The man in the blazer said only, “Remember, stories don’t end when you close the book. They end when no one remembers the words.”

I didn’t sleep that night. My sister said I was pale. That my eyes looked... stretched. Like I’d been staring at something too long, too close.

I told her I was fine.

That was the last real conversation we had.

After that, she stopped asking questions.

We never spoke in school again.

The people who once nodded in the halls stopped seeing me. Like I’d shifted slightly out of sync with their vision. Like I was on a page they’d already turned.

Even the teachers called me the wrong name.

Once, in drama class, they called roll.

The teacher paused at my desk.

Looked down.

Said, “That seat’s not assigned this term.”

On the final night, I arrived early.

No one else was there yet. Just the circle of chairs and a new book sitting in the center.

It had no title.

When I picked it up, the cover was warm.

Inside: one page.

This is the part where you decide: do you finish the story — or do you become it?

Behind me, the door creaked open.

The others filed in one by one, silent now, eyes darker, like pages soaked in ink.

The girl with the black nails sat beside me and whispered, “I liked yours best.”

I wanted to ask what she meant. But I already knew.

The man in the blazer walked to the center and picked up the book I’d touched.

Held it like a newborn. Or a ritual.

Then looked at me.

“You did well, Nico,” he said softly. “Some stories wake things. Others replace things. Yours did both.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“No one ever does.”

He offered me the book.

I didn’t take it.

Instead, I said, “What happens if I leave?”

He smiled. Not kindly. Not cruelly.

“Then the story continues. Without your say.”

I didn’t take the book.

I turned and walked up the stairs.

The light burned brighter the higher I climbed, like someone was adjusting contrast behind my eyes.

I stepped out into a city I almost recognized.

The trees were too tall.

The buses had no windows.

The signs had no words.

Back home, everything looked the same — but not quite.

The fridge hummed in the wrong key. The photo on the shelf was of a different boy. My sister called me “Nathan.”

I said nothing.

I sat on my bed and opened my old copy of House of Leaves.

The margins were empty now. No annotations. No dog-eared corners.

And on the first page, printed in clear, perfect type:

Welcome back, Nico.

You’re in the reading room now.