Someone Is Adding Last Pages to Books After We Close

The returned copy had 214.

Page 214 matched the brittle paper, faded ink, and typeface perfectly. It was not part of the original story. Instead, it described a woman named Ruth Dallow placing the novel in our overnight return slot.

Ruth Dallow was the patron who had borrowed it.

The page ended with a sentence about what she did next.

Ruth crossed the empty street without looking up and followed the man carrying her face.

I checked the return camera. At 11:43 p.m., Ruth dropped the book into the slot. She paused on the sidewalk and looked across the street.

A figure stood beneath the bus shelter. The camera could not resolve its features, but it wore Ruth's coat and held its head at her exact angle.

Ruth crossed toward it.

Neither appeared on the next camera.

She was reported missing the following morning.

My supervisor, June, said the page must be a prank added by the borrower. I showed her how the paper was sewn into the original signature. Adding it would have required dismantling and rebinding the entire book with thread manufactured before the war.

June removed page 214 with a scalpel.

Every book in the conservation room opened at once.

Pages fluttered as if a storm had entered the sealed basement. The removed sheet curled on the table, and new text appeared beneath Ruth's final sentence.

THE ENDING HAS BEEN MISFILED.

June locked The Unlit Hall in the rare-book vault.

The next return arrived before midnight.

A children's adventure had gained three pages. They described its twelve-year-old borrower, Milo Kern, waking to find a trapdoor beneath his bed. The illustrations showed him descending into shelves that stretched underground. In the last picture, librarians with blank faces stamped a due date across his forehead.

We called Milo's parents.

His mother laughed nervously and said he was asleep upstairs. While she spoke, we heard a wooden door creak through the phone. Milo shouted from far below her, “I found the rest of the library.”

The call disconnected.

His account vanished from our catalog.

The book remained checked out to PATRON NOT FOUND.

By dawn, thirty-seven returned books had new endings.

A gardening guide described its borrower being rooted beneath his greenhouse. A cookbook ended with a family setting an extra place for someone who lived inside the oven light. A travel memoir added a map of a city whose streets spelled the reader's name.

Each ending came true only after someone read the final sentence aloud.

We discovered that because June stopped midway through one.

The book belonged to her. It was a collection of essays she had borrowed during college and returned twenty years ago. A fresh page described her standing in conservation beside me while the overhead lights filled with moths.

June read until the last line, then covered the words with her hand.

The lights above us began buzzing. Wings struck the plastic panels from inside.

She refused to finish.

The moths remained trapped.

The ending waited.

We closed the library and pulled the circulation database offline. It continued updating on dead terminals. Patron names changed into titles. Call numbers appeared beside home addresses. Due dates became years of death.

My entry read:

VALE, ELIAS

A LIFE IN MARGINS

STATUS: PROCESSING

We searched the closed stacks for anything connected to the new pages. The catalog directed us to Subbasement 2, although the library had only one basement.

Behind a shelf of city directories, we found an elevator door. Its floor indicator displayed page numbers instead of levels.

213.

214.

215.

The numbers climbed whenever a return entered the slot upstairs.

The elevator opened at page 219.

Beyond it was another library.

Its shelves were made from dark wood swollen with damp. Books stood spine-out from floor to ceiling. Every spine carried a person's name. Some were ancient and cracked. Others looked freshly bound.

Whispers filled the room.

The books were reading themselves.

We heard Ruth Dallow begging someone not to turn the page. We heard Milo calling from between shelves. Thousands of voices recited their final sentences in different languages, always stopping just before the last word.

At the circulation desk sat a librarian without a face.

Its skin was smooth except for a narrow slot where a mouth should have been. It stamped a blank card and slid it toward us.

BORROWERS ARE STORIES REMOVED FROM THE COLLECTION.

ALL STORIES MUST BE RETURNED COMPLETE.

June asked who was writing the endings.

Every book turned toward us.

The faceless librarian pointed to the ceiling.

There was no ceiling. Above the shelves, enormous fingers held the building open like a book. Something beyond the darkness was reading down at us. Its eyes moved left to right, aisle by aisle.

Each time it blinked, another shelf vanished.

June's essay collection appeared on the desk.

The moths in our conservation lights began screaming through the elevator speaker. Her unfinished final page lifted from the book and hovered before her.

The last sentence was visible now.

June finishes reading, and every wing remembers it was once a mouth.

She kept silent.

The faceless librarian reached across the desk and opened a slot in June's throat.

Her voice spoke without her consent.

“Out loud.”

The elevator doors closed between us.

I heard the final sentence through the seam.

Upstairs, the lights burst. Thousands of moths poured into the conservation room, each whispering in June's voice. She was gone when I returned.

Her employee file had become a first edition displayed in the lobby. Visitors admired the binding. None remembered the woman.

I tried burning the extra pages. The flames formed letters. I soaked them in water. The ink swam into new sentences. I shredded them, and each strip became a bookmark inside another patron's life.

The endings cannot be destroyed.

Only interrupted.

I have spent the night blacking out final lines before anyone can read them. The unseen reader above the stacks is growing impatient. Shelves in the ordinary library now extend through walls. Staff arrive for work, walk between them, and do not return.

A new book appeared on my desk an hour ago.

Its cover bears the title of this account. The author is listed as whoever is reading it now.

Most of the pages are blank, but words appear as I type. The last page already contains a final sentence. I covered it without reading.

Something keeps turning the book toward me.

The overnight return slot is opening and closing like a mouth. June's moths gather around the monitor, tapping out one word against the glass.

FINISH.

If a library book has more pages than the catalog says, return it without opening the cover. Do not read handwritten endings. Do not say the final line aloud.

A story cannot take you until it knows where you stop.

This one is still deciding.