The Library That Erases You

Story

The Library That Erases You

I first heard the rumor late one night in the dorms. My roommate, Mara, leaned across her desk with a conspiratorial smirk, whispering as though the walls themselves might be listening.

“They say there’s a library under this university,” she began. “A hidden one, older than the school itself. But it’s not filled with history or secrets—well, not the kind you’d think. Every book has a name on it. A person’s name. Open one, read it… and that person disappears. Not just their body. Everything.”

I laughed nervously. “What, like magic erasing them?”

Mara’s smile didn’t fade. “Exactly. Like they never existed at all.”

I should’ve shrugged it off as an urban legend, the kind of nonsense bored students pass around to spice up late nights. But curiosity is a disease of its own. Once I heard about the place, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The Descent

It was two weeks later when I stumbled across the entrance by accident.

Our campus library was ancient, with staircases that led to nowhere and locked doors that hadn’t been opened in decades. I was pulling an all-nighter for finals when I dropped my pen. It rolled across the floor and disappeared beneath a shelf. When I crouched to retrieve it, my hand brushed against something metal.

A latch.

My pulse jumped. I tugged, and the shelf swung forward silently, revealing a spiral staircase descending into darkness.

Logic screamed at me to close it and walk away. But I grabbed my phone for a flashlight and went down.

The air grew colder with each step. My breath clouded in front of me. At the bottom, I found myself in a stone chamber, lined wall to wall with shelves. And on those shelves—books. Thousands of them.

Every single spine bore a name.

I walked down the nearest aisle. Amanda Foster. Jordan Kim. Luis Ramirez. Some I didn’t recognize, others I knew from campus. My stomach knotted tighter with each step.

This wasn’t a joke. This wasn’t some prank.

The First Test

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe to prove it was fake, maybe because some morbid part of me needed to know. But my fingers paused on a name I vaguely recognized: Professor Leonard Hayes. The man taught literature, old, stern, forgettable.

I opened the book.

The pages weren’t words but details—like a diary of his existence. Childhood memories, his first love, his lectures, every mundane moment. The more I read, the heavier my chest felt, like the book itself was draining me.

When I finally slammed it shut, I ran upstairs, desperate to breathe fresh air again.

Except—Professor Hayes wasn’t in his office the next morning. Or anywhere. His name was gone from the faculty directory. The students in class blinked at me in confusion when I asked. “Who?” they said. “We’ve never had a Professor Hayes here.”

I tore through my notes, my emails, even old course catalogs. Nothing. He was erased.

And yet—I remembered him.

Only me.

Obsession

Days blurred into nights. I couldn’t focus on school, on friends, on anything but that library. I returned again and again, each time swearing I wouldn’t open another book. And each time, I did.

A bully who tormented Mara in high school. Gone.

A corrupt dean rumored to embezzle funds. Gone.

An ex I still resented. Gone.

Each disappearance left me both horrified and exhilarated. The world bent around the absence as if the person had never existed. Pictures deleted themselves. Documents rewrote. Memories collapsed.

Except mine.

I was the last thread connecting them to reality.

The Final Discovery

It was late—maybe 3 a.m.—when I wandered deeper into the library than ever before. My flashlight beam landed on a familiar set of letters, neat and sharp across the spine.

My waseem khan

The book felt colder than the rest. Heavier.

I didn’t want to open it. I told myself to leave, to lock the shelf, to never return. But curiosity doesn’t care about survival. With trembling fingers, I cracked it open.

The pages unfolded my life—my childhood home, my first day at university, Mara’s whispered story. It was all there, like the book had been waiting for me.

Then I reached the last page. Blank.

I heard a sound—a shuffle of footsteps behind me. I turned, but the library was empty. My pulse thundered in my ears. I looked back down at the page.

Slowly, words began to appear.

"She opens the book, and the story ends."

The letters bled darker, like ink pressed fresh onto paper. My vision blurred, my hands trembled, and the world around me began to fade—books, shelves, air itself collapsing into silence.

And then, nothing.