It began with a single misplaced book, its spine bent awkwardly between volumes that had nothing to do with its subject matter. The librarian, Clara Winthrop, couldn’t ignore it; the book didn’t belong in the History section, nor anywhere on the fourth floor. She plucked it free—a tattered, unremarkable thing—and opened to the first page. Scrawled in the margins were notes, frantic and looping, that seemed to shift under her gaze. "Do not file this where it belongs," one read. Another, near a coffee stain, said, "It starts in the silence of closing time." Her hands trembled. She wasn’t sure why she flipped to the last page, but when she did, she found her own name written there, followed by the exact time on the clock behind her.

Clara opens the book, reading the starting line.

"you wanna be one of them? yeah."

Her brow furrowed as she read the opening line: "You wanna be one of them? Yeah?" She flipped back to the front, thinking maybe she'd missed a foreword or prologue, but there was nothing—just that peculiar question on the first page. It tickled something in her memory, some song she’d heard in passing, and her confusion deepened. Why was a book starting with lyrics from Kid Cudi’s Mr. Rager? And why did it feel like the book was asking her, personally?

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Clara flipped to the next page, heart thumping louder than she cared to admit. *"I think I've seen this film before,"* it read in tidy serif print. She blinked, her pulse stuttering. That line wasn’t a lyric—was it? She couldn't place it, but it stirred the same eerie familiarity as the first. Suddenly, her own monotony felt suffocating, like she was trapped in a loop of dusty book spines and her endless playlists, her life dissolving into snippets of songs she’d once loved.

She turned the page again. *"Now I'm in exile, seeing you out."*

Her breath hitched. This time she knew. Taylor Swift. The words leapt off the paper, bleeding into her mind like a long-forgotten thought, tangled with the melancholy melody she could now hear as though it were playing through the library’s intercom. She dropped the book, her chair scraping the floor as she stumbled back. The walls around her seemed to warp, shifting into shadowy voids stitched together by lyrics and lines, half-remembered and all too familiar.

Was she imagining it? Or had she wasted so much time burying herself in other people’s words that her own mind had started to crack? It felt as though the book was consuming her, swallowing her whole for the crime of being too still, too quiet, too unremarkable. The life she’d tried to escape through music and novels was suddenly staring back at her, alive and unforgiving.

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Clara backed away from the book as if it had snapped at her fingers, her breath shallow and uneven. The library, normally her sanctuary, suddenly felt alien. The hum of fluorescent lights buzzed louder, like a swarm of insects burrowing into her ears. Every creak of the old wooden shelves echoed unnaturally, mocking her with the sound of a world just slightly out of tune.

She tried to shake the feeling, forcing herself to focus. "You're overthinking," she whispered, a mantra she’d repeated countless times when her imagination threatened to spiral. But as her gaze flicked back to the book lying open on the desk, she realized the page had turned on its own.

*“Is it me? Am I the problem?”*

The words stared back at her, innocuous yet intimate, as though the book had plucked the question straight from her own thoughts. Clara clutched the edge of the desk to steady herself. That line wasn’t from a song, was it? She couldn’t tell anymore. Everything was blending together—her music, the novels she devoured, the dialogue she replayed in her head during sleepless nights.

She snatched the book, meaning to slam it shut, but her hands betrayed her. Instead, her fingers flipped through the pages with feverish urgency. Line after line leapt out at her:

*"I'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a line in a song."*

*"Help, I have done it again."*

*"Where do you go when you're lonely?"*

*"If you could see me now, you’d hate what I’ve become."*

The words weren’t just lyrics—they were confessions, echoes of her own quiet despair. They followed her as she staggered to the nearest bookshelf, hoping for an anchor in something solid, something real. But the books surrounding her seemed to tremble, their spines stretching and warping as if they, too, had begun to sing.

The library grew colder, the air charged with a static hum. Clara’s vision blurred, and for a moment, she swore she saw figures flickering between the shelves, shadowy and indistinct. One figure paused, staring directly at her, its lips moving silently. She couldn’t hear the words, but she knew they were for her.

Fleeing felt futile, but Clara bolted anyway, her shoes pounding against the carpet as the walls seemed to close in around her. The music followed, every lyric she'd ever loved or lost herself in echoing in her ears, relentless and accusatory.

*“You wanna be one of them? Yeah?”*

The first line she’d read returned, mocking her, taunting her. She clamped her hands over her ears, trying to drown it out, but the words weren’t coming from the library anymore. They were inside her head, growing louder with each step she took.

Clara stumbled into the break room and slammed the door shut, her chest heaving. The silence was deafening, but it didn’t last. The radio on the counter clicked on by itself, its dial spinning as static gave way to the familiar, haunting chords of *Mr. Rager*.

She didn’t remember turning the radio on. She didn’t remember anything but the book. And now, it felt as if the book remembered her.

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Clara huddled in the corner of the break room, knees drawn to her chest, as the radio hissed and crackled. The familiar chords faded, replaced by silence so oppressive it made her ears ring. She wanted to scream, to tear herself free from whatever was happening, but the air seemed to press against her throat, heavy and unmoving.

Then, softly, the next song began. Her stomach dropped.

*"All this time..."*

The voice was slow and deliberate, its tone tinged with something far colder than nostalgia. It wasn’t just a song anymore; it felt personal, directed, a lullaby meant to unthread her sanity.

*"I never learned to read your mind (never learned to read my mind)."*

The walls around her shimmered like heat waves, the paint peeling away to reveal layers of text—pages and pages of lyrics and phrases, crawling like veins across the room. Her name appeared, over and over again, buried within the lines as though the library itself had cataloged her soul.

*"I couldn't turn things around (you never turned things around)."*

A shadow passed in front of her, indistinct and shifting, but its presence was suffocating. Clara’s breath hitched as it knelt before her, its face obscured, its lips moving in perfect sync with the words pouring from the radio.

*"’Cause you never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs)."*

The shadow stopped singing, its head tilting as if waiting for her to respond. The room dimmed further, the text on the walls now pulsating faintly, like a heartbeat. Clara wanted to speak, to plead, to apologize, but the words wouldn’t come.

Instead, the figure reached out, its hand hovering just inches from her face, and whispered the final line in a voice that sounded like hers and not hers all at once:

*"I gave so many signs."*

And then everything went black.

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A few days later, the library stood eerily quiet beneath a gray sky, the kind of overcast that promised rain but withheld it. By evening, flames erupted from the building, licking at the walls and pouring thick black smoke into the night. The fire consumed everything—shelves, books, desks—all reduced to ash before the fire department could arrive.

Among the ruins, they found Clara Winthrop. She was curled in the same corner of the break room, her body untouched by the fire’s rage yet lifeless, as though she had simply chosen to lie down and fade away. No accelerants were found, no sign of how the fire had started. The security cameras showed nothing but empty halls before the flames appeared.

The official report would label it an accident—an electrical fault, they’d say. But the whispers spread. Staff recalled how Clara had seemed distant in her final days, how her eyes darted to empty spaces as though someone—or something—was there.

And then there were the survivors who swore they could still hear faint whispers in the air when they passed the charred ruins, the ghost of a melody entwined with crackling static:

*"All this time, I never learned to read your mind... I gave so many signs."*

No one dared to rebuild on the site. It became a scar in the town, a hushed reminder of Clara Winthrop and the haunting silence she left behind.