Eli was twelve when it happened. He had always liked staying late in the library, long after the school corridors had emptied, and the world outside had begun to darken. He liked the quiet, and the library was a place where things waited to be discovered.

            Lately though, the silence reminded him too much of home, his grandmother's voice gone from the kitchen, her stories still filling the corners of his mind. Maybe that was why he kept coming back, to listen for something familiar in the silence between turning pages.

            That November evening, he had been working on a school project about folklore, local legends mostly, stories of rivers and bridges, of things that vanished and sometimes returned.

            Outside, the rain had turned to sleet, tapping the windows in uneven rhythms as it came in sideways, like someone drumming their fingertips on the glass. He didn't notice the time at first, until the clock struck seven, each chime echoing longer than it should have. Even the librarian had gone home long ago, leaving him locked inside, forgotten and alone.

            The library had always felt safe to Eli, a place where the silence had value, but tonight it weighed heavily on him. The towering shelves, which had always seemed welcoming, now stretched into shadowy aisles where the lights barely reached. The familiar smell of old paper and polished wood had become strangely cold, as though the warmth had quietly slipped away with everyone else.

            Realising he needed to find a way out and get home, he slid his notebook into his backpack and carefully stacked the books he had borrowed onto the trolley. The wheels squeaked softly as he pushed it aside. He pulled on his coat, zipped it to his chin, and headed towards the heavy front doors.

            He had almost reached them when he heard a faint sound. It wasn’t the sleet striking the windows, nor the creaking of the old building settling for the night, this was softer, like the sound of a page turning.

            Eli stopped and the sound came again, somewhere deep within the rows of shelves behind him, as though someone was reading in no hurry at all.

            "Hello?" he called, his voice swallowed by the endless books, but there was no answer. He frowned. Surely the librarian hadn't left someone else inside.

            He waited, but there was just silence. Then, just as he convinced himself it had been nothing more than the wind slipping through the old building, another sound drifted across the library.

            A quiet whisper, not words exactly, more like someone trying to remember them.

            The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and against his better judgement, Eli turned away from the exit and followed the sound into the deepest part of the library, where the oldest books were kept and almost no one ever went.