My name is Megan Cowen and I am a librarian, though not the kind that silently judges you for your late returns and shushes you when you speak above a whisper. I am an archivist librarian. I’ve made my mark in the world of Library Sciences by helping wealthy collectors to catalog and organize their vast collections.

Recently I was hired by an estate lawyer to prepare a private collection for potential sale. My job was to create a catalog of all the works and organize them so that an appraiser could then come in and value each of the items.

I drove up to a rural town in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago to begin the work. The large mansion with its red brick facade and slate roof was a bit intimidating. It’s been a strange fall with rains starting much earlier in the year than normal, so it was quite gloomy when I finally pulled up the long drive. I remember thinking I was glad that I was staying at a bed and breakfast in the nearby town instead of that dreary place.

I often become absorbed in my work and that’s how things went for the first week. The collection was a mess. There was a room designated as a library, but books could be found throughout the house set on shelves, stacked on tables, and even tucked up in chair cushions. In addition to the visible books, I also found cartons of books stacked in the backs of wardrobes and in closets.

This is how I came across the cardboard bankers boxes containing a collection of what appeared to be typed transcripts of recordings. Each page has “The Magnus Archive” listed as the source in the footer. Since they were loose sheets I needed to go through each folder to make sure that everything was cataloged. I read through the first few and I thought maybe it was some unpublished manuscript. The stories in the transcript seemed too bizarre to be real.

Still, the more I read the more I felt like there was something going on beneath the surface. After reading through several I started to get the feeling that these was not a disparate collection of short stories. It felt like all these stories were standing in a crowded train carriage, rubbing shoulders and occasionally bumping into each other.

The whole thing is a mess. The transcripts are numbered but they don’t seem to follow any sensible order as to time or place. It’s terribly disorganized and the librarian in me somehow cannot let that stand. I’m taking it upon myself to create a compendium from these statements in hopes that I can reveal the structure underneath. This is not part of my assignment, but I feel compelled to do this work, to make something that feels unseen into something known.

I still have my archival work to do so I will have to work through the transcripts in my free time. I do feel it would be professional for me to remove them from the premises, but other than a few workers, there’s hardly ever anyone here so I don’t think anyone will notice if I spend a few hours working in the evenings. I guess I’ll be spending more time in this spooky old house.