You dig in deep

The library rules are simple: only one library patron down here at a time; said single patron can stay till closing, but a guard must be standing by.

Sweat slips down the back of your neck and you must regularly mop your brow on your sleeve. Dense atmosphere.

It does not take long before paranoia begins to distract you from the reading. Sounds creeping in and out of your awareness. An ancient furnace that groans aperiodically, flushing hot air up through ancient pipes, hard rattling. A sloshing noise — which you imagine must be a janitor doing the rounds. Sloshing, sloshing in the mop bucket, with a slosh, slosh, a drip, drip, drip. Someone, the guard perhaps, moving around behind you. Watching you, peering a little too intently, that thick presence looming just over your shoulder, spying on your reading. Always gone when you finally look.

Focus is difficult, and the time goes fast.

You must have ended up staying through a shift change, lost in study: when you get up to leave, there's a replacement guard, a tall, lanky Asian man with a curiously unwrinkled, smooth brow and flattened nose. This new guard stares with wet, yellowed eyes as he returns your card to you. When you look at it, walking back up the stairs, you are struck by the smudgey fingerprints he has left all over the hard plastic surface, like a fungal form of moss. You'll have to soak the card in rubbing alcohol when you get home.

1. You read it for hours
2. You see that creepy security guard outside of the library
3. You can't sleep that night from paranoia
4. You try to hitchike home
5. You wake up at night to see the guard staring into your bedroom window with a disturbing leer
6. Go back to the next day to study the Necromonicon some more

⤓ Dig in deep by the Sulty Shifters