Haunted Chaos: Side Stories

The Silent Stacks

The transition from cozy shopkeepers to cold-weather hunters was fast and economical, a psychological shift as immediate as flipping a safety switch. Alastor drove their beat-up, dark-blue service van—which they affectionately called the ‘Hearse’—a battered but reliable vehicle whose old frame was not just reinforced but discreetly lined with copper wiring and protective sigils of warding, granting them a crucial degree of stealth from ethereal entities. The van's tires were custom-made to absorb sound, and the suspension was tuned less for comfort and more for handling the sudden, sharp gravitational anomalies that often preceded a major manifestation. Letta sat in the passenger seat, already suited up in practical, reinforced canvas clothing, running a final systems check on the handheld thermal scanner and adjusting the small, obsidian-tipped darts holstered at her hip. She tested the voice activation on her communication earpiece. The atmosphere in the cabin was sharp, focused, and free of the usual familial distraction; the only sound was the distant whine of a police siren, a normal world sound that never quite reached their reality, existing on a completely separate vibrational plane that they were quickly leaving behind.

“You think our bratty kids will be alright back at the shop?” Alastor asked, keeping his voice low, his attention split between the road and the metaphysical currents. His eyes constantly scanned the city streets not just for traffic, but for unusual energy spikes visible only to him—flickering auras that look like heat haze on a cold night, unnatural distortions in the light that make signs ripple, and sudden pockets of unnatural cold that mark a Specter's hunting path. He was already bracing for the feeling of the library.

Letta secured her dark hair in a tight braid, the motion purely mechanical as she prepared for physical action. “They’ll be fine. Nicole has the comms and perimeter wards locked down—she’s built those shields tighter than a drum, programmed to isolate any low-level spectral drift immediately, and she knows the emergency codes for the Class 3 items. And Lexie has the ‘Unsold Junk’ inventory memorized; she knows exactly which relics are volatile and how to calm them down with her voice alone—she’s got her mother’s touch for stabilizing unstable power sources. If anything tries to manifest inside Witches - Lost & Found tonight, those girls will have it bound in iron chain and passive-aggressive notes before we even hit the library steps. They’ve been training for this kind of high-risk babysitting since they were ten, and frankly, I trust Lexie to defend the store against an unleashed Fae more than I trust her to pay her phone bill.”

She pulled the tarnished brass locket from her bag, holding it up so the dashboard light caught it. It was now glowing with an intense, sickly yellow light, pulsed with the speed of a panicked heart. “The Relic of Binding is hot. Critically hot. Which means the Specter is fully fueled. Babe, talk me through the target again: Specter of Manifestation, sourced from late fines and forgotten manuscripts? Give me the profile and the expected chaos level.”

“Of course, love,” he replied, navigating a tight corner with ease, taking care to avoid any mundane headlights. “We don’t fight a physical monster like a cutesy werewolf or a pale-faced night-snack enthusiast vamp; we fight an idea made corporeal. It manifests from raw, high-intensity emotion—in this case, the crushing weight of academic failure, the deep regret of an unread author, and the generalized anxiety of a public budget. The Lincoln Library is filled with centuries of these suppressed emotional threads. It’s not just late fines; it’s the guilt of the student who dropped out, the jealousy of the researcher scooped by a rival, the despair of the local historian whose life work was deemed too obscure to publish. These threads, normally dormant, have been violently agitated by the removal of the Relic. That gives the Specter immense, volatile emotional fuel like a nos energy drink, allowing it to rapidly shift from a vague feeling to a physical, destructive force like the Hulk but more magically amped up.” He paused, gripping the wheel tighter. “When a Specter manifests, it doesn't just scare people into peeing themselves; it forces the deepest, unacknowledged anxieties of the location to become real. Expect not traditional ghosts that moan and go boo, but levitating, chaotic floating paper trails of bankruptcy notices and rejection letters attacking like debt collectors, books violently tearing themselves apart out of authorial rage like the girls act when their hangry, or entire stacks collapsing under the sheer, symbolic weight of lost knowledge like my head when I over research something. We need to prevent it from finding a single, cohesive human memory to anchor to, or it will solidify into something much harder to dismiss than a hungry snorlax. Our absolute priority is to prevent it from solidifying into a long-term, self-sustaining entity that could breach containment and spill onto the streets, making the world believe in the impossible like getting spam email you actually wanted.”

They pulled onto the quiet street leading to the library. The change in atmosphere was immediate and dramatic, a metaphysical boundary crossed without a visible barrier. The Lincoln Library was a heavy, granite structure from the 1920s, normally a warm beacon of community and knowledge, but tonight, it was unnervingly dark, an obsidian silhouette against the city lights. The entire block was subject to an inexplicable power failure; all the streetlights were not just off, but seemed to have had their energy violently sucked out, leaving the street corner in a dead, absolute vacuum of light. This localized energy drain was a characteristic sign of a hungry Specter preparing its feeding ground. The air was noticeably colder, dropping the temperature by at least fifteen degrees, necessitating visible puffs of breath, carrying a faint scent of ozone, mildew, and something acridly burnt, like failing electronics mixed with ancient resentment and desperation. A thin, iridescent mist hugged the granite steps, shimmering faintly despite the lack of light—this heavy psychic residue was a clear sign of the Specter actively drawing emotional energy from the bedrock of the building, preparing its first wave of manifested chaos.

Alastor parked the van two blocks away, ensuring it was completely hidden by the dense, shadowy foliage of a massive oak tree. The moment the engine died, the silence was absolute, broken only by the cold, metallic rattle of their equipment.

“We’re going in, lets Winchester this bitch.” Alastor confirmed, the sharp click of his custom-made, silver-lined batons sliding from their hidden compartment a sound of lethal finality. The batons weren't for fighting but for channeling, capable of disrupting spectral energy fields without destroying the physical form of the library.

They moved with practiced fluidity, two shadows melting into the deeper gloom. They followed an old maintenance path to a rarely-used back entrance—a heavy steel service door that clearly hadn't been secured by mortal hands. The steel of the lock and bolt assembly had been violently and supernaturally twisted open, the thick metal groaning outward as if pushed by an impossible, invisible pressure—it was a signature of the Specter’s emotional brute force, a sign it was strong enough to manipulate dense matter through pure psychic will.

Inside, the library was a cavernous labyrinth of darkness and echoes. The only illumination came from the sliver of moonlight filtering through the high, arched windows, which cast long, exaggerated shadows of the towering bookshelves. The rows upon rows of books looked like silent, waiting guards, holding their secrets tight. The air here was heavy with latent potential, the scent of paper and dust mixing with the Specter’s cold energy. The familiar, comfortable smell of old books was fighting a losing battle against the supernatural cold, which seemed to be trying to freeze sound itself.

Alastor opened a utility pouch on his belt, securing a small, folding shovel. “Specter’s close, so close i can smell it, and it needs a shower bad” he whispered, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the main hall. “Containment first. We need to funnel the chaos. I’ll start laying the salt-and-iron perimeter around the reading room to cut off its retreat—a continuous, unbroken line of specially prepared granules mixed with finely ground meteorite fragments to temporarily solidify the ambient energy fields. The meteorite dust is crucial; it acts like a disruptive magnetic field for purely emotional entities. That should box it in for a few crucial minutes and slow its rate of manifestation, but it won't hold if the Specter focuses on one spot like a fat person focuses on chocolate cake.”

“Understood. Retrieval and Re-binding,” Letta responded, already gripping the glowing locket—the Relic of Binding—like a lifeline. “I’m heading to the third floor, where the older, forgotten volumes are—that’s where the emotional residue is thickest and where the Relic was initially displaced from. It’s trying to find the point of highest anxiety to fully transition into a cohesive form. I’ll find the source of the initial break, place the Relic, and hit the re-binding ritual. The Seven Sentences of Submission is a high-risk charm, babe. It requires absolute stillness and focus—I have to be one hundred percent internally quiet to project the stabilizing frequencies. If the Specter touches me during the chant, it will instantly amplify the ritual’s power against the caster, making me a conduit for the chaotic energy, essentially exploding the library and me along with it. I should only need the time it takes to chant the full Seven Sentences—approximately sixty seconds, uninterrupted.” She looked him directly in the eyes, her expression professional and resolute. “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, you bypass the ritual, start the full, aggressive lockdown—a class-four evacuation—and extract. Don't wait for me. Understand love?”

Alastor gave a frown but a tight nod, a shared acknowledgment of the grim possibilities. He immediately knelt, pulling a pouch of the protective granules from his tactical vest. He started his work instantly, scraping a fine, almost invisible line of the powerful granules across the cracked marble floor of the main hallway. His focus was absolute, ensuring the line was continuous, every minute movement an act of deliberate magic. As Letta vanished silently up the grand, marble staircase, her presence and footsteps absorbed completely by the Specter's pervasive energy field, Alastor heard the first definite sound—a soft, frantic thump from the depths of the building, followed by the faint, disembodied sound of someone weeping over a long-lost manuscript, dissolving into a screech of frustrated rage. He knew that sound meant the Specter was no longer drawing passively from the air; it was actively creating the emotional trauma it needed to survive and grow by mimicking the library's greatest hurts. He had to finish the perimeter now, before the manifestation reached his location.

Alastor scraped the final arc of the salt-and-iron perimeter, completing the circle around the vast, silent main reading room. The moment the line connected, the finely ground granules of iron and meteorite fragments flared with a sustained, intense cobalt light, instantly locking down the ambient energy fields and creating a shimmering, almost invisible barrier that hummed with a low, disruptive frequency. The Specter reacted to this containment field with immediate, blinding fury, recognizing the ancient magic of boundary.

The weeping and raging sounds that had been distant echoes solidified into a deafening chorus of psychic screams right at the barrier line. Suddenly, two towering columns of obsolete encyclopedias and forgotten theses, ten feet high and stacked haphazardly, imploded inwards, shattering their own paper structure before reforming in the center of the reading room as a furious, spinning vortex of shredded paper, shadow, and negative energy. It wasn't a ghost with a history; it was pure, concentrated, weaponized disappointment and unrealized potential. The entity, a maelstrom of violent, self-destructing text, shrieked a sound that felt like nails being dragged not across a chalkboard, but across the very bone of Alastor’s skull, tearing violently at the transparent fabric of the perimeter. The salt-and-iron line began to glow dangerously bright, the meteorite fragments vibrating so intensely that the old marble floor beneath them began to smoke faintly from the friction and stress.

“Fifteen minutes, Letta,” Alastor gasped into his comms unit, drawing his silver-lined batons. He knew he was already behind schedule; he didn't have fifteen seconds. The vortex sensed the weakness in the protective line—the minute, non-magical gap where he’d knelt to complete the circuit—and launched a spear of condensed resentment. This attack was a single, black, solidifying shard of crystallized failure, barbed with the sharpness of thousand-year-old regret, aimed directly at his center mass.

Alastor crossed his specially constructed batons in an X formation, generating an immediate, crackling shield of channeled, focused energy. The shard hit the shield with the concussive force of a battering ram, the physical impact resonating through the magical ward and throwing Alastor back against a sturdy, empty mahogany reference desk. The impact rattled his bones, and his comms unit crackled with static, the voice of Letta momentarily lost. He knew he couldn't hold the line against a Class-Two manifestation this powerful for long; the sheer emotional weight of the library's repressed history was too great. He had to disrupt it now, before it solidified entirely. Gritting his teeth against the searing pain in his shoulder, he raised his batons again, chanting a quick, internal counter-invocation, and channeled a powerful, non-lethal surge of disruptive energy, aiming directly at the vortex’s swirling, chaotic core. The paper tornado shuddered violently, dissolving into a momentary cascade of floating rejection slips before gathering itself again, losing shape for a split second. This momentary destabilization gave Alastor the precious few seconds he needed to regain his footing, breathing heavily as he scanned the slowly fracturing perimeter.

Meanwhile, on the third floor, Letta moved with practiced speed through the narrow, high-ceilinged archival stacks. The air here was so thick with psychic cold and high-frequency anxiety that it felt like swimming through molasses, muffling sound and dulling her senses. She located the source instantly: a broken shelf in the obscure history section, where the oldest, least-read, and most desperately hoped-for books resided. The shelf was right beside a small, century-old oak writing desk belonging to a librarian who had long dreamed of being an author, a nexus of personal and academic failure. The air above the desk shimmered aggressively, not with heat, but with visible emotional distortion, making the distant moonlight ripple like water.

This was the critical nexus of the trauma. The missing Relic had been the only thing stabilizing this enormous buildup of suppressed feeling. She placed the Relic of Binding—the glowing brass locket—precisely in the small depression carved into the broken shelf wood, where it had rested for decades. It pulsed violently, eager to fulfill its function but fighting the chaotic energy surrounding it.

Letta knelt, forcing her breathing to slow to a deep, meditative rate—three seconds in, five seconds out. She fought to block out the distant, chaotic noises downstairs and the overwhelming psychic pressure trying to flood her mind with forgotten debts, existential dread, and the crushing knowledge of the shop’s true inventory risk. Absolute stillness. Internal quietus. She began the chant, the Seven Sentences of Submission, her voice barely a controlled whisper in the echoing silence of the stacks:

“Ego vos invoco ad ordinem. Et finem historiae tuam…” (I call you to order. And the end of your story…)

The Specter, sensing the metaphysical threat of stability, fought back psychically. The emotional noise intensified, projecting vivid hallucinations—Letta saw the store sign of Witches - Lost & Found crumbling into dust, and the Hearse totaled on the side of the road. She felt a crushing, palpable weight settle on her chest, the collective feeling of every unfulfilled promise in the building trying to choke the breath out of her lungs. She persevered, her voice steady but strained, reaching the third sentence.

“Ad fontem, ad quietem. Nexus non est tuus. Vindicatum non es...” (To the source, to the quiet. The nexus is not yours. You are not avenged…)

Downstairs, Alastor was losing ground rapidly. The Specter’s vortex had returned, now armed with phantom chains made of infinitely multiplying overdue slips, whipping and lashing at his diminishing shield. The chains struck the cobalt perimeter, causing the entire line to short out in sections. He was relying on pure willpower and the charge remaining in his batons, which were now painfully hot in his grip. The vortex was mere feet away, beginning to solidify into a vaguely humanoid, towering shape—a spectral, bitter librarian, its empty eyes full of ancient, personal bitterness.

Letta reached the final, most crucial sentence, her energy draining fast, sweat beading on her temple as she fought the psychic resistance:

“Veni ad domum tuam, sicut iussum est. Et quiesce. Quiesce.” (Return to your home, as commanded. And rest. Be still.)

As the last word left her lips, the brass locket didn't just glow—it overloaded. It exploded in a blinding, instantaneous flash of pure, stabilizing white light, an ethereal shockwave of peace. A tremendous, visible surge of magnetic energy, like an enormous sonic boom of metaphysical vacuum, erupted from the third floor, traveling down the stacks at impossible speed. The black vortex downstairs shrieked one last, impossibly loud cry of agony and rage as the immense magnetic pull of the Relic took hold.

The psychic wave dragged the entire manifestation—the humanoid form, the paper chains, the lingering emotional weight—back through the floors, into the archives, and slammed it all into the tiny brass locket on the broken shelf. The locket instantly cooled, the sick yellow light receding, leaving behind a dull, warm, and perfectly inert metal shell.

The silence that followed was heavy and absolute, but this time, it was a peaceful silence, not a suffocating one. The bitter, supernatural cold vanished, replaced by the normal, slightly stuffy temperature of an old building. Dust motes drifted lazily in the sliver of moonlight, unbothered.

Alastor, panting heavily, dropped his spent, clicking batons. The salt-and-iron perimeter flickered and died completely, the iron granules harmlessly scattering across the floor. He found Letta five minutes later, still kneeling beside the shelf, pale and leaning against the oak desk, but whole.

“Sixty-two seconds,” she whispered, standing up slowly and carefully tucking the now-inert Relic into a lead-lined pocket in her vest. “The Specter had a major anchor. It fought the third sentence hard.”

Alastor rubbed his aching shoulder, already assessing the physical damage. “The Specter threw a full Class-Two manifestation hussy fit. You’re lucky I still remember my channeling patterns for blunt force resistance. We need to lay the residual wards before the librarian finds the damage.”

They worked in practiced tandem, Alastor applying a low-level memory dampener to the most damaged areas to make the staff see "water damage" instead of "psychic vortex," while Letta placed tiny, inconspicuous wards—pin-sized, silver-plated nails hammered into the joists—to stabilize the building's emotional energy for the next twenty years. The retrieval of their equipment and the application of a quick, stabilizing ward over the lock mechanism was quiet and methodical, leaving no trace of their battle. Within twenty minutes, the Hearse was pulling away, leaving the silent, darkened Lincoln Library to the world of mundane, forgotten things, secured once more against its own anxiety.

They pulled up to the shop, Witches - Lost & Found, at 4:00 AM. The lights were on, and the interior was perfectly quiet, smelling faintly of tea and beeswax.

Lexie and Nicole were sitting at the front counter, playing a silent game of chess with pieces carved from whalebone. They looked up, their eyes sharp and immediately assessing their parents for injury or residual energy bleed.

“Specter contained, Relic secured, no collateral damage,” Letta announced, leaning heavily against the doorframe, allowing herself the brief luxury of exhaustion.

Nicole immediately clicked off the ancient monitor showing the perimeter feeds, the intricate charts of fluctuating energy immediately turning to a mundane blue screen. “Excellent. We had a Class 1 poltergeist trying to get into the tea aisle—a rather grumpy entity from the Victorian era—but Lexie talked it down with an appeal to its historical significance and a promise of better quality leaves.”

Lexie nodded tiredly, moving a knight. “It just wanted to know if we had Darjeeling. It complained the Earl Grey was ‘too uncouthly perfumed.’ It’s asleep in the old ceramic jar by the register now, labeled ‘Unsold, Do Not Touch.’ It should hold until morning.”

Alastor smiled, the physical pain and exhaustion finally yielding to familial warmth. He walked over and gently kissed Nicole on the top of the head, then ruffled Lexie's hair. “Good job, girls. You saved the shop inventory, which is, admittedly, more valuable than the world’s quietude.”

“We saved the world, Dad, and maintained the inventory’s structural integrity,” Nicole corrected dryly, executing a neat fork on the whalebone chessboard.

“Right. Saved the world and protected the profit margins from certain doom and downfall,” Alastor agreed, already heading toward the small kitchen with Letta for the first of several required cups of coffee. “Now, who’s ready to polish three hundred years of haunted silverware! We have a lot of dust that shouldn't be here and no time to spare, before that troublesome mirror monkey ghost makes another dust storm again.” The Witches—Lost & Found was back to normal everyday business.