Today’s spooky story starts in a small library. A new librarian takes a job in a small northern town and is being shown the ropes by the older librarian. The older one is retiring and moving away, but it’s a small town and a small library so one person can handle it. As they work together, the new librarian starts to notice a strange young lady that's in the library. She’s never seen the girl come in or leave and always seems to first catch the girl from the corner of her eye. The librarian writes it off at first, but it eats away at her. She finally talks to the older librarian about it and she spills the beans.
There's a woman that haunts the library. Most of the previous librarians wrote her off as a ghost but she's not sure. It’s hard to see her directly at first, but once you notice her presence, you can see her fine. She seems to be there to most when you're closing up, you’re tired and your mind is wandering. The presence just sits in the library reading, day and night. It doesn't read particularly fast, but because it's doing it 24 hours a day, it moves through a lot of books. It just goes from one end of the library to the other, picking the next book off the shelf with no particular interest in themes or types of material. If you add a new book, it just knows and grabs that one before returning to where it left off farther down the shelves.
The librarians have a pact that they will always keep adding new books to the library so the presence never runs out. You only replace or recycle books the presence has finished and if you add a new section the stacks, you add it after the last one. The job has been passed on for generations, so nobody knows when it started, who the woman is or was, or what will happen if it stops. They just know they have to keep adding books and feel compelled to do so.
The older librarian eventually retires and hands the library off to the new one. Taking ownership of the books, the town, and watching over the presence. Over time, the new librarian starts to question the task. Is it good to keep the woman busy or is the act of reading books a prison to the presence. The librarian thinks about stopping, but always feels an unease at that and keeps at the task.
As time passes, funding gets cut to the library so new books are coming in at a slower rate, so she resorts to spending her own money buying books online and shipping them to the library. It works, but since they're older books, there are a lot of duplicates or the woman has read many of them so it knows to pass over them. The returns are diminishing quickly and small town librarian doesn’t pay enough to move any faster.
That winter, the librarian is out shopping and the sun has set early. In the darkness, she’s mugged and her leg is injured while out on the street. Knowing the latest shipment is coming today, she tries to make it to the library and will phone for a doctor there. She tries to get to the building to open up and accept the month's delivery but ends up making the injury worse after slipping on a patch of ice and passes out. Somebody in town eventually finds her on a bench half conscious and clutching her injured leg, and the librarian is sent to the hospital.
Missing the shipment and having been in the hospital for a few days to recover, the library has been closed and there haven't been any book deliveries. The winter storms have kept any backups from out of town from driving to the library and bringing in books themselves as a stop gap.
The librarian is eventually released from the hospital with just a cast left from her injuries and rushes back to the library as soon as they drop her off at home.
The woman is there, patiently waiting at its table in the library. For the first time, it approaches the librarian and says it is finished. It thanks the librarian before going out the door and disappearing into the winter fog. The librarian spends the night in the closed building, thinking over what happened. Is it good or bad? What's going to happen now that the woman is out?
The librarian wakes up, having fallen asleep at her desk for the night. Her leg aches so she decides to walk home and get her medicine before returning to work. During the trip, she passes by the spot where she was mugged before, and finds a large divot in the snow roughly the size of the figure she was attacked by earlier. Laying the divot and surrounding is a fine red mist, now frozen over. Most people wouldn't even notice the slight spray but it sticks out to the librarian like neon.
The librarian continues home and feels uneasy. She knows that the person that mugged her is now dead, through some means, and thinks more on the implications of the woman being freed from the library.