The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays
Monsieur Lefèvre had always believed himself a man of reason. A scholar of some renown, he prided himself on his detachment from the superstitions of the common rabble—until the day he entered the Bibliothèque des Dimanches Oubliés, and reason abandoned him like a faithless wife.
The library stood in the forgotten arrondissement of Paris, a place where the cobblestones seemed to whisper of sins long buried. Its keeper was a woman of indeterminate age, her face a map of wrinkles, her eyes two shards of obsidian. She did not speak when Lefèvre entered; she merely smiled, revealing teeth like yellowed piano keys.
“You seek the forbidden,” she said at last, not a question.
Lefèvre scoffed. “I seek knowledge, madame. Nothing more.”
“Ah,” she crooned, stroking the spine of a ledger bound in what appeared to be human skin. “But knowledge is forbidden. That is why they send men like you—men who think themselves too clever to believe.”
He demanded to see the rarest volume in her collection. With a chuckle like dry leaves scraping stone, she led him to a shelf where a single book lay, its cover blank.
“The Librarian of Forgotten Sundays,” she whispered. “A chronicle of all the days God chose to erase.”
When Lefèvre opened it, the pages were empty. Yet as he stared, words began to form—his own name, his secrets, his shames. And then, the laughter started. Not hers.
The library’s.