Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Stanhope Road ·
All Books Are Overdue
Every first of the month a branch library accepts returns on behalf of the dead, their fines paid in obsolete coins, and its librarian files the pressed things in an envelope in case anyone asks.
The Stanhope Road branch opened at 09:00, and at 09:00 the queue ran the length of the vestibule, and somewhere in the middle of it stood the man in the beige raincoat. Dolores Whitcombe had worked the desk for nineteen years and had long since stopped trying to reckon when he had first come. The other regulars get names or at least coats; this one had a canvas bag of books with the corners of each one always damp, as though the bag had spent the night in a windowsill of rain.
He queued. That was the part that unsettled new staff. He did not come to the desk while it was closed, he did not stand apart, and he never once stepped ahead of anyone. On the first of each month he was fifth or ninth in the line, and when his turn came he set the books down three to seven of them — without hurrying, and without comment, like any other borrower at the end of a long loan.
The system took them. That was the detail the desk staff had never solved. Each book scanned, each title accepted, each flaring on the screen **OVERDUE**, sometimes for sixty years and more, and beneath every fine a borrower's name that no longer appeared in any register in the district. Not the electoral roll. Not the phone book. Not the death records. Whitcombe had checked four of the names herself, once, on a slow afternoon; all four were buried, in order, before the dates of return. She stopped checking after that, because it did not seem respectful to count.
The fines were paid in coins that predate the card system. Sixpences. A shilling with the young profile. Once, a threepenny bit, warm from wherever coins are warm. The till accepted each without argument and rang up the credit in the small hours of the night, as far as the auditors could tell, with no one's hand on it.
Inside the books there was always something pressed. A train ticket to a terminus that had closed. A dried geranium, pressed flat and true. Once, a receipt for gas; once, a note in pencil that read *I will finish this tomorrow.* It had become procedure to slide whatever it was into a manila envelope, write the title on the envelope, and file the envelope in the bottom drawer under the letters of the alphabet, in case anyone ever asked. The drawer held forty-one of them. The drawer was not officially for anything. No one had ever asked.
The routine of the first of the month never varied, and its last step was a question. He always asked it, quietly, with the receipt spike between them: whether anyone had come in to ask after the book. Whether anyone was looking. Whether anyone had come in at all, in the way of a person who is looking for a thing of another person's.
Whitcombe usually said not yet. She said it on the occasion when she checked in a novel last borrowed in 1964 and found, at chapter nine, a bus ticket with a fare stamped in old pre-decimal type, and pasted the ticket into the envelope under the title, and then had the question asked of her. He took the news the way he took everything: unhurried, rain still beading on the beige shoulders.
Then he said that he would keep coming.
He declined a receipt for himself. This was the only thing he ever declined. If Whitcombe insisted, which she did once or twice a year, he raised his hand flat, as if declining a third cup, and said that he was sure one would not be necessary. There was no card in the name the raincoat suggested, no borrowing record, no address. The man who returned other people's books had never borrowed anything. He was not, on the evidence of the system, a member of this library, or of any library that had a counter and a till.
Last month he brought back a book of local photographs, and inside was a bookmark cut from card, with a loop of wool through it, the kind a child makes in school. The title on the spine was one Whitcombe had loved at nine. She had lent it to nobody. It had been lost for thirty-one years. She stamped it in without a word and put the bookmark in her pocket instead of the drawer.
She has not lent her own books since. She has one on the nightstand, half-finished, three years open. She has begun to wonder, on the last evening of each month, how exactly he would learn that she had stopped reading it, and whether anyone would come to ask after it while she could still answer.