Submitted for the September 2025 prompt: Terrestrial Settings

Handley Library had a way of holding sound like breath. The high dome ceilings softened footsteps into whispers. Light filtered through stained glass in fractured reds and golds, settling over marble busts and the dust-smooth spines of forgotten volumes.

 

Jorie Greaves liked the quiet.

 

Most days, she drifted through the Reference Room with a cart half-full of returns, her fingers trailing over call numbers as if they were coordinates on a map. The rhythm soothed her. Read. Shelve. Repeat. The circuit of a book knowing its place.

 

But that morning, there was a book that shouldn’t have been there.

 

It sat on the return cart like it had always belonged. Old, leather-bound, without a dust jacket or title. The cover was dark brown, scarred at the corners, and cold to the touch. She ran her thumb along the spine. No label. No barcode. Not even a trace of glue where one might’ve been peeled away.

 

She frowned. “A donation no one processed.”

 

She took it to the desk and logged into the catalog. No ISBN. No title she could find. The pages smelled like damp wood and metal, like the air after a storm. The text was printed in small, serifed type, dense and uneven, like it had been photocopied from a much older source.

 

A table of contents read more like folklore than nonfiction:

The Hollowed Ones and the Hum in the Earth

Moss as Memory

The Mouth Beneath the Mountain

 

That last one tugged at something under her skin. She shook it off.

 

She logged the book into the system under a placeholder title, “Untitled Folklore Manuscript,” and assigned it a temporary call number. She labeled the spine and slid it onto the shelf in Regional Archives, between an oral history of coal mining songs and a binder of church cemetery records from the 1800s.

 

Then she went home.

 

The next morning, it was back on the return cart. Label gone.

 

Jorie stared at it for a long time. Same battered cover. No call number, no title. She scanned the room. Was someone playing a trick on her?

 

She catalogued it again and relabeled it. This time, she shelved it in nonfiction under Appalachian History.

 

The next morning, there it was again.

 

The third day, she took it home.

 

That night, with a cup of hot tea and the windows open to the chill of early fall, she opened the book to The Mouth Beneath the Mountain. The first sentence made her breath catch:

 

They say it was never dug but revealed. A buried tunnel carved not by man, but memory.

 

She sat back.

 

The words rolled heavy in her chest. She hadn’t thought about the tunnel in years. Not since she left Stuarts Draft. Not since the summer she and Lena climbed through the brush behind the persimmon grove and found the old opening in the rock. The one the locals said was haunted. The one with the strange cold air even in July.

 

She remembered Lena’s voice echoing off stone. The moment the sound stopped echoing altogether. The silence that followed, thick as syrup.

 

Jorie closed the book. But the memory wouldn’t leave.

 

* * *

 

Two days later, she drove south. Past Staunton. Past Waynesboro. Into the foothills of Afton Mountain, where the trees leaned close and the morning light slid through them like secrets.

 

She parked near the Crozet Tunnel trailhead, where the entrance arched clean and empty into the hillside. There were signs now. Railings. Visitors. The tunnel had been reclaimed, made walkable.

 

She stepped inside.

 

The temperature dropped immediately. Her breath fogged in front of her. The light thinned and stretched. Her phone flashlight flickered, steady but unsure. The further she walked, the more the world compressed.

 

Spirals of lichen bloomed along the walls in deliberate patterns, too regular to be random, too wrong to be decorative. Her footsteps echoed off-beat, like someone else walked beside her, half a second behind.

 

The air vibrated.

 

Not sound exactly, not pressure, but something in between. Something more like thought. Something watching.

 

She paused, laid her hand against the stone. It was no longer cold. It pulsed faintly beneath her fingers, like a slow heartbeat or the static of a far-off transmission.

 

Her phone screen went dark, then lit up again. Dim white with a faint symbol in the center: a broken circle bisected by a humming line. Then static. Then nothing.

 

She took a step back.

 

And the tunnel responded.

 

A whisper rose — not in her ears, but inside her body, like a song being hummed through bone.

 

It wasn’t stone remembering her. It was something deeper. A signal buried in geology, waiting for the right frequency to respond.

 

Her skin prickled. It wasn’t language, but it wanted to be. It shaped itself around her name and failed, then tried again. Not threatening. Not kind. Just… aware.

 

Memories she didn’t own flickered across her vision: a man not from this earth adjusting a brass headset, standing ankle-deep in water. A signal bouncing off stone and returning wrong. A girl in 1912 speaking into the dark, her voice not coming back the way it should.

 

She stumbled forward and nearly kicked it: a plastic hairclip?

 

Small, pink, cracked. The one Lena wore that day when they were kids. The one they searched for. That was the day their voices trembled with something neither of them named.

 

Jorie bent down and picked it up.

 

It was warm.

 

The stone behind her pulsed twice and then fell silent.

 

The tunnel didn’t speak again.

 

But the pressure was gone. And the quiet was real this time.

 

* * *

 

Back at Handley Library, she placed the book on her desk. Its weight felt different now—somehow lighter.

 

She checked the catalog.

 

It was there.

 

Record intact. Call number assigned. Label present.

 

But the title had changed.

 

The Tunnel Remembers.

 

And below the call number, in small embossed gold letters:

Greaves, J. listed as the author.

 

She opened it.

 

The first page was blank.

 

Waiting.