Work Text:
It was the summer of 1991; with his university classes out of session for the season and needing some income, Jasper Whitlock had taken a night job as a security guard at the local college library. Most of the friends and family in his life had been shocked by the choice. A reaction Jasper had understood. To most people, an overnight job would be unheard of, sleeping all day and working all night when everyone else you knew was asleep. It didn't leave much room for a social life. But Jasper had always been a loner, had always found peace in the night. Magic in the emptiness of otherwise bustling public areas, comfort in the darkness.
The job itself was easy enough; he worked with a gruff old man who didn't speak much. The old man had gone through training procedures with Jasper and didn't talk otherwise unless to communicate vital work-related information between shifts. He hadn't even given Jasper his name. Which was okay with him. He was here to collect a paycheck; if he made friends along the way, that was fine. If he didn't? Well, that was no skin off his back, so he let the old man be.
The job included two main tasks; watching the security monitor system for anything that shouldn't be there and patrolling the library once an hour. Being a lover of books and working in a library, it hadn't been difficult to find ways to fill the time. He'd brought an old kitchen timer with him, turning the dial every fifteen minutes and looking up from his book to scan the monitors.
Jasper was on his third shift with the job when strange things started happening. He was so invested in a biography on Alfred Hitchcock that he hardly registered the strange noises coming from the outdated security system. When his mind finally caught up to his surroundings and processed that Jasper had just heard the sound of a door opening and closing, his eyes shot up to the monitors. Everything was exactly where it should be though, so he chalked it up to the system being out of date. Jasper didn't know much about the latest in security set-ups, but if he had to guess, the library hadn't updated its system since at least the mid-'70s. Confident that nothing was amiss, he returned to his book.
A week later, Jasper was making his rounds of the old building. Over the short course of his employment there, he'd picked up a book on the location's history. Jasper had learned that the three-story building had been built in the late '40s and was the town's only public library before being purchased by the university. Having always been drawn to history he enjoyed having the opportunity to explore such a historical building thoroughly.
Jasper was in one of the office hallways, checking that the doors to the restricted areas were locked when he saw her. The form of a small woman dashing down the hall in his periphery. But when he turned his full attention to the woman to ask her to leave, no one was there. He checked all the doors in the hall, and all but one remained locked. A door Jasper had never seen open even during the library's operating hours.
Inside, the room looked as though its primary function, whatever it had been, was abandoned decades ago and was now used as storage for items the university no longer needed but couldn't get rid of on the off chance a student might request them. Everything in the room was covered in a thick layer of dust, indicating that not even the team who cleaned the library had been in the room at any point recently. By all accounts, this particular storage location was long forgotten. With all of this considered, Jasper found it exceedingly odd that this particular door was unlocked. He found it even stranger that the woman he could have sworn he'd seen was nowhere in sight.
Strange events like this began to happen with increasing frequency; Jasper had spent weeks searching for a logical explanation to write off the strange sights and sounds he would experience. The woman continued to show up, only to disappear when he tried to look at her. The sounds from the security system were coming through multiple times a night now. At a certain point, Jasper had to accept there was no explanation for the occurrences grounded in science and logic. He had to look to the Supernatural.
Luckily, he had free reign of the best place in town to do research, the library. So he began using his shifts to look into everything he could find on ghosts and how to communicate with them. Eventually, he finally felt confident enough to make contact.
He felt silly that night as he ventured down the hallway to the door that this ghost kept unlocking. He was happy to see it already open. All of the books he could find on the subject had said to light some candles, sit down, clear his head, and just... start talking. He opened by establishing a way she could respond to his questions, another piece of advice from the books. He would ask a question, and she could respond by knocking once for yes, and twice for no.
"Is anyone here?" He spoke into the empty room; it remained silent for a moment when a clear knock echoed through the room.
The room remained silent after that, Jasper had prepared a list of questions for the ghost, but he hadn't expected anything to happen, to be honest. He was in shock when words began to form in the dust on the floor in front of him as though someone was drawing them with a finger. "Help Me." Once Jasper's mind caught up to his surroundings, Jasper bolted from the room and locked himself inside the security office for the rest of the night.
Having had some time to process things, two days later, when Jasper went in for his next shift, he was ready to apologize to the ghost for initiating contact and then leaving so suddenly. He wasn't sure what was polite when interacting with a spirit, but he was pretty sure that was considered rude in any culture.
He spent the first half of his shift mentally preparing himself. Ghosts were real. Apparently, one was haunting his new job, and he'd probably offended her. He waited until he could hear the door slamming shut from the monitors and went down to the abandoned room where she liked to hang out. Where he had been expecting the space to be empty as always, he was shocked to find the woman standing in the middle of the room.
"You came back!" She exclaimed, a smile lighting up her face, "I didn't think you'd come back."
Jasper, who had by this point made peace with the situation, decided to just lean into it. "I'm sorry, ma'am."
"I probably scared you, it's okay. I'm just glad you came back! My name is..." But he didn't get to hear the end of her statement as she poofed away, leaving him alone once again.
Jasper took a chance and called out, "Are you still there?" a single knock resounded throughout the room.
"Is it hard for you to be visible like that?" Another knock, and once again, the woman began writing in the copious amounts of dust in the room.
"Alice?" He asked, reading out what she'd written. "Is that your name?" another knock.
Jasper and Alice continued to have conversations like that nightly, communicating via words in the dust and a series of knocks. Over time Alice began to get better at controlling herself and was able to remain visible for more extended periods of time. Alice was delighted to finally have someone to talk to. Judging by her outfit, Jasper was able to deduce the woman had been dead for decades, likely the late '40s or early '50s. Alice had spent that entire time just trying to get someone's attention; she was lonely and confused. Alice didn't remember anything about her life or how she came to be a ghost stuck in a library; the only reason she knew her name was that it was sewn into the collar of her coat.
Over time, Jasper began to develop feelings for Alice. He came to genuinely care for, possibly even love, the strange ghostly woman. Jasper knew it was insane to fall for a woman who'd been dead for forty years. His life couldn't get any stranger, though, and he figured this might as well happen. He began devoting his free time to doing research in an attempt to figure out just who exactly his Alice was. Riley, the librarian, was a huge help and ultimately the one who directed him to a newspaper and some of the library's employee files from 1951.
From there, it was easy to piece together what happened to her, and he explained what he had learned as soon as possible. Alice had taken a job at the library, and according to testimonies from other employees he'd read in the article, Alice had started saying some strange things. She told her co-workers that if she stayed working with the location, it would lead to her demise and filed her resignation. Tragically, late one February evening, just three days before she would have been done with the job, Alice was returning some books to their locations. She hit her head on a shelf, and with no one around, bled out. By the time the security guard that night had found her, she had passed on.
Alice's expression had turned dark by the end of his story, "I remember now... I was pushed... James." She looked at Jasper with wide eyes. "It was James."
He left that night confused, they had a name, but Alice couldn't recall who exactly this 'James' was. What was stranger was as he was leaving, the old man spoke to him about a subject other than work for the first time since Jasper had taken the job six months ago.
"Hear you've been looking into that Brandon girl's death. Real tragedy, found her body myself." He shook his head as he punched his clock in code into the computer. Jasper's eyes widened in horror as he caught a glimpse at the name on the screen.
James Turner