First thing Georgie picked up on?
The silence.
Not your average, everyday hush, this was thick, heavy, like someone shoved a pillow right over the world’s mouth and dared it to make a sound.
Coleraine’s library, her library, just sat there in the middle of town, doors chained, windows blacked out. Over the handles, a grim little notice, stamped in red with that Ministry of Civic Order crest
NORTHERN IRELAND CLOSED FOR RECLASSIFICATION. ACCESS PROHIBITED.
Georgie just stood on the steps, clutching her Lidl bag full of old favourites, heart thumping so loud she swore everyone could hear. “They’ve closed it,” she whispered, but her voice just got swallowed up by the stillness.
Used to be, the place would greet her, “Hello, Georgie. What shall we read today?”
Now? Nada. Not even an echo. Across the street, a new poster flapped in the wind
FEELING BREEDS HERESY HERETICS WILL BURN IN HELL
Someone with more guts than sense had scribbled underneath, “you can’t ban the heart.” Pencil marks half-smudged by the autumn rain that just wouldn’t quit. She pressed her hand against the cold metal door. “You used to answer me,” she murmured. “Every page a voice. Every word a friend.” She’d been coming here forever. Story hour down in the basement, back in the sixties, before things got weird and the evangelicals took over everything. Rainy afternoons, nothing to do and not a penny to spare except for stories. Her dad would bring her, and they’d sit on the floor, dust in the air but also something else, promise, hope. The children’s librarian would read, voice weaving through the hush, telling tales of secret gardens and wild-hearted kids who picked love over safety. “Why do they risk everything?” she’d asked her father once. “Because love makes you brave,” he had said. That was before the Ministry started going on about emotional contaminants. Before the clipboard brigade came to measure the “affective resonance” of stories and started yanking the “unsafe” ones.
First, a few shelves vanished. Then whole sections. Last month, the new law: Unregulated Emotion is Un-Godly. Even the silence felt padlocked now. That night, Georgie couldn’t sleep. Her little stack of saved books felt thin, their words fading like old ghosts. The silence had seeped into everything. Way past midnight, she couldn’t take it anymore. Grabbed her flashlight, slipped out of her flat. The town was dead quiet as she padded down Captain Street, across the old bridge, past Dunnes and the boarded-up Methodist Church, closed for being too friendly, apparently. At the library, the seals on the doors glinted under the moon. But down around the back, ground floor, where the kids’ section used to be, a window, just barely cracked open.
Ten minutes later, after a lot of quiet cursing and careful prying, she was in. Dust everywhere. Moonlight pouring through a naked window, shelves gone silver. She reached for a familiar spine, it was blank. Inside? Pages were almost empty, just ghostly smudges where words had been. “Oh,” she breathed. “They’ve stolen your voices.” She collapsed into a chair, hugging the empty book. “They said you were dangerous,” she whispered to the shelves. “Guess they were right. You make people feel. And that scares the hell out of them.”
From memory, she spoke a forbidden line, one her mum had loved: Love is the only language we never finish learning. Nothing. For a second, just the creaking and her own heartbeat. Then, somewhere deep in the stacks, pages stirring. The book in her hands shimmered. A word appeared: love. Another. Then a whole sentence. Letters slid back onto the page, shaky, like they were waking up from a long sleep. Georgie let out a laugh, a little wild, a little broken, and started to read aloud.
Her throat went raw, but she kept going. The more she read, the more the words seemed to bring each other back. Shelves started rustling, like a hundred books whispering to each other. Light pooled in the aisles, soft and hopeful. Outside, a bloke walking home paused. From behind the locked doors, he heard a low hum, hundreds of voices, rising and falling, almost a song. Inside, Georgie scrambled up onto a table and read louder: “Love is not obedience. Love is the wild thread that binds us despite fear.”
The whispering grew warm, alive. “You’re back,” she told them. “All of you.”
By dawn, her voice was shot. Light crept in through the skylight, the books glowed, breathing slow with her own. Maybe that’s all love’s ever been, she thought just breathing together. Then: sirens. She knew the sound. Ministry vans, black and silent, coming round the corner. She tore a scrap from a half-alive book and scribbled as fast as she could: You cannot silence love. It speaks in everyone who remembers. Left the note on the steps, slipped out the side, vanished into the waking town. The guards came at sunrise, locked the place up again, filed their reports: Unauthorized Emotional Resurgence. Subject Escaped.
But the sound lingered, and none of them could explain it. Long after they left, the library kept murmuring, soft and steady, like the books had heartbeats, had a life of their own.
When the wind crept through the cracks, it carried words: love, hope, remember. People noticed. In pubs, on buses, stairwells, voices drifted, faint but there. At first, they blamed dodgy wiring, the wind. Then someone picked up the note from the steps. A girl read it out loud. The paper glowed, just a bit, and the words bounced back at her. She glanced around, wide-eyed, and whispered, “I remember.” The whole world seemed to stop, just for a second, like it was listening.