Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Public Library as Dungeon

 There is a very good reason my main witch character, Larina, is often cast as a librarian.

My introduction to “real” witches was in the library. Not the kind made of flesh and blood, but the ones you find in the pages of a book, in history, or in mythology. You could say libraries are where witches live, and I am not using that as some kind of metaphor all these years on. That is simply how it was for me.

The public library was among the first places where the world seemed to expand and grow stranger at once. You would come in off a perfectly ordinary Midwestern afternoon, make your way past the desk and the new books and whatever they had on display for the month, and then in the stacks you were liable to run across ghosts, demons, gods, vampires, lost cities, ancient rites, and other things your school teachers never thought to mention and certainly never on the "staff picks" section. 

There is a trick to a library. It is meant to be safe. Quiet, ordered, respectable. It has its rules and its due dates and its card catalogs. The librarians know where everything is. But this is precisely what makes for a fine dungeon.

Because a dungeon is more than a hole in the ground with monsters in it. It is a place of hidden knowledge, danger, and memory, with its maps, keys, locked doors, old names, and false leads. A good one will have treasures that alter the person who brings them out. An old public library has all of that.

Take my fictional Jackson, which is rooted in the real Jacksonville, Illinois. The Public Library there has the right bones for it. As a Carnegie library, built in 1902 and put to use in 1903, it has the sort of grand Classical Revival air about it that suggests books are of consequence, and perhaps a touch perilous if you give them any thought. It feels like it is holding secrets even before you start making any up. A building like this isn’t holding just ordinary books; it has something special. 

I don’t want the library in Jackson to be sinister, though. There is a difference between "evil" and being "important". It is not a haunted mansion in disguise. It is doing what it does: preserving, collecting, cataloging, remembering. There is enough danger in just that.  I mean, didn't the Satanic Panic try to teach us that books were dangerous?

A town or a local family can tell you lies, or what they want you to hear. A church can. A newspaper will be careful with what it puts in print. But the library keeps things. Not without fault; you will find things misfiled or stolen or damaged or just plain forgotten. But in a game, that is useful. A missing book means someone saw fit to put it away. A yearbook with a face marked out says more than the picture alone.

For the purposes of Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the library is the old occult archive. A Magic-user will be after his spellbooks and grimoires, a Cleric his demonologies and forbidden heresies. But a Witch? She sees relationships. The volume on local flora sitting beside one on funeral rites. A genealogy that seems to orbit the same three names over and over. Consider the old map with a road that curves for no reason. Well. No apparent reason. The church record is missing a winter. A travel diary, making note of a hill nobody goes to anymore. Or a trial transcript where they all seem to be talking around one particular fact.

This is what we call occult knowledge. It is not just about fireballs and lightning. It is the kind of thing you can see if you know how to read the shape of it, right in plain view.

Which explains the witch’s affinity for libraries. She is after more than spells; she wants to find the pattern that runs under the town, the detail everyone has overlooked because they haven’t asked the right question about it yet. In Jackson, IL, this is all the more pressing.

Take a teenage witch in 1986 like Larina. There is no internet to comb through at midnight, no way to put ten sources side by side in half a minute, or access some digital archive. If she wants to understand why the cemetery has an empty grave, or why a teacher’s name is in a yearbook from two decades back, or what happened to the old road’s name, she has to make the trip. She has to go down into the dungeon.

The public library provides something modern games are too quick to discard: a place for your information. And that is a big deal. If the answer is in the library, your characters have to be there. They have to put in the work to be seen, to ask for help, to charm the librarian or wait for the building to quiet down so the ghosts can move between the shelves. They have to get their hands on the old book.

It makes research physical. Gameable.

You can have encounters in a library. Not necessarily combat, but the real sort. The librarian who holds her tongue when she knows better. The classmate watching which book you check out. Some old man with his newspaper who puts you on the spot about your family. A child tells you there is a lady in the local history room, but you see nothing. You might come across a locked cabinet, a missing index card, a book out of place in the children’s section, or the smell of candle smoke by the microfilm.

Sometimes the library is of more use than a haunted house. One will give you a secret; the other gives you the town’s secrets, all sorted by subject. I put them in my own witch work for that reason. My Appendix O is littered with books on everything from vampires and monsters to Jung and the supernatural. Some were dubious (ok, more than some), some were serious, and some you would be a fool to call scholarship, but all are worth mining for a game.

A library does not just put facts in your head. It teaches you to wander. You start out for one title and end up with three. You put down a tome on mythology and pick up one on ghosts. You are looking into witchcraft, and before you know it, you are in demonology, then horror films, then local history, until you have found something that nags at you and becomes a character or a spell years down the line.

That is how you build a witch. Shelf by shelf. Book by book.

You won’t find much of an accident in Larina’s vocation as a librarian. If anything, it is one of the most honest things about her. She is meant to be with books because that is where you will find the doors; the doors to rooms in your mind. Some are opened with a sword, some with a spell, but a library card will open more than either of those if you have the patience and curiosity for it and are just a little reckless.

It is also where Jackson, IL, and Advanced Witches & Warlocks come together.

In Advanced Witches & Warlocks, the occult library is your hoard. Not of gold, but something better: names, maps, rituals, marginalia, correspondences, the weaknesses of monsters, forgotten gods, and that single bit of information which makes a hopeless fight a dangerous proposition. In Jackson, the public library is all that and then some, only with fluorescent lights, carpet, and summer reading posters. You won’t be in a ruined tower; you’ll be downtown. Your mother could drive by while you are in there, or your English teacher might be at the desk. Someone from school may well notice what you are holding.

There is a danger to a forbidden book in a fantasy dungeon, sure. It might call a demon. The same book in Jackson is dangerous because it can do that and get you grounded into the bargain. Both are problems you don’t want.

Then there is the matter of democracy. A wizard’s tower is his, for the cleric the temple is the god’s, and a witch has her house. The library claims to belong to the town. Anyone can put in an appearance and make a private discovery. The smart girl, the jock with nothing to do, the kid skulking from bullies, the would-be warlock after a shortcut, the old woman with her genealogy, the teacher who has put in too many hours. Even the monster in human skin who comes in on Thursdays to read the obituaries. For a horror game, it is hard to beat a public place like that. Harder still in 1986.

The card catalog has the feel of a summoning machine. You can tell who had a book before you by the checkout card in the front. The microfilm reader puts out a hum like some kind of artifact; the local paper archive is a time tunnel, and the yearbooks are grimoires of social magic with their dedications and signatures and people making an effort to look normal for posterity. The library holds these like a silent guardian of bygone truths. 

It keeps the version of the town that wants to be remembered and the one it couldn’t quite put away. That is where the witches fit in. She will spot the failure. The crack in the catalog, the year with an odd number of obituaries, a family name that vanishes and reappears under a different spelling. She will see the photograph was cut, not torn, and the map folded so often along one road the paper is thinning.

I don’t want a magic shop or a wizard school for the Jackson Public Library. I want a building with a long memory where you can walk in broad daylight and sense the dungeon beneath you. Where the ghosts are to be found under Local History. A place of better questions than answers. There is an occult section, not a big one, but you will somehow come across the very book you were dreading to put your hands on. For the Advanced Witches & Warlocks crowd, it is the same with the fantasy game. Any town that has a witch in it ought to have its library.

It could be a shelf in the priest’s study or a chest of scrolls under the wise woman’s bed. A ruined scriptorium. A set of bones with names carved in them. Or perhaps a ring of old women who commit nothing to paper and remember everything; I would call that the most dangerous library of all. The Witch doesn’t just read the book. She reads the silence about it, the hand that made the note in the margin, the missing page, the town trying to put it out of mind. In that sense the public library is a dungeon. The doors are open, the treasure is there for the taking and so are the monsters, who can read as well as anyone.

The Mirror Shard: The Locked History Room

Take the case of the Locked Local History Room. Every haunted town has one. It needn’t be locked in any literal sense. It may be behind the desk or in the basement. Maybe they only let you in during certain hours, which is its own kind of lock. Or maybe it is wide open, but no one under eighteen is to go in uninvited. That suffices.

Jackson uses this room for the things that don’t make the official tour: the old yearbooks, the church histories, the funeral cards and maps, the donated family papers and clippings. There are photographs in here no one bothered to label because at the time you knew who they were. And horror has a way of living in “at the time.”

In your game, this is the village archive, the temple record room, the witch’s cabinet of names. This is where you get the first true account of the curse, not the tavern version. In Jackson, IL, a young witch discovers that the town has been lying by omission.

The room is quiet in a way that feels wrong. It is not empty, it is listening. You can smell the dust and old print on the carpet. The file cabinets are stiff, and the table bears pencil marks from the long dead. On a shelf are yearbooks with cracked spines and an excess of smiling faces.

A good clue from this place should make the mystery personal, not put an end to it. A young witch comes across her own surname in a clipping from before she was born. A player spots his grandmother next to a man who was dead by 1935. They find a map of Mauvaisterre that someone has tried to rub out, or a yearbook with the words “You heard the bell too” scrawled in it.

There is usually a guardian to the room, though not always a monster. It could be the librarian, a retired teacher, a ghost, or a rule in red ink on an index card. He won’t tell you, “you can’t come in,” that is too simple. He will ask, “What are you looking for?” which is far worse. In a room like this, the wrong answer can still give you exactly what you are looking for. Just maybe not in the way you expect it should.