It was the middle of July, the kind of heat that makes the asphalt ripple and the air hum with cicadas. I was in Lordsburg, New Mexico, a town that seems to be mostly gas stations and dust. I found a library, the old Carnegie building on Main Street, a relic of another century with a foundation sunk deep into the desert. I went inside to escape the heat, but the building had other plans. The librarian was a man named Elias, who spoke in a whisper and looked like he hadn't seen sunlight in years. He told me about a locked room in the basement, a room that shouldn't exist, a room where the books wrote themselves. I didn't believe him. I followed him down the stairs. I shouldn't have. The room was there, and the books were there, and they were still wet. This is the story of what I found in a basement in Lordsburg, and what I carried out with me.