Volumen-Evict House: The Librarian’s Final Page
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Volumen-Evict House was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry materials, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining volume/scroll with expelled/removed, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of recorded information, now embodying its own absolute termination of knowledge. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled cataloging, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated fact-testing cells, soundproofed archive bunkers, and meticulously designed informational stabilizers intended to eliminate all external variables that might corrupt a pure intellectual constant.
The final inhabitant was Librarian Master Scrutinium Vacuum, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master indexer and informational theorist of the late 19th century. Master Vacuum’s profession was the study of classification, retention, and the fundamental nature of knowledge, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent non-recorded state that was free of all fact, data, or subjective narrative. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Page’—a single, perfect, flawless intellectual state that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known archival principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of knowledge, free of all content, error, or measurable record. After realizing that the very act of storing knowledge required both a subject and an object (a duality of record), proving that absolute, independent and secure simplicity was impossible, shattering his faith in fixed informational law, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero Page was to understand the ultimate absence of all knowledge and record. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of contradiction, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of intellectual finality.
The Canon Chamber
Master Vacuum’s mania culminated in the Canon Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not archiving, but deconstructing the act of knowledge itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no detectable informational content. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning non-existent concepts and the theoretical limits of absolute anti-fact, were found sealed inside a hollow metal stamp case. He stopped trying to define the perfect content and began trying to define the un-recorded, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Page was to eliminate the need for any form of knowledge or record whatsoever. “The fact is a variable; the datum is a shadow,” one entry read. “The final page requires the complete surrender of all knowledge and all content. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect void.”
The house preserves his systematic rigor structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated acoustic dampeners and total atmospheric sterilization fields built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-interfering environment for abstract intellectual contemplation.
The Final Record in the Abandoned Victorian House
Librarian Master Scrutinium Vacuum was last heard working in his archive, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy wood splintering and metal shearing (from the card catalog and the paper cutter) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the archive was cold, the Canon Chamber sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the black rubber. It is the final record—the Zero Page achieved, representing the cessation of all recorded existence and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken telescope and blank rubber ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, knowledge-filled world. This abandoned Victorian House, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master librarian who pursued the ultimate, pure form of knowledge, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Fact, vanishing into the un-known, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.
