Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen
A bookstore by night is a different place than a bookstore by day, even if they share an address. A daytime bookstore is for real people with real problems seeking a few hours’ escape into stories. It’s awake, alive. But when a bookstore is closed, and the people are gone, it still doesn’t sleep.
The books themselves work the night shift.
Every reader can recall a book that stayed with them for hours or days or even weeks after they’d closed the cover. They think about the book even when they’re not reading it, not realizing that the book is also thinking about them.
Duke said that once he learned he was a fictional character, he became subtly aware of his readers.
He felt their watchful eyes and sensed their quiet, gentle presence.
He knew his stories were being read when the light had a certain warmer quality to it.
And when the lights dimmed, he longed to be read again the way a plant with dry soil longs for rain.
Scientists have proven that reading fiction makes people more empathic, improves their disposition and emotional intelligence.
People, in other words, need stories. But stories also need people.
An unread book is a caged animal, trapped between paper walls.
They want reading, need it. To open a book is to set a story free.
In a bookstore at night—or a library or a box of books left in the donation bin outside of your local Goodwill—you can feel the stories working their soft magic, singing a siren’s song to draw readers to their pages.
Read me and I’ll show you what passion looks like on paper…
Read me and breathe the rusted red air of Mars…
Read me and I’ll reveal to you what really happened in that lonely cabin in the dark, dark woods…
Read me, for you think you’re too old for unicorns and fairies, but in my pages, you’ll learn you are a mere baby in the eyes of these ancient beings, and don’t you want to feel like a child again?
Read me and remember…
Read me and forget…
Read me and hate…
Read me and fall in love…
Read me and learn the secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself…
When Duke, Koshka, and I reached Words, Words, Words at four in the morning, the air was heavy with this magic.
Most people can’t feel it directly. They simply wake up with an overpowering urge to go to the nearest bookstore and buy a new novel.
But to a Book Witch, the spell is impossible to ignore.
It surrounded the building like a heavy fog.
“The Burners and I agree on one thing only,” I said, as the strange mist reached out toward us with tendrils of longing. “Books are dangerous.”
Duke smiled and said, “I like a spot of danger myself.”
We stood by my car, which I’d had to leave there earlier that evening when it wouldn’t start. If anyone caught us, we had our lie ready, that we’d come back to retrieve my Sun Buggy.
“Are you all right, darling?” Duke asked.
I shivered in the cold. Koshka pressed his small body to my legs. He let me pick him up and tuck him inside my coat.
“The books are particularly wild tonight,” I said. “Can you tell?”
He peered at the bookstore, shook his head no.
“Looks like a perfectly normal bookshop at night to me. A normal bookshop in an old, creaking Victorian house shrouded in fog and mist…”
“Books that don’t have a home yet are always trying to seduce you,” I explained.
“That’s why almost no one can go into a bookstore without buying something.
At night, the books try to get into your head, into your dreams. For a Book Witch, it’s like walking through a circus of ghosts…
and they want me to run away and join their circus. ”
Duke stared at me agog. “A ghost circus? That…that is positively sinister, Rainy. I’m going to have nightmares now.”
“It’s not too bad. Unless you’re in the horror section. Then it gets a little nightmarish. But it will be all right once I get my umbrella back. It’ll shield me. Until then, stick close.”
“Why don’t you let me go it alone?” Duke asked. “I can nick your umbrella and bring it back to you.”
“Bad idea,” I said. “If Dr. Fanshawe notices it’s gone, she’ll know I stole it. We need to get in, use it while we’re there, then put it back before morning.”
“Noted,” Duke said. “Penny said the back door was unlocked?”
“She said she thought she might have left it unlocked,” I told him. “Do you have the book?”
“What book?” Duke asked.
“ Alice in Wonderland. ”
“I thought you had it,” he said.
“Great. We’re the worst criminals ever.” I took a long breath. “Let’s hope the bookstore has a copy of one of the Alice books in stock.”
Koshka meowed.
“Right, boy, if we have to, we can use an ebook.”
“What’s an ebook?” Duke asked.
“Never mind. Let’s go.”
Duke took me by the hand. Together, we skulked through the shadows as we made our way to the back of the store.
As we neared it, my vision blurred.
“Rainy?”
“I’m okay. Keep going.”
As we pressed deeper into the mist of stories, I saw shapes forming. Old friends. Old enemies.
A man with a handkerchief tied around his head and jaw glared at me, rattling chains forged of greed and regret.
Marley’s ghost.
A Saint Bernard dog, enormous, rabid, barked silently at me, foam dripping from his mouth.
Cujo.
Three witches huddled together, stirring a cauldron of conspiracy and murder. One raised a gnarled, ancient hand and beckoned me to join them.
The Weird Sisters.
Yes, I should join their circle, shouldn’t I?
“ Fair is foul, and foul is fair; / Hover through the fog and filthy air… ” I mumbled as I started toward them.
Then suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, they were gone.
“Rainy?” Duke held me by the upper arms and gently shook me. “Rainy, can you see me?”
I blinked once, twice, and my eyes cleared.
In my hands, I held my umbrella again. I clutched it to my chest like a very long, oddly cylindrical teddy bear.
“Oh my goodness, I missed you,” I said and kissed it, which I know is odd behavior, and I make no excuses. “Did they hurt you?”
Duke hovered over me like a mother hen. “Rainy, you’re talking to your umbrella.”
“Don’t judge. It’s been a long day. Wait. What happened? Weren’t we outside?”
My head throbbed, but my vision had cleared. No more ghosts or rabid dogs or wicked witches.
“I let go of your hand for thirty seconds to open the door and lock it behind us,” he said, “and then you were gone. Koshka found you wandering in the fog muttering Macbeth quotes.”
“The Weird Sisters got into my head and were trying to recruit me again.”
“Again? I was content with the first part of the sentence, but when we got to the ‘again,’ I started to worry.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’m okay. I know we don’t have time to murder the king of Scotland tonight.”
“Or any night, yes? Please say yes.”
“Correct,” I said and blinked a few more times to get the last of the cauldron smoke out of my eyes. “Sorry, Shakespeare is heady stuff.” Koshka rubbed against my legs, then crawled into my lap. I gave him his favorite chin scritches. “I’m fine, comrade. Now let me up. We have work to do.”
Koshka leapt off my lap and onto the nearest desk.
“Umbrella achieved,” Duke said. “What’s next?”
“Children’s fiction.” I found the steps that led from the stockroom to the main floor. Duke and Koshka followed behind me.
We passed through the stockroom door into the Indigenous room, where the bookstore kept a good collection of fiction, nonfiction, and craft and cookbooks about the native Clatsop people. The floor creaked mournfully with every careful step we took.
“I don’t remember it being this loud during the day,” I said quietly, wincing every time my toes touched the ground. “They can probably hear us stomping around next door.”
“Carpeting,” Duke whispered. “That’s what we need. Thick wall-to-wall carpeting.”
Meanwhile Koshka, who barely weighed ten pounds and was born with rubberized feet, trotted merrily along, not disturbing so much as an atom of the universe.
“Or we should be cats,” I said.
“They are called cat burglars for a reason,” Duke said, and the floor whined under his shoes.
It felt like an eternity passed before we’d made it to the children’s book room. My hair was damp with flop sweat and terror.
Koshka found the book first on a shelf painted rainbow colors labeled as Classics.
I pulled a hardcover unabridged copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland off the shelf with a sigh of relief. “Let’s get this over with,” I said and put the book on a tiny plastic table, open to the end of chapter six.
I pressed my hand to the page, reaching out with my magic to touch the story. Orange electric filaments crackled around my hand as they had when I tried to open my grandfather’s locked desk drawer.
“Oh no,” I gasped.
“What?” Duke asked.
“We have a problem.”
“Two,” he said.
“Two what?”
A light flashed through the shop window. Not headlights. A flashlight.
“Two problems,” he mouthed.
Book in hand, the three of us raced back to the stockroom, where we ducked behind a book cart.
“Can you get us into the book now?” Duke whispered.
The front door of the bookshop whined open.
A stern male voice called out, “Anyone here? Police.”
Eight or nine unprintable words passed through my mind.
“The book’s locked,” I whispered back to Duke.
“What do you mean it’s locked?”
The policeman’s heavy gait rattled the old window frames.
“Pick any book,” Duke hissed.
That was an idea. I glanced around wildly, looking for a place to hide us.
A nearby cart carried special orders that hadn’t been picked up by customers yet.
I grabbed at them.
Dante’s Inferno ? No, we were definitely not hiding out in Hell.
The Plague by Albert Camus.
Absolutely not.
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.
“Why is everybody reading depressing, scary books? Somebody order something happy,” I muttered.
At the bottom of the pile, I found exactly what we needed. The footsteps grew louder.
“Hurry,” Duke said.