Porter's Bookstore - Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - Alan

Angela hit the wooden floor at the bottom of the stairs wrong and twisted her ankle. With a muttered apology she pushed past a woman and her daughter and hobble-ran towards the rear of the store where the tiny coffee counter was hidden in a nook between the romance novels and the literary fiction. She headed for the cold case and grabbed two water bottles. Without slowing down she pushed her way past customers to the counter, slammed the bottles down and dug in her purse for her wallet. The man who had been next in line stared at her in complete disbelief.

“God, I am so sorry,” she stammered as she struggled to disentangle the faux leather billfold from the neon pink address book taking up way too much space in her bag.

“I swear I never, ever do this. It’s an emergency.” She grabbed a ten from the wallet and threw it onto the counter. “Keep the change,” she said as she thrust the wallet back in her purse and grabbed the bottles. “I am so sorry, really. I swear I will never do this again. I swear,” and she ran for the stairs.

Never in her life had she felt as slow running up a flight of stairs as she did now. Every step seemed to fight her, twisting out of her reach just enough to slow her down.

“Wait!” she yelled as she made it to the top. “I’m here!”

She ran around the corner and found the haggard man kneeling near the book, staring at it as if it would leap at him if he looked away. He glanced up at her as she reached him, dropping her purse on the floor at her feet and struggling with the bottles’ screw-on caps.

“Here.” She handed him one and went back to twisting the cap on her own. “Open it!”

He twisted the cap; the safety ring snapping in resistance as the top finally came free. She stepped as close to the book as she dared and tipped her bottle over the back cover, emptying the entire thing onto it. The man did the same and they watched in horrified fascination as the water spilled into the cover and disappeared, leaving no trace. There was no sharp crack of electricity, no ozone filling the air in front of them, no man.

Angela shook the last drops out of her bottle as if they would some how be enough to fling him into existence again. “I was so sure this would work,” she muttered. “So sure.”

“It was a good idea.”

“Yeah, well it didn’t work!” she shouted and threw the empty bottle at the book. It bounced off and rolled away.

“Here,” the man said and opened the cardboard box. Two rat faces, one white and black and the other all white, poked up from inside, noses and whiskers twitching. He reached in and grabbed them both, handing the white one to her. It squirmed in her hands, wrapped its tail around her wrist to keep from falling. She pulled the tail off her skin and shivered as she tucked it in next to the rat’s body.

“Oh, God. Do we have to do this?”

“I can’t think of anything else to do!” he shouted at her.

“I know, I’m sorry. Okay, let’s just get it over with.” She shivered again but wasn’t sure if it was because she was holding a rat or because she was about to kill it.

“Okay. On the count of three drop it on the book.”

She nodded and held the rat next to his over the back cover of the book.

“One. Two. Three!”

They dropped the rats at the same time and the air filled with ozone, the hair on her head lifted and stood out. There was a bright flash and Angela threw herself backwards, felt the man close his hand around her leg and follow her motion. The crack that immediately followed was sharp, nearly earsplitting this close. They landed in a heap against the bookcase behind them and were pressed to the floor by a sudden weight. Someone groaned and gave a hoarse cry.

“Holy Mary full of grace…”

Angela opened her eyes and stared at the drawn face of the sales associate she had spoken to just twenty minutes early. “He’s out! He’s out! We got him out!” she shouted and pushed him off her side.

Brandon pulled himself out from under the sales associate’s legs and nodded, rubbing the side of his head.

“We got to get rid of it.”

She nodded and then touched the sales associate. “Are you okay…” she glanced at the name tag pinned to his sweater, “Alan?”

“Yeah. Jesus. Yeah, I think so.”

“I’m Angela and this is…” She looked at the man sitting next to them with her eyebrows raised.

“Brandon. Listen, we got to get rid of that thing.”

“How?” she asked.

The intercom broke in again. “Porter’s Bookstore will be closing in five minutes. Please bring your selections to the front registers and have a pleasant evening.”

Alan sat back against the bookcase and then thought better of it and leaned forward. “Burn it.”

“Okay, but where,” Brandon asked.

“The store’s got an incinerator in the basement. Porter runs it all the time to deal with the unsold extra copies.” Angela looked at him, incomprehension in every newly acquired deep crease in her face.

“What?”

“When you have extra copies that don’t sell right away, and if the publisher won’t take them back, you either keep them and hope someone eventually buys them or tear off the covers and throw them out. Either way you take a loss. Porter burns them to save the space they would take up in a landfill.”

“That’s awful,” she whispered. “No wonder the thing tried to kill us. It’s fighting back.”

“It’s a book!” Brandon shouted. “Books don’t fight back!”

“Well they don’t eat people either, but that one sure gave it a helluva shot!” she yelled back, her eyes wide and bulging.

Alan ran his hands across his face and then looked at his palms, the white, dry lines etched into them crying for moisture.

“We need to burn it,” he said. “Completely. It’s gonna keep doing this until it has enough moisture stored up. We need to burn it.” He stood up and headed for his cart, sidestepped the book and grabbed the metal handle to wheel the cart into place.

“Jesus!” Brandon yelled. “Not the cart you fool! It’s metal! The damn thing will just suck you back in if you’re touching it with the cart and the cart is touching you!”

Alan jerked his hand away and stared at the book and then the cart. “What do you mean?”

“The static electricity…I think it uses the static to draw in its victims. The current’ll flow from it, through the cart, and pow, you’re gone.”

“Yeah, thanks man,” Alan stammered.

“No problem,” Brandon said and pulled Angela to her feet. She looked at him hard.

“How old are you?”

Brandon blinked, glanced at his aged hand and muttered, “Twenty three.”

She nodded. “I’m twenty nine. How old do I look?”

Brandon squinted. “About fifty.” She looked over at Alan.

“You look about forty.”

He laughed. “I’m thirty one.”

She looked back at Brandon. “He was only in there, what, five minutes?”

“Yeah, and the rats are probably dead, so we need to get rid of this thing before it snatches someone else.”

“Right. How?”

Brandon looked around and then walked two stacks down the aisle and jerked hard on a shelf. The board came away from the case sending the books on its surface to the floor. He jumped aside and then used the wood shelf to plow them against the opposite case. He handed the shelf to Angela and reached for another. More books hit the floor and were plowed to the side. “Alan, get a shelf, too.”

The sales associate nodded and yanked a shorter one off the end-cap next to him. The marketing poster and carefully arranged books fell, smashing into the ones beneath and dragging a few to the floor with them. He pushed them into a pile just as Brandon had done.

“Okay, now what?”

“Now we try to get the damn thing on one of the shelves, sandwich it in between it and another shelf and get it to the basement as quickly as possible.”

“Yeah, okay, I get what you’re talking about,”

Angela nodded and walked around the book and slid the end of her shelf up against its spine.

“Put you end on the page side and let’s see if I can tip it over onto your shelf,” she said.

Brandon moved forward and jammed his shelf against the floor and the cream colored pages. “Okay.”

Angela turned to Alan. “Come over here and help keep it straight.”

Alan stepped around the fallen books and stood to her right, ready to beat the book into pieces if necessary. Carefully Angela tilted her shelf, tried to tuck the edge of the end under the spine and raise it enough to slide the shelf further under. The book shifted a little and they all jumped. It fell back, flat against the floor.

“Okay,” Alan breathed. “Let’s try it again.”

This time Angela managed to flip it over so that it was leaning fully against Brandon’s shelf, the front cover exposed. The three of them stared at it.

“There’s no title.”

“Nothing on the spine, either.”

“Well, there were words inside,” Angela whispered. “I remember the words. They were huge and sharp and wicked.”

“Yeah, okay. Angela,” Brandon nodded at her, “keep the bottom end of your shelf where it is, but hand me the rest. I’m going to trap it. Alan, don’t let it fall.”

“Right.”

Angela tipped her shelf forward until Brandon was able to reach out and take it from her, slowly bringing the two pieces of wood together on either side of the book. He slowly lowered the two shelves while Alan kept the book from sliding out with the end of his shelf. They all let out the breaths they were holding when Brandon was able to finally lay the shelving down on the floor, the book safely sandwiched between them. Alan knelt down near the book and tapped the end of it with his shelf, sliding it inch by inch down the length of the longer shelves until it was resting near the middle.

“Take your end, Angela, and we’ll carry the whole thing down the stairs,” Brandon instructed.

She licked her lips, her thick tongue doing little to wet the cracked skin. She knelt down and slipped her fingers under the bottom shelf, clamped her thumbs across the top and nodded.

“Okay.”

“You got it tight?” he asked as he did the same on his end.

“Mmhmm. Yeah.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

They stood up in relative unison, Alan watching the book and holding his shelf like a cudgel, ready to smash it if it should fall away. Slowly they stepped over and around the books that had spilled to the floor near the end cap. Alan pushed the outliers into smaller piles to make a clear path.

Angela grimaced. “Wait. Stop. I’m losing my grip.”

Brandon stood still in mid-step, his eyes wide as she clasped and re-clasped the boards, balancing the ends of the shelves against her stomach.

“Okay,” she said.

They continued, Angela walking backward, peeking over her shoulder to be sure of her steps, Brandon steering from his end, Alan beside the book, but a few steps out of reach if it should slip. As they neared the stairs the air took on a decidedly electric odor. The hairs on Angela’s head began to stand out.

“It’s happening again,” she said, the pitch of her voice suddenly higher than it had been.

“Don’t let go,” Brandon replied, his voice as firm as he could make it.

The floor beneath their feet creaked and Angela jumped, the shelf boards and the book shifting in her unsettled grip.

“Don’t let go,” Brandon growled, his eyes bulging, his teeth clenched.

“I’m trying not to,” she snapped and took another step backwards.

The ozone smell had grown stronger and Alan could see the hair on the backs of his hands standing straight up.

“God, look at this,” he muttered and turned his hand so they could see. “She’s right. It’s getting ready.”

“That’s exactly why we got to get rid of it,” Brandon snapped. The hair on his neck had lifted and was sticking out from his skin. “Keep going.”

Another step. The staircase threw out an elegant electric arc from the outside railing to the center support column. Brandon’s eyes grew wider and he glanced at Alan. The other man had seen it and nodded. Angela looked from one to the other.

“What? What?” She looked over her shoulder in time to see another white-blue flicker along the iron railing. “Oh shit.” She turned and looked at them. “I’m not going down those steps.”

“We have to get rid of this.”

“I’m not going down those steps!”

“Angela,” Alan started. She turned terrified eyes on him.

“I am NOT going down those STAIRS!” she snarled.

“Stop!” Brandon yelled. She looked back at him and he could tell that she was crying even though there were no tears sliding down her face. “Just listen to me,” he said softly. “Please.” She bit her lip.

“There isn’t any other way.”

She shook her head no.

“There’s an elevator at the back,” Alan threw in, “for people who can’t walk up the stairs or when we bring books up on the carts.”

Brandon shook his head. “No. I am not getting in a big metal box with this thing.”

“But it’s okay to get on the damn stairs and get sucked into it out here?!” Angela shouted.

“Listen to me,” Brandon started. The manager’s voice cut in once more.

“Porter’s is now closed. Thank you for stopping in and have a peaceful evening.”

He tried again. “I’d rather take my chances out here where we might be able to get away, than in a small space that we can’t get out of until the door opens.”

The stairs sent out another spark and Angela shut her eyes and started to shake. Brandon could feel it through the boards.

“I know you’re scared,” he said. “I’m scared. I don’t want to see the inside of that thing again. But I don’t want anyone to see it. Look at me, Angela.” She took a breath and opened her eyes. “The shelves are wood.” She looked down at the shelving in her hands, the dark stained grain swirling and slipping along the face of it. “Electricity doesn’t pass through wood. At least that’s what I remember from a first-aid class.”

“Yeah,” Alan muttered. “You use a broomstick to move the broken electric cord off the victim, right?”

“Yeah. The book is caught between two boards. It can’t touch us.”

“What about the stairs?”

He looked at them for a second. “I’m not sure, but I think we’ll be okay. I think it’s just static. I don’t think it can kill you, us, if the book isn’t actually touching the stairs.”

She didn’t look convinced.

“I’ll go first,” he said. “Let’s turn around and I’ll go down the stairs first.” He started to walk in a circle and she followed.

“What do you want me to do?” Alan asked. “I can’t go down next to you guys. There’s no room.”

Brandon looked over his shoulder at the stairs. “Maybe you could go down first, see if the static goes all the way down. Keep anyone from coming up or getting in the way if we have to drop it over the side of the railing.”

Alan didn’t look thrilled about this, but he nodded and walked to the top of the staircase. It snapped at him and sent a wriggling snake of electricity down the railing. He took a breath and stepped onto the first iron tread. Angela caught a cry in her mouth as she watched an arc of light dance right in front of him. He touched the railing with a finger and snatched it away, shoving it in his mouth.

“Try not to touch the metal if you can,” he said and took another step and then another. The static flew up and down the railing, arced behind him and in front, but he seemed to be doing fine. “I think it’s okay. Just try not to touch it.” He continued down the steps.

“Okay,” Brandon said and Angela looked back at him. “I want to turn around and hold this thing over my head as we go down. I need you to hang on and help me not drop the shelves.” She nodded.

He lifted his end at the same time that he bent his knees, trying to keep the whole thing as level as possible. He set the bottom shelf on the top of his head and began to turn around under it, switching hands as he went until he was facing the stairs.

“Follow me,” he said.

“Okay.”

Angela tried to step in time with him, her end slightly lower even though she had lifted it to chest height. They neared the stairs and Brandon hesitated. A thick, wide arc leapt from the center support to the railing, just missing his face.

“All right, here I go. Just try to keep up with me as best you can.”

“Mmhmm,” Angela replied, nodding, her lips pulled into her mouth and over her teeth to keep the fear inside.



~ Peace and a safe journey