Megan swallowed back a rush of anxiety and moved around the edge of the aisle.
Then she choked back a scream.
Eric was prone in a pool of blood, there on the carpeted floor between the self-help and legal sections. He was obviously dead, with large cuts and swellings on his head and arms. He looked like he’d gone three rounds with a meat grinder. One eye was covered with blood, but the other was open, already glassy, staring straight up in wide fright.
And he was surrounded by books. There must have been dozens, many now soaked in his blood, their spines cracked and pages creased.
Megan’s breath jigsawed in and out as she backed away. How could this—he wasn’t alone that long—whoever did this—
My God, they must still be here somewhere.
Megan turned and ran. She collided with Damon as he walked out of the stockroom, and this time she did scream, a quick strangled sound that cut off when she saw who it was. “Megan, what—”
“We have to get out of here, Damon—NOW.”
She half-tugged him toward the front door, her fingers trembling as she fiddled frantically with the keys. Finally the door was open, she and Damon were through, and she pressed the keys into his hand as she grabbed at her cell phone. “Lock the doors.”
“Okay, but—”
She ignored him as she dialed 911. “There’s been a murder at my store—”
She looked up then to see Damon staring at her in disbelief.
***
The police came and kept them up all night. They answered questions and waited while detectives and coroners and photographers and forensics experts all went over the scene endlessly.
The next day Megan called the District Manager and reported on what had happened. She promptly received a written warning. Eric, of course, should not have been in the store during closing. There was no “sorry you had to go through that” or “we’ll give you some extra money for security until this thing is over,” just a mark on her report and the District Manager’s reminder that she had a sales quota to meet this month.
Fortunately the killing didn’t hamper sales; if anything, it brought more customers in, including those who merely wanted to see a murder site. It took two days for the cops to finish with their work, and another day to replace the crimson-splattered carpeting, and a fourth day to write up all the books that had been damaged.
In some ways, that had been the strangest part of the whole thing: Megan had looked at the books before they’d been bagged and confiscated as evidence, and she couldn’t quite understand how so many had ended up around Eric. Surely she and Damon would have heard that many books hitting the floor, wouldn’t they? Granted, the Fook Reader display and the aisle he’d died in were probably sixty or seventy feet from the front counter, but Eric had been surrounded by at least 100 books. Why had he pulled so many books down as he’d fallen? Or had the killer for some reason pushed the books down onto him?
And the big question, of course: Where had the killer come from, and where had he gone? She and Damon had already done the final walk-through that night, and the store had been empty until Eric had come in.
The cops were clueless, in more ways than one. The detective in charge of the case, a middle-aged woman with tired eyes, skin the color of stained sheets, and the last name of Washington, told her they had nothing—no fingerprints, no footprints, no DNA, nothing. Granted, there’d been plenty of folks who hadn’t liked Eric (“including you,” the detective had said, pointedly, while peering at Megan), but nobody likely to have committed a crime this bloody and vicious. “Make sure you never close alone,” was all Detective Washington had said to her by way of advice. So Megan kept her full crew on every night until after closing, and they huddled together nervously after nine like hens stalked by the fox.
But after a week they began to relax. Business returned to normal—the crime-scene fans dwindled, the sales stayed steady—and Megan tried to forget about Eric.
Until the night Detective Washington showed up at the store and asked to speak to Megan in private.
It was after 7 p.m., a Tuesday night, and foot traffic was light. She was back to running a small evening crew, and so she called Damon over and told him to look after things while she and the Detective spoke. He frowned, but nodded and told her he’d handle things.
Megan led the way to her tiny closet-sized office in the back stockroom. She took her seat behind her cluttered desk, indicated the only other chair to the detective, and tried to quell the adrenaline coursing through her, especially when Washington closed the door and stood, glaring down.
“I gotta tell you, Ms. Barlow,” the homicide detective began, “this is one frustrating case. We’ve got nothing except you and Mr. Watkins out there—” she waved a hand in the general direction of Damon, “—telling us there was nothing to get. You didn’t see anyone, you didn’t hear anyone, and you can’t think of anyone who could have done this. Can you see why that might bother me a little?”
Washington stared down, her baggy eyes wider than usual, wider in anger, and Megan gulped back anxiety and thought, Jesus God, she thinks I did this!
“Detective Washington, I’m just as bothered as you, believe me.”
“Well, see, that’s the problem,” Washington said, pushing aside a stack of books—some classics Megan had recently pulled for herself—to sit on a corner of the desk, a gesture Megan found annoying, “I don’t believe you.”
Well, there it was. Megan was a suspect. She bit back an urge to laugh hysterically, to say there were times she wanted to kill Eric, sure, but not like that, not like…dead.
“Do you have anything you’d like to tell me, Ms. Barlow?” Washington said, leaning in closer. “You could make this easier on all of us.”
“I…” Megan’s throat was suddenly too dry to produce sound. She swallowed enough to squeak out, “No.”
“Are you sure?”
Washington leaned in closer—
The stack of books fell to the floor.
Megan jumped at the sound, but Washington had another reaction, a strange one. She looked down at the books—and frowned. “What the…”
Then Washington gasped, cried out, and fell over.
Megan rose halfway out of her chair, then stopped in disbelief at the sounds she heard: There was Washington, making stifled cries of pain and terror, but mostly it was the flapping noises, boards slamming together, the riffling of pages…
Edging around the desk, already knowing what she’d find—impossible as it was—Megan was still stunned when she came into full view: Washington was on the concrete floor, trying to defend herself from…
The books. They smashed at her, their hard spines making soft thuds against Washington’s head and shoulders. They flapped back and forth like disembodied jaws, and somehow the detective’s skin was sundered with each closing. The titles from Megan’s desk—The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, In Cold Blood—were joined by coffee table art books that leapt from a box of damaged returns that had been forgotten in a corner. A huge barbecue cookbook battered Washington’s ribs, while a collection of Van Gogh’s paintings dug into the soft flesh of an ear.
Megan stood paralyzed, mesmerized; some part of her knew she should try to help Washington, but she feared the power of the books. “No,” she cried out once, but she bit back on her protest as she realized that Washington had been right—she was responsible for Eric’s death. Because she suddenly knew that living books could only be magic, and she had enacted the magic, the night she and her roommate, both stupidly besotted, had invoked a vengeful spirit that had somehow taken up residence in the books. And now she was being protected.
In the few seconds it took her to put it all together, Washington was dead. The concrete floor was awash in blood and torn pages. The books were inanimate again.
Megan’s mind started spinning. There was no way she could report this to the police—they’d arrest her immediately. Her only chance was to try to hide the body, bu
t where…?
Of course—the vast, unused basement. It had brick walls. They’d even joked once, she and Damon, about what might be behind those walls—perhaps a real-life “Cask of Amontillado.”
She took a moment to calm herself (spotting a copy of a Dr. Seuss book in the corner helped somehow), then she stepped out of the office, closed the door behind her, and walked out into the store. Damon looked up from behind the front counter. “How’s it going with Mrs. Columbo there?”
“Oh,” Megan said, trying to wave a hand in what she hoped was a breezy fashion, “we’re done. Hopefully that was the last of the questions.”
Damon looked around. “Did she leave already?”
“Yeah. You didn’t see her go?”
“No. Well, no big loss there.”
At 9 p.m., they closed the store. Megan told Damon she had a few last items she wanted to work on, and she’d probably be late. He left, she locked the doors behind him, and then returned to her office, half-wondering what she’d find.
Nothing had changed: Washington was still on the floor, dead, bleeding from dozens of wounds, while the books waited, seemingly inanimate.
“So,” Megan said, feeling vaguely silly, “are you really alive?”
There was no obvious response, but Megan shivered, as if there were a charge in the air.
“Will you help me with her now?”
The books twitched, stood up, and fastened onto various pieces of Washington’s clothing. They began to drag the body across the floor; other books sopped up the blood, efficiently, leaving no trace. In fifteen minutes the body had been dragged down to a far corner of the basement, where Megan used a hammer and crowbar to carefully dismantle part of the brick wall. She removed Washington’s cell phone and smashed it, then she sealed the corpse in bubble wrap and packing tape, and the books helped her place it carefully in the narrow space behind the bricks. Tomorrow she’d pick up mortar at a hardware store, but she was done for tonight.
“Now, what do I do with you?” Megan asked the books, their pages stained crimson, the edges worn and corners bumped.
The books piled into the wall around the detective’s body. Megan found herself crying softly as she realized that they’d sacrificed themselves for her. She hadn’t even read The Catcher in the Rye yet, but she already felt a kinship with Holden Caulfield.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
***
She finished bricking in the wall the next day, and she began to wonder more about the books. Did they come to life at other times, when she wasn’t there? Did they stay alive once they left the store?
That question was answered a few days later when Mrs. Forrest, an elderly customer who’d once taught high school English and who now celebrated her retirement with three new books a week, came in and told Megan about something that’d happened.
“I don’t think I should read any more of those horror novels,” she said. “Last week you sold me on that new one, Malediction, and I started reading it, and it was very good, but I had the strangest dream last night: I dreamed that a spider had tried to crawl onto my bed in the night, and the book had come to life and crushed it. And you know, it’s the darnedest thing: In the morning, I found a smashed spider in the pages of the book. Isn’t that curious?”
Megan agreed that it was. But secretly, she was delighted to know that the books were protecting others who loved them.
***
A week went by. Megan received calls and visits about Washington’s disappearance, and she even allowed the police to search the bookstore, but nothing was found. The books had done a good job of cleanup. And no one bothered to look much in the forgotten basement
On a Tuesday morning, Megan pulled up to the store fifteen minutes before opening—and felt her stomach lurch as she saw the District Manager standing there already, waiting for her.
“You’re late, Megan,” he said.
She eyed him—God, she hated his stupid boring haircut and his cheap suits and his round face that looked like it’d been stamped out of a machine labeled DISTRICT MANAGERS—and then said, “We don’t open for fifteen minutes.”
“Managers are supposed to be here twenty minutes before opening,” he said.
Megan turned her attention to unlocking the door. “Sorry, but—why are you here? I thought the usual inspection wasn’t for another month.”
“It isn’t,” he said, blowing on a cup of overpriced coffee, “but this isn’t an official inspection. I’m a little worried about you and your store, frankly, Megan.”
She opened the door for him, hoping she didn’t sound as nervous as she felt. “Because of the murders?”
“Has there been another one?”
She cursed herself—she’d have to remember that the world only knew about one. “I thought I heard something on the news the other night about one in a…” she struggled for a second, then blurted out, “soap factory.”
The D.M. grunted, then followed her in. She locked the door behind them.
As Megan headed for the light switches in the back, she saw him critically examining her shelves, already facing out more books.
She’d almost reached the switches when she stopped, realizing: This would be better done in the dark, wouldn’t it?
“What’s the problem with the light?” he called from up front.
“Sir, would you mind coming back here? Maybe you can help me with this.”
He followed her voice, sipping his coffee, glancing around. “Need to face out a lot more stock than this, Barlow. We need to move these things now. Since we brought the new Fook out, our e-book sales have skyrocketed. These things are going to go the way of the dinosaurs. You know that, right, Barlow?”
“Dinosaurs…” Megan had been wondering about which section to lead him to.
“What?”
“Over this way, sir.”
The section on paleontology was in a far back corner of the store, and it was dim without the lights on. “What’s going on? Why aren’t the lights on yet?”
Megan was glad he couldn’t see her smiling. “Oh, I think the lights are on, sir.”
“What are you talking about?”
He struck a shin in the gloom and cried out. But Megan heard another sound over that: The anticipation of books flapping, of large volumes on ancient creatures thudding across the floor as they left their shelves. Thunder lizards of paper.
“You see, sir—the dinosaurs are still alive. In books, that is.”
The District Manager shouted out as the first book struck his ankle, and Megan stepped back, giving them room and thinking about how much she hated soap.
A rare Southern California native, Lisa Morton’s career as a professional writer began in 1988 with the horror-fantasy feature film Meet the Hollowheads (aka Life on the Edge), on which she also served as Associate Producer. For the Disney Channel’s 1992 Adventures in Dinosaur City, she served as screenwriter, Associate Producer, Songwriter, and Miniatures Coordinator. For stage she has written and co-produced the acclaimed horror one-acts Spirits of the Season, Sane Reaction and The Territorial Imperative, and has adapted and directed Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth and Theodore Sturgeon’s The Graveyard Reader; her full-length science fiction comedy Trashers was an L.A. Weekly “Recommended” pick. Her short fiction has appeared in the books Dark Voices 6: The Pan Book of Horror, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, Dark Terrors, After Shocks, White of the Moon, The Museum of Horrors, Dead But Dreaming, Shelf Life: An Anthology of Bookstore Stories, Dark Terrors 6, Dark Delicacies: Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre, Mondo Zombie, Dark Passions: Hot Blood XIII, and Midnight Premiere, and the magazine Cemetery Dance. Her chapbook The Free Way was published by Fool’s Press, and in early 2010 her first novel The Castle of Los Angeles was published to critical acclaim. She has also written numerous episodes of the animated television series Sky Dancers, Dragon Flyz and Van-Pires. Her first book, The Cinema of Tsui Hark
was published by McFarland, who also published The Halloween Encyclopedia in 2003 and A Hallowe’en Anthology: Literary and Historical Writings Over the Centuries in 2008. Her television movie Tornado Warning was chosen by the Pax cable station to launch their 2002 fall season, and 2005 saw the release of three horror films, the vampire thriller Blood Angels, the mutant shark story Blue Demon, and The Glass Trap, about genetically altered fire ants. Lisa was awarded the 2006 Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction for her story “Tested” (which first appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine), and the 2008 Bram Stoker Award for Nonfiction for A Hallowe’en Anthology. For the first anthology she edited, 2009’s Midnight Walk, Lisa received a Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Anthology, and she won the 2009 Bram Stoker Award for Long Fiction for her novella The Lucid Dreaming. In 2010, she received her fourth Stoker Award, this time in the First Novel category for The Castle of Los Angeles. She is also a two-time recipient of the President’s Richard Laymon Award, presented by the Horror Writers Association.
Carpool
Gregory L. Norris
The idea came to Sebastian on the third day of the new job while he brooded behind the wheel of his car, mired in gridlock morning traffic. His heart pounded in his chest while watching other cars race through the carpool lane, the rapid cadence aggravated by too much coffee and no breakfast. Somehow, he would find a way to join them. The only flaw to his plan was simple numbers.
“One plus one equals two,” Sebastian grumbled. He shot a look at the rearview, but was unable to face his own reflection. His gray-blue eyes darted toward the windshield and the line of inert cars blocking his way, then back to the little green numbers on the dashboard’s clock.
The car in front of him crept forward several inches. Sebastian followed its lead. Somewhere lengths behind in the game of leapfrog, a horn honked. Then another bleated angrily. To his left, a black SUV raced freely down the carpool lane.
Sebastian wandered to the edge of his reflection in the rearview mirror. His was a handsome, young face by all accounts, but growing steadily uglier around the edges. His mouth was clamped hard enough to make his teeth ache. And his eyes—Sebastian wasn’t aware that he’d stopped blinking until they started to burn. He switched on the radio and stabbed at buttons. Morning talk. More morning talk. An irritating song played to death during a summer years ago blasted out of the speakers, a one-hit wonder from a loser band that would now loop through his thoughts all day, thank you very much. He killed the radio, huffing a swear under his breath.
HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror Page 4