by Chris Fabry
He finally forced himself to move into the next room, back to a chair near the fireplace and a picture of Hemingway displaying a fresh-caught fish bigger than Owen. He sat down and laid the pea bag over the arm of the chair, something for which his father would have scolded him. He willed the whispers to go away, but they only grew louder.
Strange. The rug in the corner in front of the biggest bookcase in the store had been pulled back.
Owen grabbed the bag of peas and slid from the chair, whispers surrounding him. He knelt and scooted silently toward a vent in the floor. He put his ear close to the opening and strained, but he could make out only bits and pieces, sentence fragments.
“. . . must keep him away . . .”
“. . . dangerous to the cause . . .”
“. . . never know what could happen . . .”
“. . . Master will not like it. . . .”
“. . . not accept failure . . .”
It seemed to Owen as if his heart stopped when he heard his father’s voice. He had never heard him like this. The man was usually brusque and dismissive, often harsh. Now he had a whine in his voice and was nearly weeping. “I have done everything you’ve asked. Why must you torture me like this?”
Owen quietly, painfully stretched out and lay next to the vent, putting the frozen bag to his injured eye. His mind raced—the same way it had when he was younger and he imagined monsters in his room, slithering demons with hideous faces and scaly bodies. He would cower under the covers for what seemed like days before mustering the nerve to reach for the tiny flashlight on his desk. He was sure the monster was waiting to pounce, to bite off his hand as he groped for the light. But it came back whole, along with the flashlight.
In the end, the monster had simply been a cover he had draped over a chair. Its nose was the round arm of the chair. He would leave the light on awhile to settle his mind.
But now, this, this was no imaginary monster. Something was going on somewhere close. Owen had always believed his father was just a grumpy, sad bookstore owner with bad business sense. So what was all this about?
Was his father such a loner because he was a wanted man? Had he once been a spy for some secret government organization, and now they wanted him for one more job?
What if Owen’s mother, instead of dying the day Owen was born, had actually been killed in a secret operation to overthrow some dictator, and after that his father had gone into hiding?
What if his father was actually a bank robber? That would explain how he had enough money to buy the bookstore and not care how many books he sold. And what if Owen’s mother had been killed assisting some terrorist action?
Suddenly the whispers stopped and footsteps approached.
A draft reached the huge dictionary lying on its side at the end of a shelf, and its thousand pages began to flap, opening to the D section. Had you been a fly on the wall, you would have noted that at the top of the page was the word deathbed and at the bottom of the next, deceit.
Owen quickly became aware of the musty, pungent aroma that had greeted him before, smoky and dank, like something burning. He tried to shut down his breathing and wanted to open a window or a door. But that was impossible, because as much as he abhorred the smell and as much as he wanted to escape, he was transfixed. For at that very moment the huge bookcase in the corner, the only one built into the wall of the old building, moved.
Impossible as it seems, the floor-to-ceiling shelving loaded with the heaviest volumes inched out toward the pulled-back rug, creaking under the weight of all those pages, all those words.
Breath held, heart hammering, Owen silently leaped to his feet and moved into hiding behind a shelf shrouded in darkness, peering over duplicate copies of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
A flame flickered from the dark passage beneath the massive bookshelf, and a puff of dusty air shot from the opening, as if a tent flap had just closed or the wings of some giant bird had just flapped.
Owen stared at the shadows of giant figures reflected on the stone walls as they ascended. Owen’s father led the way, followed by three cloaked figures who looked as if they had walked straight out of the third stave of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, cousins of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Owen’s father reached high and grasped an ivory bookend in the shape of Medusa, the Greek mythological figure with snakes’ heads protruding from her own. With one tug, the bookcase began its slow, groaning close.
The mysterious other three followed Owen’s father toward the next room, allowing Owen to breathe. But the last of the intruders, the tallest and leanest, paused before leaving the fiction room. He stopped and tilted his head to inspect the small wet spot on the floor. He ran a pale, skeletal hand across the arm of the chair where Owen had placed the bag of peas. The being lingered, then joined the others. Soon Owen heard the tinkling of the bell over the entrance as the door opened and shut.
In all the stories Owen had read, in all the novels and short stories about children and their fathers, he had never encountered anything like this.
Anyone else in this situation may have waited until the beings had left and confronted his father, demanding the truth. But Owen is not like other people. He stored this scene in his mind, slipped out the back door, and tossed the bag of frozen peas into the Dumpster. He retraced his steps all the way around the building, made sure the hooded beings were gone, and, seeing the Come In; We’re Open sign, reentered.
His father looked up from his desk, clearly startled.
Owen explained what had happened at school, showed his father his scrapes and bruises, and followed him upstairs. No questions about the fight. No calls to the school about protection from bullies.
Though Owen’s father had never been what Owen would have called a tender man, he seemed skilled enough in tending to the boy’s cuts and scrapes. He searched the freezer, appearing puzzled, and finally placed a handful of ice in a plastic bag. “Put this on your eye and rest in your bedroom.”
As Owen left the kitchen he turned to watch his father rub his neck.
He retreated to his room, small and Spartan. His bed was his biggest piece of furniture. In the opposite corner, under a dingy window that looked out on the alley and the Dumpster, stood a small desk with three drawers and just enough space to hold a notebook and an opened book or two.
Owen’s closet showed the effects of life without a mother. His clothes were piled high—dirty and clean in an unholy alliance.
His father hired a woman to clean and do laundry once a week—actually the mother of the pest Connie—but Owen did not like her. There was something about her he didn’t trust.
He had broached the subject with his father, but his father waved him off. “What is done is done. I hired her, and she will clean.”
Still, Owen never let the woman into his room to collect his clothes. On days he knew she would be there, he kept his door locked and the key snugly in his pocket.
Now he kicked off his shoes and curled up atop the covers, the dampness from the rain seeping into his pillow and sheets.
As Owen slept, his face tightened. He thrashed about and mumbled. The school counselor or even his father might have supposed Owen was dreaming of Gordan and the beating, but you know better, don’t you? Or maybe you only think you do. For this was no nightmare about what he had just witnessed, though that certainly would have made sense. No, if you could have crawled inside the mind of our young friend, you would have seen something quite different—a recurring nightmare, a dream he had at least once a week. Something he had never told another living soul.
Tendrils of fire grow around him like vines, engulfing him. A young female cries. Through the smoky haze Owen sees terrible red eyes and a dark figure hovering. Wings flap, coaxing the flames higher, forcing thick, black smoke down, choking him. When he can no longer breathe and believes he will be overcome, a blackened hand reaches through the fire. And Owen awakens.
Your dad told my mom somebody beat you up, and I wanted to see
,” the girl said. She sat at the top of the second-floor stairs, her back flat against the wall, two books open on the floor and a third in her lap. “Your eye must really hurt. Does it?”
“It’s okay, Constant,” Owen said, shrugging.
“Wow, somebody’s really mad at you.”
Those who are kind would call Constance loquacious. Those not as concerned about a child’s feelings would call her a blabbermouth, a flibbertigibbet, or that girl with diarrhea of the mouth. She was ten, slight of frame—as if a strong gust of wind might blow her down—and had silky brown hair cut short like the pictures of Gretel in the Grimms’ fairy tale. Her nose was thin and her mouth unusually small for someone so talkative. Her skin was milky white, except for a spattering of freckles on her cheeks, and her arms were thin and dainty. Her eyes were hazel question marks. Today she wore jeans and a sweater.
As Owen stepped past her and started down the stairs, she stood. “I heard you crying in there. You sure you’re all right?”
“I wasn’t crying.”
“I’m sure of it. Maybe you were having a nightmare. I have funny dreams sometimes, especially when I eat spinach.”
“I don’t see that it’s any of your business. Snooping around listening to people sleep . . . they throw people in jail for less.”
“Do they? I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be thrown in jail. Do they actually pick you up and toss you in, or is it just kind of a shove? They probably could literally toss me in, but someone bigger like you or perhaps your father—I just can’t imagine it.”
Owen closed his eyes and shook his head, then kept moving.
Constance gathered her books and followed. “What’s it like to have a father around all the time? I don’t have one, just pictures my mom keeps in a drawer, which is not at all like having a real one, and you, you have one that’s actually home all day and not out working at some job where you have to drive a long time and stay until dark and then come home and do the whole thing again. Kids with dads like that hardly ever see them. I think working long hours and not seeing the people you’re supposed to love would be dreadful, don’t you?”
Owen shrugged. His nap had left him stiff and sorer than ever.
“If you had the choice, would you rather live with your mother or father?”
Owen answered without looking back. “I never met my mother, so I wouldn’t know.”
“I’ve never met my father either, but I’d much rather live with him than my mother any day.”
Owen turned, sighing and rolling his eyes. “How would you know if you’ve never seen him? Maybe compared to your father, your mother is a saint.”
“I wouldn’t know because I’ve never met a saint. But there’s no way my father could be worse than my mother.”
Owen had always found Connie inquisitive, but when they reached the shelves she began asking question after question about how books were bought, what sort of people sold them, what they did with the ones no one bought, and on and on.
“I can’t imagine how lonely it would be to be a book that no one wants to read,” she said. “Just sitting there, getting dusty. Don’t you think that would be awful?”
“Sure.”
“I’m almost in middle school, you know. I don’t suppose you even remember that, being in high school.”
“I remember. It wasn’t that long ago. Middle school’s not bad once you get used to it.”
“Neither are braces or an amputated leg, but I wouldn’t wish for it.”
Owen showed her the unsold-books room, and she ran a finger through the dust. Owen was surprised when a tear made its way down her cheek.
“To think of these just being thrown away and burned,” she said.
“It’s not like they have souls.”
Connie shook her head. “But what must it be like being thrown in the corner when there’s so much inside? Books aren’t just things; they live and breathe in their own way.”
“Constance!” a woman yelled from the stairs.
Connie grabbed one of the condemned tomes and rushed from the room. She returned a second later and looked Owen in the face. “I hope whoever hates you doesn’t kill you.” She turned and ran for the stairs.
If you have ever sensed you were being watched, you know how Owen felt the rest of that evening. He stayed in his room after dinner, trying to read but unable to concentrate. Part of Owen wanted to believe there was a good, rational explanation for what he had seen in the bookstore. But in his heart he knew better.
Some people have parents who sit and listen and even suggest answers. Perhaps you have a wonderful relationship with your mother or father. Well, that was not the world of Owen Reeder, and it never had been. He couldn’t remember when his father had visited his room, sat on his bed, and discussed anything that troubled him. They had never talked about girls, sports, or even Owen’s homework.
Oh, they’d had talks, but they were all on his father’s terms, about what his father wanted to discuss. It was as if by speaking once about something his father was off the hook.
So you can understand why, as alone in the world as Owen felt, he could not bring himself to ask his father about what he had seen. Something deep in his soul, an ache so real it seemed to bore a hole in his heart, told him this was something he had to keep to himself.
His mind bubbled like a simmering stew, and with a healthy amount of fear and dread, Owen waited for his father to fall asleep. The man snored so loudly that at times Owen thought his nose might pop off.
Owen opened his filthy window and cleaned both sides with an old T-shirt. The moon was full, and that somehow comforted him.
From the alley behind Blackstone Tavern, a dark figure looked up at Owen, startling him and making him fall back on the bed. This caused the bed to bump his desk and send his lamp and goldfish bowl crashing to the floor in a shower of glass and water.
“What in the world?” his father cried out, rushing from his room.
“I slipped,” Owen said, trying frantically to find his fish.
“Well, clean that up, and don’t cut yourself. Then get to bed.”
Owen, strangely warmed by his father’s seeming concern that he not hurt himself, found pieces of glass near the heating vent and spotted the edge of the fish’s orange tail inside. He hurried to the kitchen for a butter knife and pried the vent from the floor, then stuck his arm as far down as he could. But it was too late. Herbert was gone.
When Owen had cleaned up the mess, he looked out the window again. The shadowy figure was gone, but Owen could have sworn he heard chuckling in the alley.
After midnight, with his father snoring away, Owen crept from his room. He shuddered as the floor creaked, but his father only gave a snort, then resumed snoring.
The door to the hallway was locked, and Owen went through the painstaking routine of pulling each latch back as quietly as he could.
When he was finally on the other side of the door and headed downstairs, he could breathe again. He stood by the cash register and listened. Water in pipes. A clock ticking. The hum of the refrigerator. The scratching of mice in the walls.
At times like this Owen wished his father had let him have a dog. He had long dreamed of such a companion, and now with Herbert lost down the heating vent . . .
Owen often made a point of passing the pet shop and looking at the dogs in their cages. He would smile at the pups and imagine one sleeping at the foot of his bed and going on great adventures with him. It’s the type of dream boys are supposed to grow out of by high school, but Owen was sure a dog would solve his problems.
Soon, as you might imagine, something as mundane as a dog for a pet would be the last thing on Owen’s mind.
He tiptoed into the fiction room, his back to the fireplace, scanning the corner bookcase in the darkness. He pulled the rug away and ran his hand along the inside of the top shelf, feeling for the Medusa bookend, but he couldn’t quite reach it. He snatched a rickety chair from behind the cash registe
r and hurried back.
Owen began to wonder if the beating had caused him to imagine the whole thing. He could mix up the world in his mind and what was real, couldn’t he? But he had seen the weird visitors and had watched his father lead them from the room.
Owen had not tested the chair before standing on it, and now it shifted and he lost his balance. He grabbed for the shelf and caught hold of the ivory Medusa head.
As he hung there, the chair slammed to the floor. Something creaked, and Owen was sure his father had heard him. But his father still snored, and the creaking was not upstairs.
It was in front of him.
The entire bookshelf moved, and a blast of musty, cold air hit him in the face.
Owen heard a whoosh from below, as if someone had lit a gas grill.
What would be worse—something attacking or his father finding him and banishing him to his room for a century?
Past the bookshelf flickering torches lined a narrow, winding staircase. Owen quickly put the remnants of the broken chair near the fireplace, then slowly started down the steps. He grabbed the first torch for balance, and the bookcase slowly closed behind him. Owen felt the sudden urge to run back upstairs, but as you may have suspected, despite his slight frame and seeming timidity, deep inside he bore the heart of a lion. A lion that did not wish to give speeches before an entire class, perhaps, but a lion nonetheless.
As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, Owen realized that the steps and walls were stone, as if moved from some castle. The torches were spaced about every 20 steps. With his every gingerly taken step, the ceiling sloped, making the passage seem smaller and more closed in. Carvings above him caught his eye, and he tripped on an uneven stair, tumbling all the way to the bottom. Thankfully his face hit dirt instead of concrete, but his bruised eye throbbed again.
He groaned and sighed, then pulled himself up and found a round room with a textured ceiling. A wood table and chairs sat in the middle. The old and chipped table looked like something King Arthur would have used if he’d had Knights of the Rectangle Table. Its legs were as thick as Owen’s own, and he was compelled to test its weight by trying to lift it. He couldn’t budge it an inch. The chairs were also well made and thick, like the great pews he had seen in picture books upstairs.