Simple Things

by Press, Lycan Valley

  The rain slowed to heavy and steady. Officer Hardy nudged the lone set of jaws with the end of his automatic. He looked in at Niles; a dark stain was spreading across the man’s crotch.

  “I hate this neighborhood,” said Officer James. His partner nodded.

  These four hardcover books represent the entire series of Orange Keyhole Books. They were a popular series in Boston around the turn of the century, particularly for those who knew how to find the special key.

  Roy Bishop, a writer and artist sent them in from his home in Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his dog, Laserbomb. I don’t know why the dog’s name is such, but I do know these books are very special.

  ORANGE KEYHOLE

  Roy Bishop

  “SEE anything you like?”

  Amy Schultz looks up. For the last few minutes she's been stretched out across the threadbare carpet of a small bookstore in Baywood-Los Osos, California named Ike's Books. It's a cozy, ancient little shop where every inch of space is occupied, mostly with paperbacks. Shelves line the walls and three plywood custom jobs run the full length of the store, but even so there are waist-high stacks at the head and foot of each shelf and in all four corners of the sales floor. Paperbacks are piled five to ten deep across the front desk and form a castle around the cash register. Most of these books are quite old. Old is good to Amy.

  The man addressing her is the eponymous Ike, as per the name-tag clasped to the front of his Alligator shirt. He wears blue canvas shoes and a pair of loud plaid pants that would make Amy's friends back home in Austin lose their minds; they dress much the same. But Ike is pushing eighty. He probably didn't seek out these clothes; Amy guesses that he's living on a fixed income where new duds and high fashion and even semi-regular trips to the laundromat are an extravagance. Odds are good that the old man is wearing these pants just because they were clean. She catches a whiff of mothballs.

  That gets Amy distracted, not that it's all that hard to do. Amy Away, as her mother used to call her. Future on her mind; consequences and repercussions and butterfly effects. She wonders how long Ike's got, and when he dies what thrift store his old loud clothes will go to. If she'll run into these plaid pants again someday, riding the hips of one of her sneering hipster friends. If she'll have the guts to speak up when they start to sneer and snicker over the designs and colors of a dead old man's last outfit.

  “Miss?” Ike's watery eyes dart to the diamond on her finger. “I'm sorry, missus. Anything I can help you with?”

  “Oh, I'm fine,” she says, giving him her best pretty-college-girl smile. “I really like your selection here. Lots to consider.”

  “I see you got that copy of The Big Sleep they made for the Mitchum remake.” She looks down in her hands and indeed, there's Robert Mitchum staring off into space with a trench coat draped across his shoulders with a dame on his arm and a gun in his hand. She'd picked that up just to see what it was, but tilted it slightly as if interested. “Don't see why they gotta remake the classics,” Ike states to nobody in particular. “Good the way it was.”

  His eyes wander to her chest. She's not all that offended. She developed early and got used to this sort of thing a long time ago. She blames the shirt more than anything. A gift from her husband, bought well below her size. Marty likes to have her wear it when his buddies are over for a cookout or the NASCAR races, just to watch them stammer when she walks by. Then when everyone goes home they have a laugh about it, but his laughter is always louder than hers.

  “Definitely.” She slides the Chandler mystery back between a V.C. Andrews and a James Ellroy. One drawback of Ike's Books: everything was separated by genre, but nothing was alphabetized. What would have normally been a ten minute run-through has taken the better part of an hour. Marty Schultz has been waiting in their Nissan, playing on his phone and using up all their data. He'd be running out of battery life soon and would unwedge himself from behind the wheel and come in and see what was the hold-up. And I'll tell him that selling books now means paying off my student loans early. Only a small lie there. Marty had supported her through college, paid the rent and the bills with his job at the dealership. He wrote that debt off one fat chunk at a time come the twenty-first of every month.

  “You like old books?”

  “I do,” she says. “I'm a collector of sorts.” Seller, really, but what do you care. You're already working up the courage to snag another eyeful. As if on cue, Ike's tarsier eyes have moved on to her backside. She'd heard plenty of mostly unsolicited compliments on how well she filled out that particular pair of jeans. This was precious little comfort when searing denim was riding up the crack of her ass and probably giving her a rash. Another gift from Marty. We're both supposed to be on vacation. Did I even pack these costumes, or did he? “The rarer, the better.”

  “Oh! I've got some things I keep behind the register you might be interested in,” said Ike. “Nothing like old Superman comics or anything that'll change your tax bracket, but good stuff. Books that are stories to themselves.” His eyes dart from her ass to her fingers. “Mind the silverfish.”

  She looks down. A small insect, a quarter-inch of chitinous plates and legs, has crawled onto her wedding ring. Its antennae batter her knuckle, slight and unfelt. She brushes it off. With surprising quickness, Ike stomps it flat. This close, the mothball stench is near-lethal. “Sorry to be so savage,” he says. “But those things will eat right through a book, and I've got some precious cargo here.”

  “How precious?” Her voice sounds flirtier than it should.

  “Let me show you.”

  ***

  The first few books are nothing special. A pair of old pioneer Bibles – nothing you couldn't find in the attic of your average multi-generational homestead. Some penny dreadfuls printed on flaky paper, far too faded to read. A few copies of Classics Illustrated comics, the best of which is ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth.’ It boasts an eye-catching cover: an ichthyosaur and a plesiosaur locked together in mortal combat. Awash in blood and foam is an unkempt survivor on a raft made of vine-lashed logs. It's the kind of cover that will pull more money if separated from the book itself and sold to some Austinite in a nice black-rim frame. A hundred bucks at least. Ninety-five more than the whole thing would go for in its current condition.

  Disappointment is beginning to creep in when he brings four hardcovers out from under the table. All are long and wide and flat with uncharacteristically thick covers and binding. The top three are bound in cross-stitched thread that has begun to fray at the edges. Their colors – red, blue, green. These three are children's books from the look of them; made up of few dozen pages at most. The bottom book's cover-board is covered in sickly yellow-cream leather that had likely once been bridal white. Amy guesses that this one must be at least three hundred pages.

  Observing the four books, she notices a rich red coloring to the border of certain pages in the text-block. The red occurs at the very end of the first three books, only noticeable because it is offset by the sickly yellow of the text above and the stripe of white end-paper below, which makes it “pop.” But the leather-bound book – only book isn't a good enough word, she thinks, this one's more like a tome – underneath the rest has the red border every twenty or thirty pages, giving it the look of an anemic candy cane. Blank covers on the front and back, no printing on the spine. All of that stuff must have been on the dust jackets. And as faded as these books are, those must be long gone. “What am I looking at?” she asks.

  “You know about those beach party movies in the 1950s?”

  “Sure.”

  “Kewpie dolls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Little Lord Fauntleroy?”

  “I know the name.”

  “There's stuff like that all over. Things that were wildly popular for a bit, then faded away for whatever reason. You mighta heard about 'em from a grandparent, so you know the name, but you don't know what they are. These, for instance. You ever heard of the Orange Keyh
ole books?”

  “Never.”

  “Ah. They were too regional, I think. Very popular in the greater Boston area around the turn of the century. Interesting items. Books that are... are stories to themselves.” He blinks, as if trying to remember whether or not he's already fed her this line. Not a good sign, she thinks. Ike forges ahead. “Booksellers had a problem back then. People were buying paperbacks because they were cheaper than regular books. But a book, a regular book-type-book, you coulda made a decent profit from. Paperbacks go for pennies, and people passed 'em around just like the ten-dollar ones. So 'round 1890, 1891, guy decides he's gonna answer the question, you know, 'how do you make a book special all by its lonesome?'

  She leans in close.

  He opens the first book, the red one. The old binding squeals but holds. The classic shape of an old house key – a long, thin cylinder of metal with a perfect circle on one end and two teeth on the other – is impressed a few centimeters through the black end-paper of the inside cover, into the back of the front cover itself. In the empty cradle of the absent key, someone has painted a tiny night sky. White stars on navy blue with a little crescent moon split up across the teeth.

  “People kept their keys in the books?”

  “Nope. The book came with a key.”

  “What was it for?”

  “I wish I had one, cause I'd rather just show you. Sounds crazy when I talk it out.”

  He turns to the title page.

  The Vexed Vampire

  An Orange Keyhole Storybook

  written and illustrated by

  Harvey James Newton

  Pemberton Publishing

  Boston Massachusetts

  1913

  “The Vexed Vampire?”

  “See... story behind this one. Story unto itself.” Dementia. Alzheimer's. “Pemberton Publishing and all those booksellers down in Boston wanted a way to make every book special, so everyone could get one – and make a book that couldn't be turned into a paperback for a reduced price. And this Harvey James Newton fella, he had a problem of his own.”

  “Which was?”

  “His kids got a hold of some spooky paperbacks, some morbid paperbacks, and got themselves a'sceered of monsters. They'd come bounding into the room every night, waking up him and his wife, talking about ghosts and goblins and boogeymen.”

  She looks back down at the title page. “So why would he write about a vampire?”

  “Ah, therein lies the purpose of an Orange Keyhole Storybook. Let me show you.”

  Ike turns to the page.

  The Vexed Vampire is a wordless picture book done in full color. A pale-skinned, be-caped vampire – a dead ringer for Nosferatu – rises from his coffin in the dank, stone-walled basement of an ancient castle. Rats squeak, bats flap. The last light of day shines through a small window; outside the sun sinks behind a trio of round green hills. Though the quality is breathtaking, Amy senses that there is also a healthy sense of restraint at play. There are little touches of horror here and there – grave dirt under the vampire's fingernails, worms boiling up through the soil – drawn in loving strokes that suggest an Asperger's level of attention to detail. But the monster's eyes are clear and almost cartoonish; its fangs little more than mildly elongated canines. So as not to frighten the children.

  The next two pages are covered in one single illustration. The vampire exits the hollows of his castle against an excellently rendered purple-to-orange curtain of newborn night. He is rendered in profile, twisting a key into the lock of the front gate of his ruinous home. If it wasn't for the vampire, this could be in a gallery, she thinks. Or maybe even with the vampire. You can tell Newton wasn't working just for the check. He put his soul into this.

  The rest of the story hits all the traditional vampire beats. The menace creeps through an open window into the boudoir of a slumbering, begowned maiden, but upon pushing her hair back from the hollow of her throat he is thwarted by the crucifix she is wearing and driven back outside. He stalks a pair of freckled, short-pantsed moppets, who cross the bridge over a foggy stream just as he is about to pounce, leaving him exasperated on the far bank. He menaces a morbidly obese black woman in a house dress and a headscarf (the mammy archetype, so much for the good old days), who waves her Bible at him, causing him to scurry away in fear.

  In the last pages he stalks a family drawn in almost photo-realistic detail. They sit around a table with a sumptuous meal of turkey and dressing and potatoes and steaming ears of corn; a handsome young man, his beautiful wife, his three daughters. All four women have the same set of flowing red curls. Amy knows without Ike having to say it – this is Newton and his family. So when Ike turns the page and Amy sees the vampire licking his lips as it watches the family eat through a foggy window, she feels icy fingers dig into the hollow of her collarbones. That is not right. Don't ask me why, but that is not right.

  Ike sees her shiver and he offers a knowing smile. “Just wait. You gotta swing pretty far one way if you want to get anywhere when you swing back.”

  The next page has the vampire creeping up the side of the house on his fingernails – an image Amy finds particularly unsettling – but below in the window the mother can be seen walking into the kitchen. The next few pages differentiate between the vampire breaking into the attic through a small hole in the roof and the mother walking back into the dining room with a steaming tray of rolls, all of which emit wavy green stink-lines. Behind her, Amy sees that the kitchen is hung with several strings of garlic. “Garlic knots! I see where this is going.” Amy giggles like a kid. Ike smiles and turns the page.

  The family finishes their meal and heads to bed as the vampire patiently waits in the spidery shadows of the attic. At long last he creeps down a set of collapsible stairs into the main hallway. Salivating, he cracks open the door to the room where the children sleep. He glides to the bed, hands open in twisted claws, fangs bared...

  But familiar green stink-lines rise off the girls and waft like serpents toward the vampire, who backs away in comical revulsion. He retreats down the hallway and throws open the door to the parent's bedroom. They both are sound asleep in their twin beds encircled in identical wisps of green. The vampire recoils again in cartoonish disgust and retreats towards the collapsible staircase that leads into the attic – only to panic as he sees that the fumes have followed him – and cut him off! In blind terror he runs the length of the hallway and crashes through a big picture window. Glass tears at his clothes, in particular his jacket pocket. The key to his castle is rendered in shining gold, making it very conspicuous as it falls into the bushes below, unseen and unnoticed.

  Amy is smiling so hard it almost hurts. “Oh man, I think I know where this is going but – seriously, this is awesome.”

  “Isn't it?”

  As the dawn begins to paint the edge of morning, the defeated vampire retreats through a gorgeous sylvan forest. His hair is a mess, his cape torn and wrinkled, his expression crestfallen and bitter. He looks to the eastern horizon with a bit of nervousness. In a dead run he manages to make it to the gates of his castle with precious little time to spare. He reaches for his key and his fingers poke through the bottom of his pocket. His eyes bulge in surprise. Amy sees that the next pages will be the ones lined in red. Only – this close they don't look like pages...

  “Now, here's where the gimmick comes in.”

  Ike opens into the last two pages. Both are blacked out. The page on the right is lined in red because it isn't a page at all, but some kind of cardboard inlay fixed to the back cover. The white line she'd mistaken for endpaper is binding glue.

  In the center of the black cardboard is a keyhole a few centimeters deep. It is painted a solid orange save for a black-ink profile of the vampire, hands raised, against three black lines coming off of a circle. A minimalist interpretation of the sun's rays putting an end to the undead menace.

  End of book.

  Amy realizes she's laughing, and laughing hard.

 
“Look closely at the keyhole. Do you see anything funny?”

  Amy nods, she does. Along the edge there is a ghostly remnant of translucent black paper.

  “Originally, that whole image in the keyhole would be covered in rice paper. So to see inside the keyhole, you'd take the key out of the front of the book – it would be a little cardboard thing with a tooth on it – and you'd fit it into the keyhole and tear the paper away. The idea was the paper could only be broken once, and so books with the rice paper intact would be more valuable than one where the key had already been put to use on it.” The old man grins with a mouthful of white false teeth.

  “That's... odd.”

  “Indeed. The idea was that people wouldn't want a hand-me-down book from someone else. Wouldn't want a library copy. They'd want one of their own. They made their money on first-sales, so the plan was to keep making a lot of those with the same book. Year after year.”

  “I get it. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

  “Hmm?”

  She doesn't bother explaining. “It's clever, but don't tell me this actually worked.”

  “I'm sorry to disappoint you, but Mr. Newton made his publishers a good chunk of change.”

  “Hell.” She lets it slip out. The old man doesn't blush and the world doesn't end. He shuts the first book, opens another – the blue book. This one is faded and ill-used, with visible water damage. The set-up is the same – place for the key in the front, orange keyhole in the back with the fragments of rice paper. This keyhole is painted with the outline of a fat man sitting atop a collapsed bed. The arms and legs of a squashed monster protrude from underneath at all four corners. “So this guy had three daughters?”

  “He did.”

  “Protective of them?”

  “Fiercely.”