Revenant

Chapter 21

About an hour or so later, I was on a semi-familiar street and staring up at an aging, lacquered wooden sign that read 'Phonet Attic'.

That name still didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, really.

Nothing about the place left you with the impression that you were invited to come inside and browse around, nor was there anything that offered any sort of hint regarding what this store possibly sold, or even why it existed. The sun-beaten 'open' sign was still hanging in the window, much the same way it had been the first night I'd come here. I briefly wondered if anyone actually bothered to flip the sign to display the 'Sorry, we're closed!' message on the other side. Given how faded and sun-bleached the red ink of the sign had become, I figured it had been hanging in that spot for quite some time.

I tested the door handle, which turned easily, opened the door and proceeded inside.

A chime above the door frame jangled discordantly, reminding me of every single time I'd ever walked into a rural filling station . . . the kind you'd find just outside of a highway town with a population of no more than a couple-hundred people. My first tentative step forward resulted in the wooden floorboards creaking mightily, a noise so loud that it rendered the door chime completely redundant. After taking a few more steps into the store, I scouted the room a little.

It was brighter than when I'd been in last, although given that my last visit had occurred at night, this fact was hardly surprising. Even in the relative brightness provided by the half-blinded windows near the front of the shop, everything in the room seemed dull and musty. Almost spitefully so, like the entire room somehow resented the presence of even the meager light that had managed to sneak inside. There wasn't a thick layer of dust lining everything, or cobwebs hanging from the wrought-iron candelabrum near the far corner, but if there had been, it wouldn't have come as a huge surprise.

Spooky at night - spooky during the day as well. Just plain 'spooky', I guess.

"Hello?" I called out clearly, the sound of my voice contrasting starkly against the absolute silence surrounding me.

The chair the old guy had been sitting in before was in exactly the same spot, as was the table he'd been propping his feet up on. Rather than an ashtray and a bottle of Jim Beam, the table now contained three large books, each left open to a specific page. A ballpoint pen and two yellow steno pads lay to one side of them.

I turned my attention to the rows upon rows of books, and slowly walked up to the bookshelves located nearest the table to get a better look.

Every book sitting on the shelf was strange and confounding to me, but each in its own unique way. One was a leather-bound book that was so old the leather had turned a kind of grey-green, and which had Greek characters along the spine as well as a post-it note with the words 'Palia Mythoi' scribbled on it. Another was a book that looked to be bound with wood, and with an ornate slab of burnished metal in place of the spine. It was proudly displaying what looked like Cyrillic letters, spelling out something like 'Tponn Ctahnwta'. There was no helpful post-it note affixed to that one.

There were hundreds - no, make that thousands - of tomes like these, haphazardly filling shelves wherever I looked. Every inch of available wall space was occupied by books, each one giving me the distinct impression that I wasn't going to find it listed on Amazon any time soon. I doubted there was a single book here that wasn't at least twice as old as I was.

No aging long-haired hippie guy, though.

"Hello?" I called out again. "Are you open?"

Somewhere to my left, I heard someone scowl. Don't ask me how.