It was a few days preceding the meet-up at Nino's Diner that Donny's father received a call-in for his daughter to assist at The Book Store, a studious bookstore that had been more open accepting donated novels than selling them. The store was just a few blocks down and around the street from the notorious Aglionby Academy, and it served as a pretty substantial location for the money that it accumulated.
Donny set her alarm clock and woke up early to get to the bookstore by eight-thirty. For the first few hours, Donny shelved books the store had received recently. She put them by author, in alphabetical order, within their rightful genre locations. For those of the Young Adult section, in the books she'd read, she'd written small confirmations of the book's enactments and starred qualities on sticky-notes. It was something she'd begun within the past few hours, an act to pass the time, which had worked in the meantime, until Donny got bored after the twenty-third comment and wanted something that wouldn't cramp her fingers.
The owner of the bookstore, Mrs. Quinlan, wasn't exactly in today. Because of a small parade happening at the more well-off part of Henriette for the beginning of spring, she only popped in to see how things were holding up once in a while. At one point, around noon or so, she came in and told Donny to take a twenty from the cash register and advised her to go eat lunch.
Donny thought about calling up Evelyn and Agnus, so the three of them could spend lunch together, or anything of the sort, but Evelyn was occupying the day with her mother in North Carolina and Agnus was with a study group, held up at the public library. Why he and his schoolmates couldn't study at The Book Store was beyond Donny and never questioned it. Besides, he was probably doing them both a favor, because they only knew the enticement of procrastination would bite them in the ass later. So she wasted her lunch break walking a block over to the convenience store and bought a couple of Heath bars, a large bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos (con Limon), and two cans of Coca-Cola.
When she walked back to the bookstore, Mrs. Quinlan had left, no doubt to go back to the parade, but a note was left on a floral-patterned notepad that read that the spare change from Donny's purchase could go into the cash register and that there were more books in the back storage that needed to be priced and put away. Donny placed her goodies on the counter and took one of the Heath bars, tore it open with her teeth, and threw the wrapping away into the trash bin that was hidden under a small table by the bookshelves at the front of the store. She held the chocolate in her mouth while grabbing a red ballpoint pen and headed to the other room through the string of beads that separated the front and rest of the store. On her way, she dropped the change into the tips jar. Walking straight down the science fiction and religion aisle, she turned left and nearly stumbled on a few books she'd stepped on. An entirety of books were strewn on the floor, a few where they'd landed partially open with serious crease damage to their pages. Picking up only the ones with bent pages, Donny bent them inverse to their injury and based them under heavier books so that, in time, they would convert back.
The storage door was in plain sight, just past the miscellaneous and Einstein shelves, and Donny stepped over the fallen books to get to it. There was a store-bought employee-only sign that advised the common customer to not enter in very large, very presentable, blocky lettering which was tacked up with decorative tacks. She had to jiggle the knob a bit and tug it to get the door to open, which made an irascible shrilled creaking noise as it swung outward. Taking the chocolate bar out of her mouth and eating it whole in a few bites, Donny kept one foot by the door to keep it from closing and lunged forward where she grabbed a steel chair and replaced her foot with it, and added the closest box on top of it to keep it in place.
Boxes upon boxes upon boxes of new and used books lined the storage room. Most of them had been donations from the families that lived in the area, who were the more frugal of the wealthy customers The Book Store had had over the past few years, while the rest were personal loans from the employees themselves. Donny walked to the nearest set of boxes. She reached up and hefted the topmost one, dropping it without ease at her feet. It was sealed shut with packing tape.
Donny gave a heavy sigh. "Great."
Retreating back out to the front of the store, she grabbed a pair of scissors from an oblong coffee tin with its slip-on cover tucked beneath it. The front showed a blonde-haired woman smelling a small jar of coffee grounds, the phrase Ah! wie frisch gerösteter Bohnenkaffee! wavering by her face. A translation from Google Translate read it from German to English as Ah! as freshly roasted coffee beans!.
Donny went back to the storage room. Kneeling down, she folded the scissors wide open and used the tip of a blade's leg to split the tape down the middle, cutting the sides and bend the wings back to reveal a ton of paperback novelties. She sat cross-legged and marked each book their price, setting them aside in pile that she would eventually get to shelving.
As the hours passed, Donny had opened two boxes and shelved at least a hundred books. She stood on a three-step ladder, putting the last few books away in the mythology genre section, a few shelves left of the storage room all the way at the rear of the store. There was one book, however, that Donny hadn't put away. It was about four fingers spine-thick whose author was a Cambridge spectacled man named Sir James Frazer and was titled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in large, bolded dark orange font. The cover sported thinly drawn leafed twigs stemmed at their joints with little circles that could have been berries or something of the sort.
Donny rifled through the book from end to start, flipping through the pages lethargically, skipping ten to twenty at a time and having little to no interest in its contents. That was, until something caught her eye and Donny had to thumb forward a few pages. Page three hundred three illustrated a picture of a bearded man dressed in what could only be assumed of being animal pelts, with a large belt fastended around his waist, the buckle was a sort of four-fold circle that spiraled and knotted in the center.
The man's arms were stretched out on either side of him, a black bird on each and one perched on top of his head. A caption appended at the bottom of the picture explained that this man was named Owen Glendower, the supposed Raven King, as it read, who was a Welsh king who instigated a fierce and long-running, yet, unsuccessful revolt against the English rule of Wales. Enclosed within a circle above Owen's head was the symbol Donny had drawn on a napkin back at Nino's Diner the other day—three pairs of elongated triangles set in a three-folded triangle.
Donny felt a sudden tightening in the pit of her stomach crawl up to her throat. To try and calm herself down, she ripped the page from the book, crumpled it up and stuffed it in her back pocket. Taking a deep breath, she exhaled a tremulous sigh, focusing all her attention on the wooden floor, counting the rungs that separated the planks. There was always that shortness of breath when something not-so-normal would happen, and ever since Donny began living with her dad, it had been happening more often than necessary. And that was to say that it had begun to become something more of the ordinary, something she wished it really wouldn't be.
Donny's panic was interrupted by the chiming of bells at the front, indicating that someone had finally taken their time to come in and, maybe, purchase a novel. She cracked her knuckles and shimmied her shoulders before walking out to the front of the store. When she moved the beaded curtain aside, someone was standing by the counter, their back facing Donny. She could hear them crunching on something, food most definitely, and realized that her Cheetos bag was not where she'd left it before.
Donny took a step forward and said, in a controlled tone of voice, said, "May I help you?"
The person turned around, Cheetos bag in one hand, and red powdered fingers of the other. His crooked smile was the cutting edge of a razor, but his eyes held a hidden memorandum of puckish brevity. The two of them had some degree of mixed comprehension of their association with each other, and they knew it wasn't to come out as they would like it to be.
The air between them held its breath and Donny let it out.
"Kavinsky."
YOU ARE READING
Sacred Ghost-Gods
ФанфикOnce there was a boy whose brother was killed by a flaming dragon, whose mother was lost and whose father was dead. He was a bittersweet mess of misfortune and possibility, a saved creature. Once there was a girl whose dreams became her reality, wh...
