The key fell into the lock as if it had hung there for over a century. Turning carefully, the shadowed figure of Mickey Hallan, a part-time thief and lowly-rung member of a lowly-rung cult, felt every granule of dust rebel against the movement of the lock’s tumblers. It needed a jiggle, locks like these always needed a jiggle; Mickey was adamant that a troubled lock was the lingua franca a smith would employ to upset lockpicks, and that the installation of smoothly turning mechanism was an affront to lock making in general.
Hearing a click and a small pressure release around the door jamb, the smile of mischief gleamed in the flickering candlelight.
~
‘And what do you call this?’
‘Trading hours, boss.’
‘And why-’ a pause that would frustrate an eon lingered beneath the sound of the final customer departing for the night, ‘do we have these trading hours, Shadow? Why are we open?’
Hoods, chalk lined symbols enwrapped with bleeding candles lay further surrounded by the walls of a dusty storage room inside a long-closed bookshop. A third cultist, strong but impossibly dim, hummed keylessly to himself, happy in finding space for a maligned pile of books that were left within a runic circle and marked solemnly with the words “to be sorted”.
It would have been a dark and stormy night if the weather had more sense of occasion*, it would have been a night where thunder crashed and sensible people cowered beneath their bed sheets, afraid of shadows, afraid of the fowl shapes that move within the dark.
The Watcher was one of those shapes.
During his youth, the boy that would eventually call himself The Watcher had wandered past the Highwayman’s guild and had impressed its teachers with his natural ability to lurk. Offered tuition, the boy was then set to work in the scullery so that he may build character, and so that the five-hundred years of contagious aversion to washing up within the guild faculty may continue to be observed. Given purpose, the boy had quickly become engrossed in his studies, working tirelessly and soon losing the trust of his fellow students, who would gather their money and pay the boy just to blink every so often. But in a year, he had lost interest. It was not as though he was out of place working in their kitchens, there was a violent purity to drowning a plate beneath the soapy waters of retribution and then rending it clean with a sharpened knot of steel wool. But there were better things in the world, darker things that would whisper secrets and open doors that the mortal coil was unable to. Simply put, he had found a higher purpose.
The Guild were to be only so patient with their students, and on finding the boy forming some kind of summoning circle, without clothes and covered in an unusually large quantity of blood it was mutually agreed that he should find his own way in the world.
‘Open? It’s a shop, no one has ever suspected anything untoward from an open shop.’ The cultist known as the First Shadow replied, his pockets full from a day of selling worthless books to the dim-witted ink drinkers who kept smiling at him as though they had been waiting for the store to open for ten years.
Mickey hated books; they were just flat trees. Scraps of things, not even worth the paper that some tall-poppy had decided to dump a few words put on. He had tried reading once and had only started to enjoy dreary thing when he found that a book could be heavy enough to appear threatening when stuffed into a sack and swung over his shoulder.
Mickey had sold about forty books today and had turned in a tidy profit. Great! The fact that he didn’t actually own anything that he sold? All the better.
‘If we accept that the store was abandoned,’ said The Watcher, ‘would you agree that it is far more noticeable when it should suddenly reopen? Would you agree that some people might want to have look inside this bookstore? Cast their prying eyes about? Peak in doors freshly inscribed with the words “cult-ish stuff, keepy oot”?’
The hooded Watcher spoke levelly but had the anger of a blunt knife at the edge of his composure. He had prayed in demonic tongues that the shadow of night would squash worms such as Mickey Hallan. But knew that the worm had held its purpose for now. Without worms the soil suffers, the Watcher the thought as he took in the dusty air of his new lair, just imagine all the many ways in he could make the soil truly suffer.
Mickey, the First Shadow, scratched at his mess of hair in agitation, flecks of dandruff billowed out into the air and became but more dust upon floorboards.
‘You have a point, Watcher. But maybe we could hand out flyers and the like. Get more members for the cult and such.’
He was trying to be helpful. He had yet to tell The Watcher that he and Colin, the Second Shadow, had their horses stolen yesterday. But after finding a lair already set up with runes and other cult-ish junk, he felt safer in staying in the leader’s good books for the time being.
‘We are not a cult, we are an order, brother,’ said The Watcher, near to the point of luminescent rage. He breathed slowly and took a determined gulp in an effort to remain ominously neutral–people weren’t terrified of someone that shouted. They could be scared, yes; but true unblinking terror was something that you had to work on.
‘And the point of an order is that it should remain secret.’
The Watcher tapped tersely at the ground with his staff, there was a hollowness there that he would have questioned should the First Shadow not have been so pestering.
‘Feels not much like an order with only the three of us.’ Mickey continued not realising how close he was to being cleaned like one of The Watcher’s plates. He frowned and was suddenly struck with the beginnings of a scheme.
‘Actually,’ he said while wearing a false glaze of modesty that would have been better suited on a curtain which obscured the way to the adult books**, ‘we did manage to sign up some new members. Yeah, real keen on the Whispering Light they were. Wanted to set up their own chapter in Ennis Moor right away. Colin–, err, the Second Shadow, thought it would be good to give them the horses, and I gave them a watcher’s stone each, you know, just to check on them.’ Mickey’s lie was picking up steam now and he would have included a fight against the police should The Watcher’s gaze have not withered him so.
‘Recruited you say?’ a twitch had taken over the cult leader’s face, ‘May I ask if you showed them how to use the stones? May I ask if you told them anything about what we are trying to achieve?’
The First Shadow’s silence was enough of an answer for The Watcher.
‘Good, you’ve failed, but you’ve done so in a way that allows you a second chance. You are to take the Second Shadow and you are to bring our new recruits before me. I would like to greet our brothers.’
‘One was a girl,’ Mickey began before realising that he had missed his opportunity to scurry from the storage cupboard lair.
‘Oh, and Mickey,’ a leaden weight descended before the dusty precipice of the doorway, The Watcher withdrew a crude dagger from his robes and began to absently clean the dirt from beneath his fingernails ‘do not open the bookstore again this Monday.’
~
Colin was happy.
Collin Lack was usually kept a happy soul by the simple comings and goings of the passing day. But when there was a book in his hands, when his thumb would flick from one page and onto the next, he was absolutely radiant with joy. As a child he had read through each book in the Rathney library and would have begun reading them again if his father hadn’t said that it was his time to grow up.
He didn’t know how to grow, but when working in the smithy he found that it kept happening. He’d work all day, fall to sleep, and in the morning, he was taller, his arms larger than they were the day before. Born with the strength of champion boxer, Colin was maligned by the limited thinking of the opponent and had struggled when he was given too much to consider. It was not as though he was dim, he was just slow. Colin’s thoughts flowed along as is they were a babbling brook, and he was forever grateful that Mickey was such a quick thinker.
Micky was good like that, quick thinking and such.
The bookshop was incredible.
He had explored every aisle, fossicked through every section of the winding store. It was cluttered. It had an overflowing feeling to its shelves and appeared as if there were more book than space to move at some points. It had crannies, nooks that were filled with more treasures than a window shopper could scan after a week of wandering. There were piles, stacks, shelves, cases, trunks, and all of these were filled with books.
Colin thought that selling them would be difficult at first and had nearly thumped the little man who barked for a discount. But Mickey was smart. Mickey had always said that you should never throw the first punch, even when it felt right. So, Colin smiled and patted the book with his gigantic palm, ‘The paper should be a bit yellow,’ he had said calmly, not thumping the small man in his big nose or his tortoise-shell glasses, ‘means that it’s been read, means that someone enjoyed it enough that someone else should be able to read it too. It’s a good book.’
The small man had paid in full. Colin like selling books.
He also enjoyed sorting them. The chaotic piles seemed overwhelming at first but after a day he had managed to make sense of them. There was the Fiction sprawl, adamantly unalphabetised and defiant of genre. Whoever had stocked this section appeared to Colin as if they were a fellow reading rat, a person who poured over stories and felt that defining them only limited what they really could say. He liked this person.
The non-fiction was more organised though.
After a draught of whiskey, Colin had managed to brave into the section and had found it to be meticulous. There were labels, varied genres that inclined naturally into the next, it seemed that a second soul had taken great pains to ensure that this part of the shop was perfect and was very nearly finished before something had bid them to stop.
This was a good space to start. Able to follow the progression of type, Colin had gathered up some books from the cupboard and had placed them in a spare alcove next to the gardening section. They were hardbacks. Scribbly written text with over-sketched margins and busting with colour. Some of the pages shimmered with violet light, one book appeared to be still writing itself, grey ink wisping across the page as if from invisible quill. Colin gasped and closed this book hurriedly, not wanting to see the ending before it was published.
These books were special, they each had their own moods, they radiated a creativity from the inscription of their spine and appeared more verdant in their knowledge than anything that he had seen in fiction.
‘Hey daydream!’ Mickey called out, hoping that his friend hadn’t wandered off somewhere. Colin was lucky that Mickey was so smart, the big lout needed someone like him to stay on the warbling narrow. He had befriended Col after breaking into the Rathney smith-works one particularly rain-soaked night and was surprised to see someone still there in the thundering din. Colin was still working, no one had told him to go home.
‘Where are you, big guy?’
‘Occult section, Mickey,’ a deadened voice called out across the barriers of wood and paper, ‘Take a left when you see that pile of Denikovich at the counter.’
‘I couldn’t find the front door if it was on fire, Colin. Can you find me? We have to go.’
There was a silence.
‘Colin?’
‘I don’t want to go.’
The voice was quiet, a rivulet departing from a mighty river.
‘Colin, it’s an order. The boss wants us to find some friends. Remember the two who took the horses?’
They had been robbed yesterday, two smiling thieves with two smiling knives made off with their horses and had treated the theft as if it were a tea party. They just had needed to throw one punch; Micky had later spat in lamentation. Just one punch and Colin would have turned them into an envelope, stamped them, and then taken them off to the post office with a kiss.
It was the lowest that Mickey had ever felt in his life, and he felt no better when the police had happened past, Lundra’s best, he didn’t even have the energy to lie.
Well, at least things couldn’t get worse, he thought, at least he was bound to have some good luck sooner or later.
__
*Dark and stormy nights in Lundra were usually as numerable as feathers on a duck. But sometimes dramatic tension fails the ambience.
**Not that the author is aware of such things.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 