After stopping at his apartment to change and wash his face, Oz maneuvered through morning commuters to The Waning Crescent. He hoped that by some stroke of dumb luck, Jamie would be right outside the shop, trying to figure a way to get in without being seen by the owner like he had when they first met.
He rounded the corner to find a pair of black birds pecking at a discarded food carton, but no Jamie.
Faced with no other alternatives Oz gripped the door handle and pulled. He wasn’t surprised when the door didn’t budge; he was surprised when the handle scorched white hot on his palm. Oz cried out and fell backward clutching his burned hand by the wrist, waving it about to try and put out the invisible fire.
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of his face. This was new. He didn’t like new.
His palm and the pads of his fingers glowed red, but otherwise his hand wasn’t damaged. It freaked him out, but it also made him think beyond finding Jamie. No way could he leave without going inside, now.
Using the door was out of the question. A curtain fluttered above him, in an open window big enough to crawl through.
The building’s awning was old school, made with heavy steel and thick canvas. An awning meant to support a good amount of weight. Finally, his luck was turning.
Oz pulled himself onto the first floor window box, gripping the side of the awning to gain his balance. He crouched, then jumped with as much force as he could muster and managed to half-pull his upper body onto the awning. His hips and legs dangled over the side. Slowly, he pulled himself up and swung his legs over the support bar. He hesitated a moment, not moving, waiting for the thing to crash to the ground with his weight. The hinges bolting the awning to the bricks squealed softly, but held.
Oz stood carefully. The canvas gave and he clawed the brick wall, propelling himself forward. Three unsteady steps took him to the end of the awning. Oz jumped just as the old metal brackets gave and barely caught the window ledge. He dangled from the window frame for a moment then kicked and tugged himself inside the window, tumbling forward and landing with a crash on the floor of a dark storage room.
The fall knocked the wind out of him. A grungy smell assaulted his nose, making him think of his Russian grandmother’s closet—moth balls, mold and garlic. Oz coughed and examined the room. Columns of books framed the door which led to a hallway lit by strings of multicolored Christmas lights. Another door sat open just a crack at the other end of the hallway. Through the narrow opening, a shadow moved.
He stood, brushed the dust from his jeans, and tiptoed down the hallway. To his right, a narrow stairwell led to the main floor of the store.
Part bookstore, part antique shop, part weird-occult-stuff-store. Its contents displayed in a mishmash of junk that resembled a garage sale of the crazy neighbor mothers would warn children to avoid.
Oz felt an unexpected swell of admiration. Jamie had been trying to get at this stuff. It was weird, but it was interesting. Intellectual interesting. The subject of children wasn’t something Oz had dwelled on much when he was alive. He hadn’t managed to hold together a relationship long enough to consider moving in together, let alone children. But during those few and far between moments that he did fantasize about having a son—it was always a son—he’d hoped that his kid wouldn’t be the kind that zoned-out, drooling and panting in front of a brain-suck of a computer game, or agonized over sport statistics. He wanted his hypothetical son to have an original thought.
The hypothetical son would never be, but with Mark gone, Jamie came close. Whether Jamie wanted to talk to him or not, Oz knew as he wandered into the book stacks that he would look out for the kid. His role in Mark’s death aside, he’d promised.
The shop was empty, so Oz could move through the aisles freely. When he did finally get the chance to see Jamie, he ought to bring something with him. A peace offering. If only he could remember the name of the book Jamie had been after.
He studied the shelves of the first stack, but none of them sounded familiar. Wiccan Rituals, Are You Haunted?, Common Glyphs and Their Meaning, Worlds Beyond Worlds...
Oz remembered Jamie said something about it being rare. The titles on the shelves looked like modern paperbacks, some fairly new, maybe published in the last few years. It wouldn’t be there. Rare meant valuable. Valuable books, first editions, whatever, were usually locked away in glass cases. This shop only had one glass case and it housed a collection of metal talismans and stone tools—knives, a mortar and pestle, a small, pointed hammer.
There was a loud, staccato pounding on the stairs and Oz’s heart to skipped a beat. The man who’d thrown Jamie out the other day ran from the bottom of the stairs to the entrance and threw the lock. His arm circled with the momentum. Oz couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw a shadow follow him, a shadow that wasn’t person-shaped.
The man disappeared behind the desk that held the register. A jingling of keys was followed by a strained harrumph. When he reappeared, he held a wide, metal case which he dropped onto the desk and unlocked with a key from his janitor’s ring. He pulled out a book, larger than any book Oz had ever seen, the cover a faded red leather, embossed with gold writing. The man laid the book on top of the case and Oz read the title along the spine: The Three Books.
Oz slapped the side of the stack he stood next to. “That’s what it was!”
The man looked up.
Weird.
Oz sank a little deeper into the stacks. Had the man heard him, or had he heard something Oz didn’t? It was an old building—all creaks and groans.
The man muttered and opened the book.
For several minutes, the man thumbed through the pages, stopping for a moment or two to skim and mutter, flipping through others without even reading, until he came to what he seemed to be looking for. His finger traced the text over and over, as though he tried to memorize it with his flesh. He slammed the book closed, clutched it to his chest, and turned off the main lights before stomping back up the stairs.