Last night I discovered a battered old diary in a box in the attic. It was covered in dust and cobwebs, and looked like it had passed through fire and flood. The first half is missing.
Curiously enough, the year at the top of the pages reads 2023. Must be a misprint.
The following are the surviving entries, faithfully recorded by Yours Truly:
July 30: The holiday display is summer reading, and they’re all marked at half off. The customers will help clean it out for us. Tomorrow, we’ll finish clearing them out.
August 1: Let’s get started on Hallowe’en. It’s just small display, a reminder that for some people, Spooky Season is year-round. We’ll do the rest later.
August 15: I don’t remember ordering quite this many Hallowe’en books for the display, but what the heck. I’ll find room somehow. Maybe if I move some of the decorations…
September 1: All the books are out on the displays and some decorations have been scattered around the shop as accent pieces. We’ll add more as time passes. The intern is very excited; they says they love Hallowe’en. We agree.
September 12: There are far more decorations than I’d anticipated. It takes time, but we make room. The haybales and corn stalks make a nice touch by the front door, and some fall leaves seem to have drifted inside, which is odd because there are no trees near the parking lot. Oh well; they look nice.
September 21: There are a lot more corn stalks. Nobody seems to know where they came from.
September 27: We just had to hack a path through the dried corn stalks to get from the door to the counter. Plus side? Free corn maze!
September 30: By now, the decorations have filled all available wall and floor space and are starting to take over the shelves. Customers keep getting lost in the corn maze, and the store ghost has taken to humming tunelessly in anticipation.
October 1: The bookstore cat just turned completely black overnight.
October 2: The intern got trapped in the storage room and had a traumatic experience. We’ve sent they home for the rest of the day. Even odds, we’ll need a new intern. Oh well.
October 5: The intern is back. They now has a hunch, greenish skin, and a slightly unsettling cackle. This being a bookstore, that’s not actually unusual.
October 7: One of the fake giant spiders just moved on its own. Customers are complaining about the strange thumping noise from under the floor. We’re on a concrete slab, so that’s a bit unsettling.
October 11: There’s a strange fog seeping out of the Horror section, and the Hallowe’en display appears to have invaded Romance. This has led to some very… interesting… books, but the customers are buying them. Business is brisk.
October 12: The fake spellbook decoration just showed up in the Reference section. Several dictionaries are missing, and the spellbook is noticeably fatter. It must be a prank. Just in case, we’ve now chained it to the holiday display table.
October 13: It’s a Friday. ‘Nuff said. Opened at 10, closed at noon and went home. Some days, it’s better not to get up in the morning.
October 14: Evidently, when we closed early yesterday, we accidentally locked the intern in. They didn’t mind, and spent a restful evening reorganizing the cookbook section. We decide not to look, just for our own peace of mind.
October 17: It’s quiet. Too quiet.
October 18: The police were just here looking for a customer who popped in “just for a minute” and never came out again. We direct them to the Horror section. They don’t emerge, and aren’t there when we go check. The strange fog is much thicker today. When we leave tonight, we walk past the silent patrol car and try not to think too much about it.
October 21: Six more police officers have vanished since Thursday, and the Horror section has been cordoned off with yellow police tape. The Hallowe’en display has completed its conquest of Romance and Fantasy and is now engaged in a furious battle with True Crime over on the borders of NonFiction. We warn customers away, but some give in to curiosity. Too bad.
October 23: There are now bats.
October 25: A thin gentleman in skull makeup wearing a tall black topper asked where the “special books” are kept. We’re about to reply that we don’t have such a section when the intern shows up, nods quietly, and beckons him into the alcove where we used to keep the cookbooks. He leaves with several large tomes we don’t recall ordering, having paid for them with very badly tarnished silver coins from another century.
October 26: The spider decorations are now eating the bats.
October 27: The Horror section was just raided by the FBI. There were sounds of conflict but no gunfire. The silence afterward was unsettling, only broken by a soft dripping noise. Drip… drip… drip…
October 28: The holiday display and True Crime appear to have reached a truce, teaming up in order to invade the rest of NonFiction. The results were… not entirely unexpected. Celebrity autobiographies were the first to go. On the plus side, nobody will ever miss them.
October 30: Most of our regulars haven’t been in for weeks, but we do curb pickup so that’s OK. The only three sections remaining in the store are True Crime, Horror, and the Hallowe’en Display, plus whatever it is the intern has been selling out of the cookbook alcove. The store is quiet, but the fog from Horror has now spread to every corner and is rising. There are now three bookstore cats, all black.
October 31: Trick or Treaters love what we’ve done with the place. Sales are better than ever, and we stay open late. Toward the end of the night, screams erupt from the cookbook alcove, and when we go check, it has been replaced by a gate to R’lyeh. The intern is nowhere to be seen.
November 1: Dio de los Muertos party! Everyone’s invited!
The rest of the pages are blank.
Dedicated to Gibran.
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