01/16/2004: "David Parker's Journal: 6"
The door shut behind me, pulling itself closed with the whoosh of a pneumatic cylinder. Loose glass in the door’s nine rectangular windowpanes rattled. The latch clicked, the bolt sliding into place, locking the public out, and me in.
I looked around the Old Curiosity Shoppe, wondering what I’d been sent there to find. Whoever – whatever – burned down the other antique store had torched the wrong business, Tatiana said. The thing, the mysterious thing she hinted I was supposed to find, was supposedly here, in the Old Curiosity Shoppe.
But what was it? How was I supposed to find it amid the clutter heaped up like treasure, as if old Life magazines and 1940s-vintage Coca-Cola coolers were silver and gold?
Wherever I looked in the Old Curiosity Shoppe I saw junk – valuable antiques to some, junk to me. Every available inch of floor space was filled, leaving only room for claustrophobic aisles that bigger customers would have trouble squeezing through. But the floor was only the first layer on which the subsequent layers were heaped. Beside me was an old dining room table with claw feet; the top of it were piled chairs – not chairs that matched the table, or even each other, but random chairs; on top of some chairs were boxes, on others lamps. Perched on one lamp was an old fedora with a price tag pinned to it. Another lampshade was festooned with campaign buttons from presidential elections in the 1960s and ’70s.
The chaos was almost dizzying. I shut my eyes center, drawing in a long breath. The air was full of bee’s wax, old perfume, turpentine, decaying newspaper, and beneath all else, the accumulated dust of decades, the smell of time past, a fine powder of decay, a patina of grime that penetrated cracks, sifted into fabric in ways that cleaning could never remove.
I forced myself to move through the room. I picked my way carefully, possessed by an irrational idea the mountainous cast offs of dead generations might crash down on my head, trapping me in the Old Curiosity Shoppe.
Not knowing what I was looking for, I employed all my senses, including the ones I gained when I became a vampire. I reached out to read the subtle vibrations and received such a blast of psychic noise that I had to dial back to almost nothing or else be overwhelmed.
If what I was looking for was on the first floor, I didn’t find it, but how could I know for sure? I felt as if Tatiana had sent me on a fool’s errand. There had to be a point to it, but I’d be damned if I could figure out what I was supposed to be looking for.
There was a narrow staircase leading to the second floor. I started up and instantly the fear was upon me. It was as if an invisible pressure was coming at me, driving the air from my lungs.
The man at the top of the stairs was a laborer, from the looks of him, wearing the clothes of another century. He swayed unsteadily back and forth, so drunk he could barely stand. There was madness in his eyes. Looking back behind me, at the bottom of the stairs, a woman in a long cotton housedress, her neck broken. I turned back to her killer, but he had already gone.
I was tempted to turn around and leave, but I continued up the stairs. There were two doors at the top, one to the left, one right. Through the left door, I could see the husband’s ghost, a noose around his neck, swinging from the ceiling. I decided to start in the other room.
My hand went for the light switch, more from habit than need, since eyes could see well enough in the dark. I stopped myself. The police station was only two blocks away, and a light in the second story widow of the Old Curiosity Shoppe after closing hours might draw attention.
I made my way around the aisle left around the room’s perimeter, occasionally bumping into things sticking from the mass of junk. The entire south wall was taken up by a bookshelf. I scanned the spines, finding little of interest. Old encyclopedias, copies of Readers Digest Condensed Books from the 1950s, nothing that seemed like it could be related to the Illuminati. There was a bookshop in town specializing in rare books. No doubt anything valuable turning up at the Old Curiosity Shoppe was resold to Antiquarian Books.
I was turning the corner when I felt a strange tingling in the back of my neck. I spun around, expecting to find someone standing behind me – an apparition, maybe, or even another vampire, since a human would not be able to creep up a vampire unnoticed.
There was nothing there. And yet, I sensed there was … Something was happening. Something odd that I didn’t understand.
There was a small movement at eye level. A mouse, I thought at first, but it was one the of books sliding itself out. I started to take a step forward to examine the phenomenon when the book jumped out in the air, levitate a moment, then dropped straight to the floor, the leather cover slapping the floorboards loud enough to make me jump. The impact of hitting the floor made the cover fall open to the middle of the book.
“Hello,” I said, part nerves, part revelation. It seems the thing I had been sent to find instead had found me.
I picked up the book and scanned the text. The language was archaic English and vaguely familiar. I’d read this book before. I turned the book around in my hands and read the title on the spine: “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
It came back to me – the summer literature class in college.
I was more confused than ever. Had Tatiana really had sent me to the Old Curiosity Shoppe to find an old copy of John Bunyon’s 17th century religious allegory? What significance could the book have to the Vampiri?
I mentally noted the page the book had fallen open to, then used my thumb to flip through the pages, my eyes sweeping the text, looking for a note, something written in the margins – anything that might have been hidden in the book.
Nothing.
Examination of the outside of the book proved similarly useless. It was just an old book, the leather binding beginning to crack. The edition was printed in 1922. My guess was the book was neither collectable nor valuable.
Inside the front cover I found a bookplate proclaiming that the book was “from the library of William Benton.” The name was familiar. One of suburbs of the city was called Benton. I was vaguely aware that Benton had been an industrialist in the early part of the 1900s. I hadn’t made a point of learning the local history, but you pick up things when you stay in the same place for very long.
The only noteworthy thing was that Benton apparently had been a Freemason. The bookplate was decorated with Masonic symbols. In the upper left corner of the plate was an engraving of they Sphinx, in the opposite corner, a pyramid.
The Sphinx and pyramid began to glow with pulsing light, like the painted-over symbols I had seen in Hiberian Hall.
“My God,” I said, having to will my hands to hold onto the talisman instead of flinging it away.
I had definitely found it – but what was “it,” and what did it mean?
