The Haunted Bookshop Christopher Morley (sci fi books to read TXT) 📖

modest and cheerful merchandising makes the western pavement of Gissing Street a jolly place when the lights are lit. All the shops were decorated for the Christmas trade; the Christmas issues of the magazines were just out and brightened the newsstands with their glowing covers. This section of Brooklyn has a tone and atmosphere peculiarly French in some parts: one can quite imagine oneself in some smaller Parisian boulevard frequented by the petit bourgeois. Midway in this engaging and animated block stands the Haunted Bookshop. Aubrey could see its windows lit, and the shelved masses of books within. He felt a severe temptation to enter, but a certain bashfulness added itself to his desire to act in secret. There was a privy exhilaration in his plan of putting the bookshop under an unsuspected surveillance, and he had the emotion of one walking on the frontiers of adventure.

So he kept on the opposite side of the street, which still maintains an unbroken row of quiet brown fronts, save for the movie theatre at the upper corner, opposite Weintraub’s. Some of the basements on this side are occupied now by small tailors, laundries, and lace-curtain cleaners (lace curtains are still a fetish in Brooklyn), but most of the houses are still merely dwellings. Carrying his bag, Aubrey passed the bright halo of the movie theatre. Posters announcing The Return of Tarzan showed a kind of third chapter of Genesis scene with an Eve in a sports suit. “Added attraction, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew,” he read.

A little way down the block he saw a sign “Vacancies” in a parlour window. The house was nearly opposite the bookshop, and he at once mounted the tall steps to the front door and rang.

A fawn-tinted coloured girl, of the kind generally called “Addie,” arrived presently. “Can I get a room here?” he asked. “I don’t know, you’d better see Miz’ Schiller,” she said, without rancour. Adopting the customary compromise of untrained domestics, she did not invite him inside, but departed, leaving the door open to show that there was no ill will.

Aubrey stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. In an immense mirror the pale cheese-coloured flutter of a gas jet was remotely reflected. He noticed the Landseer engraving hung against wallpaper designed in facsimile of large rectangles of gray stone, and the usual telephone memorandum for the usual Mrs. J. F. Smith (who abides in all lodging houses) tucked into the frame of the mirror. “Will Mrs. Smith please call Stockton 6771,” it said. A carpeted stair with a fine old mahogany balustrade rose into the dimness. Aubrey, who was thoroughly familiar with lodgings, knew instinctively that the fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth steps would be creakers. A soft musk sweetened the warm, torpid air: he divined that someone was toasting marshmallows over a gas jet. He knew perfectly well that somewhere in the house would be a placard over a bathtub with the legend: “Please leave this tub as you would wish to find it.” Roger Mifflin would have said, after studying the hall, that someone in the house was sure to be reading the poems of Rabbi Tagore; but Aubrey was not so caustic.

Mrs. Schiller came up the basement stairs, followed by a small pug dog. She was warm and stout, with a tendency to burst just under the armpits. She was friendly. The pug made merry over Aubrey’s ankles.

“Stop it, Treasure!” said Mrs. Schiller.

“Can I get a room here?” asked Aubrey, with great politeness.

“Third floor front’s the only thing I’ve got,” she said. “You don’t smoke in bed, do you? The last young man I had burned holes in three of my sheets⁠—”

Aubrey reassured her.

“I don’t give meals.”

“That’s all right,” said Aubrey. “Suits me.”

“Five dollars a week,” she said.

“May I see it?”

Mrs. Schiller brightened the gas and led the way upstairs. Treasure skipped up the treads beside her. The sight of the six feet ascending together amused Aubrey. The fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth steps creaked, as he had guessed they would. On the landing of the second storey a transom gushed orange light. Mrs. Schiller was secretly pleased at not having to augment the gas on that landing. Under the transom and behind a door Aubrey could hear someone having a bath, with a great sloshing of water. He wondered irreverently whether it was Mrs. J. F. Smith. At any rate (he felt sure), it was some experienced habitué of lodgings, who knew that about five-thirty in the afternoon is the best time for a bath⁠—before cooking supper and the homecoming ablutions of other tenants have exhausted the hot water boiler.

They climbed one more flight. The room was small, occupying half the third-floor frontage. A large window opened onto the street, giving a plain view of the bookshop and the other houses across the way. A washstand stood modestly inside a large cupboard. Over the mantel was the familiar picture⁠—usually, however, reserved for the fourth floor back⁠—of a young lady having her shoes shined by a ribald small boy.

Aubrey was delighted. “This is fine,” he said. “Here’s a week in advance.”

Mrs. Schiller was almost disconcerted by the rapidity of the transaction. She preferred to solemnize the reception of a new lodger by a little more talk⁠—remarks about the weather, the difficulty of getting “help,” the young women guests who empty tea-leaves down washbasin pipes, and so on. All this sort of gossip, apparently aimless, has a very real purpose: it enables the defenceless landlady to size up the stranger who comes to prey upon her. She had hardly had a good look at this gentleman, nor even knew his name, and here he had paid a week’s rent and was already installed.

Aubrey divined the cause of her hesitation, and gave her his business card.

“All right, Mr. Gilbert,” she said. “I’ll send up the girl with some clean towels and a latchkey.”

Aubrey sat down in a rocking chair by the window, tucked the muslin curtain to one side, and looked out upon the bright