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

Aubrey still stared. She wore a faded dressing gown and her hair was braided as though for the night. She looked frightened, and must have spoken, for Aubrey saw her lips move. The man remained bent over his counter until the last drops of liquid had run out. His jaw tightened, he straightened suddenly and took one step toward her, with outstretched hand imperiously pointed. Aubrey could see his face plainly: it had a savagery more than bestial. The woman’s face, which had borne a timid, pleading expression, appealed in vain against that fierce gesture. She turned and vanished. Aubrey saw the druggist’s pointing finger tremble. Again he ducked out of sight. “That man’s face would be lonely in a crowd,” he said to himself. “And I used to think the movies exaggerated things. Say, he ought to play opposite Theda Bara.”

He lay at full length in the paved alley and thought that a little acquaintance with Weintraub would go a long way. Then the light in the window above him went out, and he gathered himself together for quick motion if necessary. Perhaps the man would come out to close the cellar door⁠—

The thought was in his mind when a light flashed on farther down the passage, between him and the kitchen. It came from a small barred window on the ground level. Evidently the druggist had gone down into the cellar. Aubrey crawled silently along toward the yard. Reaching the lit pane he lay against the wall and looked in.

The window was too grimed for him to see clearly, but what he could make out had the appearance of a chemical laboratory and machine shop combined. A long work bench was lit by several electrics. On it he saw glass vials of odd shapes, and a medley of tools. Sheets of tin, lengths of lead pipe, gas burners, a vise, boilers and cylinders, tall jars of coloured fluids. He could hear a dull humming sound, which he surmised came from some sort of revolving tool which he could see was run by a belt from a motor. On trying to spy more clearly he found that what he had taken for dirt was a coat of whitewash which had been applied to the window on the inside, but the coating had worn away in one spot which gave him a loophole. What surprised him most was to spy the covers of a number of books strewn about the work table. One, he was ready to swear, was the Cromwell. He knew that bright blue cloth by this time.

For the second time that evening Aubrey wished for the presence of one of his former instructors. “I wish I had my old chemistry professor here,” he thought. “I’d like to know what this bird is up to. I’d hate to swallow one of his prescriptions.”

His teeth were chattering after the long exposure and he was wet through from lying in the little gutter that apparently drained off from the sink in Weintraub’s prescription laboratory. He could not see what the druggist was doing in the cellar, for the man’s broad back was turned toward him. He felt as though he had had quite enough thrills for one evening. Creeping along he found his way back to the yard, and stepped cautiously among the empty boxes with which it was strewn. An elevated train rumbled overhead, and he watched the brightly lighted cars swing by. While the train roared above him, he scrambled up the fence and dropped down into the alley.

“Well,” he thought, “I’d give full-page space, preferred position, in the magazine Ben Franklin founded to the guy that’d tell me what’s going on at this grand bolshevik headquarters. It looks to me as though they’re getting ready to blow the Octagon Hotel off the map.”

He found a little confectionery shop on Wordsworth Avenue that was still open, and went in for a cup of hot chocolate to warm himself. “The expense account on this business is going to be rather heavy,” he said to himself. “I think I’ll have to charge it up to the Daintybits account. Say, old Grey Matter gives service that’s different, don’t she! We not only keep Chapman’s goods in the public eye, but we face all the horrors of Brooklyn to preserve his family from unlawful occasions. No, I don’t like the company that bookseller runs with. If nach Philadelphia is the word, I think I’ll tag along. I guess it’s off for Philadelphia in the morning!”

XIII The Battle of Ludlow Street

Rarely was a more genuine tribute paid to entrancing girlhood than when Aubrey compelled himself, by sheer force of will and the ticking of his subconscious time-sense, to wake at six o’clock the next morning. For this young man took sleep seriously and with a primitive zest. It was to him almost a religious function. As a minor poet has said, he “made sleep a career.”

But he did not know what train Roger might be taking, and he was determined not to miss him. By a quarter after six he was seated in the Milwaukee Lunch (which is never closed⁠—“Open from Now Till the Judgment Day. Tables for Ladies,” as its sign says) with a cup of coffee and corned beef hash. In the mood of tender melancholy common to unaccustomed early rising he dwelt fondly on the thought of Titania, so near and yet so far away. He had leisure to give free rein to these musings, for it was ten past seven before Roger appeared, hurrying toward the subway. Aubrey followed at a discreet distance, taking care not to be observed.

The bookseller and his pursuer both boarded the eight o’clock train at the Pennsylvania Station, but in very different moods. To Roger, this expedition was a frolic, pure and simple. He had been tied down to the bookshop so long that a day’s excursion seemed too good to be true. He bought