The All-Night Bookstore

By Grant Carrington

As soon as I walk in the door, Larry, who manages the bookstore in the evening and late afternoon, says, “Glad you’re finally here. It started early today.” He takes the cash tray out of the register, locks it, and heads down to the office in the basement, where he will lock it in Lenny’s safe. I take out the sign that says, “Exact Change only. 11 pm to 8 am” and pull the night safe out from under the counter so I can easily put the money in the slot at the top of it.

Things look pretty normal to me. There are five or six people wandering through the aisles, picking up books and putting them back again, sometimes in the right place. The coffee pot at the back of the bookstore is full but no one is drinking any right now. We ask for a dollar and we do get some during the day but not during my shift except for Clancy, who always tries to go by the book.

I go back to get a cup. Can’t tell what’s in it this time. Maybe it’ll get more obvious as the night moves on.

It’s usually pretty quiet before midnight, when the eeries start to show up but tonight Ed and Al show up almost as soon as I take over the counter. They’re still in their daytime form but the tiny horns are already sprouting at the top of Al’s head. He stands about 6 foot 8 or so, all muscle and blocky like a football lineman but he’s as gentle as a lamb and he knows just about everything that’s ever been written. He’ll tell you about Jim Tully, Robert Greene, or Wyman Guin and a lot of other people you never heard of as well as those you do know. That’s if you can get him to talk in the first place.

Ed on the other hand hardly ever stops talking and, when he does, he says “But I don’t really know what I’m talking about” and then he starts all over again. He’s about 4-foot-6 with sharp-pointed elfin ears, even in daylight, and a couple of short fangs that come out at night, and his mouth is always moving, like a Chihuahua telling you, “I’m down here. Don’t step on me.”

He looks up at me and says, “Hey, Dean, you got anything by Murray Leinster?”

“Never heard of him,” I say.

“C’mon, man, you run a bookstore, you should know these kinds of things. He was a big sci-fi writer back in the Forties and Fifties, went to Hollywood and made a ton.” He then goes into a description of every single story the guy wrote until Al says, “Leinster didn’t write that one, Ed. That was a Daniel Keyes story.”

“Really?  Shows you I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But who cares?”

“And his real name was Will Jenkins.”

Al heads back toward the Arcana section of the bookstore, Ed at his heels, still talking about science fiction writers. Al stops and looks back at me. “Oh, by the way, tonight’s The Night.”

“The Night?”  But I’m talking to his back.

I take another sip from the coffee; now it tastes like spiders, kind of furry like a tarantula.

Three little guys in tight white suits come in. I can’t help myself; I have to stare— I haven’t seen anyone in a white suit since Tom Wolfe died. Larry was right— it’s getting weird early these days.

“This is All Night Bookstore?” one of them says.

“This is it,” I say.

“It is a bookstore all night?  Nothing else?”

“It’s a madhouse sometimes.”

“Madhouse?  Real crazy people?”

“Sometimes.”

They huddle together and buzz among themselves. They seem excited about crazy people being here. Usually, people can’t wait to leave when that happens.

One of them (don’t ask me which one— they all look the same to me) comes back to the counter. “Show us a crazy people. We pay you. We have exchangeable symbolic labor.” And he pulls out a wad of bills that would choke the proverbial horse if not a whole damn elephant.

“Put that away,” I say. “You’ll start a riot.”

“May we?” he asks eagerly.

“No!  Go down to the all-night diner down the street.”

“Thank you. That will be fun. Here is some symbolic labor for you.” And he puts a fifty on the counter.

I hesitate a moment then grab it and put it under the counter. Crazy as it gets around here, it never gets that kind of crazy. “Thank you very much. Have a good riot.”

I’m glad to see them go. The rough-housers are bad enough to deal with but it’s the innocents who always cause the most trouble.

From eleven in the evening until three or four in the morning, the store is peopled by the denizens of the night, the gentle college professor who walks the night streets looking for action, the dopesters and their providers (there is an unspoken agreement not to deal in the store, an agreement which is frequently broken), the streetwalkers and the fifty-year-old lady who whips men for money, the hustlers and the hackers, the pool sharks and the card players, the gamblers and the ramblers, and of course the fresh-faced young students, so guilty in their innocence, some of whom I’ve watched as experience slowly turns their faces into hard-faced masks, most of whom I will never see again after they graduate.

Lenny finally saved me from all that. Lenny and me go way back. We’ve known each other since we were pups. I was the first one to know he was gay, back when neither of us knew what gay was, just that he was different and then I had a blackmail secret on him. “Let me have that steelie or I’ll tell.” Poor Lenny, the times I made him cry. Then I had a blackmail secret of my own, about that homely dumpy girl with witch’s hair back in eighth grade, and there was only one person whom I could trust to tell it to and we became the closest of friends (well, not that close) and buds forever. Lenny eventually bought this bookstore so now I have a halfway decent job and I don’t have to join Toothless Johnny out on the street.

But that’s then and this is now.

At the last midnight stroke of the cathedral down the street, the coffee pot erupts then puts itself back together and any of the normal customers left over from the evening quickly leave as the eeries come in. The regulars just keep a safe distance from them, watching them. Most of the kids leave too but some of them stay for the show. Some of them have brought their girlfriends with them, hoping this will somehow allow them to score.

Tonight, at that last twelve o’clock bong, I can see something coalescing at the back of the store, a man in leather armor with a huge full red beard, a man so large he has to stoop over despite the ten-foot ceiling. As he comes into full existence, he starts roaring something in a language that I don’t know (which is most of them). Al goes up to him, looking small against that bulk, and they start talking to each other.

“What’s going on, Al?” I holler. “What does he want?”

“He wants to know what happened to Valhalla.”

“Send him to the bar down the street.” We actually have a bar here called Valhalla as well as others named Hades and Nirvana.

They talk a bit and the guy stomps out (I don’t think he could walk any other way), squeezing his bulk through the door with an ease that amazes me, slamming a large gold coin on the counter, which I pocket immediately. What Lenny doesn’t know doesn’t hurt me.

Outside the guy throws thunderbolts at the cars as he stomps down the street, scattering pedestrians, streetwalkers, and the biker gangs in front of the Hairy Gods Saloon.

“Al,” I say, “what was that guy speaking?”

By now, Al is in his eerie blue body, blue unshod feet (what happens with his shoes?) with big yellow nails, totally into his friendly ogre phase.

“It was some kind of Scandinavian, probably old Norse. I couldn’t understand a lot of it.”

“Is there any language you don’t know?”

He thought a moment. “Sanskrit. Aramaic. But I can read it.”

“Aramaic?”  Ed perked up. “That’s what Christ spoke, you know.” And he was off and running as they walked back to the science fiction section.

By twelve-thirty there’s almost twice as many eeries as usual and, surprisingly, almost as many normals, if you can call someone who comes into a bookstore after midnight normal. Not to mention the guy behind the counter.

The whip lady is here, talking to a long-necked guy with a zebra-striped feline face, talking to him as if they’ve known each other a long time. When she finally comes up to the counter, I ask her about him and find out he’s one of the nighttime regulars whom I had never seen in his eerie form.

“Yes, he’s a rare-timer but tonight all the threads are coalescing into one, aren’t they?”

“Are they?”

She looks at me for a long moment. “You’re more of a normal than most of us who come here at night, aren’t you?  I never noticed it before. You hide it well.”

I think about it a moment. “I think I’m something else,” I finally say.

She nods her head. “Yes. My mother was an eerie but I have only a slight touch of the wyrd myself. Maybe that’s why I do what I do so well, knowing what they need. What do you need, Dean?”

I shrug. “I need to get out of here in one piece.”

She takes my hand and holds it a minute.  “If I find out what you need, maybe I’ll tell you. If you need to know.”

Then she leaves and this guy comes up with our only copy of The Necronomicon. It’s only a third edition but even those are hard to come by. I have no idea where Lenny got it. It’s one of our best sellers. This guy is in a trench coat that covers his entire body and is wearing sunglasses under a hat that is jammed down over his head. Tiny ears peek out from a thatch of coarse brown hair. The only thing I can see of his face is his long prehensile nose which ends in two piglike nostrils. A large hand out of proportion to his stature comes out of the trench coat with a twenty. The hand ends in four five-inch-long claws.

“I can’t give you change,” I say, pointing to the sign.

“That’s okay.” His voice is guttural, completely in keeping with his appearance, and echoes as if it comes from a hundred-foot-deep well.

I look down toward the Arcana section and it looks like another copy of The Necronomicon has already replaced the one he has taken.

In the far corner of the store, a smile fades into view then becomes the Cheshire Cat, which pads toward me, ignored by everyone else. It jumps up on the counter.

“How’s it going, Dean?”

“You’re not real.”

“For tonight I am. You better believe it.”

There’s a buzz going through me. It must be the coffee. I wonder what was in it. I look to the back of the store; the coffee pot and the whip lady are dancing together.

The Cheshire Cat is gone. But before I can relax, Vishnu comes in or maybe it’s Brahma. I could never get the Hindu gods straight. Whatever, he (or is it she?) has four arms and blue skin and, even as I look, his/her face changes into that of a lion, looking a bit like Bert Lahr. Then it turns back when he sees Al, goes over, and gets into a serious discussion with him before they come over to the counter together.

“Vish and I are old friends,” he says. “Dean runs this place.”

“Are you good?” Vishnu asks.

“You don’t have to be very good to run a place like this.”

“No, you have to be brilliant,” Al says, looking around for Ed who, at that moment, seems to be having a vigorous discussion about baseball with the coffee pot, which is having a hard time getting a word in.

“Are you looking for Nirvana?” I ask.

“Are they in town?  I’ve never seen them in concert.”

“How many times have you seen the Grateful Dead?” Al asks.

“Oh, many times, in all their many forms.” He chortles at his little joke.

“Well, the Nirvana Bar is just down the street,” I say, “right next to Paradise and Valhalla. Just follow the sticks.”

“Thank you.” He turns back to Al. “See you in your next incarnation.”

At two o’clock the bars let out and this time so do the books. Little characters come scrambling out of them, Shakespeare dueling with Marlowe, Casanova putting moves on Juliet, which Romeo takes exception to until Maude comes over and drags him into the Erotica section, where two of the students are in the process of writing their own book. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are pulling down Becky Thatcher’s dress, which doesn’t seem to bother her at all. They’re everywhere, the normals and the good-sized eeries stepping on them, which doesn’t seem to faze the book characters at all. It’s Bedlam. And most of its inmates come out of the books too.

The place is a mess, books on the floor with their pages open, books hanging out of the shelves waiting to fall, while all these little people are singing, shouting, fornicating, and even drinking, holding up little mugs of ale, tiny beer cans, or whatever is appropriate to their time period, sharing it with those who had never encountered that kind of alcohol.

Something else is forming in the back corner and this time it’s not the Cheshire Cat. It’s dark gray and it’s got horns and goat’s legs and a scraggly goatee.

That’s when Clancy comes in.

Toothless Johnny shambles in while I’m talking to Clancy. Toothless Johnny and Clancy go way back, all the way back to when Toothless Johnny had all his teeth and all his marbles too. Clancy says hello and Johnny mumbles something unintelligible. Clancy flips him a quarter. “Go get yourself some coffee, Johnny.”

Johnny stumbles to the back of the bookstore totally ignoring the mayhem going on around him, which is maybe less interesting than the mayhem going on in his head. The coffee pot is doing an imitation of a dishwasher, which doesn’t bother Johnny one bit.

Clancy sees the apparition in the corner and immediately heads back for it. “Get. Scram. Begone.”

“Listen, you have no business here.”

“What if I want to buy a book?”

“You want me to run you in?”

“You want to try?”

As Clancy takes out his nightstick, the apparition holds up his hand and Clancy whacks it with his nightstick.

“Hey!  That hurts.”

“There’s more where that came from.”

The satyr looks at his hand then takes out a cellphone and mutters something into it in some blasphemous tongue. “Hmmm.” He puts the phone into a pouch around his waist. “The wyrd ain’t what it used to be; it seems to be weaker these days.”

Clancy raises his nightstick again.

“I’m going, I’m going.” It sighs. “Ah, for the good old days.”

The book characters are still going at it when Clancy leaves.

I look around for Toothless Johnny. I find him at last playing Monopoly with a little racing car and a flatiron. He has shrunk down to their size and has on a formal suit, a top hat, and a thick white mustache. He is barely recognizable until he looks up at me and waves.

The place is a shambles.

“All right, everybody, listen up. The party’s over. Time to clean up and go back to your nice comfortable books.”

All I get is a tiny raspberry.

“Hey, hey, people!  You’ve got to stop this. This is terrible. Go back to where you belong. Go back to your books. Right now.”

A few stop to give me the finger but most of them ignore me. I get down out of the counter and start scooping up people and trying to jam them into books, any books, but they bite me and fight and tumble out of the books I put them in. When I get to the back of the bookstore, the coffee pot lets go a huge cloud of steam that scalds my face.

I crawl back to the counter and lay my head down on my arms. I’m licked, beaten. Lenny will be here in an hour or so and we’re not kids any more.

Superman flies up to the counter and hits me on the nose. It doesn’t really hurt. I pick him up and hold him in my fist while he flails around with his arms.

“Shazam,” I say.

“Wrong superhero.” He keeps flailing.

I finally fling him off into the bookstore. He flies around erratically and finally crashes into a floating crap game being held in the Music section. Another ancient god comes in and swallows the whole coffee pot then leaves but the pot is still there— now the coffee is paisley and tastes of marijuana, nutmeg, and mushroom.

“Alcahotec,” I yell.

A large thin bright forest green book comes out into the center of one of the aisles. “You want me, boss?”

“Get up here.”

The book grows a couple of small feet and trundles up to the foot of the counter and tries to leap up while I try to grab it. It falls heavily on the second try, says, “That hurts,” and crawls along the base of the counter until it goes under the gate and I’m able to pick it up and put it on the counter.

“I need a spell that will clean up all this mess and put everybody back in their books.”

“Sorry, boss, but most spells are inoperative during The Night.”

“Isn’t there something you can do?”

“Let’s see.” The pages of the book flip and stop. “Oh, here’s a nice recipe for shirred eggs using vodka and a hammer. Very tasty.”

“Not right now.”

The pages continue to flip as the Aztecs and the Vikings get into a quarrel. The Aztecs seem to be getting the worst of it.

“Here’s a small flood spell that’s still operative. It requires nutmeg, marijuana, and mushroom.”

I pick up my coffee and taste it. “Let’s go.”

I close the book, put a napkin on it, and my coffee cup on top of that while Alcohotec chants the spell, and a rush of water comes in through the front door and sweeps all the characters away except for Toothless Johnny, who stumbles out the door. The store looks cleaner than it has in years.

“Wait. Where are the characters?  The books will all be empty.”

“Drink the coffee,” Alcahotec says, “drink the coffee.”

I drink it down as fast as I can, practically choking myself, and the characters all come out of the woodwork and jump into their books. I pick up Alcahotec and take him back to his aisle. Like most large-sized books, it’s at the bottom of the case and I’m on my hands and knees when Lenny comes in.

“What’re you doing down there?” he wants to know.

“Uh, just putting a book back.”

A tiny Eeyore lets out a tiny bray. I put my hand over him so Lenny can’t see him.

He looks at the floors and lets out a low whistle. “You’ve been busy. I haven’t seen this place this clean in years.”

“Yeah. I’ve been busy.”

“I’ll see you in about half an hour.” He heads downstairs to his office.

I let Eeyore go. “Go find your book.”

He runs around the aisles braying until Christopher Robin comes out of a copy of Winnie the Pooh and yanks him inside.

I go back to the counter to find a mini-T. rex gobbling up the last of my fifty-dollar bill. As I come up, it jumps into the slot of the all-night safe.

“Hey,” I holler, “don’t eat any money in there or Lennie will have my ass in a sling.”