More Downstairs →

by Margo Pecha

Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:

The shop was a hole in the wall, a place to step into from out of the rain. Edie must have passed by the shabby doorway daily on her route to and from work but had never noticed it until then, the faded, paint-peeling sign snagging her gaze and causing her feet to falter. She cupped her hands against its foggy glass window and peered inside. 

The interior was cramped, stuffed floor to ceiling with mismatched shelving and precarious towers of books that cluttered the floor like strange monoliths. In the center of the chaos sat a man behind a run-down counter, engrossed in a creased paperback. As if sensing her presence, he lifted his head and smiled at her, beckoning her in with a wave of his hand.

“Me?” she mouthed, a stab of panic shooting through her chest. 

He nodded his head, grin widening to split his face.

Edie’s tired feet throbbed, reminding her that perusing books was not part of her after-work plan. She was supposed to be home an hour ago, reclining with a hot cup of tea and the comfortable weight of a cat on her lap. Now that she’d been caught snooping through the window, she felt like she had to pop inside. 

A quick peek, and then I can go home.

She pushed through the door, the bell above jangling, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. An endless xylophone of tattered spines filled her vision. Behind the counter, the man was surrounded by stacks of cardboard boxes that looked as if they’d split apart at any moment, spilling their contents to bury him alive. 

She smiled tentatively and stepped into the disarray.

“There’s more downstairs,” he said, motioning toward the back of the shop. 

At this gesture, her eyes caught on a tattoo on his upper arm—a skeleton ripping itself from within the man’s bicep, its head and shoulders protruding from the ragged, red-inked hole as its hands gripped flesh surrounding it. It leered at her from beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt, its jaw hanging open and crazed eyeballs rolling within their sockets like it was his own skeleton removing itself from his skin. 

Bile rose in her throat, hot and bitter, and she hurried around the checkout counter, her pulse pounding in her ears. She peered at it from behind a rack of romance novels, taken aback by its grotesqueness in such an unassuming shop, branded on such an unassuming man.  

Its eyes seemed to follow her, cutting through the curling covers of swooning women with tousled manes, and she shivered as she retreated into the jumble of the store. She’d have to pass it again if she wanted to leave—and she really did want that cup of tea—but at the moment she wanted to get as far away from it as possible.

Edie wandered the shelves of books stuffed tight as sardines in a can, rows of paperbacks and faded dust jackets and oversized hardbacks shoved and squeezed into every available space. The back of her neck prickled, conscious of those crazed eyes following her every movement. She walked deeper into the labyrinth.

At the back of the shop a doorway loomed, a curling paper tacked beside it noting More Downstairs →, which she followed dutifully, if only to get away from the lunatic stare of the skeleton.

The ancient treads groaned beneath her feet, every step eliciting protestations. Books stacked in haphazard piles along both sides of the staircase left only the slightest path through which to pass, so she stepped carefully. One wrong move would send her tumbling down and bury her beneath an avalanche of texts. 

At the bottom of the staircase, she emerged into a basement crammed with even more books. She picked her way along a row of sagging shelves. Her aching feet snapped against the cold concrete floor. A single bare bulb swung from a cord on the ceiling, shedding a weak yellow glow among the inventory and stretching crazy, contorted shadows across the walls. The drizzle of rain on the street above had quieted; only the occasional muted blare of a car’s horn leached into the room.

She appeared to be the only person in this part of the store—and, come to think of it, she hadn’t noticed anyone else upstairs besides the man at the counter. Her flesh prickled again, rippling up her spine as she remembered the skeleton’s leer, and she rubbed at the back of her neck, trying to rid herself of the sensation as she forced herself to poke around the lower level. Bookshops were supposed to be happy places, after all; she wouldn’t let a silly tattoo dampen her mood.

Edie teased books at random from the cabinets and tried to read their titles in the poor light, but the lettering was indecipherable, written in a language she didn’t understand. When she paged through interiors, words swam and scrambled as if evading her. She shoved each tome back into place, growing increasingly frustrated as she moved down the shelves and selected more, only to discover the same gibberish filled each one.

When she reached the other end of the room, she found another doorway, another curled paper sign tacked to the wall: More Downstairs →.

She paused on the threshold and frowned, peering down a second staircase nearly identical to the first one, crowded with an amalgamation of texts on the verge of disintegration. Was this place still part of the store? The sign appeared to indicate so, but something in the back of her brain remained unsure, gave her pause. Her tired feet throbbed, reminding her once again that being here wasn’t part of the plan, before she descended again.

Her surroundings grew dimmer still, the all-encompassing reek of musty paper and dampness assaulting her nose. She could no longer hear the drizzle outside or the rush of traffic on the street above. The silence was so complete that her ears rang, fabricating a white noise that set every muscle in her body on edge. Her steps ricocheted like gunshots, redoubling as they echoed back at her like a second set of footsteps. Goosebumps pimpled her arms.

Was someone following her?

Edie pressed her shoulders against the shelf behind her, its spines pressing into hers, and waited, shaking, listening for the clatter of approaching footsteps. Who would follow her? The shopkeeper? Maybe she wasn’t supposed to be down here after all. 

“Is someone there?” she asked, her voice uncomfortably loud. No grim figure shuffled through the gloom.

She extended a hand to steady herself, and an entire shelf collapsed beneath her palm, crumbling to the floor in an ashy pile. Edie jumped and hurried on, glancing back from time to time, but all she saw were endless rows of crumbling books.

At the other side of the room, she discovered yet another doorway, another curling paper sign barely legible in the near dark: More Downstairs →.  Edie hesitated once more. She wanted to turn back, knew she should, but was petrified by who or what she’d encounter if she did.

An approaching sound, bony and death-rattling like the gait of a skeleton, decided for her: she plunged down the stairs, spiraling far beneath the shop with an ear trained backward, uneasily monitoring the extra set of footfalls falling behind hers. 

Down and down Edie went, groping along the damp shelves and mildewed walls. The books grew older the farther she progressed, their leatherbound spines cracked and flaking, littering the concrete floor with a fine layer of sediment. Shelves bowed in places, sagging their wavy, waterlogged contents. The light faded more with each new sub-basement she encountered until eventually she felt her way along in complete darkness. 

She’d lost track of how many staircases she’d descended—seven, eight?—and panic unfurled in her chest like a night-blooming flower, slow and delicate. How far down did it go? She couldn’t turn back now; she’d lose her way, doomed to wander forever the maze-like corridors of rotting books and folios, scurrying along in evasion of her pursuer until she collapsed from exhaustion or felt the grip of skeletal fingers on her shoulder. 

In the darkness she heard shuffling footfalls, felt the moth-wing brush of another shoulder against hers, a breathy “Sorry” in her ear as she continued blindly forward, arms extended before her and heart pounding wildly against her ribs. Somewhere she thought she heard a sob, bloated and lonesome. She picked up her pace.

The dark grew colder. She shivered, hugging herself. She supposed, if she could see, she’d see little puffs of breath with every exhale. Her feet stirred a layer of litter on the floor, desiccated and papery, jumbling the detritus as she plodded ahead.

Edie felt her way onward, her hand trailing along moldering rows of books that crumbled beneath her fingers and sloughed off the shelves as she passed. The shuffling of nearby feet had faded, the sobbing ceased. All she could hear was the rush of blood in her own ears.

Her stomach ached, hollow and empty. She trudged on until the hunger ceased to matter, and there was only the action of putting one foot in front of the other, of stumbling forward into the vast nothingness of time itself, and her personal needs slipped away like ancient books on disintegrating shelves.

Hours or days passed; she wasn’t sure which. She couldn’t feel her feet anymore, had the distinct impression that she was no longer walking but floating through an eternal void. Whether she ever left this accursed darkness with its decaying perfume of rotting paper didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She was a blip of humanity passing through something much larger than her brain could comprehend. A scream built in her chest but found no release.

Then, when she thought she couldn’t bear the confines of her mind any longer, she saw it. At first, she thought it was her light-starved brain playing a trick—but no, in the distance a white-hot dot shone, and she moved toward it, the brightness growing the closer she got. 

Her surroundings smudged into visibility again—the gray outlines of shelving on either side, the knobby, peeling spines of packed tomes. After a few more minutes, color began to tinge the grayscale, bleeding into her vision like runny wet paint. She hurried onward, her numb feet finding a reserve of energy.

Edie stepped down into the storefront, blinking at the harshness of the light. Outside the rain had cleared, and sun poured in through the shop’s front windows in golden slants. She pressed a hand to her mouth and suppressed a cry. She’d made it out; that it made no sense didn’t matter. She was alive—hungry, tired, and free from the encroaching footfalls of death.

She wended her way back through the maze of bookcases, marveling at the vividness of the packed spines and the warm glow of the wooden shelving after an eternity groping her way through the dark. The sunlight was much sweeter for the ordeal. Tears streamed down her face.

The man at the counter was still absorbed in his book as she approached. She wiped her wet cheeks with the back of a dirty hand and cleared her throat, hoarse and out of practice. 

“Find everything okay?” he asked, lowering the paperback from his face.

“Yeah, I… I got turned around for a minute,” she croaked.

“Looks like you found your way just fine,” he said. “Most people do eventually. Are you ready to check out?”

She realized that at some point she’d accumulated a small collection of books she now cradled in the crook of her arm. They were grayed and ancient, their spines splintered and pages protruding untidily from the bindings like smashed flies’ wings. She set them on the counter and nudged them toward the man. What else could she do?

He pulled the books toward him and checked the inside of each cover for the penciled price, punching in the numbers on an old cash register, and then, she noticed it. She tried not to stare but could feel the muscles of her forehead furrow. The tattoo was gone, the plane of his bicep a smooth, vacant canvas waiting to be filled. 

That couldn’t be right. Maybe it was on his other arm?

Edie took a peek at his other shoulder while she rummaged in her purse for her wallet. Nothing was there. Had she imagined it? No, she couldn’t have. Where would she have even come up with such a grotesque character? She checked again, but she found nothing, not even faint scarring to indicate he’d had it removed.

She felt the man’s eyes on her as she fumbled crumpled bills from her wallet and pushed them across the counter, and when she lifted her head again to meet his gaze, his eyes were bloodshot and bulging, rimmed in red and rolling crazily. The skin of his face stretched tight across sunken cheeks, his skull beneath grotesquely defined. 

“Enjoy,” he told her with a smile, and he scooted the stack toward her. 

She made a small, frightened sound in her throat and scrambled to collect the books, backing away. He barked a laugh as she fumbled with the door, the bell clanging atonally.

Edie stumbled out of the shop, clutching her purchases to her chest. She squinted into the sun and headed home, the smell of mildew and old paper clinging to her nostrils. She tried her best to ignore the sensation of eyes boring into the back of her head.

SPECIAL EXHIBIT FIVE: Return to “Five Matches”

Continue Gallery Three: Revealing with “When One Door Closes”