Page Keeper 1: A Slice of Life Fantasy, page 1
Page Keeper 1
A slice of life fantasy
Dante King
Copyright © 2023 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
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About the Author
Chapter 1
“Wow. How’d it get this late so early?”
I glanced down at my phone on the counter, shoving a stack of textbooks to the side in order to do so. More books littered the front desk, in various degrees of organization. Cleaning them up and putting them back where they went looked like the work of an entire evening, or maybe even two.
Good for me that it was closing time, then.
According to my phone it was 8:02 PM, which meant that the Woods Book Company had officially been closed for two minutes. Of course, none of the customers I’d waited on today would call the store that—to them it was just ‘the bookstore.’ A squat, three story building on the corner of two avenues, a couple of blocks from the Maryville Women’s College.
And never busier than in the week before the fall semester, when the students of the college came back to start their classes and match their syllabus with their textbooks.
Half the people who bought textbooks here probably thought I was officially part of the college, but that wasn’t the case. The store had been in my uncle’s name for decades—his signature was still on most of the paperwork in the office I’d been meaning to spruce up and redecorate.
The place was named after him; it had borne his name on the window for God only knew how many semesters. Alfonso Woods, a fixture in Marywill.
Now my name was on the place.
I would have rathered it if my uncle were still with us, but I couldn’t deny that the bookstore had fallen into my lap at the perfect time.
There were no customers left in the store, so I took my time locking the entrance and pushing back the little bell that rang any time someone came into the place. The bookshop didn’t have one of those pull-down grates, which surprised me—though I’d been assured by pretty much everyone who came in that they weren’t necessary.
Crime was practically non-existent in Marywill.
Through the windows, I could see young people enjoying the finest of what a Tuesday night in a sleepy New England college town had to offer. Mostly ice cream and shopping, though a few people wearing the sweatshirts of a local sports team made me think there had to be a game or two going on somewhere around here.
“Maybe I’ll check one out when I have more time,” I mused, closing the curtains. “There’s a lot I want to do, once I have the time to make it happen.”
Once the door was locked and the curtains drawn, I put my hands on my hips and looked around the place. Well, T.C., I told myself, a sense of pride and accomplishment filling my chest. You really did it. You started the next chapter of your life.
The words T.C. Woods, Proprietor flickered in the corner of my vision as I turned away from the front of the store.
It stood for Thomas Cromwell Woods—my Dad’s idea of a clever joke. The original Tom Cromwell helped Henry the Eighth marry the foxy French temptress Anne Boleyn, which was an action that split England from the Catholic Church.
My own birth had reportedly come about in similar circumstances, only the other way around. Mom and Dad had both gone to different churches, and they’d fought about the one they’d stick with right up until I was born.
I’d healed the rift between them—which was about the only rift I’d ever healed in my thirty four years of life. My parents didn’t even stick with the whole church thing, but it wasn’t like they could change my name once they signed the birth certificate.
Only a short while ago, the thought of running a bookstore in some humdrum college town would have sounded like an exotic form of torture to me. I’d been riding high all through my 20’s, making bank in my position as head programmer at Morningstar Studios.
We made strategy video games, the kind that people could play for hundreds of hours without getting bored, and we had a hell of a reputation for quality. As a guy who’d wasted an embarrassingly large chunk of his college years playing The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, it felt like the dream of a lifetime to put my own stamp on the genre.
Every dream ends, I suppose, I thought, dragging a broom across the floor.
I wasn’t great at sweeping up the place, and I made a mental note to call a local cleaning company in the next few days to set up regular maintenance. I wouldn’t have trouble paying them: even setting my inheritance money aside, this place was rolling in dough. I couldn’t believe how busy I’d been most of the day.
I’d had it all: a good paying job that allowed me to pursue my creative interests, an apartment in the city, and a halfway decent social life. I’d even had a girlfriend who I’d begun to grow increasingly certain was going to become my wife in the not too distant future.
Looking back, my life had been built on a far less stable foundation than I’d expected. It was all swept away so easily.
First there was the buyout. The sovereign wealth fund of some country I’d only heard about on the news bought a controlling stake in Morningstar Games. It was literal pocket change to them, the kind of deal they pulled off over a long weekend. When the layoffs hit our desks Monday morning, my name was right at the top of the list.
My girlfriend’s, on the other hand, wasn’t.
I was a programmer, and she was in marketing. Maybe the people buying the company thought marketing games was more important than making good ones in the first place—or maybe they’d just thought that an attractive woman in her mid-20’s would please the new owners a lot more than a bearded guy pushing thirty-five who looked like he needed to hit the gym more often. Either way, I was out on my ass, and she wasn’t.
We’d fought about it, to my surprise. And then she’d dropped the bomb on me.
She was relocating to the company’s new corporate offices in Europe. And she wasn’t taking me with her.
To say my whole life crumbled around me would have been an understatement. Sometimes when I thought about it, tears still came to my eyes. I didn’t like thinking about it, but at least I’d managed to leave Morningstar and my girlfriend with my dignity intact. I hadn’t begged or pleaded in either case.
Morningstar, at least, had given me a pretty decent severance package. My girlfriend hadn’t even given me a kiss goodbye.
So it was already a really terrible week when I found out my uncle Alfonso had kicked the bucket. To me, it was more like a drop in the bucket. The executors had had to reschedule the reading of the will with me twice, because I’d been so busy relocating to a new apartment and divesting of my old life.
That’s when I got the third and final bombshell that changed my life.
Alfonso left everything to me.
I suppose he expected I’d sell the Woods Book Company. After all, I lived on the West Coast—what was I supposed to do with a bookstore in the middle of Stephen King country? Jessica certainly wouldn’t have moved out here with me. Normally, that’s just what I would have done: offloaded it onto the college, or some local buyer, and socked the money away in mutual funds.
But I didn’t live on the West Coast anymore. At the time, I didn’t live anywhere.
And my uncle’s apartment was still directly over the Woods Book Company. Fully furnished, too.
So maybe it wasn't a bolt from the blue, or a sign from realms beyond. But for a guy whose parents hadn’t taken him to church since he was old enough to bring a Trapper Keeper to school, it kind of felt like someone up there had been looking out for me.
As I straightened up the place, I connected my phone to the Bluetooth speakers around the room and switched over the music. While students and their parents were shopping in the place I liked to keep the tunes light—mostly pop rock stuff from the late 90’s and early 2000’s, that elevator music nostalgia stuff.
Now that the place had cleared out, I could be a little more adventurous with my musical choices. Throw something a bit heavier into the mix.
I flipped through the first five Black Sabbath albums (the only thing in life you can trust besides yourself, as the man said) before settling on Paranoid. As the opening chords of War Pigs rolled through the bookstore and Ozzy started shrieking about generals gathered in their masses, I tried to arrange the masses of books into something resembling orderly piles.
A thump stopped me. I listened, but it didn’t repeat.
Must be the pipes, I told myself.
These old buildings had all kinds of problems like that. I ignored it and concentrated on my work.
I had quite a bit of work to do. The place was trashed, having been picked over by dozens of customers throughout the day. I knew from my cursory Google searching that Marywill had a decent student body for a college of its size, but I hadn’t realized just how many of those students relied on this bookstore to fulfill their requests.
“Or how many of their books I wouldn’t have on me,” I grumbled, sliding a hand into my pocket.
There, resting against my fingers, were around two dozen slips of paper. Each was emblazoned with the name of a book (or several books), along with the name and the contact information of the person requesting it.
Marywill’s students required all sorts of esoteric tomes for their advanced classes. Apparently these weren’t the sort of books you could just look up and buy on eBay, either—you had to track them down special order.
Well, specifically I was the one who had to track them down.
Once I’d cleaned off the counter enough to make space, I set down the slips of paper and fanned them out. Of all the special requests I’d taken throughout the day, there was one that kept returning my mind no matter how many times I tried to dismiss it. Even as I sifted through the slips, I found the one I was looking for and held it aloft.
Brenna, read the name on the paper. As I read the word, my mind’s eye filled with her portrait: a vivacious, blonde student with a prim, proper manner. The kind of girl the guys back in my day would have called a real looker.
She’d come in with a group of her friends, each carrying a thick syllabus. I’d filled out the same orders for each of them—but when it came time for Brenna’s order, she’d beamed at me and written her phone number at the bottom of the slip, rather than the e-mail address I usually used as a point of contact.
At first I thought I’d been taking crazy pills. But this girl—Brenna, this gorgeous young student—wanted me to call her. And not just to let her know I’d found the book she was looking for.
I thought about her as I closed up shop. Some of the freshman students who’d visited today had made a mess of my philosophy and history books, and I busied myself setting the volumes back on the shelves and putting them back into alphabetical order.
Am I ready for that? I thought, glancing back at the phone number on the counter. Shit, you’d have to be an idiot not to call, right?
I hadn’t thought much about the opposite sex since Jessica broke up with me. Over the last few months I’d been focusing on myself: reading more, lifting weights and hitting the treadmill. My Playstation was in a storage locker back in my hometown, and I found myself missing it less and less with each passing week. It was amazing how quickly I’d fallen out of love with video games: though I suppose being laid off from your dream job of making them might do that to a guy.
Finished organizing the books, I made my way back to the front desk. As I passed one of the pillars holding up the building’s upper stories, I paused before a mirror hung there.
“Shit,” I whispered, rubbing my stubble. “No wonder you managed to get a girl’s number without trying, TC. Looking pretty decent…”
Decent was a relative term. But I’d lost some weight and put it back on as muscle. I looked better than I had in years, and I felt better, too.
Another set of clanking sounds echoed through the walls. This time, the noises that reached my ears sounded less like plumbing and more like some kind of animal. Were there rats in the walls or something like that? I’d either have to call an exterminator or H.P. Lovecraft if that were the case.
I wondered if I’d be able to hear it from my apartment. By some quirk of the building’s design, it wasn’t possible to get directly to the floor where I lived from the bookstore. There were no stairs connecting the building’s first floor to the rest of the place, which meant the bookstore was like its own little world within the world.
In order to go home, I’d have to exit through the front door, go around to the back of the building, and climb a set of metal stairs. The first night I’d tried it, it made me look a little bit like a man trying to break in through his own fire escape.
Did it have to be that way? I hadn’t had much time to look around the bookstore; I’d been too busy today. If there was a back stair somewhere in here that led upwards, that would have been awfully convenient for me—
Someone knocked on the front door of the bookstore.
“We’re closed,” I said without turning around. You’d think whoever it was would be able to see the sign on the door—since they were coming to a bookstore, I assumed they could read. “We’ll be open at eight o'clock tomorrow morning—”
The knocking came back, louder this time.
Shit, I thought, shaking my head. It sounds like they’re going to break through the glass.
Telling myself that it was probably a student, I made my way across the room. I remembered full well what it was like being late for a college deadline. If it was one of Marywill’s new recruits come to arm themselves before the fall semester, I’d probably let them in. It wasn’t like I had any other plans tonight.
Unless you want to call Brenna, I thought, sliding between the stacks. She seemed to really like you, dude…
Thoughts of cute students were banished from my head as the knocking intensified.
Now it sounded like more than one person stood outside the door: it seemed impossible for such rapid strikes to be coming from a single pair of fists. It sounded like someone had unleashed a double bass drum against the front door of my store.
Was this some kind of prank?
“Hold your horses,” I said, reaching for the lock. “There’s no need to crack the glass…”
I trailed off as I opened the door. No one stood on the welcome mat.
I leaned outside, looking both ways up and down the street. No one stood on the sidewalk, or in the middle of the intersection in front of the bookstore. There weren’t any alleyways next to my store, either—we shared a wall with both of the businesses on either side.
I’d heard frantic, furious knocking, like someone was being chased by a killer and begging for shelter. There was no way anyone doing that would have managed to get out of my sight in the two seconds it took to open the door.
“What the… fuck?” I muttered, craning my neck in every direction. I even looked up, wondering if someone had managed to climb the little awning over the display window. No dice.
Either the Flash had decided to play a prank on me, or there hadn’t been anyone standing outside in the first place.
Maybe the wind? I thought.
I took a step outside and closed the door, waiting to see if the next heavy breeze shook the pane. I could understand that—it was likely loose, in need of maintenance. That would probably have caused the noise I heard.
The breeze blew hard enough to mess up my hair. The windows didn’t move, and no sound rattled against the door.
Weird, I thought, looking up the street once more.
A small cluster of students were hanging out in front of an ice cream shop at the next corner, but that was nearly fifty yards away. Unless one of them was secretly Usain Bolt’s cousin, I figured I could rule out them being the ones who’d knocked at my door.
Fuck it. I had bigger things to worry about.
I stepped back into the bookstore, locking the door behind me. Just in case any after-hours customers didn’t see the sign.
“I’ll finish this up in the morning,” I told myself, heading for the front desk. “I’ve done more than enough for today.”
