corpse, avoiding the thin woman, out the door, dodging the ancient creep under the awning. Let's get drenched, but let's get to the car, and drive straight to DC, leaving the clothes and that damned dossier and these doomed and haunted towns forever.
He stopped. Breathed. He was on the clock, and that horrid book was clearly planted there to throw him off the trail. It's effects, he thought madly. Special...special effects. He left the book on the floor and continued toward the dimly lit reaches of the basement. He reached the end where books were piled sufficiently high to block the lower shelves. Others were fanned across the floors. The books here seemed to consist mainly of European history and pictorials. He looked vainly for a local section, and then saw that the wall was not, in fact, a wall, but a densely packed shelf behind which another set of stairs descended into darkness. There was no "NO ADMITTANCE" sign, no chain, so Clem felt along the wall and then above his head until he found a string. He pulled it and saw a faint orange glow from somewhere below.
Nowhere to go but down, he thought, and descended. The stairs were narrow, grazing his shoulders on both sides.
The lowest room was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. There were two waist-high bookcases and a sagging loveseat between them. What little light there was glowed from recessed lights in the prodigiously cobwebbed stone ceiling. One of the bookcases seemed to consist of books, many disbound or slant-spined, by local poets and authors; the other shelf was the one he sought. He did notice on the lowest shelf of the former a fat, mouldering old tome bearing the name Abrecan Geist, but the binding proved nothing more than buckram, and the pages were yellowed and fragile, rendering the text and illustrations quite impossible to read. Turning back to the Local Lore section, he noted among whip-stitched chapbooks a thick tome entitled "Western Massachusetts Witch-Cults and Covens," authored by a Rangel Bantam. He plucked it out and fell backward into the loveseat.
The frontispiece was a photograph of a group of men congregated on stone steps familiar to him as those of Northampton's City Hall, a building that looked to him like some kind of boxy medieval castle, complete with balistraria and Norman towers. The men were gravely countenanced and pit-eyed, affecting postures of arrogant defiance. All wore smirks suggesting shared secrets. They were dressed in formal topcoats. Several men wore top-hats; two sported monocles. Tiered surnames in script at their feet identified the men above: Whiteshirt, Slaughton, Gare, Dither. Morphew, Lusk, Stockton, Ronstadt, Geist. Geist! The author of that horrible skin-bound book was a bald, stout man whose cheeks were stippled with acne scars. He wore a patterned ascot and a vest.
The other figure that struck him was that of Stockton. Taller than the other men, and positioned prominently, his face was lined, brows thick and furrowed, lips thin. Angled across his torso was a walking stick with a cat's head grip. The fingers clasping the walking stick were long, almost feminine, each encircled with several rings forged in the shapes of mystical symbols. There was something in the man's eyes...it seemed as though the man in the picture was looking across time up from the book at Clem, challenging, cajoling...glaring. In a familiar way. His jaw hanging, his eyes wide, Clem flipped to the table of contents: An Incident in Southwick, The Monson Magicians, The Warlock of Williamsburg, The Magi of the Second Laugh, Anna Gare and The Hilltown Ten.
The name pecked at his brain. Gare. The name of the store. He flipped back to the picture. He had missed her the first time: among the men, mostly obscured, stood a thin woman in petticoats: Anne Gare. Her hair was slack, one of her bony hands resting on the shoulder of Stockton. A flaw in the
He stopped. Breathed. He was on the clock, and that horrid book was clearly planted there to throw him off the trail. It's effects, he thought madly. Special...special effects. He left the book on the floor and continued toward the dimly lit reaches of the basement. He reached the end where books were piled sufficiently high to block the lower shelves. Others were fanned across the floors. The books here seemed to consist mainly of European history and pictorials. He looked vainly for a local section, and then saw that the wall was not, in fact, a wall, but a densely packed shelf behind which another set of stairs descended into darkness. There was no "NO ADMITTANCE" sign, no chain, so Clem felt along the wall and then above his head until he found a string. He pulled it and saw a faint orange glow from somewhere below.
Nowhere to go but down, he thought, and descended. The stairs were narrow, grazing his shoulders on both sides.
The lowest room was not much bigger than a walk-in closet. There were two waist-high bookcases and a sagging loveseat between them. What little light there was glowed from recessed lights in the prodigiously cobwebbed stone ceiling. One of the bookcases seemed to consist of books, many disbound or slant-spined, by local poets and authors; the other shelf was the one he sought. He did notice on the lowest shelf of the former a fat, mouldering old tome bearing the name Abrecan Geist, but the binding proved nothing more than buckram, and the pages were yellowed and fragile, rendering the text and illustrations quite impossible to read. Turning back to the Local Lore section, he noted among whip-stitched chapbooks a thick tome entitled "Western Massachusetts Witch-Cults and Covens," authored by a Rangel Bantam. He plucked it out and fell backward into the loveseat.
The frontispiece was a photograph of a group of men congregated on stone steps familiar to him as those of Northampton's City Hall, a building that looked to him like some kind of boxy medieval castle, complete with balistraria and Norman towers. The men were gravely countenanced and pit-eyed, affecting postures of arrogant defiance. All wore smirks suggesting shared secrets. They were dressed in formal topcoats. Several men wore top-hats; two sported monocles. Tiered surnames in script at their feet identified the men above: Whiteshirt, Slaughton, Gare, Dither. Morphew, Lusk, Stockton, Ronstadt, Geist. Geist! The author of that horrible skin-bound book was a bald, stout man whose cheeks were stippled with acne scars. He wore a patterned ascot and a vest.
The other figure that struck him was that of Stockton. Taller than the other men, and positioned prominently, his face was lined, brows thick and furrowed, lips thin. Angled across his torso was a walking stick with a cat's head grip. The fingers clasping the walking stick were long, almost feminine, each encircled with several rings forged in the shapes of mystical symbols. There was something in the man's eyes...it seemed as though the man in the picture was looking across time up from the book at Clem, challenging, cajoling...glaring. In a familiar way. His jaw hanging, his eyes wide, Clem flipped to the table of contents: An Incident in Southwick, The Monson Magicians, The Warlock of Williamsburg, The Magi of the Second Laugh, Anna Gare and The Hilltown Ten.
The name pecked at his brain. Gare. The name of the store. He flipped back to the picture. He had missed her the first time: among the men, mostly obscured, stood a thin woman in petticoats: Anne Gare. Her hair was slack, one of her bony hands resting on the shoulder of Stockton. A flaw in the
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