The Last Bookstore (Part 1)

The bell above the door gave its usual half-hearted jangle, a sound so faint you could mistake it for the settling sigh of the building. Evelyn Chase glanced up from the counter, her glasses slipping halfway down her nose. Outside, Millhaven’s main street lay under a pale winter sun, its cracked sidewalks and boarded shopfronts holding more ghosts than people.

PageTurners sat on the corner like an old woman in a faded dress, stubbornly refusing to leave the party after everyone else had gone home. Its bowing shelves leaned like tired shoulders, its windows smudged with decades of rain, fingerprints, and stories that no one told anymore.

Inside, the air smelled of dust and something older, not just paper, but the weight of memory. Evelyn liked that smell. It was the one thing in her life that hadn’t changed.

She returned to her book, a brittle 1963 printing of The Moonstone, but the sound of the bell lingered in her mind. No one came in this early. No one came in much at all.

“Morning, Miss Chase,” came a voice from the doorway.

It was Arthur, the postman, one of the last civil servants still making his rounds in a town where mail had become mostly digital. His boots left damp prints on the scuffed wooden floor as he crossed to the counter.

“Package for you,” he said, handing her a slim, brown-wrapped parcel. No return address. Just her name, in a neat hand that looked almost… deliberate.

“Thanks, Arthur.”

He tipped his cap, muttered something about the cold, and disappeared. The bell jangled again, softer this time, like a whisper.

Evelyn slit the wrapping carefully, mindful of the way old paper tore like tissue. Inside was a book, hardback, black cover, no title on the spine. It was heavier than it looked. She turned it over in her hands, frowning.

When she opened it, the pages were blank.

Almost.

On the third page, faint as a shadow in fog, words emerged in a looping script:

February 14th. 9:15 p.m. Millhaven Square. 37 lost.

Her stomach tightened.

It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a message like this. The last had been three years ago, a warehouse fire. Twelve dead. She’d dismissed it as coincidence at the time, assuming it was an old note scrawled by a morbid previous owner. But she’d found the fire report later. Same date. Same number.

She touched the page, her fingertips brushing what felt like a raised impression, almost as if the words had been pressed into the paper without ink. A cipher, then. Someone wanted her to find this.

The front door rattled suddenly, making her start. Through the glass, she saw a man in a dark coat standing on the sidewalk. He was watching her. Not the shop, but her.

Evelyn snapped the book shut. And she looked again, but the man was gone.

From the back of the store came the creak of shifting shelves or perhaps footsteps where no one should be. The air seemed to thicken, carrying a faint scent of something metallic.

She told herself it was nothing. Just the building settling, the way it always did. But her fingers tightened on the strange black book as she whispered under her breath:

“Not again.”

-Click for Part 2-