Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore Read Online Free PDF Page A

herself.
    This is Mat’s secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful.
    *   *   *
    So of course I told Mat he should come visit the bookstore, and tonight he does, at half-past two. The bell over the door tinkles to announce his arrival, and before he says a word, his neck bends back to follow the shelves up into the shadowy reaches. He turns toward me, points a plaid-jacketed arm straight to the ceiling, and says: “I want to go up there.”
    I’ve only been working here for a month and don’t quite have the confidence for mischief yet, but Mat’s curiosity is infectious. He stalks straight over to the Waybacklist and stands between the shelves, leaning in close, examining the grain of the wood, the texture of the spines.
    I concede: “Okay, but you have to hold on tight. And don’t touch any of the books.”
    “Don’t touch them?” he says, testing the ladder. “What if I want to buy one?”
    “You can’t buy them—they’re for borrowing. You have to be a member of the club.”
    “Rare books? First editions?” He’s already in midair. He moves fast.
    “More like only editions,” I say. No ISBNs here.
    “What are they about?”
    “I don’t know,” I say quietly.
    “What?”
    Saying it louder, I realize how lame it sounds: “I don’t know.”
    “You’ve never looked at one?” He’s paused on the ladder, looking back down. Incredulous.
    Now I’m getting nervous. I know where this is going.
    “Seriously, never?” He’s reaching for the shelves.
    I consider shaking the ladder to signal my displeasure, but the only thing more problematic than Mat looking at one of the books would be Mat plunging to his death. Probably. He has one in his hands, a fat black-bound volume that threatens to unbalance him. He teeters on the ladder and I grit my teeth.
    “Hey, Mat,” I say, my voice suddenly high-pitched and whiny, “why don’t you just leave it—”
    “This is amazing.”
    “You should—”
    “Seriously amazing, Jannon. You’ve never seen this?” He clutches the book to his chest and takes a step back down.
    “Wait!” Somehow it feels less transgressive to keep it closer to the place where it belongs. “I’ll come up.” I pull another ladder into position opposite his and leap up the rungs. In a moment, Mat and I are level, having a hushed conference at thirty feet.
    The truth, of course, is that I am desperately curious. I’m annoyed at Mat, but also grateful that he’s playing the part of the devil on my shoulder. He balances the thick volume against his chest and tilts it my way. It’s dark up here, so I lean across the space between the shelves to see the pages clearly.
    For this, Tyndall and the rest come running in the middle of the night?
    “I was hoping it would be an encyclopedia of dark rituals,” Mat says.
    The two-page spread shows a solid matrix of letters, a blanket of glyphs with hardly a trace of white space. The letters are big and bold, punched onto the paper in a sharp serif. I recognize the alphabet—it’s roman, which is to say, normal—but not the words. Actually, there aren’t really words at all. The pages are just long runs of letters—an undifferentiated jumble.
    “Then again,” Mat says, “we have no way of knowing it’s not an encyclopedia of dark rituals…”
    I pull another book from the shelf, this one tall and flat with a bright green cover and a brown spine that says KRESIMIR . Inside, it’s just the same.
    “Maybe they’re recreational puzzles,” Mat says. “Like, super-advanced sudoku.”
    Penumbra’s customers are, in fact, exactly the kind of people you’d see in coffee shops, working through one-sided chess problems or solving Saturday crosswords with blue ballpoints pressed perilously hard into the newsprint.
    Down below, the bell tinkles. A jangle of cold fear makes a quick round-trip from my brain to my fingertips and back. From the front of the store, a low voice