The Red Finger Pulp Mystery Megapack. Arthur Leo Zagat
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The Selma Lagerlof Megapack
The Harold Lamb Megapack
The Murray Leinster Megapack***
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack***
The Jonas Lie Megapack
The Arthur Machen Megapack**
The Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack
The A. Merritt Megapack*
The Talbot Mundy Megapack
The E. Nesbit Megapack
The Andre Norton Megapack
The H. Beam Piper Megapack
The Mack Reynolds Megapack
The Second Mack Reynolds Megapack
The Rafael Sabatini Megapack
The Saki Megapack
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack
The Robert Sheckley Megapack
The Bram Stoker Megapack
The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack
The Carolyn Wells Mystery Megapack
The Virginia Woolf Megapack
The William Hope Hodgson Megapack
* Not available in the United States
** Not available in the European Union
***Out of print.
OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
SECOND-HAND DEATH
There is nothing to distinguish Duane’s Second-hand Bookstore from the other shops of its kind that line lower Fourth Avenue with their decrepit outside-boxes of tattered volumes in front of their dark bookstacks within. Its signs—“This Box 15¢ Each”; “Choice Selections, 50¢”—are just as rain-streaked and illegible, its grimed plate-glass just as forlorn. As pathetic, too, the men and women with worn faces and threadbare garments who dare its gloomy precincts to browse along those musty shelves.
Nor is there anything to set him apart from the other storekeepers the long-faced, alpaca-coated man who inhabits its depths—as dusty-seeming and inconspicious as his stock-in-a-very-paltry-trade, except that he appears a bit younger than the others, and that his very blue eyes are continually moving and very watchful.
And yet, death and the fear of death are a living presence in that drab shop.
The shadows that lie in black pools on the unpainted floor might well be the brooding shadows of world-events stirring heavily in the womb of time; the dirt-streaked curtains at the rear that part occasionally to show a narrow camp-cot, a wooden chair, and a two-burner gas-plate on an upended box, might be the veil that hides a nation’s fate. For Ford Duane is not quite what he seems, though his very existence depends on the maintenance of his identity as a dreamy, cobweb-brained sexton of a Tomb of Defunct Books.
Surely the bent old man, in a frock coat of rusty black, and high, clean stock over which his grayish chin folds and quivers, who hugs a dog-eared volume in his gaunt fingers, cannot have picked this particular doorway in which to stand timorously for any other cause but chance. He had tottered slowly down the long block, pausing momentarily at each cluttered entrance, palpably working up courage to pass through one of them. His bleared old eyes blink and peer nearsightedly at Duane as he silently appears from the shadows almost as though one of them had come to life.
The ancient gulps. “I—I—You buy old books, do you not?” he quavers.
A secret smile flickers around the other’s suprisingly firm, determined mouth. “Occasionally,” he responds, “Though I prefer to sell them. What have you there?”
“A Petronius, printed by Arden and bound by Trant.” He says it proudly, and hearer’s dark eyebrows arch as if in appreciation, but, curiously enough, there was never any such printer as Arden nor any binder as Trant. Is Ford Duane a neophyte then, to be impressed by unctuously mouthed but counterfeit names? Is the would-be seller a fraud? Perhaps. And then again…
“Let me see it.” Duane takes the book from the reluctant hand of the old man, riffles its yellow pages. The leather of its binding smears his fingers with a fine brown dust. “Yes,” he says at last. “It is a fine specimen, but I can only offer you two dollars for it.”
“Two dollars! It cost me twenty-five!” And so starts a leisurely chaffering on the doorstep, where any passerby can hear. And why not? They have nothing to hide, those two…
Nothing?
The bargaining is over at last, the book is Duane’s. As he counts the money into a palsied palm, he watches the old man falter down the street, vanishing around the nearest corner. Then he turns back into his shop.
Those extraordinarily keen eyes of his flick over the two or three idlers as he moves slowly toward the rear. His thin, aquiline face is impassive, but an exceedingly close observer might notice that a tiny muscle is twitching in his smooth cheek. He goes through the curtain that ineffectually conceals his living quarters from the store proper and it drops behind him. Momentarily, at least, he is concealed from those outside. He rests a hand on a breast-high book-filled shelf; there is a flicker of movement—and he has vanished!
* * * *
Behind those shelves that have swung out and back on oiled hinges so quickly, Ford Duane is no longer impassive. By the light of a small bulb high up in the ceiling his face is alive and his eyes glow with excitement.
The book he has just purchased is still in his hand, he lays it on a shelf that is attached to the inner wall, opens it to the first blank flyleaf. Seating himself on a high stool, he pulls out a drawer beneath the shelf, fumbles out of it a tiny hooded lamp that he sets next to the leather covered Petronius. He plugs the short cord attached into a socket before him, reaches to a handy switch.
Click! The ceiling bulb goes out and velvety, impenetrable darkness invades the cubicle. Click! That was the sound of another switch, but the blackness remains, so thick as to be almost tangible. There must be something wrong with the wiring of the little lamp.
No! There, just where the book must be, tiny wriggles of light appear, iridescent tracery of living fire. Indistinct at first their outlines become clearer. They are letters, words. Exhaled breath hisses sharply as Ford Duane reads the message that has come to him thus deviously from an inner, closely-barred and guarded room in a certain building in faraway Washington.
A solution of aspirin, a ball-pointed pen, were all that were required to write that invisible communication. A special bulb, equipped to emit only ultra-violet light was all that was needed to make it give up its secret.
But a man will die tonight, before Duane can act on the instructions thus given him. A man will die and horrible death will hover over hundreds, thousands more. Tomorrow a coded cable will flash under two oceans and bring consternation into another barred and guarded room in a chancellery three thousand miles from the one in Washington…
* * * *
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