Night Gallery: The Hauntings of Eagle Eye

        Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three artistic objects, revealed here to the public for the first time. Each is a collector’s item in its own way—not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures in its own story, suspended in time and space, a page in the book of Eagle Eye's tales from the darkside.

The Haunted Baby

I can remember the day that Finn, a humble clerk and scholar of literature, processed his first large donation—two storage totes full of old children’s books that had been left at our door.*  As he unpacked the second tote, his hand caught on the corner of a wooden frame. He carefully lifted the dusty hardbacks off of it, revealing an old photograph of a baby. But this was not just any baby. He was the most photogenic baby Finn had ever seen. Looking to be around 14 months old, he struck a sassy pose in light blue overalls and had thin, curly hair, in the style of most boomer babies. Finn showed us the baby and he dazzled us all. He placed the picture in the front corner of the store, for any lucky customers who happened to be shopping for socks to see.

            The trouble started almost immediately. Customers began complaining that the sock area was freezing cold. When they tried to select a pair to look at, sometimes they would fly violently onto the floor. These customers swore that they heard a high-pitched voice yell “NO!” in their heads as the socks hit the ground. When I came in to open the store the next day, boxes of tea situated near the photograph were stacked in a small tower.

            After some trial and error, we figured out that serenading the photo with one of our music boxes first thing in the morning works to put an end to these happenings…mostly. If you come by and walk past the photograph, some say you just might hear the faint sound of baby laughter.

*please don't leave boxes at our door overnight.

The Red Shirt         

Last year, Jamille designed t-shirts with our store logo on them. But they aren’t the first shirts on our shelves that sport our name. You may have noticed, perched above the travel books, a red, long-sleeved collared shirt with “Eagle Eye Book Shop” printed on it in tiny letters. Legend has it that this shirt appeared in a shipment that came in ten years ago. It was nowhere to be found on the packing list, and nobody remembered putting it on order at all.

One night after close, I went to pull a travel book someone had ordered off the shelf when I felt something drip on top of my head. Then something dripped onto my hand. It was thick, red, and disconcertingly warm. Frantically looking up, I saw nothing but the red shirt—and it was leaking blood! I ran up front to get away. But when I looked at my hand again, there was no trace of it. Everything around the travel section looked normal. Nobody believes me, and they refuse to move the shirt because it’s a very convenient way to show customers where the travel books are.

It is worth noting that one of our most storied employees has an identical red shirt. We have no idea where he even got it. This is just another piece of evidence supporting our theory that he is a vampire.

Large Marge

It never ceases to surprise me how many longtime customers don't know about our reading room. In the liminal space where mystery/thriller ends and children's picture books begin, there is a door to a warmly-lit room with well-stocked wall shelves and some cozy places to sit. Here live the Westerns, dozens of hardback sci-fi titles, and a ragtag assortment of overflow books that cannot fit on the main floor shelves. Last year, these unassuming residents found themselves with a strange new neighbor, threatening the entire vibe of their home.

        "Don't ask me how much this cost." Doug, the proud owner of Eagle Eye, stood with his hands on his hips in front of a looming mechanical eagle, mounted on a wheeled wooden platform. We stood open-mouthed as he made the contraption come alive by nudging a sphere suspended beneath the eagle's body. In an impressive illusion of flight, her wings began to flap. Jamille christened her Large Marge in tribute to one of our favorite films, Pee Wee's Big Adventure. She was given a place of honor, next to the cooking station, ready to welcome customers on their way in with a steady, determined gaze.

        Things went smoothly for a few weeks, until the day a beloved former employee, Foster Lewis, came searching for a book by some dead charlatan who devised a new method of prayer by smooching mossy rocks in the woods. As Foster walked alongside Large Marge, all of us watched in horror as her wings began to flap violently. Foster had the misfortune of being the exact height for one of her wings to slice clean through his neck, sending his head flying at the feet of some poor soul who had just walked in the door.

        Dispatching Large Marge to the dumpster would have required dragging her all the way past the parking lot and down a bumpy slope to the dumpster area. Nobody was particularly eager to do that. So it was decided that we would banish her to another realm. Doug tied a rope around the feet of Large Marge--a safe distance from her wingspan--and carefully pulled her through the threshold of the reading room.

        And so Large Marge has been caged, in a way, between a cabinet and the wall. With her wings lowered, she doesn't take up much space. She still holds her head high, with dignity, her gaze exuding power and pride. Her indomitable spirit persists, and she stands as a worthy, if not morally ambiguous, guardian of her territory.

Bonus tale: The Boo-comer

Mary Kay Andrews is a werewolf.

Why "Something Wicked This Way Comes" is the Perfect Halloween Novel

     Halloween isn’t like other holidays. While it’s true I can only really speak for the holidays my family and I celebrate, the act of gathering in a home, enjoying hot food and warm fires, and sharing time with your loved ones feels fairly consistent. Halloween, broadly speaking, doesn’t prioritize any of these things. Halloween pushes you out of your four cozy walls just as winter’s first frosty advances are sending the leaves toppling from their branches. Halloween rejects the light, insisting that its most sacred rituals take place under the cover of night. Halloween eschews the familiar, embracing the weird, the abject, the monstrous. Ray Bradbury understood Halloween, a fact plain to see in many of his writings from The October Country to The Halloween Tree. However, I believe that his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes most perfectly describes that indrawn breath of terror and delight that is Halloween. Beware, some light spoilers may follow.

    I think that having an October birthday predisposes you for hauntings. For me, a childhood full of Halloween-themed birthdays doubled the significance of the season. The jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, bats, and other of Halloween’s folk seemed to emerge to celebrate my birth, making me price of the festivities and carrier of its phantom spirit. Bradbury seems to agree, as his protagonists take the idea a step further. Will Halloway, born October 30th, 11:59pm, is bright-spirited, sensitive, cautious and loyal. Jim Nightshade, born October 31st, 12:01am, is dark, reserved, impulsive, and fearless. The two boys of thirteen each embody the seasonal spirit differently, Will ever returning to his father, his home, his family as a touchpoint, while Jim pushes ever farther into freedom and mystery. However, this is not a novel in which the children must brave horrors alone, the adults blissfully blind to the atrocities brewing in their small town arcadia. Will’s father, Charles, follows the two into the dark.

    It is this tension between child and adult, young and old, past and future, that sets the tone for the novel’s central conflict. On the surface, the book tells the story of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a twisted and demonic carnival that sets its sights on Will and Jim after touching down in their home town. Through this overlying story, Bradbury describes the perspective of the child on Halloween: their world has been invaded by the supernatural, and the inanimate or dead come to life in the flickering dark. Upon closer inspection, however, the characters inner concerns consistently circle back to topics of age and intergenerational understanding. Jim wants to be older, feels that he has seen the darkness of the world but is still too young to protect himself against it. Charles wants to be younger, feels embarrassed about having his first child at 39, and feels discouraged by the age gap between him and his son. This is the novel’s perspective on the adult: holidays express themselves to the fullest through the eyes of children, and it is only in bittersweet remembrances that Charles Halloway is able to find himself the protagonist of his own story. These desires, to be younger or older than you are, have no solutions, save time and acceptance. No solutions, until the Carnival’s profane festivities bring forth a carousel that can wind the years of a life forwards or backwards. Suddenly the hidden desires become attainable, and in doing so become unable to be ignored.

    The malleability of age shapes much of the horror of the story. Hierarchies of assumption break down; age ceases to have meaning when it can be turned forward or back like the hands on a clock. The Carnival weaponizes the carousel against its victims, sending them back to helpless childhood, or far forward into decrepitude. Unable to return to their former lives, the victims have no choice but to join the traveling sideshow, becoming just another monstrous attraction to sharpen the teeth of Cooger and Dark themselves. The breaking down of these boundaries, which seem so set in stone, is another characteristic of Halloween. The way the characters choose to respond to this dangerous and unpredictable position is where the true soul of the novel resides.

    Ultimately, Something Wicked This Way Comes doesn’t need its commentary on time and age to be a wonderful Halloween novel. Its monstrous cast, from the all-seeing Dust Witch, to the ancient and decaying Mr. Electrico, to the soul-hoarding Illustrated Man, have enough spine-tingling texture to make the novel well worth reading all on their own. However, the way it so subtly interrogates how the fear and magic experienced in childhood changes, or doesn’t change, makes it truly special. The book reminds children that their parents are people too, and reminds adults that rationality falls apart when your very skin is telling you that the horrors unfolding before your eyes are real and true. Halloween thrives on that feeling. When the night is over and you have laughed off all the scares, that chill reminds you that while you may have survived another year, Halloween waits with open arms. If you don’t believe me now, try out the book. Bradbury can certainly convince you.

Happy Halloween!

Purchase the book here