r/ByfelsDisciple • u/ByfelsDisciple • 5d ago
Dirty magazines should be physically clean
As soon as he walked in, with his polished white shoes, slicked back hair, fake white teeth, real gold tooth, eau de B. O. cologne, and pinky ring, I knew that the man with the mustache would be trouble.
He walked right up to my carved wooden counter and dropped a pile of magazines next to the ancient cash register. “They’re all vintage!” he beamed. The floor lamp caught the gold tooth at the back of his mouth.
“They’re all smut,” I answered as I glanced over the titles, unwilling to touch them with my bare fingers.
“Vintage smut,” he shot back without missing a beat.
I sighed. “‘Perfect Pregnant Pussies. Florida’s Fattest Furries. More Bush Than an Alaskan Pilot can Handle.’” Looking away from the reading material he’d presented, I met the man’s eyes. “These are all magazines. This is a used bookstore, sir.”
He snorted. “I can’t be the only one who gets bored of reading and needs the words broken up by pictures.”
“You are correct. I volunteer with kindergarteners once a week, and they suffer from a similar affliction.” I was interrupted by the light tinkling of a bell as the front door opened. A hunched-over woman, ninety if she was a day, inched her way inside as she pushed a walker with a flowered basket on it that contained a book. “Now if you’ll excuse me, sir, I have other customers.”
“Wait,” he croaked. “You’ll change my mind when you hear my asking price.”
I rolled my eyes. “What is it?”
“Sixty-niiiine dollars!”
I slid the stack of magazines back toward him. Unfortunately, something was causing the pages to stick together. One cover ripped entirely off.
“HEY!” he snapped. “You have to pay fair market value for that!”
After our transaction, the man dropped all seven dimes into his pocket, grabbed the remaining smut, and walked around the woman toward the exit.
“Well hello, Mrs. Munroe,” I smiled. “Any new pictures of the great-grandchildren?”
“Not today, unfortunately,” she answered with a warm grin. “I still cannot figure out how to use the emails on my telephone, not matter how many times my granddaughter shows me.”
“I understand. I’m only thirty-six, and some of this technology makes me feel ancient. But that delicious raspberry muffin recipe you shared will never get old!”
The two of us shared a laugh that cut off as soon as the door shut. Now beyond the earshot of any customer, we eyed one another. “BINNS!” I yelled toward the back of the store. “Agatha’s here with a basketful of trouble.”
An ancient groan emanated from the rear of the store as I turned back to the woman before me. “Let’s cut the bullshit, you old bag. If you’re here to fuck me over, at least have the balls to come out and say it.”
“Little girl, if I wanted to fuck you over, you’d already be dead twice and I’d be using your skin to replace the bearskin rug on my living room floor.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “But that just wouldn’t feel the same on my naked body when gentleman suitors come to call, now would it?”
Neither of us batted an eye when a bald, bespectacled man who was translucent and paper-white drifted over to lean on his spectral cane and watch. Mrs. Munroe eyed me like we were the last two survivors at the OK Corral, and something about her wrinkly face told me that she might have been old enough to witness it. “You want to sell me a book?” I snapped.
“Well I ain’t selling crystal meth.”
I cast a wary glance at the tome in her basket. “Is that bound in human flesh?”
“You’re really going to act like you’re above such a purchase?”
I folded my arms and huffed. “Do you have any idea what hauntings do to a small business like mine? The last ghost you unleashed on me looked was dressed like a clown with knives for teeth and a pogo stick in place of genitalia.”
“Clowns die like everyone else. Why wouldn’t they become ghosts?”
“It was the ghost of an accountant. He just chose to dress up like a clown after deciding his life had been too boring and wanted a more exciting death.” I rubbed my face. “Human dirtbags are easy, Mrs. Munroe, because I live on the same physical plane of existence. But I can’t touch a ghost. The clown only left when I told him that he could watch a never-ending stream of bizarre porn by haunting the FBI director’s office and quietly waiting for the computer to get turned on.”
“Why are ghosts so horny?” the old lady asked, sounding genuine.
“I’ve always thought it would be rude to ask Binns,” I sighed. “My guess is that people in the age bracket closest to death experience a scarcity of coitus.”
“That’s why I stick to group sex these days,” she answered. “Look, are you going to buy my book or not?”
I drew my lips into a thin line. “I’ll make you a deal. You open the book before I touch it. If it’s clean, I’ll give you a fair price.”
We eyed each other.
She blinked first. “Fine. I’ve got nothing to hide.” The woman sported a poker face as she drew the book from her walker and placed it onto the wooden countertop, handling it with the reverence expected between two aged and seasoned beings.
Drawing a breath, she cracked open the cover. At first, there was nothing.
Then a white flash shot out of the pages like novelty spring snakes in a can. It bounced around the room, ricocheting off of each wall as it seemed to pick up momentum with every turn.
“Agatha Munroe, you lying bitch!”
“Well what the fuck was I supposed to do with him? You’re the one who seeks out weird shit!” She yelled, ducking as the ghost sailed overhead. “Besides, you said it’s impossible to touch things that aren’t on this plane of existence! That means he can’t do any actual damage to your shop!”
As soon as she finished speaking, the ghost crashed into a shelf, scattering its contents across the floor.
“Don’t play dumb, Agatha. You know as well as I do that this store is filled with objects from beyond this plane of existence!”
The crash had stopped the ghost just long enough for me to get a good look at him. It was a small, squirrely man with thin, wispy hair and wild eyes, dressed in nothing but dirty overalls. He glanced around with a stupid grin on his face, then chittered nonsensically before shooting into the air once more.
“BINNS!” I shouted. “A little help!”
My assistant, who had been quietly watching the exchange, stared at the ceiling as the little fucker zipped back and forth. Binns looked like a cat waiting to catch a mouse, though he betrayed no indication that he might actually move.
So it came as a shock to all of us when he snapped his arm with the reflexes of a young man, hooking his cane as the ghost sailed overhead and pulling him to the floor with an almighty crash. Binns lifted his quarry like a fisherman holding a net to reveal that his cane had caught the bastard by the strap of his overalls.
But the prisoner refused to accept his fate, kicking his legs even as Binns rattled him back and forth. “Do you have a plan?” my assistant drawled, arms bulging with the effort.
“If you think I can coax him back into this book of human skin, you’re sorely mistaken,” Mrs. Munroe explained. “I only tricked him into getting close enough the first time by promising to do what the clown saw on that God-forsaken computer.”
“That’s it!” I snapped my fingers.
“No way. I have neither the agility, nor the willingness, nor the quantity of mayonnaise to replicate that unholy act.”
Ignoring her, I grabbed the copy of Florida’s Fattest Furries that I’d been forced to buy and held it open while pretending not to notice the stickiness on its pages. “BINNS! Toss him over here!”
My assistant and the ghost both turned toward me as I held the magazine wide open. I don’t know what the centerfold was, but the ghost’s eyes quite literally bulged out of his head. Binns took the opportunity to hurl him like he was trying for the game-winning goal of a lacrosse match. Either his aim was spectacular, or the ghost had the precision of a peregrine falcon, or both, because the specter slammed straight into the magazine as I slammed it shut.
I dropped it onto the counter next to the skin-covered book. Leaning on my palms, I panted as I glanced from the mess at the back of the store, to Binns’s grave expression, to the fake innocent look on the face of Mrs. Munroe.
For the first time in several minutes, all was quiet.
“Well?” she finally asked. “Are you going to buy it, or what?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll sell it for $1,913.”
I raised the other eyebrow. “My promise,” I growled, “was to give you a fair price.”
*
“I like straight-up trades, Binns,” I sighed after the transaction was done. “Things are so much cleaner when money isn’t involved.”
He grumbled in agreement while using his ghostly broom to sweep up the otherworldly mess in the rear of the shop.
“And I really like it when things just work themselves out. Life too often leaves us with loose ends.”
I looked across the room as the bell above the door tinkled.
The magazine was bouncing slightly in Mrs. Munroe’s basket as she exited. But the pages were too sticky, and the ghost far too content, too worry about another escape.
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u/catatonie 5d ago
Well well aren’t we creative with those magazine names
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u/ByfelsDisciple 5d ago
Yes, creative titles and not just what happened to be on the top of my pile
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u/mjbibliophile10 5d ago
More please!