Darryl wrote down as many names as he remembered. Tried calling out a few. But no answer came, not even the sound of a flapping page. The more names he called out to the silence, the more a cold loneliness wrapped itself around Darryl’s chest, the feeling he sometimes tried to drink away with half a bottle of wine after work, when there was nothing else for his hands and mind to do except remember that, once upon a time, he’d planned a bigger life. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even pretended to write.
Old folks called dead people who came back haints, but what was the word for those, like him, who had been left behind?
Darryl was close to telling himself he’d imagined everything when he saw the haint in the window. He? — She? — was standing just below the giant golden script of the backward S in Sankofa on the glass. At first he thought it was someone standing outside, obscured in a blaze of sunlight, but it was a reflection as if someone were standing inside the store. No one else was with him, not on a Tuesday afternoon when it wasn’t Black History Month. About six feet tall. Dark skin. Darryl couldn’t make out the facial features, but the figure’s bulk standing there looked as real as the life-sized Michelle Obama cutout posed beside his desk.
Darryl couldn’t read the expression on the blurry face, though the eyes were staring straight at him. The stare felt ominous, so dispassionate and yet... so urgent. All moisture left Darryl’s mouth. For the first time in his life, he rubbed his eyes like people do in movies to make sure they’re not hallucinating. He wasn’t. The haint was still in the window when he opened his eyes.
“Who...” Darryl cleared his throat, since the word was buried in nervous phlegm. “Who are you? What’s your name? What do you want?” The questions running through his mind for days spilled from his mouth.
The haint only stared from the window, reflecting... no one.
“Why are you here? Tell me what you want me to—”
Bells jangled, and for one glorious, endless breath, Darryl was sure the haint was communicating in a musical language from another plane — until the front door opened and a customer wandered in. (Only the door chimes! The disappointment was real.) She was a blond-haired white woman in a sundress and wide-brimmed hat like a Hollywood starlet. A tourist, obviously. Her nose was sunburned bright red.
“Excuse me... can you recommend a good beach read?” She pointed to the new names in his window display. “How about Stephen King?”
Darryl had glanced away for only an instant, yet of course the haint was gone the next time he looked. Rage coursed through him, but he swallowed it away. Would rage bring the haint back? Bridge the gulf between the living and the dead? The present and the past?
For horror fans, Darryl usually recommended Victor LaValle instead, or Octavia’s Fledgling, or that anthology Sycorax’s Daughters with horror by all of those fierce sisters, but instead he only said blandly, “Which one? I think I’ve got ’em all.”
“Right?” she laughed. Her laugh was a knife twist, though he didn’t have time to explain the long story about how Sankofa was supposed to be.
He pointed her toward his New York Times best sellers section. She bought two King books and didn’t blink at the price. At the register, she chatted about how she was staying in an Airbnb at the Gardens after flying in from Phoenix for a pitch meeting and how the neighborhood was so convenient to everything in LA. Darryl barely heard her. He was thinking about how Mrs. Richardson rarely visited in person after she broke her hip last December, and how she would barely recognize her own store now. And how maybe it was time for him to find another job. Another city, even. Another life.
Darryl stared at the window looking for his haint the rest of the day.
The next morning, every book from the shelves lay across the floor in a sea. Darryl stood in the doorway staring at the spectacle for a full two minutes, nearly in tears. Then he went inside, locked the door, and kept the CLOSED sign turned out. He definitely wouldn’t be selling any of Stephen King’s books today. Or anyone else’s.
He almost called the security service — the card was still propped by his register as an inside joke to himself — but he didn’t want to invite those two assholes near him again, especially not that itchy one. Besides, the more he looked around, the more he realized it couldn’t be the work of vandals.
The evidence was all around him. The door had been locked. No windows broken. Nothing taken from the register. It was as if Sankofa had suffered its own private earthquake, the books shaken away while everything else was left upright. No part of it looked natural.
And the scene felt angry. An attack. A taunt. For the first time, Darryl felt afraid of the haint. (But he definitely didn’t want the haint to know that.)
“Oh yeah?” Darryl said. “Fuck you. This is my store, not yours. What else you got?”
His knees were tense, ready to spring him under his desk in case the haint did have something else. (As he thought about it, a haint might have a hell of a lot else.) Yet the store was still and silent, just like the storeroom before the door slammed.
“You want me to leave? Is that it?” Darryl said. “You’re the one who needs to leave. Get out of here! I better not see you again. Leave me alone!”
Darryl didn’t go to many horror movies because the characters could be so dumb, but he wondered why more people in movies didn’t just tell the ghost to fuck off. Because that would be a short-ass movie, he decided. But that was his plan. And if establishing dominance wasn’t enough, he’d bring in that new tarot reader from down the street to make the banishing more official. “Mess up my store like this?” he said as he went shelf by shelf, replacing the fallen books one at a time, setting the ones with bent covers aside, a growing pile. “You just fucked all the way up.”
He impressed himself with his tough talk, decided he wasn’t scared, but then a soul food cookbook in trade paperback teetering on a shelf behind him fell to the floor, and he screamed like a high school girl. And then laughed at himself. And then... yeah, maybe he cried a little too. Or a lot. All of those Black books scattered in disarray on the floor, the bare shelves looking eager for a new adventure, made Darryl want to curl up in a corner. The store felt closer to the truth today than it had in a long time. Mrs. Richardson said she could barely make rent in the past couple of years. How long before he would be packing up Sankofa anyway? Should he even bother reshelving the books?
But over time, as he filled the shelves aisle by aisle, the despairing feeling was replaced by resolve. Excitement, even. He’d always wanted to move the Science Fiction section closer to the Mystery & Thiller section, and add a dedicated Horror section, and suddenly he had the freedom to recreate the store the way he’d wanted to, no longer bound by Mrs. Richardson’s years of habit. By the end of the day, he’d filled all of the shelves except the New York Times best sellers section. No way he’d put those back. Now he finally had room for the Young Adult section he’d been dreaming of: rows of Black and brown boys and girls who were wizards. Vampires. Basketball champions. They were anything they damn well pleased.