As soon as he got off the phone with his uncle Ray, Max didn't waste any time texting Chloe. You're still into horror, right? It was just after midday, so he knew there was a good chance she'd be on her lunch break.
       Her reply came through moments later.As in mass entertainment or as in the existential horror of existence?
       First one, Max texted back, smiling. Want to help me sort through a collection my uncle's just bought?
       Books huh? Interesting. When?
       Tonight. Working all day tomorrow & he wants it done before the weekend. So...?
       Will there be alcohol? There's a correct answer to that, btw, and it isn't 'no.'
       Pub -- food (your choice) -- offie -- books, in that order.
       Go on, then.
       Max started typing his reply, but the 'dot dot dot' of a follow-up text appeared on his phone's screen before he could finish.
       But if Nikki decides she's done being mad and makes me a better offer, I reserve the right to blow you off & not feel guilty about it. Txt me where & when. Later! (Probably.) x

       After meeting Chloe outside South Harrow tube station shortly after eight p.m. that evening, Max made good on his promise and led her around the corner to The Star.
       "So, explain to me exactly why your uncle couldn't do this himself?" was the first thing Chloe wanted to know as soon as they were settled in the pub.
       "One, he's a lazy old buzzard with a soft touch for a nephew he's made an art form out of exploiting, and two, he has a thing about horror. Hates the stuff. Always has."
       "He stocks it in the shop, though," Chloe said. "Isn't that where you got those Shirley Jackson paperbacks you gave me a couple of Christmases ago?"
       "Yeah, but there's a whole shelf of Barbara Cartland and Catherine Cookson, too, and he can't stand those either. But it sells, so he stocks it."
       "An entire collection, though? Must have set him back a bit."
       "Actually, it was a steal, from what he told me. He got a call yesterday from a lawyer handling the estate of some local chap who's just died, and his will specified he wanted his collection sold to a local book dealer for a reasonable price. Ray's Quality Used Books is pretty much it for local second-hand bookshops these days, at least round here. The lawyer gave my uncle a brief description; my uncle made an offer, and that was that, done deal. The boxes were delivered this morning."
       "How many boxes are we talking?"
       "Not many. Twenty ... ish."
       "Max..."
       He held up his hands in the universal symbol for please don't throw your drink at me. "It'll take a couple of hours, I promise. Just a quick inventory, get an idea of what's what, set aside anything that might be of interest to specialist dealers. We'll be out of there in no time."
       "I'm holding you to that," Chloe said, knocking back her rum and coke. "Right then, my round. Then we eat. And you're buying."

       It was after ten by the time they reached Ray's Quality Used Books, and as soon as they were inside, Chloe immediately started browsing.
       "Weird, I've never actually been here before," she said as Max locked the front door behind them and switched on the lights. She leaned close to a shelf of orange-spined Penguin paperbacks and inhaled. "Definitely has the 'bookshop' smell."
       "Place used to be a tobacconists," Max told her. "Ray says the only thing he can ever smell in here is Old Chum."
       "How long has he been here?"
       "Since the mid-eighties, I think. Bought the place outright after he left publishing."
       "I didn't know that."
       "Yeah. He's always been a bookworm, but he said working with books before they actually became books never really suited him. I'll give you the tour." That took all of two minutes. The shop was three cramped rooms, each lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves, equally full free-standing units creating narrow aisles and too much gloom for the low-wattage lighting to adequately deal with.
       Chloe lingered to check over the 'Horror & Supernatural, etc.' section, clearly tempted by a trio of good condition Charles L. Grant Tor paperbacks.
       In the far corner of the end room was a door marked 'Private.'
       "We're through here," Max said. "Grab the wine, would you? I left it up front on the counter."
        The door opened into a large square room that served as a back office - with a makeshift kitchen add-on - and storage room. The 'office' section comprised a single cheap, flat pack desk that was home to one of Max's old self-built PCs, an equally cheap but surprisingly comfortable office chair, and two battered and slightly fire-damaged filing cabinets, one supporting a temperamental wireless Canon printer and the other a trio of very dead cactuses. When Max was helping out at the shop, he spent most of his time behind the desk, listing titles on the website he'd put together for Ray, tracking orders, and cursing the Canon for refusing to print off invoices.
       The rest of the room was storage. A row of industrial-looking metal shelving units ran along one wall, while piled against the opposite wall in various teetering stacks were all the old, damaged, and generally unsellable books Ray couldn't stock in the shop but was yet to dispose of. The musty, oddly comforting smell of old paper and book glue that prevailed back in the shop was here as well, but soured by the addition of water-damaged paperbacks and mould.
       The usually barren block of floor space in the middle of the room was currently occupied by a loose pyramid of cardboard storage boxes, each an identical 11" x 13". There were definitely more than twenty.
       "'A couple of hours,' I believe were your exact words," said Chloe as she followed Max into the room and saw what awaited them.
       He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on the corner of the nearest shelving unit. "I saw the way you ogled those Grants," he said. "This guy was a collector. Imagine the treasures we might find inside those boxes."
       "I should have made you buy two bottles," Chloe said, finding a space on the desk for the wine. She tossed her own jacket across the chair and joined Max over by the boxes.
       "Let's get on with it then."
       Together, they lifted the first box down from the stack, and Max used the edge of a door key to cut along the double layer of packing tape. The sheet of bubble wrap placed across the top of the contents stuck to the tape and came away as he pulled back the flaps. An eye with a screaming mouth for an eyeball stared at them from the cover of a hardback Ramsey Campbell collection.
       "Nice," said Chloe. The box contained all hardbacks, all in good to near mint condition, the dust jackets protected by clear plastic sleeves.
       As Max reached the bottom of the first box, placing the contents in two neat stacks on the floor, Chloe was already pulling the next over from the foot of the pyramid, using Max's key hack to quickly slice through the tape. Before opening it up, she paused, sniffing suspiciously. "Smell that?"
       "Yeah," Max said, sniffing too. "What is that?"
       "Smells sort of like burnt--" Whatever Chloe was about to say degenerated into a fit of coughing as she pulled free the sheet of protective bubble wrap. "He could have given these a quick dusting before packing them," she said and coughed again.
       Max remembered the wine. There were no glasses, but there was an assortment of mismatched mugs by the ancient kettle. He gave two of them a quick wipe with some kitchen towel and poured them both some Chilean red.
       Chloe was peering suspiciously into the box she'd just opened as Max handed her one of the mugs. She knocked back a third of the contents, swirling some of the wine around inside her mouth as if attempting to wash away an unpleasant taste.
       "They look okay," Max said, staring down at the three stacks of paperback books inside the box. An axe-wielding grey-haired grandmother stared back menacingly from the cover of The Year's Best Horror Stories: XXI. Then he looked at the waiting pyramid of still unopened boxes, drank some of his own wine, and put the mug on one of the shelves where he hopefully couldn't spill it over anything potentially valuable.
       "Okay, let's try and be systematic about this," Chloe said. "Paperbacks on my side, hardbacks over there. Empty boxes can go down the back to be dealt with whenever."
       "Actually, let's be careful with those. They'll probably come in handy later."
       Plan of action agreed upon, they set to work. It was hard not to pause every other minute to enthuse over the contents of each box as they opened them. Most of the paperbacks so far were in good or better than good condition, including complete sets of the Fontana Books of Ghost and Horror Stories and the Pan Books of Horror Stories, but it seemed that most of the collection was comprised of hardbacks and many of those were limited editions from specialty small presses Chloe recognised as a reader, and Max as a (part-time and underpaid) bookseller.
       Before they were halfway towards fully dismantling the pyramid, impressive stacks of Ash Tree, Arkham House, Tartarus Press and Cemetery Dance were forming, all in excellent condition thanks to their protective plastic sleeves.
       Chloe was right about the dust, though, and Max found himself coughing a few times himself. And that odd, burnt organic smell seemed to linger over some of the contents, but he was sure it would fade now the books were getting a bit of an airing.
       After another half an hour, he decided it was time for a wine break.
       While he took the mugs over to the desk to refill them, Chloe continued lifting titles out of the nearest half-emptied box, and as Max returned with the wine, she was frowning down at a thick trade paperback.
       "Anything good?"
       "I don't know," she said. "There's no title or name, or for that matter anything at all on the cover." She turned it over so Max could see the featureless black spine and back cover.
       If he wasn't mistaken, it seemed to be the source of the unpleasant burnt plant smell he'd noticed ever since they started opening the boxes. "Some kind of galley or uncorrected proof?"
       He placed her mug on the floor beside her and sipped from his own. Then he shivered. It was suddenly a good few degrees colder than it had been only moments before. And darker, too, but when he glanced towards the ceiling, the decades-old track lighting seemed to be providing the same anaemic yellow light as always. Even so, the shadows at the far end of the storage room where they'd been stacking the empty boxes seemed to have taken on more depth, and the boxes themselves were barely visible.
       "Chloe ..."
       "Holy crap, take a look at this," she said before Max could articulate the sudden shiver of anxiety he'd just felt pass through him.
       The featureless black trade paperback was tented open on Chloe's lap, and she was reading a single sheet of creased, slightly yellowed paper.
       "That was in the book?" asked Max.
       "Yeah. It's brutal. Take a look."
       It was a typed letter dated September 1982. The name printed above a London address at the top of the page, Chadbourn & Welles, definitely rang a bell, but for now, Max couldn't place it. The letter below was addressed to a Mr. K. Norton, and 'brutal' certainly summed it up. It was a rejection letter describing K. Norton's recently submitted short story collection, The Howl of Darkest Night & Other Tales, as "crude, derivative, and frankly unsellable." The letter's author followed up with a brief but savage tirade against the entire genre of "spooks, monsters and pathetic things-that-go-bump-in-the-night" K. Norton's "woeful efforts" typified.
       It was signed "Head of Acquisitions, R. Spencer."
       And as Max realised why the name Chadbourn & Welles seemed so familiar to him, the temperature inside the room dropped even further.
       Chloe seemed to be affected by it, too; while he was reading, she had been across the room to slip back into her jacket. As she rejoined him, she nodded down at the letter. "Some rejection, eh?"
       "My uncle wrote this," Max said.
       "What? Don't be daft."
       "'R. Spencer'? As is Ray Spencer. And that's definitely his signature."
       "Come on," Chloe said, "that's way too much of a coincidence."
       "I told you he used to be in publishing, remember? Well, Chadbourn & Welles, that's the publishing house he worked for. I'm telling you, Chloe, my uncle wrote this letter."
       "Hold up." Chloe stooped to retrieve the trade paperback she'd been flicking through when she found the letter. She opened it to show Max the title page. "See? Same title, and the author's name is Kenneth Norton," she said. "And look here." She turned to the copyright page: First Printing, February 2023.
       "So, what, forty-odd years ago this guy sends his manuscript to my uncle, gets the worst rejection letter ever written for his efforts, and then finally gets his book published a few months before he dies?"
       "Not only that, though," added Chloe, "He then arranges for the book to be sent to the author of that letter, alongside his entire horror fiction collection. And unrelated, but why the hell is it suddenly so cold in here?"
       Above them, the track lighting flickered, fizzled loudly, and went out. They were plunged into darkness for no more than a second, but when the lights sputtered back into life, the light they produced was pale and weak, barely strong enough to form a single pool of illumination centred on the middle of the room where they stood.
       From the sudden darkness now consuming the far end of the room came the sound of falling cardboard boxes.
       "Max..." Chloe sounded more annoyed than frightened.
       "It's nothing," he said. It was easier to believe that himself when no further noises came from the darkened end of the room. The fact it was now cold enough that he could see his own breath cloud in front of him wasn't quite so helpful.
       In the darkness, more boxes shifted, almost as though something or someone had brushed against them.
       "Shit." When Max glanced at Chloe, he saw that she'd taken out her phone, but there was no comforting glow from the iPhone's screen.
       "Try yours," she said as she pushed her thumb against the unresponsive power button for a third time.
       Max did as she suggested, with exactly the same results.
       From the darkness came another scrape of cardboard against bare stone floor, followed by what sounded alarmingly like a foot shuffling towards them across the same surface. And then another.
       "Oh, hell no," Chloe said decisively and immediately turned and headed for the door.
       Max wasted no time following her. He told himself the sound of shuffling footsteps he could hear were definitely, one hundred percent, without question, his own.
       "Keys," Chloe said, gripping the door handle with one hand and holding out the other.
       "I didn't lock it," Max said.
       "Well, you must have because it isn't -"
       "Chloe, I promise you, I didn't lock it." Regardless, he reached into the front pocket of his jeans and then remembered his keys were back in the middle of the room because they'd been using them as impromptu sharp edges to slice open the boxes.
       Chloe tugged at the unresponsive door handle one more time and then let it go. "This is the only way out of here, isn't it?" she asked him in a quiet voice that suggested she already knew the answer.
       Behind them, something brushed against one of the stacks of paperbacks, sending them tumbling. The shuffling footsteps that followed sent one of the fallen books skidding across the floor towards them.
       Max couldn't help himself; he turned and glanced down, and there, close enough that he could reach down and pick it up, was a fine copy of the Corgi edition of The Haunting of Hill House. "A Masterpiece of Sheer Terror!" the cover proclaimed.
       A masterpiece ... "I've got an idea," he said, turning back to Chloe.
       "Does it involve getting this effing door open? Because right now that's the only kind of idea I'm interested in."
       "Just back me up, okay," Max said and turned around fully to face the room.
       He could see it now, just beyond the very edge of the pool of anaemic yellow light. A figure in silhouette, a man-shaped piece of the darkness that had overcome that end of the room.
       It stood perfectly still as Max approached, quietly cursing Chloe close behind him. He could see his keys lying on the floor by one of the partially emptied boxes, and just in front of them, the trade paperback copy of Kenneth Norton's The Howl of Darkest Night & Other Tales.
       Max had no idea if what he had in mind would even work, but he slowly reached down for the book and carefully picked it up anyway. "Chloe here's the expert," he said, addressing the motionless shadow.
       "I'm the wha-" Chloe started to say before he quickly pushed the book into her hands, giving her no choice but to take it. She shot him a look that was half confusion, half consternation.
       "Not like my Uncle Ray," Max continued. "He couldn't recognise a decent horror story to save his life. But believe me, Chloe here knows her stuff. So how about this: she reads us a story from this book and then gives us her honest, unbiased opinion?"
       Above, the track lighting flickered briefly, and a sound that might have been a moan of assent filled the air around them.
       "Okay then. Chloe, over to you." Max glanced over at her when there was no response. She looked so furious he might have laughed if he wasn't so scared. "Go on, open it to the contents page. Read out some titles." For a moment, he really thought she was about to slap him with the book instead of open it, but open it she did.
       "'The Howl of Darkest Night,'" she read aloud without much enthusiasm. "'The Crawling Hands', 'As Sweet as Blood' -"
       "That's got to be vampires," Max said, glancing down at the contents page himself. At only eight pages, 'As Sweet as Blood' was one of the shorter stories in the book. "Chloe, you love vampires! Read us that one."
       "Do you seriously expect me to stand here in front of--"
       "Wait one sec," Max said and quickly went to fetch the chair. As he placed it down behind Chloe, he quickly mouthed, "Make it good," fully aware he'd owe her a lot more than a few freebie paperbacks if she managed to get them out of this.
       Still looking none too happy, Chloe sat down and opened the book to the relevant page. She took a moment to get comfortable, cleared her throat, and began. "The foetid air of the sepulchre was pierced by a scream Hammond could only describe as ungodly, and tightening his grip on his freshly carved stake, he plunged forward into the darkness to find its source..."

       "I still can't believe that actually worked," Chloe said, opening the door to Ray's Quality Used Books so she could watch for the arrival of her Uber. There was no way she was carrying a box of expensive first-edition hardbacks (and one trade paperback) all the way home on the night bus.
       "What amazes me is how you managed to say all that with a straight face."
       "Sure, I may have exaggerated just a teeny bit, but technically I wasn't lying. It was a good story. Pulpy as hell, and he definitely likes the word 'foetid' a little too much, but it was a fun read. And I didn't see that twist coming."
       "Well, you're now the proud owner of the only copy of The Howl of Darkest Night in existence. Together with about two grand's worth of Ash Tree Press and Arkham House first editions."
       "What your uncle never knows can never hurt him," Chloe said, throwing him a cat-that-got-the-cream smile.
       "Yeah, yeah. Are you sure you won't stay and help me sort through the rest of those boxes?"
       "There aren't enough Terry Lamsley first-editions in the world, my friend." She watched as a dark green Nissan came to a stop outside the shop. "Here we go; this looks like me."
       Max carried the box down to the car and slid it onto the back seat while Chloe climbed in beside the driver. She blew him a kiss as the car pulled away, and he pulled out his phone to check the time. Nearly twenty past one in the morning.
       He pictured the smaller but still daunting stack of boxes awaiting him back in the storage room and slouched back towards the shop. Even the thought of the half-finished bottle of Chilean red waiting there, too, wasn't enough to inspire any real enthusiasm.
       Even with his jacket on, it was still cold inside the shop, but he put that down to the pair of them standing there with the door wide open for the past five minutes. The temperature didn't improve as he made his way through to the door leading to the back room, and though he opened it, he paused for a moment before stepping through.
       Feeling acutely alone and quickly deciding his sudden nerves were due to no more than that, he tugged a thick hardback edition of a Dickens biography off a nearby shelf and propped it against the door to hold it open.
       But he was being silly. The storeroom looked exactly as it always had, not counting the chair still in the middle of the room, or the stacks of books on the floor, or the boxes he still had to sort through before he could think about heading home himself.
       "No darkness here, foetid or otherwise," Max muttered to himself as he walked over to the chair, intending to return it to its usual spot behind the desk.
       The sound of the door slamming shut behind him froze him to the spot, one hand clutching the chair's cushioned backrest. He knew there was only one thing that sound could mean, but he forced himself to glance back anyway.
       He felt the backrest slide away from his hand as the chair began to swivel, but he only turned away from the sight of the closed storage room door once the edge of the seat began to tap against his leg.
       When he saw the copy of The Howl of Darkest Night waiting for him to pick it up and begin reading, he wondered how Chloe would feel when she opened her box and found it missing.