Inkwell of Shadows 6: Dusty Decimal Systems

November 7, 2024. Simmons Store-All near the Leatherdown Bayou. Unit 45. Buried in boxes and a few memories…

Author’s Note: Inkwell of Shadows is a serialized fiction story in Moonlight Curiosity Mysteries, set in Blighridge County, Alabama. A quiet corner of the world where old ghost linger, cursed objects refuse to stay quiet, and some secrets never stay buried—at least, for long.

New installments or chapters will materialize every Monday…

Missed a chapter? You can find the full list here.

Previously. Suspicious deal done, Daniel and Cassidy dove into tracking down the history of the pens. It took four days of false leads but a faint breadcrumb of information appeared—none of it pleasant. A trail of previous owners having met untimely, or suspicious, ends came to light. This collection of clues, estate sales, and more traced through Moonlight Curiosities, suggesting more might be found in the shop’s old records. Namely ones tucked away in a Store-All near a Bayou at the edge of town…

November 7, 2024. Simmons Store-All near the Leatherdown Bayou. Unit 45. Buried in boxes and a few memories…

As it turned out, dumpster diving through old antique shop records did have a lot less death involved. But there were still plenty of bitter-smelling, yellowed papers with an airborne invasion of brown dust. It was a powdery, dry grit that occasionally billowed out of boxes filled with my uncle’s cryptic journals and accounting ledgers.

We headed to the Simmons store-all rental unit late the next day after we’d closed shop. The store-all unit was modern and indoors, complete with a good air filtration system. Still, yellow-brown dust was everywhere. It stubbornly fogged the chilly air with a musty scent from decades past. So, after about an hour, I figured the nearby air filters had given up and left in disgust.

Cassidy set aside a stack of papers, then sneezed so hard she practically bounced off the floor where she sat.

“God,” she snorted, then sneezed twice more. “It’s like inhaling history. I’m just not built for this.”

I handed her my handkerchief, then promptly sneezed four times in a row.

“You’re not the only one,” I chuckled dryly after a rough snort. “But hey, you’ve got echolocation if the lights go out,” I teased.

She shot me a perturbed look—sharp hearing and sheet metal walls never mixed. With a light wave of her hand, she indicated the storage unit.

A tinny, country western tune echoed down the lonely, near-dark hallway outside our unit. It gave the empty store-all hallway bad horror movie vibes I wanted nothing to do with. I leaned on the current stack of boxes between us.

“Okay, that’s fair. Metal walls with a country music beat do not a good echolocation moment make,” I relented. Then I gave her a faint smile. “Hey, at least the worst here is dust swarms, not murder ink.”

Cassidy snorted from the dust and my limp humor.

“I’ll give you that one, but the music could still be better.”

As if insulted, the ceiling speakers in the too-empty hallway changed to something involving cowboys and pickup trucks both being sad in beer. Maybe the beer was just sad, I wasn’t sure. Laughing, we continued to search.

I took another break an hour later. My hands had turned ghostly gray from forgotten dust, and every ledger page just looked like a paper cut waiting to happen.

Cassidy had settled cross-legged in the middle of the storage room with a Midori travel notebook. The book was open in her lap, with journals and papers arranged around her in a rough semi-circle. Green, cloth-bound ledgers were stacked off to her right.

She took notes with a sort of monkish discipline, scowling over every page. Every so often, she let out a “huh” or “interesting” over something she’d found.

Progress? Maybe. But perseverance eventually paid off as I tapped an open journal balanced precariously on a stack of boxes.

“Found something here in a journal,” I said slowly.

I cleared dust from my throat.

“October 4, 1977. Got two Waterman fountain pens from Meredith today,” I read aloud. “Amber tortoiseshell, odd amber veins along the surface. Meredith made me swear to not sell these to repeat clients or children. She claimed they were haunted, but they both passed the ‘cold touch’ test.”

Cassidy sat up straight.

“Hold on, you never told me he believed in haunted objects.”

I winced a bit and grimaced.

“Sort of? Maybe? Uncle Elias said there was always an explanation. Just not a neat and tidy one everyone liked,” I explained. “I’m starting to think he did believe in haunted objects, and knew a lot more than he let on. Listen to this.”

I cleared my throat again.

“There was ink in the pens. After trying a handwriting sample, I had vivid nightmares. These might be a bad investment. Best to put them in the vault.”

“Vault?” Cassidy echoed. “What vault? I remember when you cleared his safety deposit box after the will was read. Maybe he meant a safe?”

I shrugged.

“No idea. Wasn’t in his will. I’ve not seen a safe in the shop or when I had to clear out his home.”

My eyes scanned the journal page, reading over the entries again. This time I noticed a thin scrawl in the margin. I ran a finger over the notes, squinting at the letters that had nearly turned sepia with age.

“Cassie? Look at this,” I said, walking over to her with the journal.

I sat down next to her on the concrete floor, and pointed at the notes.

“This doesn’t look like part of the journal entry. It was like he made it later.”

Cassidy brushed her red hair out of her face, leaning over to look. I read the notations aloud.

“LGR77… P4… W27.” I frowned. “Looks like a math problem.”

Suddenly Cassidy snapped her fingers.

“No, I bet it’s an index. Think about it. LGR might mean ‘ledger’. The ‘P’ could be ‘page’?”

I nodded, quickly catching on.

“So ‘W’ might be word?”

She shrugged then squeezed my arm affectionately.

“Your uncle was really obsessive about staying organized. What if it’s some custom shorthand?”

Cassidy reached over to the ledgers, until she found the one for 1977. She flipped frantically through the entries.

“Here!” she tapped a yellowed page. “I swear, beloved, your uncle’s handwriting is so neat and spidery, it gives me fantastic chills. Anyway, yes, I’ve got something.”

She traced a finger along the page, counting off the words.

“…twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven. The word is ‘return’.”

“Return what?” I muttered. “Library books?”

Cassidy gave me a wry look, tapping the next line.

“Daniel, look. Right here on line thirty-one—”

She spun the green-bound ledger toward me. At the bottom of the page, almost lost in a sea of numbers at record entry thirty-one was another cryptic entry. It was as faint and sepia toned as the ones from the journal.

“P12? W14-22?” I read aloud. “Okay, P12? If ‘P’ was ‘page’ before, that would be page twelve. Then ‘W’ is word, so words fourteen through twenty-two?”

“It’d have to be,” she replied.

“No idea what the 77JNL42 or L4 means, though,” I sighed.

Cassidy exhaled, eyes drifting to the journal I brought over.

“Is there anything else in the journal?”

I turned it over in my hands, then searched each page again from front to back. A small faded number was circled on the upper left corner of the first page.

“Thirty-eight.”

Cassidy blinked at me.

“What?”

I showed her the number, then frowned at two of the journals next to Cassidy.

“Hey, I wonder.”

On the first page of each dusty book, I found a tiny circled number in the same location.

“They’re numbered!” I exclaimed, then rose to check two more journals. “I think the numbers restart each year? Maybe?”

A grin spread over Cassidy’s face as her green eyes lit up.

“That has to be it! I bet that’s journal forty-two for 1977. The rest would be page twelve, line four. Then the last part is words fourteen through twenty-two.”

Numbers spun through my head in overlapping patterns.

“Cassie, are we sure this is even right? Why would anyone bother to do this?”

She scrubbed a hand over her face, narrowing her eyes at the middle distance between us.

“Beloved, I’ve no idea,” she replied thoughtfully. “But your uncle did have a habit of stashing things out of sight for safekeeping.”

Her eyes went a little wide as if a thought struck her. She laughed softly, then gently squeezed one of my forearms.

“You know, it’s like trying to work out the combination to an old safe.”

The next moment passed in dead silence. Even the country music in the hallway had stopped.

“A combination.” I asked, raised my eyebrows.

“Like for a lock,” she replied. Then her eyes lit up again. “It’s a trail!”

I let out a low whistle.

“Okay. Let me dig out journal forty-two.”

Two hours later, the floor looked like an archivist’s graveyard. Journals from across 1977 to January 1978 were spread around us in uneven stacks, ledgers propped open like an accountant wizard’s spellbooks.

Cassidy muttered half to herself, counting out words, lines, or paragraphs. She’d frown or thump a page each time she hit a wrong number, curse then start back to the last good line.

As for me, my fingers wound up smudged with ghosts of ink and dust. The tips a bit sore, probably the same way my uncle’s had been from years of all these journals.

But we kept at it. Each time one of us found a clue, the other picked it up and ran with it, until everything turned into a steady rhythm.

By the time we were done, we sat on the store-all unit’s concrete floor, surrounded by dusty books. Cassidy had scrawled pages of notes in her own notebook.

For a long time, neither of us spoke. We just stared at the journals and Cassidy’s notes.

“It’s a hidden journal,” I said quietly. “Uncle Elias set up this entire page, line, word puzzle combination to hide an entire personal journal entry about these pens.”

Cassidy nodded, tapping a section of her notes.

“Right down to Meredith Rawls telling your uncle to burn the pens or get a priest.”

“Yeah, that’s encouraging,” I replied sourly, leaning back to work out a stiff back muscle. “It’s odd after telling Uncle Elias that, she kept one of the pens for safe keeping, what? Two days later?”

Cassidy flipped through her notebook.

“Three.” She pointed at her notes. “That’s when Uncle Elias stashed a pen in his own vault. Meredith was supposed to store the other pen in her vault.”

“More with these vaults or safes or whatever,” I sighed, running a dusty hand through my hair. “We’ll have to find them. Uncle Elias obviously had one, and probably kept it close by where he could get at it.”

Cassidy brushed a strand of hair out of her face, then idly tapped the side of her notebook.

“The shop. It has to be there, somewhere. Your uncle was so meticulous and careful, he’d never keep something like this at home. He also kept the shop’s security up to date.”

I leaned back on my hands, taking in a deep, dusty breath. Then I checked my watch.

“It’s not that late. Which first? Head home and turn the shop upside down, or find Meredith Rawls’ safe?”

I watched the wheels turn behind my wife’s eyes a moment, thumping a pen against her notebook.

“Meredith Rawls’ house,” she decided. “If your uncle’s safe is in this shop, and I really bet it is, we’ve time to find it. But we’ve no idea if the Rawls’ house is still up for sale since she died last year. Better to check.”

“Makes sense,” I nodded. “If someone’s bought the place or everything’s been cleared out and sold, we’ll have to track all those pieces down to maybe find this vault or personal safe. We have an address?”

Cassidy grinned as she snapped her notebook shut, wiggling it at me.

“Sure do. It’s not far from here, either. Along the edge of the bayou.”

We cleaned up the store-all unit, or at least made the chaos more organized instead of less. After that, we locked up, climbed into the car and headed for the address.

Just like Cassidy had said, it wasn’t far away—a short ten-minute drive. I frowned at the sign for Crescent Edge Cemetery, when I turned off the county road onto a gravel drive.

“Crescent Edge Cemetery?” I asked warily.

Cassidy frowned, quickly scrolling through her phone.

“Yeah, that bothers me, too. But I don’t remember why.”

We realized it the moment we pulled up in front of the old Victorian-style home.

Our headlights swept over the skeletal fingers of the wrap-around porch, before resting on a trio of ancient oaks in the front yard. Ghostly-gray fronds of Spanish moss, draped over the branches, shivered in the wind.

At the house itself, yellow warm light peeked out from around sun-aged curtains in the stained windows—a ghost’s half-lidded eyes thick from sleep. On the porch a man stood framed in that same yellow light, shoulders easy, as if he’d been standing there waiting.

I knew that silhouette.

A sharp smile sliced through the dark.

Dorian Callix was already home.

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Moonlight Curiosity Mysteries is a work of pure, unabashed fiction. To be honest, it’s a bit creepy, if not spooky, when is isn’t beside itself with nerves. It tends to be a little shy. Did I mention it likes to needlepoint because there’s lots of stabbing? Names of characters, places, events, organizations and locations are all creations of the author’s imagination for this fictitious setting. Which means, really, he gets all the blame.

Any resemblance to persons living, dead, undead, or why-aren’t-they-dead-YET is coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s, since the characters and the author tend to disagree a lot. Like daily.