It's not the book ghosts; you're never afraid of them, even when the shelves are full and all those authors, living and dead, whisper: "Read us... Read us... Read us..." 
"Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out?" Christopher Morley wrote. "They follow you like the hound in Francis Thompson's poem. They know their quarry!... That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it."
A reader practically from birth and a bookseller for years, you've been chased by those ghosts all your life. Now they're just something Tim Burton might create--scary looking, yet also funny and even mildly annoying. The real terror lurks elsewhere, in the familiar places and objects that take on a spectral air this time of year.
Imagine your bookshop at twilight on Halloween.
You're getting ready to close. A few customers linger. Maybe the pale girls in the children's section look a bit too much like The Shining's twins. Maybe that local author furtively turning his book face-out makes you think the text within repeats "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."
Everything poses a threat. The hand-scrawled "Out of Order" sign on the public rest room door seems as terrifying as "REDRUM" written in blood on another door--The Shining again. You really don't want to know what’s behind that portal now, do you?
And those eerie, flickering lights moving up and down the aisles, dancing across the covers of books? Demons! No, just customers showrooming your books with smartphones so they can buy online. Okay, yes, demons.
It's all getting weird. You should do a walk-through inspection to allay your fears. Watch your step. Did you hear that? Never mind. Just the wind, you suspect. The front door always groans a little, and these ancient wooden floors creak only as much as they should.
In the staff break room, the sink is heaped with food-encrusted dishes, and on a nearby table, the hardened remains of a birthday cake invoke the musty scent of Miss Havisham. Next to the lethal-looking steampunk microwave oven, a sagging bookcase predicts the future through ARCs lined up like headstones. You pluck one and read the back cover. So this is what will happen on February 11, 2013. Terrifying. You replace it quickly, as if trying to clamp the lid down on Pandora's Box.
Stay out of your office! You can't. What's that paper on the desk? A warning? Don’t look! You did. Publisher's invoice. Payment due! Second notice! It awakens frightening memories of a phone call hours earlier. Your landlord. It's about the lease. Again!
You careen through the back room, stumble and fall across a stack of old sealed cartons hidden in a seldom-used, cobwebbed corner. Just boxes, you think, but suddenly you remember that bargain book show in Chicago four years ago, and a few too many drinks and a number tossed out in a moment of ill-chosen buying bravado mixed with the certainty that you could handsell anything, even a New England diet crockpot cookbook--"600 copies? I'll take all of them." You've sold 53. Now they will be here... forever and ever.
Seeking a moment's solace in the events space proves futile. Those skeletal chairs remind you of too many nights when their emptiness was its own brand of horror. And this memory calls up the image of a shriveled hand reaching once again into the air, as if from the grave, beckoning for attention. It's the lady who attends every author event, sits in the front row, asks embarrassing questions and never buys the book. Try not to meet her stare. She'll turn you to stone.
Something bumps against your leg. The bookstore cat. Tonight even his stare is malevolent. You close your eyes, call upon Titiana, Morley's patron saint of practical, no-nonsense booksellers ("I'm not afraid of ghosts.") for protection.
And then, quite suddenly, you're safe again in the knowledge that, while being a bookseller can have its nightmarish aspects, not being one is an unimaginable fate.
What was that noise? Legions of stumbling, glazed-eyed zombies are lurking outside your front door, pounding on the glass and demanding entry. No, wait, that's just a vision of the Black Friday crowd next month. They can't get in... for now. Happy bookish Halloween! --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now).
