(My response for this week's writing prompt at "Becky's Writers' Block Busters". This is longer than our usual responses, but my imagination kept going, so...)
"Write About a Used Bookstore"
Urban adventurers. That's what they call people like ourselves. Tammy, Gene and I had learned a few things from a couple websites, decked ourselves out with black everything, cameras, and went off into all the nooks and crannies of the city. As exciting as it must be to venture deep into South American jungles or Egyptian tombs, we knew there was just as much undiscovered mystery in our own town.
Our last venture into the Aldergrove Psychiatric Hospital last month was taxing enough on us. Gene had slipped and cut his arm really bad on I don't even know what, and the security guards had gotten a little too close for comfort. Still, we got some amazing photos and were excited to show off this little forgotten part of the city on our website; we certainly earned it.
But we didn't want to do anything large-scale like that for a while. We wanted, what Gene called it, "a vacation outing." Tammy suggested the old used bookstore on Royal Avenue. Gene and I were in full agreement. It was close by, lightly guarded, and had plenty of stories in and of itself.
Tammy was retelling most of them as we drove to the bookstore that night.
"The bookstore is actually in the building basement," she said from the back seat. "It's underneath the community centre."
"Which no one uses," I said, "it's mostly just wasted space that the city doesn't know what to do with, right?"
"Right," Tammy said. "So in general this should be pretty straight forward." Tammy spread a sly grin across her face. "Then we can take some pictures of ghosts and dead things and all that other fun stuff."
"Oh yeah," I said, smiling and shaking my head slowly for our group's founder. "Dare to dream..."
Pulling into the alley behind the row of buildings, we quietly tied bandannas around our faces and stepped out into the fairly cool summer air, making our way towards the desolate community centre. Tammy and I had scouted the building out last week and already had an entry point into the building; we were all inside within the next two minutes.
The community centre was just as we expected it to be: dusty rooms filled with stacks of boxes connected to smaller dusty rooms filled with stacks of boxes. Tammy was already snapping pictures of all the rooms while Gene and I looked for stairs that would lead to the bookstore beneath.
"Ahh, we've failed already," Gene said with a laugh, shining his flashlight at our footprints in the dust behind us. "The ghosts, they will know we have come." Even though his bandanna covered his face, the wrinkling around his eyes more than gave off how amused he seemed by our inability to walk on air.
"Well, if we're lucky," I said, "the dust ghosts will cover that back up for us after we leave." Considering how undisturbed the building already was, it seemed more than likely that it would remain as such once we were gone. In any case, Gene took a picture of our footprints for posterity before we continued down the hallway.
