Fridays curious shop, p.1
Friday's Curious Shop, page 1
Friday’s Curious Shop
KAT SIMONS
FRIDAY’S CURIOUS SHOP
Copyright © 2022 by Katrina Tipton
Cover design: © 2023 by T&D Publishing
Cover Art: © David Burke © Artem Beliaikin | Dreamstime.com
Published by: T&D Publishing
T&D Publishing: https://www.tanddpublishing.com
Kat Simons Website: https://www.katsimons.com
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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A store for the curious. Enter if you dare…
Riley Anderson needs a job. Desperately. If she doesn’t find paying work soon, her roommates will kick her out. And living on the streets of New York City as winter approaches…? Not appealing. The Wanted Ad for Friday’s Curious Shop seems like the perfect opportunity.
Pays well. Starts immediately. She even likes secondhand stores. Perfect.
Even if the shop does feel a little…strange.
But things get weird once she crosses the threshold. What’s wrong with that customer? Why can’t she go into the backroom unescorted?
Why are her self-preservation instincts screaming to run?
Doesn’t matter. A job’s a job. And Friday’s Curious Shop is hiring. Everything will be just fine.
Right?
Author’s Note: This novella is also published in the collection HAUNTS AND HOWLS WHERE DEMONS DWELL.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Thank You
Books By Kat Simons
Other Books by Kat Simons
About the Author
Newsletter Bonuses
For my fellow lovers of classic 80s horror TV shows.
Long live the spooky!
Also for my family because always…
Chapter
One
Riley checked the job listing on her phone. Again. Then looked at the storefront. Again. Yup. This was the place.
Friday’s Curious Shop.
Not curios. No. Curious.
And to be fair, it was a pretty curious place.
But it wasn’t just the spelling mistake—was it a mistake?—that gave her pause. The store itself didn’t engender a lot of trust. Located off a side street in Queens near a massive train depot, lots of personal storage unit buildings, and a few truck parking lots, it wasn’t exactly in a place that got a lot of foot traffic. She’d have assumed an antique-collectibles store would have to at least be in a place where people could find it and might go in spontaneously. It took effort to find this place. She’d walked around the area three times before she’d spotted the sign just off the weird triangle intersection, down a dead end side street that looked awkward banging up against the elevated tracks behind it.
If she went down another of the streets off the triangle intersection, the local fire department and a pharmacy sat next to each other looking perfectly ordinary. And a gas station with a little sundries shop sat at the front of the intersection along Northern Boulevard. The smell of days old trash and gasoline cut sharper in the bitter cold early winter air—another less than appealing lure for pedestrian traffic—and the sound of the N train rumbling past was almost loud enough to block out the sounds of honking traffic on road behind her.
Did she really want to do this interview? She needed a job something bad. Her part of the rent was due in a week and she was down to her last few dollars. If she had a job, with money actually coming in, she knew her roommates would float her this month’s rent long enough for her to get her first paycheck. Without a job, though, they’d kick her out and get someone who could cover their bills. There was no sentimentality in the New York rental life.
Riley didn’t have anywhere else to go. If they kicked her out, she’d be living on the street or bumming space on a friend’s couch. Neither option appealed, especially with winter approaching fast.
Could she really afford to be picky about where she worked? If things didn’t pan out, she could stay long enough to get a little cushion of money and find a new job. Then she could quit.
That was, if she even got the job.
She still had to do the interview. Which wasn’t going to happen if she kept stalling, standing like an idiot on the sidewalk, looking between her phone and the storefront across the street.
Pulling in a deep breath, she checked for traffic—which seemed excessively cautious as this was a dead end street with nothing on it but Friday’s Curious Shop. There was even street parking still free, and yet no one seemed to turn down the road to take advantage of it, even though parking in this area was at a premium this time of day. She considered that as she jogged across the street to the store.
Friday’s Curious Shop had an elaborate wooden sign hanging out front, decorative and large with scrollwork around the name, which was written in some sort of calligraphy design and painted gold against a maroon background. It looked like something out of a different century.
Which in and of itself wouldn’t have been bad. Riley liked old things, and sometimes felt a little out of touch with modern times—except where her cellphone was concerned; they’d have to pry that from her cold, dead hands to get it away from her—so the idea of working in a shop full of old things had appealed to her. She knew, since the store was in Queens and not Manhattan, that the antiques probably weren’t the sort of thing sold at Christies, but she’d have bet a knowledgeable collector would find something valuable. She didn’t really know. She’d never had enough extra money to be a collector of anything. Still, she imagined a used and antique store, even in Queens, might be fun.
But the charm of the place ended at the sign, at least on the outside.
The building was very industrial and functional. The glass windows looking into the store revealed a lot of old brown things piled haphazardly around the place, hard to even distinguish as individual items. There might have been an old wheel? And was that a rusted can? That half rag, half porcelain doll with a torn gray dress and no eyes wasn’t creepy at all.
She shivered.
Did she really need the money this bad?
An icy breeze tunneled down the street, tugging at her worn wool coat and the little bobble at the end of her knit cap, reminding her how very much she did not want to be homeless next month.
She gave the glass front door an experimental shove. It opened soundlessly and smoothly, a little jingle from an overhead bell the only thing announcing a new customer. She wasn’t sure why she’d expected the door to screech in protest, like the hinges were rusted. Like no one had opened the front door in years. The place just sort of felt that way. Old, neglected, tossed aside.
For some reason, that made her sad.
The interior of the store hit her with dim light and hot air. Compared to the harshly bright winter light outside, that darkness forced her to a stop just inside the door while her eyes adjusted. The surrounding dust made her sneeze three times in rapid succession. Yeah, if she got the job, she was going to need to take antihistamines every day. She couldn’t really afford antihistamines.
She blinked as her eyes finally adapted to the low lighting and she got her first good look at her surroundings. She stood perfectly still, afraid if she moved, she’d bump into something. Because there was a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. Everywhere. Piled on tables, freestanding against walls, piled in the center of the floor. There seemed to be narrow paths cut through the detritus which wove through the store, but she couldn’t see any other immediate organization. Dolls were piled with books next to a chipped tea pot by some tin boxes sitting on top of an old piano against which paintings in huge wooden frames were stacked. Some of the stuff looked like it might just be valuable—contradicting her earlier opinion of the place—but a person would have to be a determined picker to find the valuable in the midst of the chaos.
“Duck!”
The shout from somewhere in the middle of the stacks of stuff startled Riley so much she actually did duck while looking up. She expected one of the taller piles of stuff to be toppling over on top of her. Instead, she watched a very modern, small drone dip and sway overhead, before barreling past toward the back of the store.
“Sorry about that,” said the same voice that had warned her to duck.
She stood slowly, hesitantly, and turned to face the voice. A man roughly the size of a bear stepped from between a stack of books and a large instrument case—maybe for a base fiddle or something? She wasn’t sure. The man was dressed in tweed dress pants, a button-down white shirt, and a vest with a red tartan pattern on the front and black silk on the back. All of which stretched comfortably over a thick, but not fat, body. His red hair and beard were long and blended together so she couldn’t really tell what was hair from his head and hair from his face, but the whole mass was neatly trimmed and clean. There was just a lot of ha
She had no idea how old the man was. With the full beard and mustache covering so much of his face, she had a hard time judging. There were faint creases around his eyes and between his eyebrows, but the furrows on his forehead seemed more from his frown than permanent signs of age.
“Damned thing goes the opposite direction it’s supposed to,” he grumbled.
It took her a minute to realize he was talking about the small drone.
“Not sure why Doreen thought it would be a good idea.” He tossed a remote-control hand unit onto the stack of books, and brushed his hands together as if dusting something from the remote off. “You here for the job?”
“Um. Yes. I’m Riley Anderson.” She wasn’t sure if she should offer her hand or not. She was so off balance by the drone skimming over her head and the sudden appearance of the large man, things like manners and proper interview behaviors went clean out of her head. She did remember to pull her hat off and stuff it into her coat pocket.
“Good to meet you, Riley Anderson.” The man solved her to-handshake-or-not-to-handshake problem by reaching out with one large hand.
His fingers engulfed hers completely, but his firm, quick handshake was very gentle. Obviously, he was used to being twice the size of everyone else around him.
“This way. Doreen will want to meet you.”
She stumbled after him through the narrow path between walls of stuff—how the hell did he get through this store without knocking things over?—and cleared her throat. “I…I didn’t get your name?”
“Oh.” He stopped abruptly and faced her. “Sorry. Ian Sinclair. Doreen is my sister. We own this place.”
“Who’s Friday?”
A smile broke through the beard and mustache. “That was our great-grandmother’s name.”
“Friday Sinclair?”
“Don’t ask.”
He led her deeper into the store, until eventually they reached a cluttered wooden counter near a back wall that was covered in shelves piled with even more stuff. At least, she assumed that wall was the back wall. She’d gotten turned around in all the stacks and wasn’t entirely sure which direction the front door was anymore. She’d need a map to navigate this place.
It seemed larger inside than it had looked from the outside, too. With all the clutter, she’d assumed it would feel small. It certainly felt claustrophobic. But the trek from the area near the front door to this wooden counter had taken…time.
She frowned and glanced behind her, but blinked back to her surroundings when Ian introduced the woman sitting behind the counter.
“This is Doreen. She handle’s the books and keeps track of inventory. I’m customer care and acquisitions.”
“We’re both acquisitions,” the woman said, her brow raised and her mouth pinched as she looked at her brother.
“Fair enough,” he said with a sigh. “Both acquisitions. She is better with the books, though.”
“True enough.” She turned a smile on Riley that was both polite and pointed. “You’re here for the job?”
“Yes,” Riley stuttered. “Uh… Yes.” She was fumbling this, badly, but the whole place left her off center and a little confused. She wasn’t even sure why. Maybe the sheer amount of stuff everywhere was just disorienting. “I’m Riley, by the way. Riley Anderson.”
“Good to meet you,” Doreen said. “Welcome to Friday’s.”
She was a red-head like her brother, and her hair was just as curly, but she had it pulled back into a low ponytail that kept it away from her face. She was pretty, pale, freckled, and also of an indeterminant age. Her dress sense was a little less dramatic than her brother’s—no tweed and tartan mixes. Just a simple emerald green turtleneck and a purple and black striped skirt over thick-soled, chunky boots. Her glasses looked heavy duty, thick plastic brown frames that suited her face, but lenses that seemed weighty.
Riley’s own glasses felt a little less substantial in comparison. Not that she had them on right now—they were old and she needed an updated prescription since she didn’t see out of them as well as she did her contacts. So she wore the contacts she’d been nursing along for the last year. She needed new ones of those, too. But she needed a job with health insurance first. Mostly the job part. If she could manage her allergies in this place, she was prepared to start tomorrow.
Except the siblings had barely said anything. Interview. Get through the interview without fucking up first.
Doreen said, “What about the ad attracted your attention?”
She held Riley’s gaze as she asked, the stare seemingly casual, but Riley felt the look as if Doreen was peering through her soul.
Riley shook off the uncomfortable feeling to say, “I like old things, and dealing with people who like old things. I always have.”
“Spent a lot of time in antique and curio stores?”
“Thrift shops mostly,” Riley admitted, hoping the state of her thrift shop coat and slacks helped her case here and didn’t detract from her suitability for the job.
“That all?” Doreen asked.
Riley shrugged and decided they looked like people who would appreciate honesty. “And you actually listed the starting salary, so I knew what I was getting into.” She glanced around, frowning a little. A shop like this being able to pay a decent starting wage was…unexpected. But she wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. For all she knew, the siblings were rich and this was their side business, and they had plenty of money to pour into it. “Not everyone wants to tell what they’re paying upfront.”
“Told you,” Ian said.
He hadn’t gone behind the counter to join his sister, but was instead standing a few feet from Riley with his thick arms crossed over his massive chest, looking like a giant bear trying to look like a less giant, more harmless bear.
Riley appreciated the effort.
“Anything else in the advert that caught your attention?” Doreen asked, ignoring her brother.
Riley thought back to the listing on the job-finder app. She couldn’t really place anything in particular. She liked that they listed salary. The added bonus of benefits included was also nice. And after all the time she’d spent in thrift shops over the years, she figured she’d be able to handle a curios shop. She had assumed the “curious” part of the store’s name in the ad had been a misspelling, but obviously it wasn’t. Which made her—ironically?—curious about how the store got that name.
“Mostly, I just thought I’d be able to do the job,” Riley answered after a moment of enduring Doreen’s stare. She almost said the “no experience necessary” part had been another big draw but was a little afraid that was a step too far in the honesty department. She needed this job really badly. That meant coming across like she wanted to work here, in a place like this.
To be fair, it couldn’t possibly be worse than her last two jobs.
Doreen exchanged a look with her brother that Riley was sure had more meaning than was obvious to an outsider. She stuffed her hands in her coat pockets so she wouldn’t visibly fidget, but her fingers were doing a twisting dance in her pockets as she tried to calm her racing pulse. Despite the heat in the place, she felt a little clammy and cold under the threadbare wool and decided keeping the coat on was a good idea.
Doreen opened her mouth, as if to say something else, then snapped it shut. And glared at the front door moments before the bell sounded to announce a new customer.
The fact that someone had walked in off the street surprised Riley, but maybe the place had a following, people going out of their way to visit the store. Maybe it wouldn’t be a boring job of mostly dusting and rearranging old junk. Not that she’d object to boring and dusting and rearranging, so long as it paid on time.
