Continue The Tale - Part 3

The door to the Booken Hausen slowly squeaked opened and Dale entered gingerly. The air smelled of paperbacks and also of paperback readers - a musty, human, comforting smell. The third smell in the air was of faint mold. Tampa, one of the moldier cities in the country. Swamp mold, the most insidious - it could get inside you and you wouldn't even know it had set up shop. Pretty soon your insides look like they've been wallpapered by a gecko obsessed with fractals. Dale breathed this in deeply and his body settled. Whatever was in this air, he liked to breathe it. It was like a memory he didn't know he had - like of an old couch that he might have known as an infant. In this smell was a sort of knowledge. It was a key to something. He didn't know. All he knew was that he liked it here despite the low, yellowy water-damaged ceiling, the narrow aisles overstacked with books, and that funny smell.

Dale located the book he was seeking. It had been a popular title a few years ago. He had been a reader of Sheldon DeLume for some time but had never ventured into his "sultry series" - it was a mix of his usual speculative historical fiction but with more scintillating titles and covers and more beguiling, unsettling "modern" plot twists. Technological, historical, psychological, sexy too. Basically, they were thinking man's erotica but, instead of paying off with multitudinous love scenes, they just kept ramping up into more convoluted heights of fantastical possibility. Like for instance: a dragon becomes a lion and then the lion has a key in his mouth and the key is to an airship that is in the shape of a gold bug and the gold bug travels to and from the past through a fiber optic cable... but there is a problem. The problem is interference from a madman with telekinesis and a lover's grudge. Just add in some lacy underthings , a few semi-automatic guns, some vicious mustaches, some luscious barroom ladies (or are they a hallucination?), and over it all, a pink helium moon high and aloof.

Dale's found one copy of this paperback between books by Kimberly Doons and Brandon DeLush. It had a pretty weird cover: A man with a robotic arm fighting a classic medieval dragon in the foreground, the Arc de Triomph shrouded in a smoke in the background, and a chesty woman in ruffled blouse peeking out forlornly from a barred room at the top of a high tower behind the dragon. With a pink background and angular, bold black lettering. A strange, dizzying cocktail of an image. Dale opened up to page one and began to read...