The Magician and the Fool by Barth Anderson

Author:Barth Anderson [Anderson, Barth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Retired teachers, Homeless men, Tarot, Body; Mind & Spirit, General, Occult fiction, Thrillers, Fiction, Divination
ISBN: 9780553383591
Publisher: Bantam Spectra Books
Published: 2008-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

T he cardboard boxes of his dreams and horrors were open. Boy King had opened them himself, but after twelve years sealed, simply seeing the boxes undone quickened his pulse and jumbled his brain with fright.

Rippled sunlight fell around Boy King, cast down through antique glass. He’d let the rain go, let the morning sun come. A car door slammed—Farah coming home with a client (he could tell which one by the sound of the car door: the middle-aged introvert with the acne scarring.

“Born to Run” would begin its nonstop cycle soon). For a long time, Boy King sat listening, making certain the wooden stairs hadn’t squeaked, that no one was below the third-floor trapdoor, trying to open it.

A few moments later, when the E Street Band started its classic crash, Boy King decided things were normal, and from a leather bag produced a mirror and a red-and-black Mexican wrestling mask. Even touching mirrors made him nervous, but it was time to look at last into the crystal ball.

Time to clarify what Lara couldn’t, and do it before Visconti came knocking.

Boy King placed a chair at an angle, facing the wall, and then leaned the mirror upright in front of the chair, so that he could see the ground at a right angle through the mirror. Then he sat down and rested a wooden Art Deco poster for Riemann Hardware against his knees and dragged the cardboard box of his dreams and horrors in place on the other side of the poster. Deep breath. Deep breath. Then Boy King tugged the mask over his face, fabric stretched painfully across his broken nose. By reaching around the poster with both arms in a sort of embrace, he could look at his hands in the mirror and see the box. But he couldn’t see the contents with his own eyes, not even in his peripheral vision—only in the reflection. The poster was in the way, so he couldn’t see his trembling hands, and he was careful not to look at his own face, his own reflection.

Across the lot, Farah was shouting over Springsteen.

“Dude! Dude! Aw, dude! Dude!”

Boy King removed the first small painting, hermetically sealed in its clear plastic casing, and showed it to himself in the mirror.

The workbench. The baker’s hood. The unformed dough.

Or, from another point of view: the con man’s table.

The swooping hat of a deceptive foreigner. A piece of cloth covering something before him.

And from yet another: a ram-headed lord with long, wavy horns and two half-formed wads of soon-to-behuman clay on his potter’s bench.

Boy King removed more paintings, also sealed. A

hunter with his orange dogs; the skygazer and her beautiful twin stars; the delirious horseman—each still blazing in Boy King’s mind from the day the Mad Monk had shown them to him.

Boy King raised another painting and looked at it through his angled mirror. The Arch. This image was the most terrifying of the thirteen ancient paintings, because whoever had painted it knew. Maybe the painter knew

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.