Dark Arts by Randolph Lalonde Read Free Book Online Page B

the tombstone and one on the grass. He didn’t notice a car pull
in on the side of the road behind him.
    The light touch of a hand on his shoulder
startled him out of the desperate act of trying to regurgitate the
quarter sandwiches he’d had possibly hours before. He spun around,
falling backwards.
    It was Miranda, beautiful with the blue of
the sky behind her, wearing a summer dress so light he could see
the bathing suit she wore underneath. It was in a new style,
flashy, the sort of thing Farrah Fawcett would wear. She looked
almost as worried as Bernie, who was standing behind her. He
dropped to one knee to attend to Max. “What’d you take? What’s the
reaction? Was it the LSD?”
    “Fucking sandwiches,” Maxwell replied, still
stunned enough to reply honestly, but not so out of his mind that
he couldn’t recognize how ludicrous the answer was. “They must’ve
drugged me with the sandwiches,” he explained. It still sounded
ridiculous aloud, and he surprised himself with an involuntary
snicker.
    Miranda was frozen to the spot, confusion
slowly replacing her expression of alarm. Bernie checked Max’s
pupils then fixed him with an irritated look. “You’re fine and
clean. Wait, did you say sandwiches?”
    The whole situation sunk in for Maxwell. The
likely possibility that everything he fought to disbelieve was
true, that he was nearly killed by his father’s downed headstone,
and that he just spent ten minutes trying to upchuck sandwiches
that he suspected may have been poisoned under the supervision of
Bernie’s father, a man he saw as more of a father than his actual
dad. It sunk in, and all he could do was laugh. It was a
high-pitched, raspy, unrestrained kind of heel-kicking laughter
that put him flat on his back when Bernie let him go.
    “You asshole, I thought you’d taken
something and it was going wrong,” Bernie said. “It’s going around
today.”
    “Does he do that?” Miranda asked, unable to
stop herself from smiling a little in reaction to Max’s
unrestrained laughter.
    “He does magic mushrooms sometimes, some
weed, but chemicals,” Bernie said, shaking his head. “No, not for a
year, probably longer. The last time he did acid we couldn’t get
him out from under the bus until sunrise. You all right, mate?” the
last he asked with his own terrible impersonation of a British
accent.
    “Is he okay?” Miranda asked, still looking
amused.
    “No, I think he’s lost it this time. I don’t
even think he’s been into the weed, his pupils are fine,” Bernie
said.
    “Okay,” Max said, taking a deep breath and
recalling the sobering scene he’d just witnessed in his vision, or
hallucination, he wasn’t sure. “Okay, I’m all right.” He turned
away from Miranda while he wiped his nose and mouth, then tried to
clean his hands in the grass. He put the pentagram on his left
middle finger, and the heavier Seal of Julius on his right middle
finger then pocketed his other rings. “It’s been a hell of a day,”
he said, standing up and turning around. “Everything’s gone strange
today, but not all bad,” he looked to Miranda then. “Glad to meet
you again after all the bad news this morning, then dark sprits and
murder attempts from beyond the grave. My head was under that a
second before this geezer turned his stone down,” he said, kicking
his father’s headstone.
    “Bad omen,” Miranda said. “Lucky you got
out.”
    “Bernie, you know I do everything I can to
step lightly around what you and your dad believe,” Maxwell said.
“I want to believe that these are just patches of dirt, with
people’s old bodies under ‘em like old clothes. All used up,
nothing hovering around or moving on.”
    “You’re good at stepping around that, it’s
cool,” Bernie said.
    “If that’s how you feel, I’ll tell my
Aunts,” Miranda said. “They’ll back off.”
    “Right, well listen. I don’t want to say I’m
a believer, because I’m half way to checking myself in to