Rook: Snowman by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

until it got what it wanted. Ever .
    He put the card down on the coffee table and went across to his bookshelf. He picked out his dog-eared copy of The Tarot Interpreted and thumbed through to the section where all the cards were illustrated in color. The Tarot deck traditionally included twenty-two trump or ‘triumph’ cards known as the major arcana, numbered zero to twenty-one, except for number thirteen, the Death card. Among the major arcana were the Sun, the Hanged Man, the Lovers, the Moon and the Fool. In some decks, Death was unnamed, but the card with the hooded figure on it wasn’t Death. It was something else: something beyond Death. Something that stood in the frozen wilderness and waited – but God alone knew what it was waiting for.
    Jim heard a sudden scuffling sound. He looked around, and saw that Tibbles Two was standing up on the couch,her eyes wide, her back arched, her teeth bared into a snarl. On top of the coffee table, the Tarot cards were dancing in the air, flying around as if they had all been caught in a gale. They whirled higher and higher off the table, going around and around, until they formed four columns of flickering, flackering pasteboard, all light and color and dazzling images.
    The four columns leaned slightly to the right, almost as if they were four men leaning against the wind. Jim slowly approached them, watching them in fascination. They looked just like the four vertical lines that had been drawn on the misted-over mirrors in the college bathroom. They made a noise that reminded him of something he used to do as a boy: stick a stiff square of cardboard into his bicycle wheel, so that it made a loud clattering sound as he pedaled along.
    He lifted his hand over them, but he could feel no updraft whatsoever. These cards were dancing by themselves, unblown by any natural wind.
    “What the hell is this, TT?” he asked Tibbles Two. He had experienced many supernatural events before, and he was a believer. But this was extraordinary. Nearly forty fortune-telling cards were spinning around in front of his eyes, in a room without the hint of a draft, and they were showing no signs of dropping or falling or losing their momentum.
    Jim knelt on the rug beside the coffee-table. He reached up and touched one of the columns of cards. Three or four of them were scattered for a moment, but then they flew back up to where they had been before. After a while, the remainder of the pack flew up into the air, as if somebody had thrown them up in the palm of their hand, and suddenly burst into thousands of tiny fragments. The pieces flew everywhere – all across the table, all acrossthe floor, a blizzard of cardboard – while the four columns of cards bent themselves even more doggedly against an imaginary storm.
    TT mewed and lifted her paw as if to say Look, dummy. Look what’s happening on your coffee table. This is a message. This is a sign. Look at what I’m showing you, and learn .
    “I don’t know!” Jim shouted at her. “I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be looking at!”
    The cards whirled around faster and faster; and the snowstorm of fragments blew around the entire living-room, and even out of the window, on to the balcony, like confetti. Then, just as abruptly as they had started to dance, the cards dropped on to the table, and lay there, lifeless and scattered, while the snowstorm gradually subsided, and all of the pieces spiraled to the floor.
    “Very enlightening, I don’t think,” said Jim, looking around his paper-strewn living-room. “Also very messy.” Tibbles Two jumped down from the couch and went into the kitchen, where he could hear her noisily lapping up her soya milk. He stood up and collected all the remaining Tarot cards. He checked them all, thumbing through the whole deck three times over, but there was no sign of the card with the hooded figure on it. Must have been one of the cards that self-destructed, and turned his living-room into