The Kaleidoscope by B K Nault Read Free Book Online Page A

places if you are looking. I read, mon. Surprised?”
    Without further pontification, the cart pushed forward, and Harold realized Rhashan was leaving. “Wait!” came out a little too loud.
    “Yeah, mon?”
    “What will you do with the…the prophecy you received?” If that’s what it was.
    Rhashan shrugged. “I wait for answers, sir. I wait for answers.” His chin lifted, the beads clacked. “The question is, what will you do?”
    Turning the device absently in his hand, Harold considered the challenge. Twelve minutes ago he’d believed the man was a slacker, who worked the bare minimum so he could spend the rest of his time doing God knows what. Had the colors really spun into a prophetic image?
    Harold turned over the Kaleidoscope, inspecting the precision detailing and excellent workmanship. Whoever had crafted it had an eye for beauty, a talent for working with metal and glass. He sighted down the shaft, admiring the tessellations of hues that fell into place. Then when he turned a dial, new images appeared. Green, gold, blue, teal and purple. It was stunning.
    A memory suppressed long ago squirmed its way to the surface. Once, Grandma Destiny had taken him to the Los Angeles County Fair, where he was fascinated by the fortune-teller. Grandma equated her trance to a drugged stupor, and convinced him anyone who claimed to speak with spirits in another world was delusional. Whenever he smelled cotton candy, images of the creepy woman’s angular arms, her freckled finger beckoning him recalled that day. A crystal ball sat dead center of the heavily draped round table in the tent that evoked the legends of Scheherazade. His grandma had yanked him from the tent’s dim interior before she could add to, “Your life will unfold before you as an undulating sea, generations before and still to come will herald you.” The crone kept his quarter even though he didn’t get the whole ten-minute reading. He wanted her to tell him if his mother could be reached from the beyond. Sandalwood incense still made him sneeze. Was Harold and herald a play on words, or was it some kind of power of suggestion and good guessing, as his grandma insisted about the fortune-teller’s game?
    Could an object have magical powers? Harold had to believe otherwise. Every bone and sinew fought against any other possibility. But already the mysterious device he turned over, that now warmed in his palm, had begun to change his life. Where did this mysterious object come from, and what made it tick? What did it want from him?

Chapter Six
    Walter tied a shoestring, his swollen fingers uncooperative. The glass splinter was still a painful reminder of his handiwork, and Walter worried again how to communicate its import without endangering himself or the guardian.
    The cot squeaked as he pushed up. The diminutive workshop and sleeping quarters he’d called home would soon be demolished. He was no longer needed to change the light bulbs, sweep the steps. Now it was time to go, and just as well, because the doors were about to close permanently behind him. And it was time to move on so he could focus on the final piece of his life’s mystery.
    “Where will you go, my friend?” Father Tucker had come downstairs to help Walter pack up his few items.
    “I’ve made some contacts.” Walter hedged the details, for privacy’s sake. The priest helped him strap on a heavy backpack bulging with his yellowed notebooks, packets of seeds, the Dremel and its worn parts, one extra shirt, and a box of hair dye #114, light ash brown.
    “I’ve arranged for Luis to take you to the station.” The monsignor pressed a handful of cash into his palm, and then prayed a blessing over Walter. “I’m sorry you feel you must go. I’m still appealing to the city about the demolition. Won’t you wait and find out if our appeal is granted?”
    “I must move along, Father.” Walter drew out the duplicate kaleidoscope, a perfect copy of the one already delivered.