The Spirit Cabinet by Paul Quarrington Read Free Book Online

pinkish hues and stroke the air with sparkling wands. With the nightfall, they begin to move toward
das Haus
with ginger menace
.
    They clutch empty bags
.

Chapter Four
    Jurgen had not been entirely honest when he told Preston that his first book had been
The Secrets of Magic Revealed
, written by Preston’s father, the Magnificent. True, his journey toward professionalism had started when he’d pulled open that cover and read:
Never reveal the secrets in this book
. The reading itself had been slow and laborious, because the book had been translated into High German, and Jurgen had his difficulties with languages. (He also had his difficulties with mathematics, sciences and anything to do with geography or history. It was Jurgen Schubert’s well-kept secret that he was a dim-witted boy. He was handsome and could work hard, and he’d learned that a sober, silent industry was often confused with intelligence.) Fortunately,
The Secrets of Magic Revealed
was full of photographs, black-and-white images of a huge set of hands. These hands were pale and delicate, the nails filed into beautiful crescent moons. They were photographed from every angle, and Jurgen found it thrilling to see the secret photographs, the ones that showed the coin nestled between the second and third knuckles, the playing card bent and cupped in the hollow of the palm.
    Jurgen had learned almost everything from that book. He learned the sleights and passes, shifts and manipulations. And whatever information Preston the Magnificent left out, he gave directions to its location, the wonderful Erdnase card book, for example, or the classic
Modern Coin Magic
by J.B. Bobo.
    But, technically, it had not been Jurgen’s first book. His first book had been
Houdini on Magic
.
    Jurgen had found the book while hiking. Though there were no true forests anywhere in the vicinity of Bremen, only spare outcroppings of diseased trees and moonlike shelves of slate and granite, Jurgen often tramped away into the countryside. He had a vague sense that there was a romantic rightness to this, which he got not from poetry, but from some paper placemats he’d once seen in a restaurant. The placemats showed a strapping blond German youth all decked out in hiking gear, his upper body criss-crossed with leather straps. The lad’s legs were thick with muscle and dressed lightly with golden hair. Jurgen hoped, actually expected, to encounter this creature sometime on the trails. An even more compelling reason for his hiking had to do with the overcrowding back at his own house. The house was tiny to begin with (Jurgen would realize one day that he could fit his entire childhood home into the trophy room of
das eindrucksvollste Haus im Universum
) and the Schubert family grew as if by cell division. His mother was usually both pregnant and nursing, his father was frequently announcing a visiting relative, the elder daughters were constantly getting married and their feckless husbands were never working and the elder sons would disappear briefly and then return with their own burgeoning broods. Jurgen was a middle child, but what he was in the middle of was a vast sea of humanity. This is why he loved to lace up his hiking boots.
    The boots were actually street shoes into which he’d forced long, thick laces, twisted and ribboned into complicated outdoorsyknots. Lacking not only
lederhosen
, but shorts of any kind, Jurgen hacked off the legs of some faded flannel pants and then rolled up the bottoms to reveal the entire length of his pale blue thigh, blue because the rolled-up pant leg cut off the circulation below his groin. He crossed two small belts over his chest, cinching them so that they, too, were biting and painful. He found a hat which he managed to persuade himself was Tyrolean. The one good thing about his home was that strange articles of clothing were easy to find, especially accessories, materializing suddenly in odd places and remaining unclaimed. Ties stayed hooked