Trick of the Light by David Ashton Read Free Book Online Page A

melancholy pulsation as if it was his last moment alive, his attention was caught by a newly tacked-up piece of thin white vellum amongst the promised joys.
    The paper was already curling up, as if recoiling from the company it kept, and on impulse he ripped it from the nail and held it out under the light to reread the words he had already registered.
    What is your future ? said the message.
    Magnus came back to the present. A hotel in Edinburgh. Turned over a card. It was the jack of diamonds.
    He knew that future now.
    The side door opened and Sophia Adler slipped through, locking it behind. She had changed into a simple pale green gown that fell softly round her uncorseted body in seductive folds and for a moment Magnus felt a carnal urge to leap across at her like some natural animal. But then he observed she had that distracted air and slewed, swivelling motion to her eyes; as if she had been floating in a fluid universe and was still immersed in some opalescent reverie.
    Accordingly he returned to the cards, turning them over slowly while she walked to the window and looked from the hotel onto the sober thoroughfare of George Street spread out below, not yet echoing the busier parallel of Princes Street a few roads further down.
    The weather was mild but the distrustful citizens paid no heed to the possibility of clemency; heads down, hunched as if suffering a driving rain, they shuffled and darted in the gloomy afternoon amidst carriages and sundry vehicles like denizens at the bottom of the deep, half-blind, anxious to avoid contact lest it contaminate.
    At least that is how it appeared to Sophia. So much of her time when alone was spent in a world of shifting shapes and snatches of voices on the wind, that she was sometimes unsure where one world ended and the other commenced.
    But she had worshipped at the shrine and cleansed her soul. Now it was almost time to begin.
    Vengeance.
    She was nineteen years old and had waited long enough. This was the city. Sophia had made her plans. Now it was time. Magnus snapped over a card and muttered in annoyance at the result. Then he suddenly laughed; it was one of his most attractive features, a sound that seemed to come from low in his belly and fill the room with genuine physical pleasure.
    ‘ What is your future ?’ he said, sliding one more unsuccessful card into the overlapping talon .
    She smiled, remembering the way the flimsy door had creaked open in San Francisco and she had clutched a small derringer under the table in case her intuition had deceived, but no – a man stood there, liquor on his breath, a wild, desperate look to his eye. Caged inside himself.
    The chosen one.
    An empty space that she could fill.
    It would take time but she had the power. He was the instrument.
    ‘How much did you charge that night?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘Five dollars. It was all you had,’ she answered from the window, watching a vagrant dog barely escape the wheels of a hurtling carriage, the coachman whipping the horse on in brutish fashion.
    As the vehicle plunged off, the barking dog was joined by another, a yellow cur, slinking, less brave, the weaker of the two animals.
    But strong enough to kill a rat.
    Magnus laughed once more and puffed out a last thin column of smoke before stubbing out the cheroot. She liked that smell on his breath, it brought back memories.
    Good before they became otherwise.
    Her mother’s eyes looking into hers. Dilated, wild and wanton.
    The broad back of a man. A man she recognised only too well.
    She pulled herself back from memory. The hotel room was a pale peach colour, which she found restful and untainted by previous association: the place newly converted from three buildings meshed together.
    The Spiritualist Society of Edinburgh, though not the main thrust of the organisation, had done them proud. It was the end of a long tour of Victoria’s kingdom and Sophia had insisted Magnus arrange that it end here. They had travelled all the main