The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

With my gaze fixed on a corner payphone, I never saw the man who staggered into my path. We collided, my cane clattering to the sidewalk. Something fell from him, as well. The ragged man dropped to his hands and knees and began slapping the sidewalk for what I quickly understood were his glasses.

“Over here,” I said, spotting them beside a tree planter.

I stooped and lifted his glasses by a temple bound in thick tape. I looked from the greasy Coke-bottle lenses to the man, whose stringy hair draped his bowed head, and then back to the lenses.

Well, damned if I hadn’t just found the East Village conjurer.

36

I held the conjurer’s glasses toward him and watched as he took and pressed them onto his black-whiskered face. In a city of six million, what were the chances? Then again, the nearby park had long doubled as a staging area for the homeless, who shuffled in and out of the library during the day for the bathrooms and newspapers. The conjurer had likely joined their ranks, because it was definitely him.

“Hey, are you all right?” I asked.

I drew closer but didn’t attempt to help him to his feet for fear he would startle. He blinked as his magnified eyes floated upward. It was hard to tell where they were aimed, exactly. But his head soon cocked to the side, and something like recognition took hold in his swimming gaze.

“Y-y-you-y-you!” He stood and shuffled backwards in a pair of ragged tennis shoes.

I was pretty sure he didn’t recognize me. The only time we’d been this close, he’d been out like a light, the filaments of his mind blown. This was mental illness talking. I decided to use it to my advantage, ethics be damned. I needed to find out where he’d gotten the spell to summon a shrieker.

“Is that Clifford?” I asked, affecting pleasant surprise. “Wow, I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays.”

He hesitated, his grimy fingers wringing between the flaps of an army surplus jacket.

I patted my chest. “St. Martin’s outreach service?”

I was trying to present myself as harmlessly as I could, but at mention of the church, Clifford’s face contorted in what seemed pain. Tendons popped from his shaggy neck. His thick lips sputtered, but the words, as well as his breath, were trapped in his shuddering chest. When a bluish shade of burgundy spread from his cheeks to his forehead, I reached out a hand.

“Hey, are you—”

“Demon!” he shrieked, stumbling backwards.

Demon? Was he picking up the shadow of Thelonious I carried? Sometimes the mentally afflicted were also endowed with powers of perception.

“No, no,” I tried, “I’m with St. Martin’s—”

“Demon!” he repeated. “You are of your father SATAN and he was a MURDERER and abode NOT in the truth because there is NO truth in him and when he speaketh a LIE he speaketh of his own for he is a LIAR and deceiveth the whole world and he was cast OUT into the earth and his angels were cast out with him…” His words expired in a straining gasp, even as his lips continued to move. But in the mash-up of biblical passages, I’d picked up a theme.

“Who lied?” I asked.

“The demon,” he whispered. “The demon in the glass.”

“Demon in the glass?”

He jabbed a finger at my chest, the bugging madness of his eyes replaced by the roundness of fear. He babbled and staggered backwards. When he tripped over an ankle-high fence bordering the lawn that hedged the library, he screamed and fell. I rushed to help him, even as his backpedaling heels kicked up chunks of brown sod and his cries grew more piercing.

I only realized a loose crowd had gathered when one of their members spoke.

“Hey, man,” an edgy voice said. “What’s your problem? Leave the dude alone.”

I turned. The dozen or so homeless advancing on me were in their twenties and thirties. They had been working students before the Crash: bartenders and baristas. Cut off from income, they’d given the middle finger to their massive student debt. Even now they wore their scavenged coats and patched pants with defiant pride, as though they were all members of the same clan. A clan Clifford belonged to more than I did. I was the outsider here.

I watched two young women separate from the group to help Clifford up.

“It’s not what you think,” I said, taking a step toward them. “I actually know him.”

The man who’d first spoken drew up in front of me, black discs in his stretched earlobes, fierce judgment in his eyes. “Leave him. The Fuck. Alone.”

The others took up positions around me. Geez, what was it about me that inspired a let’s-beat-his-ass mentality? Whatever the reason, I had a lot to piece together and not a lot of time to do it.

“All right,” I said, showing my palms. “I just caught Clifford on a bad day.”

The group let me edge from their circle, then formed a barricade in case I changed my mind and made another go for their compatriot. I watched as, with hard backward glances, they escorted Clifford away. As much as I needed answers, I let him leave. I’d gotten some information, scattered though it was.

I wheeled and strode for the payphone. Demon in the glass, demon in the glass. What in the hell did it mean? As my reflection rose up in the phone’s steel body, I saw the answer.

The mirror in Clifford’s apartment. It had been in the summoning room, intact, the first time I’d seen it. But on my second visit, the mirror was shattered, its round frame a mouth of silver shards. I imagined Clifford driving a fist against it in fear and horror before he clunked off with his trunk.

I thought back to the apartment of the Chinatown conjurer. Yes, there had been a mirror in Chin’s summoning space, as well. And the crime photo in the Scream showing Flash’s apartment? Another mirror.

The spells had never been written down and distributed,