Feeling Very Strange - Site de Thomas - Free

the little Magic shop | 15
hammerings were heard.
In the morning, young James found his stepfather downstairs by
the hearth, still in his dressing gown, sipping teacup after teacup full of
brandy and absently bending and straightening the fireside poker.
James offered morning greetings with his usual cordiality. The
stepfather’s eyes darted frantically under matted brows. James was
informed that his mother was on a mission of mercy to a distant family
stricken by scarlet fever. The conversation soon passed to a certain
upstairs storeroom whose door was now nailed shut. James’s stepfather
strictly commanded him to avoid this forbidden portal.
Days passed. His mother’s absence stretched to weeks. Despite
repeated and increasingly strident warnings from his stepfather, James
showed no interest whatsoever in the upstairs room. Eventually, deep
within the older man’s brain, a ticking artery burst from sheer frustration.
During his stepfather’s funeral, the family home was struck by ball
lightning and burned to the ground. The insurance money, and James’s
fate, passed into the hands of a distant relative, a muttering, trembling
man who campaigned against liquor and drank several bottles of Dr.
Rifkin’s Laudanum Elixir each week.
James was sent to a boarding school run by a fanatical Calvinist deacon.
James prospered there, thanks to close study of the scriptures and
his equable, reasonable temperament. He grew to adulthood, becoming
a tall, studious young man with a calm disposition and a solemn
face utterly unmarked by doom.
Two days after his graduation, the deacon and his wife were both
found hacked to bits, their half-naked bodies crammed into their onehorse
shay. James stayed long enough to console the couple’s spinster
daughter, who sat dry-eyed in her rocking chair, methodically ripping
a handkerchief to shreds.
James then took himself to New York City for higher education.
It was there that James Abernathy found the little shop that sold
magic.
James stepped into this unmarked shop on impulse, driven inside by
muffled screams of agony from the dentist’s across the street.
The shop’s dim interior smelled of burning whale-oil and hot