Free Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold Page B

wanted. As if they had a life of their own, his arms reached out and held a brick over the statue. This was an Italian sculpture , he thought, dropping the brick.
    He lifted his brick up, then dropped it, then again, and when the statue was reduced like broken bits of seashell, Charles crushed them under his shoe.
    In the back of his throat, he felt a miserable longing for someone, anyone, so he could hit them with all of his might. It had stopped snowing; the snow was melting now, and there were people out on the street: still, both his mother and his father were gone. It dawned on him that there was no one coming, no one to stop him from destroying the world.
    . . .
    Charles miserably joined his brother in his father’s study, where their fire was still going. They had dragged in wood from other rooms and thrown in logs whenever it had threatened to die. Since they had fought that morning over who got to look through the kaleidoscope, and were not speaking now, Charles looked out the bay window. In many different places the color white capped a hundred shades of green: snow on the far ivy cliffs of the headlands, rough water on the bay, frosted branches in the nearby Presidio. Right below him, snow on the eaves of Jenks’s cottage. The wire connecting their houses had survived the snows and a finch sat on it, head twitching, wings fluttering.
    James, who lay on top of the tangled blankets on the leather couch,had a huge old book from their father’s shelves propped on his stomach. He said, “Well, well, what do you know?”
    Charles didn’t answer him.
    “Well, what do you know?” James said, louder, eyes popping at his book.
    “I’m not interested in whatever baby book you’re reading.”
    “I’m not talking to you. Well, what do you know ?”
    “I’m coming over there and I’m going to hit you.”
    James opened his hands. “Ala-ka-ZAM,” he cried. A quarter dropped out of his hand. It rolled in circles on the carpet.
    “What’s that book?”
    “It’s mine.” But James had to retrieve his quarter from under the carpet and he left the book open on the couch.
    Charles stared at it. It had illustrations, like a child’s book, but it also had dense text. The page James had opened to showed a series of diagrams: a hand with a coin in its palm; the hand closing; the hand opening with the coin gone.
    Charles had only to take one step toward the book before James slammed it against his chest. “I’m not done,” he said.
    “All right,” Charles said, so calmly it surprised him. He felt such a crushing ache to see the book, he was weirdly willing to wait for it.
    Making a coin vanish was difficult for James, even when weighed against the promise of annoying his older brother. Charles sat quietly, looking out the window at nothing in particular, until he heard James cry, “This is stupid,” and throw the book to the floor.
    Charles didn’t move until he heard the door to the toilet slam shut. Then he picked the book up. It was cloth-bound, with splits in the seams; the pages were yellowed around the edges. The title, The Practician’s Manual of Legerdemain, by Prof. Ottawa Keyes, was embossed in metallic gold on the spine.
    This book would explain how the giant had taken his Racketeer nickel. He let it fall open randomly, reasoning that he could guide it, magically, to the right page.
    He read the line his finger pointed to. “If you purchase used equipment, varnished surfaces may be made to look like new with a pound of wheat bran boiled in a gallon of water.”
    Wheat bran? No sentence had ever disappointed him more, not even those in the Electric Vibrator brochure. He flipped a few pages, to a drawing of a candle.

To produce a lighted candle from the pocket, one of the illusions most pleasing to the eye, prepare the candle using a wax match as the wick. The best waxes are tropical in nature. . . .
    He shook his head. This was an awful kind of book. But he wasn’t ready to let it beat him, for