Karl Thorrson, Crime Boss - The First Day

Karl Thorrson was a giant, nearly seven-feet tall, with bones as dense as granite.

His hands were as big as a polars bear’s paws and his shoulders as broad as a draft horse, and yet despite his size he was graceful, as light of foot like a dancer, as nimble fingered as a seamstress…and he only had one eye.

There was a large black stone in his otherwise empty socket. It was studded with diamonds set in jagged line…like a lightning bolt; when they caught the light just right rainbow flares leapt from his gaze…he worked that flash to great effect.

The word on the street was that the giant could see with that rock in his head, it allowed him a different kind of vision, better than any eye. People said he could see into the world beyond; they said that he had gouged his own eye out with a red-hot iron to make room in his skull arcane-stone and gain the power that it possessed.

People said he could see and talk to spirits. They said he was haunted by all the men he had killed and that ghosts that were drawn to him like moths to a flame. They said he could command the lightning, and that he was cursed by it, that the rain followed him relentlessly and animals shunned him.

Thorrson liked to believe the things people said about him; he encouraged such stories, embellishing them whenever he could, adding luster to their grandiosity.

The giant was not motivated by vanity, it was just that he led a public life and felt more secure wrapped in an aura of danger and mystery…it was good for business, he thought.

His legend was partially true.

Slow-heavy drops of rain were falling when he left the reading room on Lake Street.

His partner and sister in law, Ingrid Magnusson, had gone north unexpectedly to see her twin, Helga…his wife.

The giant wasn’t happy about that, but he couldn’t stop her.

He was angry and impatient while he was at the reading room. He had been obligated to keep an appointment on Ingrid’s behalf. He had to wait for a professor, Dr. Peirce Johnson of Augsburg, a scholar of antiquities; who was coming for a very precious book.

Ingrid had promised him a look at the Albigensian Grimoire, and Thorrson was loathe to lend it out, but there were some passages in it that neither he nor Ingrid had been able to translate, and the professor promised to be of help.

With his help we might raise the dead; Ingrid had suggested, and the giant thought that such a promise was worth the risk.

Thorrson didn’t like the tall-skinny man when he met him. The he heard his own name spoken out loud by a total stranger, a young man who had been waiting in the parlor who had not come with the professor, but left at the same time as him.

Thorrson did not bother himself with making an introduction, though he wished he had. There was something about the young man’s voice that gave him an uncomfortable feeling, it was almost as if he had heard it before.

There was a resonance in his tone that felt familiar to the giant, as if he had been listening to it for years.

Ms. Angela Guthrie, Ingrid’s assistant, was dismissive of the boy, which might explain why he left, but he went out the door right on Dr. Johnson’s heels as if he were a highway man stalking his mark, Thorrson didn’t like that either.

He didn’t like anything about the day, especially the heat and the oncoming storm that he was powerless to stop; he knew that people were fond of believing that the rain followed him.

In actuality, the giant had discovered that the mystical orb in his skull gave him a limited ability to control the weather, by sheer force of will, but there was something in today’s storm that he knew was beyond him.

At the end of the day Thorrson had business down Lake Street at a tavern called the Round-Up, a small place that refused to pay him for the protection he offered, one of the last hold outs on the St. Anthony strip.

The giant gangster wanted to get the matter settled with the proprietor personally, rather than send his men a third time, only to see them get nowhere with the owner and his wife.

He wanted to get on with it, to finish consolidating his control of the city, despite the feeling of nausea that had taken a hold of him ever since he heard the stranger in the bookstore say his name.

Something he had not foreseen lay in front of him, Thorrson surmised. 

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Dr. Pierce Johnson, Professor of Antiquities - The First Day

Dr. Johnson cursed himself as he walked away from the lake, gripping his cane tightly in one hand, not bothering to swing it while moving as fast as he could.

He was rattled.

He wanted to get back to his car, and to his offices at Augsburg.

He had been followed from Ingrid Magnusson’s bookstore by a man who looked like he could be police…or a prizefighter.

Perhaps he was one of St. Anthony’s notorious Park Rangers, the professor thought.

This prospect worried Dr. Johnson most of all.

The young-man was tall and broad-shouldered. He had been sitting by himself in a chair at the reading room when the professor had arrived to collect a rare book, the Albigensian Grimoire.

He had finally gotten permission from his patroness, Ingrid Magnusson, to examine it.

He had been waiting more than a year for it to become available. He had followed her to St. Anthony so that he could be in proximity to it, and he was eager to look into its pages, both to examine its ancient lore, as well as the modern interpolations that had been made by Lord Crowley and his minions, and their predecessors in the Golden Dawn.

Now he had lost it, and he feared Ingrid’s partner, Karl Thorrson, would not let him live it down…the professor was certain that the one-eyed giant would not let him live for losing it.

Dr. Johnson was not a brave man, nor did he aspire to be one; a fear of violent reprisal had haunted him since childhood. Despite his height, which gave him a somewhat imposing disposition, he was graceless and physically weak.

When he first had the notion that the young man from was following him he panicked and began walking toward Loon Lake.

The professor was hoping that he was imagining things; he suffered from paranoia. But, then the man turned with him on Hennepin, and then again on 31^st Street, and he matched his gait.

When Dr. Johnson got to the lake he attempted to lose the fellow in the brush growing on the steep hill that formed a ridge on the lake’s east side.

It did not work.

Then the professor decided that the man must be one of the Rangers, a semi-private police force, like licensed-gangsters that everyone in St. Anthony tried to steer clear of.

Dr. Johnson did not want to be caught with the book in his hands so he decided to hide it beneath some shrubs, figuring that he could come back for it later.

He walked away from it then, walking right past the man who had stopped on the path to watch him.

The professor went along calmly, feeling as smug as could be, telling himself that he had outsmarted the sleuth, pretending for a moment that he was the better man.

The feeling did not last.

Within the space of ten paces his heart began to fall into stomach.

He knew the man would retrieve the book, and he contemplated the implications.

He would need to do something desperate if he was going to survive this blunder.

Dr. Johnson looked out over the surface of the water as he turned away from the lake, fearing that he would be sleeping there soon, eighty feet below the surface…perhaps before the night was through.

He needed to see Ingrid, she might protect him, and he needed an ally…he thought he should call his protégé, Celene Forrester, and solicit her aid...she might introduce him to her father, the Colonel. He felt that he might be safe with someone like the great man to shield him.

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Amelie Elmquist-Forrester - The First Day

Amelie stood by her window in the antechamber of the wing she occupied in the Forrester mansion. It was a spacious room, cold and white, but well-lit and fashionably appointed.

She stood at the window watching her father, Colonel Forrester, as he conducted a prolonged interview of a poorly dressed young man in the garden below her.

There was something about the young man that troubled her, and it wasn’t just because he was tall and handsome, and disheveled.

Amelie could not peel away from the perch where she concealed herself behind the long white curtains, wishing more than anything that she could hear the conservation taking place between them.

She knew that the household staff were preparing a room for him in the guest quarters of her father’s wing at that very moment, though she did not hear of it until a few minutes prior to his arrival.

Nils, their butler, had kept the information from the staff and from her, though he had probably known for some days that her father intended to keep the boy as their guest for a term of days, possibly longer.

Amelie positively loathed those kinds of secrets. She felt that they were disruptive, and not just to her. They were disruptive to the staff as well.

She had been feeling out-of-control lately, and such disruptive secrets would only contribute to that.

Amelie had managed to squeeze a little information from Nils about the shabby-boy and what he would be doing at the mansion; Nils had told her that his name was Johnny Holiday, that he worked for the Saint Anthony Star, the evening paper, that he was an aspiring journalist and a student at the University of Saint Thomas, across the river in Pig’s Eye.

Nils said that her father had enjoined him to do some research, and perhaps write a story concerning Amelie’s husband, Bjorn Elmquist, who had gone missing a few months earlier.

Amelie had begun to shake, slightly, when the old butler told her that.

Nils told her that it was his understanding, that the Colonel, on account of his fondness for her husband, and believing he may never return, wanted something tangible to remember him by, a piece of prose to capture the essence of the man and remind him of their time together.

Amelie found Nils’ explanation to be preposterous.

She felt threatened by the prospect of this boy getting into her business…it was more than just disruptive, it was menacing.

However, Amelie knew her father was obsessed with stories, he believed narrative had a mystical quality, the way some aboriginal tribes believed that photographing a person could steal their soul or rob them of their essence, as the renowned anthropologist Margaret Meade had reported.

Her father believed that stories could do the same thing, like the ancient people whose singular ambition was to be remembered in song and have their deeds recorded in sagas and epic poetry, to be retold throughout the ages.

Ultimately, Amelie suspected that her father was not satisfied with the notion that Bjorn had decided to leave her without a good reason, and without saying goodbye to anyone…including him.

The Colonel wanted to find out why he had gone and he wanted someone who was unknown to both his friends and enemies to carry out the inquiry.

            Perhaps he would get a good story out of the investigation, she concluded, but that would just be sauce for the plum…so to speak.

Amelie was nervous, and shaky, and it was getting worse by the minute

She didn’t want anyone asking questions about her marriage. Bjorn was gone, and her father was right, he would not be coming back.

Amelie was certain of it, and she wanted her father to accept it and move on.

Bjorn would never be heard from again.

She watched them drinking coffee, while she-herself quaffed a tumbler of strong brown liquor; she needed it she told herself…she always needed it, to settle her nerves and prepare her for her own interview with the aspiring journalist, which she intended to conduct just as soon as her father was done with him.

Amelie was determined to discover his purpose.

Nils would bring him to her shortly and she would put his heels in the fire.

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