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.
Buy
Now on Amazon
