Trumps of Doom Read Free Page B

mantelpiece between the clock and a stack of paperbacks dealing with the occult.   The moment I touched them and felt their coldness I realized that this was even more serious than I had thought.   They had to be the thing of mine she’d had that I would be needing-only they were not really mine, though as I riffled through I recognized them on one level and was puzzled by them on another.   They were cards, Trumps, like yet unlike any I had ever seen before.
    It was not a complete deck.   Just a few cards, actually, and strange.   I slipped them into my side pocket quickly when I heard the siren.   Time for solitaire later.
    I tore down the stairs and out the back door, encountering no one.   Fido still lay where he had fallen and all the neighborhood dogs were discussing it.   I vaulted fences and tram pled flowerbeds, cutting through backyards on my way over to the side street where I was parked.
    Minutes later I was miles away, trying to scrub the bloody pawprints from my memory.,

CHAPTER 2
    I drove away from the bay until I came to a quiet, well-treed area.   I stopped the car and got out and walked.
    After a long while I located a small, deserted park.   I seated myself on one of the benches, took out the Trumps and studied them.   A few seemed half familiar and the rest were totally puzzling.   I stared too long at one end seemed to hear a siren song.   I put them down.   I did not recognize the style.   This was extremely awkward.
    I was reminded of the story of a world-famous toxicologist who inadvertently ingested a poison for which there was no antidote.   The question foremost in his mind was, Had he taken a lethal dose? He looked it up in a classic textbook that he himself had written years before.   According to his own book he had had it.   He checked another, written by an equally eminent professional.   According to that one he had taken only about half the amount necessary to do in someone of his body mass.   So he sat down and waited, hoping he’d been wrong.
    I felt that way because I am an expert on these things.   I thought that I knew the work of everyone who might be capable of producing such items.   I picked up one of the cards, which held a peculiar, almost familiar fascination for me-depicting a small grassy point jutting out into a quiet lake, a sliver of something bright, glistening, unidentifiable, off to the right.   I exhaled heavily upon it, fogging it for an instant, and struck it with my fingernail.   It rang like a glass bell and flickered to life.   Shadows swam and pulsed as the scene inched into evening.   I passed my hand over it and it grew still once again-back to lake, grasses, daytime.
    Very distant.   Time’s stream flowed faster there in relationship to my present situation.   Interesting.
    I groped for an old pipe with which I sometimes indulge myself, filled it, lit it, puffed it, and mused.   The cards were functional all right, not some clever imitations, and though I did not understand their purpose, that was not my main concern at the moment.
    Today was April 30, and I had faced death once again.   I had yet to confront the person who had been playing with my life.   S had again employed a proxy menace.   And that was no ordinary dog I had destroyed.   And the cards .   .   .   where had Julia gotten them and why had she wanted me to have them? The cards and the dog indicated a power beyond that of an ordinary person.   All along I had thought I’d been the subject of the unwelcome attention of some psycho, whom I could deal with at my leisure.   But this morning’s events put an entirely different complexion on the case.   It meant that I had one hell of an enemy somewhere.
    I shuddered.   I wanted to talk to Luke again, get him to reconstruct their conversation of the previous evening, see whether Julia had said anything that might provide me with a clue.   I’d like to go back and search her apartment more carefully, too.