In For a Penny Read Online Free PDF Page B

unstylish and evidently eccentric, except for one blonde woman who looked a great deal like Marilyn Monroe. She was attractive, with an evident sexual allure and a dress meant to emphasize it, but the word neurotic sprang into Art’s mind within ten seconds of being introduced to her. She had apparently led past lives, the same phenomenon that accounted for the presence of several others of the group. All of them had been of elevated rank centuries past, although the blonde woman, whose name turned out to be Cassandra, had been a peasant girl originally, only becoming a queen, like Ruth in the Bible, after catching the eye of the king. Art found himself uninterested in this kind of thing—not that he had any grudge against it, but because past lives were just that, past. His life and its weird complications was on the front burner right now. He thought of the man who could bend spoons, but noticed right off that the spoons by the teapots were made of plastic, and he felt a little bit let down.
    After pouring a cup for himself and spooning in honey, he struck up a conversation with the man who had let him in, Roderick Gunther, who had written a book on Atlantis, and although Gunther’s connection to the lost city was obscure, there were hints that he could trace his lineage back to that far-flung time. His face was narrow and he was nearly chinless, and his forehead tilted back at a surprising angle. His heavy glasses magnified his eyes, which darted back and forth as he spoke, not as if his attention was wandering, but simply because of some optical tic. He showed Art a copy of his book, which was full of line drawings and maps, none of them very convincing. Art told him a little bit about his own adventures, the predictions, the telephone rigamarole. The man considered what he was saying with apparent interest.
    “Which direction do you sleep?” Gunther asked.
    “Pardon me?”
    “Is your bed oriented east to west or north to south?”
    “North to south,” Art told him.
    “Good. And you sleep with your head to the …?
    “South.”
    “There’s
a problem. It’s as simple as this—you’re incorrectly magnetized. Turn around. Sleep with your head to the north.”
    “All right,” Art said, nodding at the man. But it was impossible, actually. Their bedroom was set up in such a way that there was only one good place for the bed. If he turned around, he’d have to have his head at the foot end, in the middle of the room, and that seemed simply wrong to him. Sleeping backwards would certainly be the first step on the slippery slope of eccentricity Art noticed then that Gunther wore shoes with Velcro straps instead of laces and that there was a trail of hooked-together paper clips attached to his heel through a brass grommet.
    “I drink and bathe in ocean water,” Gunther was telling him. “Not mere salt water, mind you, but
ocean
water.”
    “Can
a person drink ocean water?” Art thought of sailors, dying of thirst in open boats.
    “Oh yes, very much so—an astonishing array of minerals in ocean water. You want it from ten miles out, though, far beyond any sewage outfall, preferably from the depths. I have a contract with a fisherman out of San Pedro who keeps me supplied. If you’re interested I can increase the order. He’ll fill a ten-gallon drum for twenty dollars, but you’ll have to pick it up at the docks, and only on Sunday afternoon.”
    A strange idea came into Art’s head—that Gunther ‘s high collar was intended to hide gill slits. Time to move on, he thought, and he excused himself cheerfully and wandered over to where a woman who must be Krystal talked to an older woman, perhaps in her seventies. “I’m Art Johnson,” he said, introducing himself to his hostess. “We spoke on the telephone.”
    “It’s nice to see you, Art. Let me introduce you to Mrs. Selma Vallerian. She was deeply involved in the search for Dr. Halsey.”
    Art smiled and nodded, wishing he knew whether Dr. Halsey