Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore Read Online Free PDF

see Mrs. Winesap's eye peering back at her. Instead she went to the phone, moved both by her assertion and the need to leave some kind of message.
    Harvey always considered it an intrusion for Marianne to tell him anything. Nonetheless, he would deeply resent not being told. A quick message on his machine would be the least risky way of informing him, and if she avoided answering the phone for a while after that, he might see Makr Avehl Zahmani's name on the news and realize that Marianne was, in fact, only telling him the truth. It was part of Harvey's usual treatment of her to accuse her of making up stories, as though she were still seven years old, and once committed to the assertion that she was fabricating it would be hard for him to back off. She encouraged herself to take a deep breath and do it, managing to make the message sound calm and good-humored. She unplugged the phone with a sense of relief. She didn't want to hear it ring if he called her back.
    "I am ahead on points," she told herself. "Well ahead, and I have no intention of ever getting behind again." She tried the pot of crocuses in various places, finally putting them on the window seat as she had originally intended, then threw together a few scrappy bites of supper. When she had finished, she started to take the dishes into the kitchen, stumbling unexpectedly over something which was not supposed to be there.
    The Box.
    It was at the edge of the kitchen counter, where she could not avoid stepping over it, where she must have already stepped over it while preparing her meal without seeing it, without remembering. She stared at it in confusion. That morning—
    yes, that morning it had been in the living room under the coffee table. Who could have moved it? Mrs. Winesap? Perhaps out of some desire to help, some instinct to tidy up? With a grimace of actual pain she lifted it back to the place she last remembered it being, half under the table, possessed in that moment by a completely superstitious awe and fear.
    The Box was a symbolic embodyment of Harvey-ness. If she gave him cause for disturbance up in Boston, then the Box would take it out on her down here in Virginia. She knew this was ridiculous but was as firmly convinced of it as she was of her own name. Her mood of valiant contentment destroyed, she went about her evening chores in a mood of dogged irritation. Sounds bothered her. Traffic. Mrs. Winesap rattling the trash cans. Doors closing. A phone ringing. Mrs. Winesap laboring up the stairs and a repetition of that firm, brook-no-nonsense knock, the knob turning, her voice.
    "Girl, your brother called our phone. Says he's been trying to reach you and can't get an answer." Broad face poked around the edge of the door, eyes frankly curious as the face was frankly friendly.
    "Oh—shit," said Marianne, breaking her own rules concerning language and behavior.
    Mrs. Winesap pulled a parody of shock over her face. She had heard Marianne's lecture on scatology directed more than once at Mr. Larkin. "Got the phone unplugged, haven't you?"
    Marianne nodded in dismal annoyance. "How did he know to call you? He's never been here. He's never even met you."
    "Yes, he did. Came by one day about two weeks ago. Told me he was your brother. Introduced himself. Course, I introduced myself back. We talked some."
    "You... talked some."
    "I told him it was a nice day," she reported with dignity,
    "and I told him you weren't in your apartment but I'd be glad to take a message. He pumped me all about you, and I let him know I was blind in both eyes and couldn't hear out of either ear. Did tell him my name, though, and I'm in the book."
    "You never told me."
    "No reason to. Why upset you? I didn't like him, so I figured you probably didn't either. He was all over sparkle like a merry-go-round horse, expecting anyone with a—with breasts to fall down and play dead."
    "Oh." This was precisely Marianne's view of Harvey, but she had not thought it generally shared. This