Strange Magic Read Online Free PDF Page A

it to the outside door. It wasn’t until he hit the fourth step down on the front porch that his feet tangled up again, causing another nosedive to the ground. This time, there was no soft chocolate cake to cushion his fall, his hands and face scraping painfully along the cement walkway leading to the house. This was definitely not the way he’d hoped his day would go. Wilson wished he could just lie there and die.
    What a damn day , he thought. I get drunk and blow my first good job in months. Then I get punched out by apissed-off macho dad who I’m sure isn’t gonna pay me. What else can go wrong?
    It was then Wilson looked up into the smiling face of a Billington police officer.
    “Heard you were causing trouble again, Wilson,” the blond-haired policeman said. “What the heck have you been up to now?”
    Wilson was on a first-name basis with most of the police in the area, seeing as most of them had scraped him out of one gutter or another during the last few years. He recognized the officer as Jacob Jackson and breathed a sigh of relief. Jacob was a whole lot nicer to him than some of the other cops in town.
    “I’m not causing any trouble, Jake,” Wilson slurred, staggering to his feet. “I’m just…ahh, I’m just—”
    “You’re just coming with me, clown-man,” Officer Jackson said as he led Wilson toward the waiting backseat of his black-and-white.
    “Yeah, okay, Jake. Whatever you say.”
    Jackson closed him in, went up to the house to get a few statements, and returned with something in his left hand. He climbed behind the wheel and started driving away.
    “They’re pretty pissed back there, Wilson. When are you ever gonna get your act together? Huh?”
    Wilson put his head in his hands in a display of honest shame. “That’s what I was trying to do, Jake. I guess I just fucked up again.”
    “Yeah, you did. Here, Reggie said to give you this.”
    He tossed Wilson’s big red sponge nose. Wilson picked it up, and with no place else to put it, stuck it back on his scratched and bleeding face.
    Officer Jackson took a peek at him in the rearviewmirror, shook his head sadly, and said, “You’ve been acting like a clown for years, Kemp. At least today you decided to dress the part. It’s real sad, man. Pretty pathetic.”
    Tears ran down Wilson’s made-up face. “I know, Jake. I know it is. I’m working on it.”
    It took another fifteen minutes for the cruiser to make it into the Billington Police Department’s parking lot. Wilson’s luck was looking up—his nose had stayed glued to his face for the entire trip.

C HAPTER T HREE
T HE P ERVERT
    The shades were drawn and the lights were out. A distraught man, naked as the day he’d been born, sat hunched over on a high-backed wooden desk chair with his head resting in his sweaty hands. The room was almost as bare, scantily furnished with a scarred rolltop desk and one other chair matching the one on which he sat. The walls were bare as well as the hardwood floor, save for a small pile of discarded clothing the man had recently removed.
    Twilight rays still snuck their way into the shadow-filled room between the cracks in the blinds, casting a distorted silhouette of the troubled man against the far wall. He didn’t know the exact time of day, but he guessed it to be around 9:15 P.M., not that it was important. All that mattered was the sun was nearly gone, only a tiny sliver hung on the horizon, and soon the sky would be dark. He hated the dark, or to be more precise, he hated himself when it was dark. When the sun abandoned this part of the world, a transformation sometimes happened to him. He changed. Nothing as drastic as sprouting hair and long, sharp teeth like the legendary werewolf; but a change nonetheless.
    Ordinarily, the frightened man would have turned onevery light in the house rather than sit in the darkening gloom, but he had to keep the room dark and keep the shades drawn for fear anyone might see him change. Exposure