All the candles burn down. Tom, who has returned from the Forest in pieces, does not sleep. He reads, but the words wash over him in waves of neat black print. He is cold, but not overpoweringly so. Every so often he feels the stirrings of a migraine, but it never amounts to anything but a faint pulse behind his eyes. He entertains the vague idea of writing in the diary--which lies beside him on the common room couch--but every time he touches it is like a wound splitting open, raw and hot and bloody. It might fade with time or it might not. He doesn't know. Silence. It winds loosely around him, seeps through his skin and into his blood. He hangs there, suspended in the quiet, for seconds or minutes or hours. It doesn't matter. But eventually,
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Tom's lips curve with elegant disinterest as the barman slams a flagon of something or other down in front of him and goes back to his unintelligible conversation with a one-eyed woman whose long and ragged fingernails tap out some aimless beat--one, two, three, four--on the bar.
A door slams. Tom traces patterns in the dusty wood--spirals and whorls which double back and over each other--and very deliberately ignores the presence of the whippet-thin hunchback until he's standing right beside Tom at the bar.
What do you want? rasps the stooping man in Czech, abandoning any introduction. He stinks of sweat and rancid water and bitter Czechoslovak cigarettes. His jacket is too short in the arm, displaying sallow, bony wrists and the edge of something terrible tattooed on his skin in faded black ink.
I was looking for the magician of Prague, Tom replies in German, not Czech, noting with amusement the way the man starts horribly and the other two break off their rapid fire muttering to shoot Tom matching filthy glares. Three years after the war and the blood may have dried on the streets but all the hate remains, sticky and fresh. But now I think I've found …show more content…
On Samhain, the story goes, spirits reawaken inside their useless flesh, repulsed by what they have become. Driven mad by the dark and the silence and the stench, they flee their coffins and begin the long battle through six feet of wet earth, up towards the stars. They are just corporeal enough, however, to be snagged in the web of spindly yew-roots which have crept out through the churchyard and between the coffins over all those quiet centuries; it is here, consumed by the yew, that the soul's journey comes to its final end. This is why the sap and leaves are poisonous; this is why the yew can live for more than two thousand years, immortal on a diet of human souls.
Of course, myths are just myths, except when they are not. But Tom does not yet know of Inferi. Instead he curls young fingers around the dark wood with its bright phoenix core and in one smooth sweep that cloying pain is wiped away and a sudden rush of gold rains down, as bright as the gleam in Tom's eyes. Curious, most curious, Ollivander mutters, followed by something else, quieter this time, that Tom is too distracted to discern. He passes the man five gold coins, slips his new wand into his jacket pocket instead of taking the box and leaves the shop dazedly, vanishing into the
Tom's lips curve with elegant disinterest as the barman slams a flagon of something or other down in front of him and goes back to his unintelligible conversation with a one-eyed woman whose long and ragged fingernails tap out some aimless beat--one, two, three, four--on the bar.
A door slams. Tom traces patterns in the dusty wood--spirals and whorls which double back and over each other--and very deliberately ignores the presence of the whippet-thin hunchback until he's standing right beside Tom at the bar.
What do you want? rasps the stooping man in Czech, abandoning any introduction. He stinks of sweat and rancid water and bitter Czechoslovak cigarettes. His jacket is too short in the arm, displaying sallow, bony wrists and the edge of something terrible tattooed on his skin in faded black ink.
I was looking for the magician of Prague, Tom replies in German, not Czech, noting with amusement the way the man starts horribly and the other two break off their rapid fire muttering to shoot Tom matching filthy glares. Three years after the war and the blood may have dried on the streets but all the hate remains, sticky and fresh. But now I think I've found …show more content…
On Samhain, the story goes, spirits reawaken inside their useless flesh, repulsed by what they have become. Driven mad by the dark and the silence and the stench, they flee their coffins and begin the long battle through six feet of wet earth, up towards the stars. They are just corporeal enough, however, to be snagged in the web of spindly yew-roots which have crept out through the churchyard and between the coffins over all those quiet centuries; it is here, consumed by the yew, that the soul's journey comes to its final end. This is why the sap and leaves are poisonous; this is why the yew can live for more than two thousand years, immortal on a diet of human souls.
Of course, myths are just myths, except when they are not. But Tom does not yet know of Inferi. Instead he curls young fingers around the dark wood with its bright phoenix core and in one smooth sweep that cloying pain is wiped away and a sudden rush of gold rains down, as bright as the gleam in Tom's eyes. Curious, most curious, Ollivander mutters, followed by something else, quieter this time, that Tom is too distracted to discern. He passes the man five gold coins, slips his new wand into his jacket pocket instead of taking the box and leaves the shop dazedly, vanishing into the