Read Online Andromeda Klein by Frank Portman - Free Book Online

reading them but touching them. She had been known to caress her van Rensselaer or her Magick Without Tears . That is, she thought of them as hers, though they belonged, strictly speaking, to the library, which meant the county and ultimately the state. But they were from her section, and she was the only one who cared about them. The library’s copy of Magick Without Tears was particularly fine, a small quarto, bound (or possibly rebound) in quarter calf and white buckram with gilt edges, a strange, obviously limited edition she had been unable to find on any official bibliography. Such books were themselves talismans, or they could be, powerful as objects. Hands laid on them could absorb their power, and even, some said, their contents. Living with them or around them could influence and transform your world.
    There were three of the library’s six Crowley books on the list and they were excellent choices: Magick in Theory and Practice , of course, and Magick Without Tears because it was a rare special edition, and The Vision and the Voice , or Liber 418 , an underappreciated classic documenting the exploration of the Enochian Aethyrs of Dr. Dee in the Sahara with Frater Omnia Vincam in 1909 e.v. It could also be read in Gems from the Equinox , but the stand-alone edition on the list was a far better text. It was odd, though, that True and Faithful was not one of the selections, as it was one of the library’s most impressive volumes and a text of great importance.
    The Sylvester Mouse list had its reasons, evidently.

iii.
    Andromeda Klein was thinking of “her” Magick Without Tears , the way it felt and the way it smelled, so her ride home was much more high-spirited than her previous ride had been.
    But the Klein household killed high spirits with striking regularity and precision. Andromeda made sure the red phone was turned off, in case she got a call or text from the mom on the wrong phone as she was walking in. It was a complicated system, but it was necessary. The mom had gotten her the blue phone, on a shared-minutes plan, a transparent scheme to keep track of whom Andromeda was talking to by means of the bill, which registered both incoming and outgoing calls and texts for all numbers on the account. The mom was not above calling numbers and interrogating whoever answered. The “Why have you been calling a health clinic?” conversation was infuriating and humiliating nearly a year later. And it still amused Andromeda to think about the mom’s response to the Old Folks Home (“Dromeda, it’s wonderful that you are volunteering, but you shouldn’t let it interfere with your schoolwork or work around the house….”). Yet it had been clear that the mom had to be stopped if Andromeda was going to have any privacy.
    St. Steve had suggested the solution, an additional prepaid phone, same make and service but red rather than blue so you could tell them apart. Switch the SIM cards and use the blue phone with the pay-as-you-go chip, so the mom would think it was the family-plan phone if she saw it, but the calls made on it wouldn’t turn up on the family bill. Keep the red phone with the family-plan chip hidden, and use it only for mom communication and for decoy calls to make it look like the phone was being used often enough to be believable. The decoy calls could even be fun, to the degree that they could elicit questions like “Honey, are you thinking of having something upholstered?” It kept them both busy.
    By the time Andromeda had locked up her bike and had gone in and up the stairs, she was already in a bad mood again, thinking about the hoops she had to jump through just to reach everybody else’s starting gate.
    The building was a Spanish-style duplex in the flats, a part of Clearview that Rosalie van Genuchten regularly referred to as “the ghetto.” The Klein family occupied the top half, left entrance. A combination of water damage and poor design and materials had caused the building to