Read Online Now You See It by Richard Matheson - Free Book Online

walked over to my wheelchair and laid his right hand on my shoulder.
    “I apologize for frightening you,
Padre,”
he said. “But I wanted you, of all people, to see the effect. It
was
a grand one, wasn’t it?”
    Leaning over, he kissed me on the cheek, then turned away and walked back to Harry.
Sonny, Sonny
, I was thinking,
what is happening in your mind?
    Reaching Harry, he began explaining—in a positively cheerful voice.
    “Let me anticipate your questions,” he said. “One, the capsules: B-complex. I added the smell of bitter almonds to fool you. Two, the lack of heartbeat as you listened: A skill I learned in India from one Pandit Khaj, a fakir of surpassing knowledge.”
    Pandit Khaj! Of course!
I thought.
How could I have forgotten that?
    “Three, my heartrending performance,” Max was saying. “Have I not told you that a magician is, first and foremost, a skilled actor?”
    Skilled indeed
, I thought.
Enough to almost finish me off, Sonny boy
.
    Harry found his voice then.
    “You bastard,” he said.
“You dirty, miserable, shit-faced, mother-fucking, cocksucking son of a bitch!”
    “Kudos,” Max responded. “You appear to have incorporated all the major profanities in one sentence. I shall forth with notify
The Guinness Book of Records.”
    Ambivalence raged within me. I wanted to bop my son on the head for putting me through such an ordeal.
    I also wanted to laugh aloud. (I’ve always yearned for the unreachable.)
    Harry, on the other hand, was obviously not experiencing ambivalence at all. The emotion he felt was singular and pure.
    Revulsion.
    With a shake of his head, he pushed to his feet and moved unevenly to the chair. Picking up his attaché case and hat, he started for the entry hall.
    Max strode quickly to the desk and reached beneath it.
    As Harry approached the door, I heard a click in the latching mechanism. Harry turned the knob and tried to pull the door in. It would not move.
    Harry didn’t turn. I saw his face gone hard. In a low-pitched voice, trembling with anger, he said, “Unlock the door, Max.”
    Max did not reply. Harry waited, then spoke again, his tone more vehement.
“Unlock the door
, Max,” he ordered.
    No response.
    Harry whirled, cheeks flushed with rage. “Unlock the fucking door!” he shouted.
    Max did not reply or move.
    With a teeth-clenched grimace, Harry lunged toward the desk.
    Max picked up the pair of dueling pistols and stepped aside as his frothing agent searched for the button which would unlock the door.
    “All right, where
is
it?” he demanded. He kept groping underneath the desk in vain. “Damn it!” he cried. He glared at Max.
    Then a vengeful smile pulled back his lips. “All right,” he said. “I’m calling the police.”
    Max shifted one of the pistols to his left hand, extending the other in his right, pointed at Harry’s chest.
    “I wouldn’t,” he said.
    Harry’s snarl was soundless. “Another of your frigging little tricks?”
    Max’s smile was barely visible.
    “Care to test that supposition?” he inquired.
    Harry wasn’t sure anymore; Max was behaving too erratically.
    He did not pick up the telephone receiver.
    Still, his fury bubbled over, uncontrollable.
    “You went through all that
shit
before—the arsenic, the phony death—just to get back at me?”
    “In part,” Max answered quietly.
    “All that crap about your precious Adelaide?” Harry sneered.
    Mistake.
    He twitched with a grunt of shock as Max’s face went rigid and his arm abruptly levered out, pointing the pistol at Harry’s head.
    Harry cried out in stunned dismay as Max pulled the trigger and the pistol fired with a deafening report.
    On the mantelpiece, a vase exploded like a bomb, shooting terra-cotta shrapnel in all directions, making Harry gasp and fling his arms up automatically. In his agitated state, he’d failed to notice Max’s wrist cock to the left an instant before he fired. I’d noticed, but it hadn’t relieved my state of