The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

As I said, my family relations are rather complex.

“It seems, Helena,” I told her, “that since you learned so much at this press conference which I unfortunately missed, someone there must have had a clue as to where these important manuscripts actually are?” They certainly weren’t mentioned at the reading of the will, as I could attest.

“Why, yes, Ms. Behn,” she told me. “That’s the reason I’ve phoned so soon, of course, because time is of the essence. According to the executor, in the event of your cousin’s death all his property was to be placed in your hands no more than one week after the date of the reading of the will.”

Holy shit. My life had been put in danger—I’d been completely set up—and all by my own true blood brother, Sam.

Actually, it was not totally impossible to delineate my familial relationships for others. It was just a damned unpleasant experience.

My grandfather Hieronymus Behn, a Dutch immigrant to South Africa, married twice, first to Hermione, a wealthy Afrikaner widow who already had one young son, my uncle Lafcadio, whom Grandfather Hieronymus adopted and gave the Behn name. This marriage of Hieronymus and Hermione produced two children: my uncle Earnest, who was born in South Africa, and my aunt Zoe, born in Vienna, where the family moved just after the turn of the century. Therefore these two children were half siblings to my uncle Laf, since all three shared the same mother.

When Hermione became ill in Vienna and the children were still small—so the story goes—my grandfather, at Hermione’s request, hired an attractive young student from the Wiener Musik Konservatorium to serve as a sort of nanny or au pair to the younger children and to provide their music education. After Hermione’s death this young woman, Pandora, became in swift succession: my grandfather’s second wife; mother to my father, Augustus; and, after deserting them both to run off with my uncle Laf, the most famous opera singer in post-Secession Vienna.

To further tangle matters came the complex issue of my black-sheep aunt Zoe. Zoe—who’d supposedly been practically raised by Pandora and who had barely known her own sick and dying mother, much less her busy father—elected to run off with Laf and Pandora, thus creating, in a single blow, what later became known as the “family schism.” Zoe’s subsequent life as Queen of the Night, the most successful demimondaine and camp follower of the great and famous since Lola Montez, would take some describing.

What I now was dying to know, so to speak, was how much Uncle Laf, a key actor in the family drama, knew about these manuscripts I’d inherited; whose they actually were, Pandora’s or Zoe’s; and what role they played in the overall picture—information I hoped I’d glean this weekend. If I lived that long.

It was clear that Sam, too, knew far more than he was able to communicate. But why some decades-old letters and diaries were still too hot to handle, or why my father had said they were all in code, which no one else had mentioned, or why Sam had faked his own death with the aid of the U.S. government and set me up as the fall girl at a last-will-and-testament-blabbing press conference—all these remained to be seen. This last item still left me speechless with impotent rage. But for now, since I wouldn’t be able to confront Sam even by phone until tomorrow afternoon at the No-Name cowboy bar, I would have to figure out how to hedge my bets and stay alive.

My first step was to ring off the phone with Helena, star investigative journalist for the Post (who’d told me a good deal more than I’d told her). I said I’d let her know first thing, if I got the manuscripts.

My next step, critical to events in the days ahead, was to decide whether to let the parcel lie a bit longer in anonymity at the post office, leaving me with only this tiny claim check to conceal, or to pick up the package and try to figure out what to do with it until I could get it to Sam. He certainly deserved to have it returned with equal zeal, like the hot potato it actually was. Whatever the contents—and I was certain by now I didn’t want to know—they’d probably have been better left buried. What a fool I’d been ever to believe I could escape my awful family by burying myself here, potatolike, in Idaho.

That night before bedtime I lifted my woven, feathered “dream-catcher” down from the place where it always hung, keeping away bad dreams, just above my bed. I put it in a drawer instead. I thought if I planted the idea in my psyche, just before falling asleep, I might catch a dream that would place in my hand the thread I needed to guide me through the labyrinthine nightmare that was swiftly becoming my life.

I awoke before dawn in a frantic sweat.

I’d dreamed I was running—not upright, but on all fours—as fast as I possibly could through canelike underbrush so dense I could barely see. Behind me I could feel the hot breath of a large dark animal with ravenous, slathering jaws, its gnashing teeth snapping at me. I saw through the cane that I was coming to an open space of meadow with a wall just beyond. Could I cross it fast enough to leap up and escape the pursuing beast? I gave one extra push of power, though my lungs were already bursting; I crossed the patch of grass and leapt for the wall.

Just then, I woke up and sat bolt upright in bed. Jason, who’d crawled into the bed and somehow wedged himself flat beneath me and the warm pillow, was lying on his side, his eyes shut tight. But his feet were paddling back and forth as if he were running fast to escape something fearful. I started laughing.

“Wake up, Jason,” I