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

“Oh, Miz Behn, I’m sorry,” said George, weighing and stamping things for the other customers. “I got to tell you this was all my fault, but I tried to make it up. Jest wait here fer a minute, and I’ll get it right quick.”

He tapped a bell on the counter as I got that horrid sinking feeling again. What had gone wrong? What did I need to be made up for by George? What was he going to get for me “right quick”? I was horribly afraid I knew, but I filled out my form anyway and handed it to him.

The assistant clerk, Stuart, came out from the back and started taking slips from those who’d come to collect parcels. George disappeared in the back and returned with a package. It didn’t look much like the one I’d received last week—but it was in a large, battered, padded mailing pouch such as Sam had described, about the size of two reams of paper.

“I gave you the wrong parcel last week,” said George. “This was the one what matched your yellow claim slip, but I didn’t check. That other one come in the very day you was here; we hadn’t filled out a slip to you about it yet. This Saturday, we was going through packages down here, to send unclaimed ones back to the sender—and lucky I was here jest then, and I seen my mistake. I sure am sorry about that, Miz Behn.”

He handed me the parcel, and I gritted my teeth before looking at it. I knew I had only ten minutes to get to the airport for my flight to Europe with Wolfgang Hauser. I forced myself to look at the package. The postmark was San Francisco, just as on the original yellow claim slip I’d found in the snow. And this time there could be no mistake: the handwriting scrawled across the mailing pouch was Sam’s.

THE GIFT

The danger [to giver and receiver is] nowhere better sensed than in the very ancient Germanic law and languages. This explains the double meaning of the word gift in all these languages: on the one hand a gift, on the other poison.…

This theme of the fatal gift, the present or item of property that is changed into poison, is fundamental in Germanic folklore. The Rhein gold is fatal to the one who conquers it, Hagen’s cup is mortal to the hero who drinks from it. A thousand stories and romances of this kind, both Germanic and Celtic, still haunt our sensibilities.

—Marcel Mauss,

The Gift

[When Prometheus stole fire from the gods, in retaliation] Zeus told the fabled craftsman Hephaestus to create a gift: to combine dirt and water and form a beautiful maiden just like the immortal goddesses … then Zeus instructed Hermes to fill her full of shameless trickery and deceit.… Hermes named this female “Pandora”: she who gives all gifts.

Epimetheus had forgotten that his brother Prometheus had warned him never to accept a gift sent by Olympian Zeus, to return it in case it should prove an evil to mankind. But Epimetheus took the gift. Only later, when the evil was his own, did he comprehend.

—Hesiod,

Works and Days

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. (I fear Greeks, even those bearing gifts.)

—Virgil,

The Aeneid

I fled the post office, jumped in my car, and headed at breakneck pace for the airport. I screeched into the parking lot, jumped out, grabbed my stuff, and tore across the icy drive. Inside, I frantically scanned the two gate areas. Down at the end near Gate-B security I saw Wolfgang, waving his arms in heated debate with a guy from the ground crew.

“Thank God,” Wolfgang said with relief the moment he saw me, but I could tell he was angry. To the crewman he said quickly, “Are we too late?”

“One sec,” the man said, picking up the phone to call the cockpit as, behind his back, Wolfgang glared at me. The man listened, then nodded. “The steps are still there—but you better hop to it, buddy. We got a schedule.”

He ran our bags through the scanner and pulled our ticket stubs. We dashed across the tarmac and up the metal steps. The instant our seatbelts had clicked into place, the plane was moving.

“I hope you have a good explanation for this,” Wolfgang said as we taxied toward the runway. “You knew there wasn’t another flight to Salt Lake for three hours. For the past half-hour I’ve talked and talked to convince them to hold the plane; we might have missed all our connections! What did you think you were doing?”

My heart, still pounding from that run, was hammering in my ears; my breath came in short hard bursts; I could barely speak.

“I—um—I had to run an important errand en route.”

“An errand?” Wolfgang said in disbelief.

He was about to add more, but just then the propjets started revving for takeoff. His lips were still moving, so I gestured that I could no longer hear him. He turned away in anger and pulled some papers from his briefcase, leafing through them as our plane raced down the runway and gained altitude. We didn’t speak again during the smooth but deafening forty-minute flight to Salt Lake. That was okay with me. I had plenty of thinking to do.

There was no question the parcel inside my canvas shoulder bag now stuffed under my flight seat was the gift my grandmother Pandora had bequeathed Uncle Earnest, which then passed from him to Sam—a gift so dangerous the body count included not only a few of Sam’s colleagues but maybe Pandora and Earnest as well—a gift so destructive that, given a difference of only seconds, it could have killed Sam too. Now the gift was mine.

Since I no longer trusted friends, colleagues, and most members of my own family to be anywhere near this poisonous parcel, I’d been understandably reluctant, under the eyes of a dozen postal patrons,