The Master Read Online Free Page B

the goblins will someday pay. Someday, I promise
.
    He suddenly remembered their last kiss—how sweet she had been and how shy, as she had looked up at him with wide golden eyes. There has been mimosa and orange blossoms in bloom then, too, and she’d worn a wreath of them in her hair.
    Qasim allowed himself a moment to savor the only happy recollection of his life, and then he slammed the door on her memory.
    He would never think of her again.

 
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II
A HAUNTED MAN

Chapter One
    December 20, 2005
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    Qasim’s face twitched. It still hurt, but the surgery in New Orleans had been largely successful. There were just a few sutures in his mouth holding his skin together at the place where his tusks had been removed by a now dead oral surgeon. Contact lenses hid his eyes, though the irises were still an unpleasant shade of gray that resembled the smoke from burning tires, and he’d learned how to roll up his tongue so that it didn’t show when he spoke. Really, in spite of the pallor that belonged on someone in a crack house, and his size, he looked quite respectable; he could be any exceptionally muscular man involved in a near-fatal car crash and then stuck in a hospital for months to recover in darkness.
    Still, the Christmas crowds tended to part around him, as though these sheep somehow sensed—in spite of his brightly colored shopping bag from Cherries Galore clasped in his now five-fingered hand—that he was not truly one of them. He had actually terrified the clerk in the fruit shop into trembling speechlessness. The boy would probably have to send his uniform to the cleaners after work. It had been an accidental revelation, a moment of unusual discernment on the young man’s part and a rare moment of unguardedness on Qasim’s, when the boy had looked him in the eye and seen the true monster that dwelled behind the colored plastic lenses. It was potentially inconvenient, too, though it was good to know that he could still strike terror into the human heart without even trying. There would be a time to put such fear to use. Still, if the boy talked, he would have to be taken care of, and Qasim would rather not have the police around, fussing over a body. That would make everyone extra watchful and fearful.
    Fear . . . it had its uses, but it was overused in human civilization. Qasim had seen politicians routinely use it to turn the populace into a unified voting block guided to key choices beneficial to society—at least, beneficial to the politicians’ society.
    Advertisers used low-grade fear, too, and quite effectively. Dandruff, facial lines, body odor, bad breath, gum disease, flared or peg-leg jeans—it was universal, this insidious installation of concern about one’s health and appearance. It made the human populace so predictable and dull. Not that they needed much help.
    Qasim stood still, eavesdropping on the thoughts around him. Yes, it was here even now: mild but chronic fear and worry. It was everywhere. Just as he’d expected. And the sheep suspected nothing. They didn’t know that death walked among them; they just milled about, row upon column upon regiment—human clots of worried eyes and troubled brains, looking at watches, looking at their children, mostly looking at the other humans who stood between them and the throne where the fake Santa Claus held court. And when there was nothing else left to stare at, they gazed into the eyes of the mechanical snowmen shoveling fake snow at the outskirts of this fake North Pole, and they grazed on pretzels and popcorn. The snowmen ignored them, as machines almost always did, but that didn’t stop the humans from staring.
    Qasim didn’t understand the human fascination with machines—except for guns, which were useful and had no brains of their own. He didn’t like complex electronic devices. From cars to computers to compact-disc players, machines had to be constantly