Now that I've edited Sods Law for the final time, I think, I've made it free from the 18th -22nd of November.
I think it's funny. It makes me laugh, although that, perhaps, isn't the best recommendation. Even my wife laughed, hopefully at it, and not at me. Below is an introduction to one of Arnold's weird clients. Later on in the books he plays a large part, although unintentionally.
Julian Mackenzie was an odd person, although odd was a masterful understatement. He could have been any age, but Arnold guessed around fifty. The man looked like someone who’d been thrown forward in time from very long ago. Certainly his clothes were several centuries out of date; especially the hair cut. He must have been the last man on the planet to douse his hair in pomade. More disturbing were his eyes. Why anyone would possibly want the whites of his glaring orbs tattooed black was something he didn’t want to think about. But none of that was what really bothered Arnold.
Julian was a white witch, or a Wiccan, or a warlock. The differing titles depended upon how much the curious man had drunk during his spell casting. All Arnold knew was that his trips to the man’s home were fraught with undiagnosed danger. True, he’d never actually seen anything weird, apart from Julian that was. But the creepy old place in which he lived was a storeroom of the most disgusting things Arnold had ever seen.
Hanging from virtually every surface, large and filthy bottles clanked against each other after the lightest of breezes, or even just Arnold’s passing. All housed dead insects, flies and small gruesome animals he had no desire to identify. In the master (and only) bedroom the walls were daubed with strange symbols. Pentacles, Julian had told him on his first night, laughing off his terrors. It was the odd writing, all in a language Arnold could not identify that really creeped him out. Ultimately all Arnold had to do was what he did in every client’s house: to watch the place, prevent burglars and put out any spontaneous fires. From electrical appliances? Arnold had asked him on the first night. "Oh, no," Julian had replied, "fires caused by any of my errant spells rebounding." He’d nearly walked out there and then, never to return, but the small white hand upon his arm had stopped him allowing Julian to change his story, claiming that he meant appliances.
His first time there had been frightening but happily free of any rebounding spells or impromptu blazes. Thereafter Arnold quickly learnt to ignore the potential danger, especially as he knew the door and freedom were just steps away. Moreover, if the bloody place took it into its head to burn down then it was probably for the better. In reality, fires and burglars were the least of his fears upon his twice monthly visit to this strange man’s house. What really scared him for the first few times was the ghostly rattling, possibly imagined but no less terrifying because of it. Those and the awful feeling that other things occupied the house with the man; things just waiting to jump out at him in the night when the noise from outside was non existent, leaving him isolated in a world of pure terror.
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