Michael Bedard Quotes

When Cass and his mother move to the upper floor in an old house, a great curiosity develops about Mr. Magnus, who lives on the ground floor.

No one goes near the place. It stands in the shadows...dark, crumbling, and forbidding. At night, smoke curls from beneath its doors, and an old man toils in secret.

Cass and a new friend Maddy are initiated into the secret world of alchemy and the mysterious search for true meaning as they befriend the old man.

“The old man was standing with his back to Cass, bent over a squat potbellied stove from which a length of stovepipe launched off awkwardly into the ceiling. The rest of the garage was an incredible chaos of junk and clutter.

Inside, something is moving...tongues of luminous color lap against the glass...coiling and curling...begging to be released.

The old man stands before his creation. Silently he tends the fires that feed it...waiting for the right moment to unleash its power upon the world.

He stood motionless before the stove, wearing a tattered dressing gown trimmed with satin, his thin white hair hanging over the collar. A single bare bulb in the ceiling behind him cast his weedy shadow on the wall.

“Now he moved to one side, and Cass gaped in astonishment...It was unlike anything he had ever seen. He instinctively drew back from the hole and something sharp bit deeply into his leg.”

“For the past week his mother, Alison, and he had been hunting them in earnest, setting out the traps around the apartment at night, shaking out the catch come morning, like a pair of trappers tending their line.”

″ It was just past nine the next morning when they stepped off the bus on the edge of a large park. Yesterday’s storm, no doubt winter’s last stand, had spread a thick icing of snow over the park. A tenuous path had been tramped through it.”