On the other walls hung a huge green monster-man so muscled he appeared to be a green lump, with huge bare feet, clad only in tattered purple pants, giving an animal leer; a woman whirling a golden lasso, wearing a brassiere shaped like an eagle and zooming through the air atop an airplane made of glass; a Viking with long yellow hair and bulging muscles, swinging a hammer as large as he, his icy blue eyes flashing a solemn warning; a man dressed in a midnight-blue cowl with pointy ears like a cat and a midnight-blue cape to match, which billowed even more than the sorcerer’s, the emblem of a bat planted across his chest. There were posters of little creatures with hair on their feet as thick as rugs, who possessed round bellies and smoked huge pipes. There were designs for starships, and diagrams of battlestars, star maps and star charts, a list of names of demons and pictures of gryphons and krakens and gorgons . . .

Papers were scattered about the room; on the bed, on the floor, on the desk and the dresser and the nightstand. And the books. Books piled high, opened and marked. Old books, new books. Colorful and drab. Books half-read standing on their parted pages, the spines pointing toward the ceiling. Boy, his grandfather would say, cross and vexed, Can’t you keep your room no neater than this? What you gone do when they puts you in the army? They don’t have no such foolishness there. But the A’s and A-pluses on his report card would quiet his grandfather’s commands—Clean up that room, boy—to mere grumbles, mild reproaches, disapproving shakes of his head.

The school library allowed Horace, or any other student, to check out only three books at a time. So he also belonged to both the county library in Crosstown and the local library in Sutton. Then there were the book clubs: the Book-of-the-Month Club; the History Book Club; the Science Fiction Book Club . . . He borrowed books from his teachers, from his friends. When he went to larger cities—Wilmington, Kinston, Goldsboro—he would buy even more books, usually paperbacks. Most of them he had read, some more than once; in others, mostly the nonfiction, he read the parts that interested him most, from ancient Chinese history to shipbuilding to biographies of famous businessmen and great scientists. But that had been before; now he concentrated on the occult.