“I can tell you a great many things that you would like to know, but first you would have to agree to my terms. There is nothing for you here. Aren’t you curious?”
I was. I was super-duper curious. I was beyond curious. I thought about telling her I’d think about it if she let me talk to Z or if she could prove he was alive but I didn’t get the sense she was the bargaining type. If I didn’t follow her now I was never going to see this lady again.
“I don’t think so,” I told her. She looked legit disappointed and then composed herself again.
“Is there anything I can say that might change your mind?” she asked.
“What happened to your eye?” I asked, even though I knew whatever she said wasn’t going to change anything.
The smile I got for that question was real.
“Once upon a time I sacrificed an eye in exchange for the ability to see,” she said. “I’m sure you know magic requires sacrifices. For years I could see the whole story. It doesn’t work anymore, not here, because I made a decision and it left me with hazy versions of the now. Sometimes I miss the clarity, but again, sacrifices.”
I almost believed her. I stared at her and that cloudy blue eye stared back at me and caught the light from one of those vintage bulbs above us and it wasn’t a cataract at all, it was a swirling stormy sky, clear as anything. A crack of lightning flashed across it.
I downed the rest of my sidecar, grabbed my book and my bag and my coat with my stupid, sticky hands, and stood up, and lifted the book to my forehead, and saluted her.
I left the business card on the table.
And I got the heck out of there.
“I’m disappointed, Miss Hawkins,” she said as I walked away. I didn’t turn around and I couldn’t quite hear what she said next but I knew what it was.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
THE SON OF THE FORTUNE-TELLER is dead.
His world is an impossibly quiet darkness, empty and formless.
Somewhere in the formless darkness there is a voice.
Hello, Mister Rawlins.
The voice sounds very, very far away.
Hello hello hello.
Zachary cannot feel anything, not even the ground beneath his feet. Not even his feet, for that matter. There is only nothingness and a very faraway voice and nothing else.
Then it changes.
It is like waking and not remembering falling asleep but it is not gradual, his consciousness returns suddenly and shockingly, his existence suspended in surprise.
He is back in his body. Or a version of his body. He is lying on the ground wearing pajama pants and no shoes and a coat he still thinks of as Simon’s though both the coat and this death-worn version of it know they belong to the one who wears them.
On his chest is the mark of a freshly burned key but no wound, no blood.
He also has no heartbeat.
But the thing that convinces him beyond any doubt that he is truly dead is the fact that his glasses are gone and still, everything before his eyes is clear.
Zachary’s ideas about any possible afterlife have always varied, from nothingness to reincarnation to self-created infinite universes, but always came back to the futility of guessing and assuming he would find out when he died.
Now he is dead and lying on a shore much like the one he died upon, only different, but he is too angry to notice the differences just yet.
He tries to recall what happened and the memory
is painfully clear.