Brad’s hand was tight on hers. He was with her now. She believed that he loved her, and that they could make it.
“In the dark and in the mist, there lie the places of danger. Let not the hand that holds you slip, for when the wind blows and the trees dip, there you find death,” Damien said. “Look to the ball, keep your eyes on the crystal.”
She was compelled to look back. She heard screaming again, and sobbing full of deep agony. The branches of the trees were like skeletal hands. Snow began to fall, and then…
Suddenly she was staring at the corpse of a woman, dangling from a hangman’s noose tied to one of the skeletal branches. A scream caught in her own throat as the body rotted right in front of her eyes.
“Indians,” Brad said. He sounded almost bewitched. “Sorry, Native Americans.”
She managed to tear her eyes from the deathly scene to stare at Brad. He was smiling, clearly seeing something entirely different.
“The first Thanksgiving dinner,” he said, marveling.
She had to get out of there.
“You’re really good,” Brad told Damien.
Damien smiled at him, then turned to Mary, and she thought there was something nasty in his stare, something licentious and…evil.
“Touch the crystal,” Damien commanded them.
No. She wasn’t going to do it.
But she was compelled. It was a projector of some kind, she told herself. It was a holograph. Had to be.
Whatever it was, whatever the compulsion, Brad felt it, too. Their hands still joined, they touched the crystal ball.
Now, when she stared into its depths, she saw corn.
Rows and rows of corn.
Cornfields filled with scarecrows and an overwhelming sense of evil.
Was Brad seeing the same thing now? Whatever he saw, he was staring at the ball as if hypnotized.
“You are in danger,” Damien told Brad. “You loved, but you betrayed, and now you’re weak. And because you’re weak—” he turned to Mary “—you are easy prey.” Damien spoke as if the words gave him pleasure. “He lacks the faith in himself necessary to fight for you, so you will be lost in the mists of evil.”
Brad stood abruptly and looked down at Damien, furious. “What the hell is this? You should be arrested. We didn’t come here for this kind of crap.”
Damien rose, too. “I’m sorry you didn’t like the reading, but the crystal tells the truth. It speaks, not I.”
Brad threw a twenty on the table, then grabbed Mary’s hand firmly and pulled her out of the tent with him.
Back on the pedestrian mall, they were surrounded by people laughing, having fun. A group of kids burst out of one of the haunted houses, laughing. An old man, trying to avoid all the rush, slipped into a coffee shop. A woman walked by with two little girls dressed up as fairies. Even the dogs walking by were in costume.
“Leave it to me to pick the jerk,” Brad said apologetically.
“Hey, don’t worry. He felt he had to put on a show, that’s all.” She was careful to speak lightly. Brad had been really angry, maybe even shaken. It was strange, the way Damien had been able to sense the tension they were escaping and home right in on it.
But now, out here, surrounded by shrieks of delight, quiet conversations, silliness and games and laughter, the visions in the crystal ball seemed like fading images, nothing more.
“I’ll tell you, though, that turkey dinner looked fabulous. I’m starving,” Brad said. “I swear, I could almost smell turkey. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure those In—Native Americans were sitting down to dinner. They had hatchets, and they looked angry.”
Mary smiled. A breeze was blowing. It felt fresh and clean. She already felt like laughing, though it did trouble her that she hadn’t seen any turkey dinner. A holograph should have been a holograph, right? Or maybe there were different projectors. The guy might be an asshole, but his act was a good one.
And she was not going to let herself be unnerved by it.
Still, over a late lunch she couldn’t help asking him, “Brad, was that turkey dinner all you saw?”
“Well…”
He sounded reluctant, she thought, and wondered why.
Finally he went on. “At the end…I know this sounds crazy, but there was this cornfield, and this body that…” He looked at her and said, “Forget it. It was just some stupid illusion.”
“Why were you so angry?” she asked.
“Because he pegged me for a jerk,” he said, looking at her apologetically. “If Jeremy were here, he’d know how the guy pulled it off. In fact…” He laughed. “I can just see Jeremy staring at that stupid crystal ball, then getting up and figuring out where Damien—or whatever the jerk’s real name is—keeps all his special-effects equipment.”
Mary smiled. “He’s in New Orleans almost all the time now, huh?”