Crystal Ball (7AF)

    Brandon Gomes was a particularly boring name, so his home-made business cards and his store front used the name Galdur.

    Brandon couldn’t remember where he’d read the name. Some fairytale he found in a burned-out husk of a library a few years back? It didn’t matter. No last name this time. The last two times, family names invited recounting of said family, questions of origin, and all manner of things he had no interest in devising on the spot. 

    “I am ready,” Brandon said.

    His first word-of-mouth recommendation since he restarted his con. If he nailed this one, he was on his way.

    He spoke, selecting a tone in his highest natural range. For this run-through he decided not to bother with a foreign accent. Hard things to keep consistent. Last time a patron from his proclaimed native Galway, found his accent of choice anything but pure. He lamented that particular error. He had been doing so well that time.

    Staring into the small sphere of glass on the table, he didn’t look up as his appointment entered. He tilted his head low, revealing only the brown stubble on the top of his close-cropped scalp and held his arms wide and cupped gently forward as he focused completely on the red ball before him.

    He focused on it not as a trick, but as a means of watching without being seen, using reflections where nobody remembered their images existed. The semi-translucent red liquid presented her features as it had other recent customers in its distorted fish eye lens. Her hair contained touches of gray around her temples, with course straggly hairs that stuck out from her bouncing ponytail. The smell of her perfume hit him, strong and rose-scented. It overpowered the sandalwood incense burning a few feet away. No small achievement. She wore a wedding ring, but not on the traditional finger or hand. It was too big for her by at least two sizes. Her clothing, in a style now popular in the Southern States of America, mimicked plaids and sweaters of pre-Fall.

    The ball served more than just the powers of observation. Mirrors made people suspicious, but few understood that any reflective surface served for a touch of iconomancy or scrying. It was said that there was a hint of the original in every image. The essence of a person locked in a painting, and touch of a soul reflected in a mirror. Actual tethering to the mortal coil in the case of idemancy, the post-Fall voodoo of the world, which was built from hairs and stolen bits of a person had proven particularly powerful. Fears and hopes had been given flesh by the new rules of Mother Nature. Those defenseless portraits, pieces and reflections, devoid of the greater whole, allowed magic to wend its way into people and affect the totality with greater ease than a direct assault, where consciousness could fight back.

    Words rose from the back of his throat in the lowest register he could sustain for several minutes. Italian served as his magical language of choice. Few enough spoke it and it sounded enough like the northern Latin of the Kritarchy that it gave the entire experience an added element of truth.

    Brandon, as Galdur, coaxed the image from his view of the reflection, showing the faint outline of a man standing beside her. Taller than her in the reflection, his arm draped lovingly around her. Brandon had hoped for more, but his showmanship with stage magic trumped his actual skill of iconomancy magic.

    “I see a man. He is standing by your side, in a loving embrace, but he is not with you anymore.”

    The last part was a guess but a good enough one given the ring and the vision.

    “My husband,” she said. “Michael.”

    “Michael has something he wishes to say to you today,” Brandon offered up.      “Not a secret, but something you need to know, which he did not have time to say.”

    The standard playbook worked well even before the Fall. Cold reading combined with even a hint of magic was criminally easy.

    “Yes!” She leaned forward in her seat.

    Brandon waited to see if she gave him a hint of which of the big-ticket items to probe. Middle age and recent death, he guessed finances. She was old enough to have a child if that failed. The intensity of her stare at the old snow globe filled with beet juice said nothing so mundane as work.

    He pushed his luck, continued the deep chanting and still did not make direct eye contact with her as he stared into the globe, trying to cast at her again. His words formed a basic scrying spell he had practiced for years. His confidence in it had grown, and so too its utility. An image of another man stood opposite her reflection. He appeared smaller, and further away, but the glimpse was brief.

    “I see … a second man,” Brandon offered.

    “Larry. If I don’t get him the rent, we will both be homeless in a few weeks. Michael always said he had something saved. His rainy day hide-away…”

    “Tell me of his passing, that I may walk the right roads of the afterlife to find him for you quickly, and bring him here to speak to you.”

    “His heart was just too weak. Doctors said it was a heart attack, a month back. He pulled through but he was tired all the time. Got winded just getting up. They understood what was wrong, and explained it all to us, but they said they couldn’t do anything about it anymore. We couldn’t afford a biomancer, so they told him he needed to get his affairs in order, but he just kept insisting he would pull through. Starting a week ago, he went back to the mill every day. Even managed to stay up and help me make dinner each night, but he didn’t have much appetite. Every night just before he headed up to bed, he went out to the back porch, and had one cigarette. He said it would be his last pack…” She choked up. “He only had three more left.”

    Her eyes glazed over, wet with the promise of tears to come, and stopped speaking.

    “Hold the ball with me,” he said.

    He waited for her to place her hands on the smooth glass and then placed his fingers in exaggerated gnarled positions on the inverted reflected image of her through the ball, covering her ears and eyes with his middle and pointer fingers respectively. Manipulating her reflection he magically dulled her senses, to make her miss subtle cues of the room’s mechanical tricks.

    Brandon chanted again, this time sprinkling Michael’s name into the words for effect. She did not need to understand that the language of the spell bound her eyes and hearing to his will, but she did need to believe that this had to do with her lost husband to be willing to pay the bill. With a little luck she would make rent, and even be a repeat. If not, she got a show worth the money she had paid up front for his time.

    He stifled a sigh at the ease of it. People believed in seers and psychics before the new world and they believed even more after. That didn’t make everyone freak out. Show them a hint of fire magic or iconomancy and half run screaming to form a mob. The irony.

    Verbal components of his spell crescendoed as his left foot pushed down on a lever in the floor, which connected to a fly wheel, which, in turn, drew a fishing line taught. He had designed the room around the show and the line rose, colorless, clear and barely a few hairs thick, from the chair to his left, up to the ceiling. A thin diaphanous cloth placed on the chair rose with it, taking on the vaguely humanoid shape of thin, cut-plastic straw “bones” beneath it.

    Candles flickered under a deliberate breeze from a mechanical fan sending waves of air into the room. Low irregular light, combined with the thin haze of smoke already pervasive from the incense, and the red velvet drapes hung from the ceiling, gave an overall effect of something ethereal coming to life.

Her breath caught in her throat. He used the pedal, lightening the tension and then increasing it easily, to make the cloth waver, bounce and defy gravity.

    “Michael!” she said.

    She loosened her grip on the old snow globe and reached for the perceived image of the man with her right hand, which bore his ring.

    “You must maintain contact,” Brandon hissed. “Quickly, ask him what you must.”

    He played up the great effort in maintaining his connection, twisting up his fingers harder, bringing the knuckles white with the strain.

    “Where is it? Is it in the yard? Is it with your dad? Did you hide it in the basement? I already looked everywhere I could think of!”

    Brandon made the ghostly sheet dance some more and then began to ease the tension in the line to give the appearance of the being settling back into the floor.

    “Do not give up, Michael,” Brandon said. “Your wife needs your answer!”

    He looked to her now making sure she met his own blue eyes.

    “Focus. Why might he may not be able to tell you the answer?”

    It was always good to plant the seed for future sessions. Sadness, and guilt were the easiest to plant and the longest fruiting. Nobody sent their loved ones off with everything resolved.

    He strained his voice, putting the English between other Italian words of his séance, pretending to not dare break the spell for more than an instant, but she had already bought in completely. He could drop the iconomancy binding entirely, let her see and hear everything clearly if he wished and it would work just as well. He upped the ante. It always proved informative how people interpreted it.

    With his other foot he pushed a second small lever on the floor which lay beneath his own chair and well-hidden below the tablecloth. It released three construction hammers to fall from their hooks on the second story of the house. They landed in succession, each one impacting the floor in a different place, getting louder with each impact.

    Her blue eyes shot up, but her hands stayed on the globe near his.

    “Don’t be angry,” she said. “Larry is just trying to feed his kids! Please. We just need to know where it is!”

    That was an uncommon response, and not one he expected. Larry didn’t sound like a new lover, or a sibling. Improvise, he reminded himself.

    “He is trying to tell you your answer,” Brandon said in a chanting tone.

    “Three? Three?”

    She repeated the word over and over to herself. Realization crossed her face, but it was not elation or hope. Her brow furrowed and a line between her eyes where a future wrinkle of sorrow would embed itself deepened, and her eyes grew wide. She let go of the globe then, and gripped the back of her chair and the side of the table as she faced the false spirit.

    “No! I didn’t, I swear it!” She pronounced. “Tell him! Tell him it’s the truth! I didn’t do it again! Please!”

    She looked at Brandon with a held breath and tension in her legs as though she meant to stand, her weight already half off the seat.

    He guessed infidelity. He immediately slipped his hammer-dropping-foot back, and kicked a third pedal, which dropped a small holding pin out of place. The entire floor beneath them both dropped an inch.

    One inch did not seem like a long way to drop, unless you believed the floor, chair and room to be stable, and suddenly they were not. People, in his experience, trusted the chairs they handled themselves and moved themselves. There was no trick in the solidity and realness of the furniture, so when they fell and the room vibrated it had to be real. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for his wallet, they never thought big enough when expecting magic tricks.

She sat back down immediately, and her hands grabbed the table and chair.

    “Please!”

    Her voice filled with tears, and her face filled with guilt. She no longer met the gaze of the false ghost, and Brandon wondered if there was truth to the infidelity he conjectured.

    The entire house thumped again.

    Brandon’s chanting almost stopped, and he checked his seating and the position of his feet. He hadn’t hit any other pedals and nothing he rigged for his con could make the entire building vibrate.

    The cloth, floating in the air, began to smolder. An extra layer of sooty aroma sitting just on top of the wood and perfume caught his attention. The smoke and haze increased and his head faced the sheet which in turn also moved to face him.

    He let his foot off the pedal and the sheet, now visibly browning over, should have fallen to the floor. Instead, it drifted on unseen air currents and continued to hover in the air. If he had still been speaking, or breathing, it would have been a half breath later that the material burst into flame, consumed in seconds.            Brandon fell back, away from the table. He knocked the chair down behind him and it hit the wall with a crack. His client stood, but didn’t retreat from the apparition. She had come to be tricked, if unknowingly. He had worked to play a trick, not summon the dead.

    “Jesus Christ,” Brandon said.

    He crossed himself, and stared at the wavering lines of heat in the air outlining a man, taller than his guest, just like the reflection. It hovered without feet, or legs and took on substance, the heat coalescing into lines of white and red, like a clean dress shirt burning with crisp bonfire colors.

    “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

    The entire building shook again, and Brandon took off at a sprint. The soft velvet slippers he wore for ambiance did nothing to dull the impact of concrete and old asphalt outside as soon as he crossed the threshold out of the old shop. He did not look back, and he didn’t stop to consider the ramifications of whatever he or the woman had drawn into the world.

    He would start over. He swore to Jesus, God, and several local deities he’d heard whispered, that if he lived, next time, he would open a simple fortune teller shop.

    “Above board trickery all the way. I promise. I swear! I’ll never dabble in the world of the beyond again. Please!”

    Behind him, the shop burned.