“Extra?” said Hammond.
“Sure. You look like you boys been on the road a while. Probably been lonely.” He took another belt from his flask and nodded at the cart.
“Probably costs a considerable amount more than a fortune-telling, huh?” said Hammond.
“Probably. But it improves your immediate future a hell of a lot, I’ll tell you that.”
Hammond eyed the people at the carnival and smiled. “I can probably improve my fortune for free.”
“Jesus, you’re not going to find anything under a hundred and fifty pounds over there. Any farmgirl still drinking beer at this time of night ain’t nothing worth looking at.”
“I don’t know,” said Hammond with a wry grin. “It’s a pretty dark night.”
“Goddamn. Suit yourself. What about you, big fella?” he said to Connelly.
Connelly shook his head.
“You don’t say much, do you?”
Connelly shook his head again.
The carnie grunted, chuckled, then drank and spat.
Pike charged out of the cart looking downright furious. “A waste of time,” he said angrily. “A
“Told you so,” said Hammond.
“Nothing but
“Well, hell,” said Hammond, and got to his feet. “Now I’m curious.”
“Ain’t we all,” said the carnie, who wiped his shoes in the grass. He seemed used to such treatment. He took Hammond’s coins and he and Connelly watched as Hammond passed through the beaded curtain and vanished into the darkness of the cart.
“There he goes,” said the carnie.
“Yeah,” said Connelly.
“You know, it’s funny. Most people don’t like what Sibyl says.”
“Is that so.”
“It is. Most folk hate it. And I got to figure, that’s odd. I mean, most fortune-telling acts around here now, they just say something nice and happy or something mysterious that don’t mean anything at all. Bunch of fwoosh and bang and such. But Sibyl just makes them mad. Mad until one or two come true, then they just think she’s heaven on earth.”
Connelly grunted.
“I keep telling her that when she says something good, she got to stop right there. Don’t go no further. But no. If she tells someone about marrying, well, then she’ll tell them about how their woman will get fat after the first birth and go blind and then he’ll be sick of her, or if they win money how they’ll just blow it on some damn fool thing or just stupid idleness, and if they’re going to have a lovely boy for a kid then she’ll tell them when he’s going to run away from home to go whoring around town. Shit. Girl just don’t know when to stop.”
They were quiet for a while.
“Then maybe what she’s telling is true,” said Connelly.
The carnie drank and nodded. “Maybe so.”
Hammond came out, smirking to himself. “I never believed in any of this stuff anyways,” he said. “Head on in, if you want. It’s damned impressive, at least.”
“Thanks,” said the carnie. “You’re up.”
Connelly got to his feet and paid the man and then pierced the veil of beads with his hand. At once the heavy, sweet stink washed over him, like old perfume or bad fruit, and he looked back at the carnie, who shrugged and nodded forward. Connelly walked in. The beads clicked behind him as the curtain fell.
Connelly carefully stepped through the darkness. The cart was bigger than he thought. It was barely lit by a few slats of starlight that came filtering through the curtains. It seemed to go farther back than any cart should.
“Hello?” he said.
There was nothing.
“Anyone here?”
Then a voice murmured, “Connelly.”
A match flared a few feet in front of him, dazzlingly bright. He squinted at it and saw pink-white fingers holding its end as its flame licked at a misshapen candle. His eyes followed the hand and the white arm until he found the pale, sad moonface hovering in the dark with doe eyes like toffee and a small, timid mouth. One eye’s whites was a pus-colored yellow like curdled milk, and somehow he felt that this eye was the one truly looking at him, looking at and looking beyond all at once.
She was younger than he thought she’d be. She could not have been more than sixteen. His heart went out to her for one moment before he snatched it back and recovered himself.
“Marcus Sullivan Connelly,” said the girl. The stench of bad fruit was overwhelming.
“That’s an impressive trick,” said Connelly. “You ask them my name?”
“Not in the business of asking. Business of telling.” Then she shut her eyes like she was fighting tears and shook her head.
Connelly studied her. Her wrists were bone-thin and her neck was barely able to support her head. A thin, wispy dress of powder blue hung about her shoulders like a ragged tapestry. It was meant to be mysterious but it was tattered and had not seen soap in months at least.
“Sit,” she said quietly.
He did so.
“I didn’t want to see you,” she said.
“I heard.”
“Didn’t want to tell you anything.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Dangerous.”
“What?”
“You’re dangerous, I believe,” she said.
“This part of the act?”
“No.”
“I was about to say. It can’t lend itself well to commerce.”
“I don’t have an act.”
“Then what do you have?”
“Whatever I can give you. People come and they ask me for the things they wish. And I give them, if I can. What do you want, Connelly?”
“You can’t give me what I want.”
She nodded solemnly. “No. I can’t.”
“You must be wore out. I can go if you want.”
“You can go right now. Go all the way back home. But you won’t. Will you?”
Connelly watched her carefully.
She sighed again. “You’ve come. You’ve already left. You’re still coming. Still turning down the offer to bed me like a whore and still calling me a liar.”
“I never wanted to do that.”
“I know.”
“I never called you a liar, neither.”
“I know that, too. Don’t let it trouble you.” She blinked and brushed her hair back. “You want a reading.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
“What from?”
“From everything,” she said, and dumped a stack of cards on the table. They had unearthly paintings of kings
