This Isn't What It Looks Like (27 page)

Mrs. Johnson wasn’t buying it. “Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I…
we
are with our lady-in-waiting. Cheating is cheating,” she said huffily.

She sounded rather as if she were about to march out of the camera obscura in protest. Instead, she walked in front of the
illuminated wall. Upside-down images of the outside world flitted across her, making the tiara on her head sparkle and the
black pendant around her neck gleam.

With so much else to see, nobody seemed to notice that the pendant was floating ever so slightly in the air.

“Next thing you know, they’ll be defending forgery!” she declared, patting down her pendant. “Now students, I… I mean,
we
want you to start exiting quietly, and single file, not like a bunch of heathens.”

The small room erupted in noise, all the students trying to leave at once. On his way out, Ben tugged on Max-Ernest’s sleeve.

“Thank me later,” said Max-Ernest, pushing away from him. “Can’t talk right now.”

“What’s that around Mrs. Johnson’s neck?” asked Cass when Max-Ernest rejoined her and Yo-Yoji. With all the clamor around
them, she could speak almost normally without being overheard.

“Yeah. Why does it look like it’s floating?” asked Yo-Yoji.

“Because it is,” said Max-Ernest. “It’s a lodestone. A naturally occurring magnet.”

Cass scratched her head. “I knew that, but how did I know that…?”

“Mrs. Johnson is obsessed with magnets now. You should have heard her talking about them when I went to give her the Tuning
Fork.”

Cass took the Double Monocle out of her pocket and surreptitiously looked at the lodestone pendant through it. Although there
were at least half a dozen arms and shoulders in the way, the monocle gave her a clear view. As she stared at the black stone,
it glowed blue and appeared to pulsate. Cass felt a tug on the monocle—the pull of the lodestone—and a matching tug on her
memory.

“I’ve seen that stone before,” said Cass, amazed to see another object from her journey into the past appear in the present.
“It looked different, bigger, rougher, but it’s the same stone.”

The sense of being in two places at once intensified. Suddenly, she couldn’t bear it a second longer. “I’m feeling totally…
claustrophobic. I have to get out of here right now.”

Before her friends could stop her, she started pushing through the crowd and rushed out of the room.

Excited whispers followed in her wake:

“That’s that girl that was in the coma!”

“Do you think she’s OK?”

“Maybe she’s having a relapse!”

“She’s going to be fine,” said Max-Ernest angrily. He then started pushing his way out after her.

Yo-Yoji followed. “Yo, guys, wait up. You know, you might actually need me sometime!”

T
hey caught up with Cass in front of a dusty carnival tent. A sign hung on a chain:

“I’m going in here,” said Cass.

“Then we’re going in, too,” said Yo-Yoji. “Pietro said we should keep you in sight.”

“I’ll be fast.”

“I thought you were feeling claustrophobic,” said Max-Ernest. “That’s the kind of condition that gets worse over time. It
doesn’t just vanish—”

Ignoring her friends, Cass pushed the heavy curtains aside and entered the tent. She wasn’t sure why, but she simply had to
go inside. It was almost as if she’d been hypnotized and instructed to enter precisely this tent at precisely this time.

“Hello, Cassandra.”

It was the Seer. Clara. Sitting at her tree-stump table in front of a deck of tarot cards. As soon as Cass saw her, Cass remembered
every detail of her appearance. The long straggly hair. The skin so pale it was translucent. The eyes of unblinking blue.

“Hello, Cassandra,” Cass echoed, recalling that hers was one of the names by which the Seer was known.

She’d never been so happy to see someone she barely knew. At last her memories were coming back! Of course, it was odd that
the Seer should be here at the Renaissance Faire five hundred years after Cass had last seen her. But Cass felt a renewed
sense of confidence; she was certain that the Seer’s appearance—and everything else—would now be explained.

“It is good to see you again,” said the Seer. “Sit. I will read your cards.” She gestured toward the waiting stool.

Her ears tingling with anticipation, Cass obeyed.

As before, the Seer passed a hand over her tarot deck and a card flipped over as if by its own volition. A trick all the more
astonishing now, in the present, in the real world.

“Ah. The Ace of Wands returns. But this time, right-side up.” The Seer looked quizzically at Cass. “You have come to return
something, then?”

“No, not really… like what?”

“Did I not once tell you that something must be returned to its rightful owner?”

Cass struggled to recall their conversation. “Yeah, but… I don’t think I ever figured out what it was.”

“Oh no? I should think it would be obvious. Do you not have something with you that is mine?”

Cass hesitated, perplexed. Then…

“Oh, you mean the monocle!”

“The Double Monocle, yes. For years it has been out of my hands and away from my eye.”

Fumbling, Cass brought the monocle out of her pocket and handed it to the Seer. Cass couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret;
the monocle had been her primary link to the past. But if giving up the monocle was the price of restoring her memory, she
would gladly pay.

The Seer put the monocle up to her right eye and peered out at Cass. Then the Seer looked beyond Cass, seemingly to some distant
time or place invisible to the naked eye. She appeared to be testing the focus as one would with binoculars or a zoom lens.

“Ahh. Much better. Thank you,” she said, lowering the monocle.

“You’re welcome, but I thought you meant
return something that I already took,” said Cass, sorting through her still-disjointed memories. “When you read my cards
before, I didn’t even have the monocle yet… right? How could I return it?”

A hint of a smile crossed the Seer’s lips. “Yes, the cards work in mysterious ways, don’t they?”

She passed her hand over another card. It flipped over in the air, then settled back down like an autumn leaf.

“Did you ever find your jester?”

“Yeah, I think so…. At least, I’m pretty sure we were in a dungeon together.”

The Seer nodded. “He may need finding again. Look, this time it is he who is upside down—”

She pointed to the latest card to turn faceup. It was the Jester, the card that so closely resembled Cass’s Jester,
the
Jester. But he was facing Cass instead of the card reader—upside down in tarot terms.

Cass frowned. “You’re not saying I’m supposed to go back in time again, are you?”

The Seer shook her head. “I wouldn’t advise it. You have spent too much time out of your time already. It has changed you.
I could see right away.”

“Changed me? How?” asked Cass, alarmed.

“Are you not seeing things yourself now?”

“Like what? What things?”

“Things you didn’t see before.”

“No, I mean… why? Should I be… seeing things?”

“Only if there are things to see.”

“Are there… things to see?” Cass asked, growing nervous.

“There is always something to see… just not always with those two marbles you call your eyes.”

“With what, then?”

“Have you heard of the inner eye—the third eye?”

“Yeah, I guess, but I never really believed in it….”

“A tiny housefly has hundreds of eyes. Why should it be so hard to believe you have three?”
^*

“Are you saying I’m a…”—Cass stumbled over the word—“seer… like you are?”

“Perhaps not so much like me, but we are both called Cassandra, aren’t we?”

Cass nodded hesitantly.

“And your Secret? Did you find that?”

“No, at least, I don’t think so…. No, wait, that’s it—that’s why I remembered the lodestone!” exclaimed Cass, almost jumping
off the stool in her excitement. “The lodestone hanging around Mrs. Johnson’s neck—the Jester said he would leave the Secret
under it. Or, like, a message about the Secret.”

“Oh?” queried the Seer mildly. “The Secret must
be very short if it can be written under such a small stone.”

“So then… you don’t know whether I’m right about Mrs. Johnson’s necklace?” asked Cass, a little frustrated that her revelation
hadn’t been greeted with more enthusiasm.

“I can only tell you what the cards tell me—”

The Seer flipped the next card over with a breezy wave. On the face of the card, a robed man held his wand aloft in his right
hand while pointing down with his left—the Magician.

“Remember:
as above, so below
.”

“I remember—but what does it mean?”

“That depends on what is above and what is below, naturally.”

Based on her previous experience with the Seer, Cass had expected the Seer to lay out several more cards, but it appeared
from the way the Seer folded her hands that she considered the reading finished.

“OK, then. Thanks, I guess.”

Cass stood up, distinctly unsatisfied, but anxious to tell her friends the news.

Max-Ernest and Yo-Yoji were waiting impatiently outside the tent.

Before either could say a word, Cass launched
into a breathless account of her adventures with the Jester, almost all of which she now remembered, ending with the Jester’s
promise to hide a message about the Secret under the lodestone. “The thing is, I don’t know if he ever even found the Secret.
He hadn’t even heard of it until I told him about it.”

The other two Terces members stared at her in disbelief.

“How could he not have heard of it?” asked Yo-Yoji. “He’s practically the only one who ever knew it!”

“I know, I couldn’t believe it, either. But the worst thing was that Lord Pharaoh already knew about the Secret—that’s what
the homunculus told me—so I made the Jester promise to find it before Lord Pharaoh did….”

“You… you
made
him?” Max-Ernest stammered.

“Wait… you didn’t…
meet
Lord Pharaoh, did you?” asked Yo-Yoji, stammering as well.

Cass nodded, seeing again the dark green, reptilian-looking eye magnified by the Double Monocle. “Yeah, it was pretty scary.”

Her friends shook their heads in amazement, unable to hide how impressed they were to hear Cass speak in such a familiar way
about the Jester and
Lord Pharaoh—the Terces Society’s legendary hero and legendary villain, respectively.

“Well, logically, the Jester must have found the Secret eventually,” said Max-Ernest, recovering. “He did start the Terces
Society, didn’t he?”

“And you think that rock around Mrs. Johnson’s neck—that’s the Jester’s lodestone?” asked Yo-Yoji.

Cass nodded. “Uh-huh. Well, carved up. But from the same rock. I know it sounds crazy. Like how would she get it? But it looked
exactly the same when I looked at it through the monocle.”

“Maybe it’s not so crazy,” said Max-Ernest. “Mrs. Johnson said the lodestone came from the same witchy aunt of hers as the
Tuning Fork.”

“Wait… wasn’t her name Clara?” asked Cass, noting silently that the name was the same as the Seer’s.

“Yeah. That’s the one. How ’bout that?”

“So that means if we want to see the lodestone up close, we have to get it from… oh man!” Yo-Yoji groaned.

The others nodded glumly in agreement. Once again they were going to have to retrieve a precious heirloom from their principal.

“That’s it, it’s over. This time we won’t be
expelled; we’ll be sent straight to juvenile hall!” declared Max-Ernest. “I almost wish you never went to talk to that mannequin.”

“What mannequin?” asked Cass.

“Uh, the one in the tent you’ve been in for the last twenty minutes. You must have fed it a lot of quarters.”

“What do you mean?” Cass’s ears began to tingle with panic. “There’s no mann—wait just a sec. I think I forgot something.”

She turned and ran back to the tent, throwing aside the striped curtains.

Sure enough, sitting behind a window in a small booth, where a moment ago she’d seen the Seer, or
thought
she’d seen the Seer, there was now a mannequin. More accurately, an automaton. A robot fortune-teller in a red velvet turban.
The kind you see at carnivals. The kind that hands out little cards that say things like
You will live a long and prosperous life
or
You will have many children
.