For Anne, a weekend at the beach was like a weekend at a carnival. While the adults slept on towels, browning their oil slicked backs, she wandered down the boardwalk. Duffy's sold gleaming conches and periwinkles, imported all the way from Cape Hope and dunked ten times in varnish for long term preservation. Wacky Patty's offered rhinestone rimmed sunglasses, flourescent pink visors, postcards of the local Hilton, and one-size-fits-all T shirts emblazoned with "Ocean City, Miami of the North" in screeching orange. Behind a scratched open air counter reeking of solidified grease, a coppery man with an accent hawked cotton candy and hot dogs with everything on them. A fat lady in a polka dotted bathing suit waddled out of the gypsy parlor, scratched her balding scalp and exclaimed that Madame Celeste, Reader and Advisor, had foreseen wealth and romance in her future. Anne glanced at the faded gauze curtains behind the chipped hand-painted lettering and wondered if this gypsy bought her crystal ball and tarot cards from some discount wholesaler of psychic paraphernalia.
"So, what do you want today, little girl?", the man asked when a tinkling bell on the door announced Anne's entry into Bane's House of Magic; the owner's bass, which sometimes jarred her like a blast from a trombone, greeted her today with the warm suggestive notes of a cello. "Not outside watching Lola?"
Lola, a gray hen, strutted haughtily in a her cage while vacationers scowled at the gold and purple calligraphy "How smart are you? Can you beat Lola at tic-tac-toe? 25 cents", then rummaged through pockets for spare change. Swaggering playboys with carefully exposed chests would drop ten quarters into that slot, then slink away. College guys would scoff that any moron could beat a bird, then wince at their losses and embarrassment. Stooped old men in Hawaiian shorts, tanned mothers pushing strollers and weightlifters turning to flab would glance away from Lola, recalling how they'd been trounced. Anne had thought Lola a magic bird, a prodigy even smarter than whiz kid Danny, until Father told her that Lola was probably controlled by a computer.
"The bird always goes first, right?," he'd asked. "And always puts her X in the center square? With that strategy, you're guaranteed to never lose a game of tic-tac-toe. A computer records her move and tells her where to peck next; it only takes a simple computer to do that, I could build one in the basement. And Lola's been taught to peck where the computer sets a little red light blinking. When she wins, she gets rewarded with more bird seed, right? Simple behavioral conditioning." Anne didn't know what behavioral conditioning was, but she knew that wires and cables ran out of computers; when she scrutinized the cage, she couldn't see any wires poking from mysterious black boxes or cables snaking under the floormat or red lights.
"No, I'm shopping inside today."
"Oh, we have lots of goodies in here too," the owner cooed as he leaned towards her, close enough for her to smell his sweet spice breath laced with ginger and something that prickled her nose. With his craggy face eroded into deep gullies around the mouth, he seemed as ancient as a boulder; still, his black eyes sparkled, sometimes burned into her more hotly than the sun. He billed himself as Doctor Heironymous O. Bane, expert magician and master alchemist, and demanded to be addressed as "Doctor" in business transactions. Anne's father guessed that the name was fake, a stage name for business; no real doctor worth his weight in diplomas would set up shop selling snake oil and plastic wands.
"Do you sell snake oil?", Anne asked.
"Snake oil?" The proprietor cackled. "Little girl, didn't they teach you in school that snake's aren't oily? They're not even slimy. They feel like alligator shoes and their insides are all sinew and fang. But, little girl, we don't even sell snake meat; that would be a sacriledge to one of nature's most beautiful animals. Someone's been telling you stories, dissing the snake. Watch a snake move, little girl, it dances through the grass; it's melody in motion. And the painted mosaics on its back beat any designs those fancy merchants of Turkish carpets sell to suckers. But kid, I'm rambling. Wander around, see what catches yor eye."
Anne scanned the pale lavender walls, the gauzy cobwebs draped from a cracked plaster ceiling, the gaunt proprietor as pale as an overcast sky. The same weighted dice, guaranteed to bring any wannabe gambler into the winner's cycle, grayed under sedimenting dust; the same packs of marked cards, which wouldn't even fool a sleepy kid, waited in smokey boxes labeled "Players' Dream". Long capes, of violet velveteen studded with glass beads or decorated with white felt moons and gold foil stars, hung from creaking racks beside spray painted silver wands stippled with glitter. Top hats in black, white and royal blue satin lined a high shelf, each with a secret compartment for hiding even the fattest rabbit during a disappearing act; Anne imagined the hat rocking back and forth on the performer's head as the rabbit scratched at his scalp before being allowed to leap away. Whenever Anne entered the shop, Doctor Bane glared at her over his pince nez, then loped towards her, his shiny bowtie incongrously formal against his dusty complexion; Anne guessed that Father was right, that few customers bought merchandise and that the seller of dreams and magic made his profit off the genius bird.
"But our best stuff, the really interesting stuff, is behind the counter," Dr. Bane interjected.
He lifted a box and spread tinted bottles, jars of crimson and fuschia creams, plump and skinnny brushes, and oily pencils ranging from raw umber to yellow ochre across the counter. "Face paint," he continued. "Actors have used it for centuries. But you can too. If you follow the instructions in this manual, you can make yourself look like anyone. You can be anyone; put on the new face and be the person of your dreams. You can fool your teachers into thinking you're the kid next to you who's always well behaved. You can fool your mother into thinking you're an reservation orphan collecting for charity. You can pencil in arched black eyebrows, cover your own with this special white paste, wear this black wig and look like the greatest geisha of the century -"
"Geisha?" Anne looked perplexed. "But I don't want to look like a geisha. And my parents wouldn't allow me to wear all that makeup."
"Parents," Dr. Bane muttered sympathically, "They never understand, do they? But, I wouldn't want to cause you any trouble at home. There's other stuff back here, stuff which won't start the parents asking questions, stuff far more interesting to an intelligent girl than the geisha kit." Dr. Bane lifted a heavy tome, with thin yellowing pages and the title "The truth Behind Edgar Cayce: How to Become a Genuine Psychic" in gilt across its cracked leather cover.
"How much is it?" Nothing in this store ever had a price tag.
Dr. Bane squinted. "Eighty dollars," he drawled.
"Eighty? That's way more than I can spend, Mr. Bane," Anne sputtered. "Way more than I have in all my savings put together, and some of that money has to go for birthday presents and lunches."
"That's Doctor Bane, little girl". His eyes, above the angular frosted cheeks, glowered in their dark hollows. "Never forget the doctor. Eighty dollars isn't much when you're buying lessons in telepathy. When you're learning how to predict the future, including the lottery numbers which could make you a millionaire. Darn cheap, for a payback of ten million dollars or knowing in advance who's scheming to screw you over. Or knowing all the answers because you can read the teacher's mind. Bargain basement cheap; most people would grab it but I don't offer it to most people. Mow a few lawns, run a few errands, kid, and it's yours. Some people do work for what they want."
"Uh, Dr. Bane, I do want it, "Anne stammered. "But I'd be afraid to read it. The pages are so thin; they feel like they'd fall apart when I turned them. And the writing's so small, I can hardly make out the words. And the script's funny too, slanted and squiggly."
"Gothic, back then all the deep writing was in the Germanic style, the style of the arcana." Dr Bane noticed Anna's perplexed expression. "Maybe when you're older. No, this really isn't for kids to play with; one needs maturity. But - I have something you might enjoy now."
He lifted a pocked lumpy rock; it looked like a piece of concrete. "A genuine piece from Haley's comet, fell to earth the last time Haley passed by. This rock's been past Pluto, it's seen mercury close up and personal, and it comes with its own certificate of authenticity." Anne squinted at the round gold seal pasted on a sheet of vellum filled with illegible signatures. "See. All these signatures are from genuine nobel laureates or first rate space engineers. It's not everyday that you get something authenticated by rocket scientists, a genuine piece of the cometary rock."
"Uh, I don't know," Anne shrugged. "It looks too much like the pieces that broke off the back steps last summer. Or something I could steal from a construction site. My mother won't be happy to see it in my room; she'll tell me to throw that ugly hunk away and tell me that only beautiful things should be brought indoors."
"Then, if you want something beautiful, I may have just the thing for you, "Dr. Bane pronounced, as he lifted an egg shaped mass. "An extraterrestrial geode. Or really, an extratemporal geode...if the term 'geode' can even be applied to something not of this world"
Anne gaped. The exterior was as smooth and glossy as factory buffed metal, but gleamed like mica, as though hundreds of semitranslucent, reflective flakes had been layered atop one another; this casing ended at the opening into an amythest city. The longer she looked, the more Anna felt pulled into that metropolis of purple towers, noticing how one facet reflected rosy light and immersing herself in alleys where tiny facets joined into stairs rising towards the enigmatic and invisible.
"It was dropped by a ship from a world where time runs in the opposite direction; that's what the scientists think. Our future is their past, and this is a memory stone from that world. For us, it's a prophecy stone." He peered closely at Anne until her stare was locked into his. "That means, this rock can tell you about the future. But you have to hold it in both hands and ask it your question out loud, then stare into the crystals to see the picture. Try it."
Anne clutched the smooth exterior that resisted scratches and her own sweaty fingerprints. "What will Camden be like in the year 3000?", she asked, recalling the treeless streets of tin box stores and factories lean and brown as cigars that belched out suffocating plumes of mauve and yellow. Whenever she rode through Camden en route to the shore, she tried to hold her breath against the stinging smells; her father called it "the pollution capital of the east" and wandered how many mutant children were locked away in its attics.
The stone vibrated gently and warmed in Anne's hands. The amythest crystals trembled, then dissolved into a lavender cloud which whirled until its particles joined into vague shapes, then a distinct picture; Anne saw a flat land spotted with craggy charred ruins and only occasional tufts of dry grass poking through the wounded earth.
"Are you sure it's not just reading my mind? Or that I'm not just seeing what I imagined might happen?" Anne asked.
"Well, some people believe we can create reality, bring something into being if enough people imagine it intensely. But that's religion or psychlogy; this rock isn't a psychologist. And you should try asking it about something in the near future, something you can verify. You won't be around in a thousand years to find out what happens to Camden."
"True," Anne muttered. "What will my family be eating tonight?"
Dr. Bane nodded approvingly. Anne gazed into the geode and saw her parents bickering, her mother insisting that "We're at the shore, Fred; fish is what people eat at the shore", then the hostess leading them to a table where father ordered shrimp for everyone from a discrete waiter.
"How much?", she asked.
"How much do you have?"
"Only $38.50," Anne sighed. "And that includes lunch money for tomarrow." She dropped her gaze to the floor and idly drew a line in the dust with her left shoe.
"Well, I'll make a deal with you. You're not an everyday customer. I'll give it to you special, for just $38; you can keep the change."
Anne gaped, wide eyed, then pawed through all her pockets, heaping crumpled bills and coins on the counter. Dr. Bane counted carefully.
"It's yours," he declared. "I'm almost giving it away. And remember, little girl, people don't usually give away anything for free, not in this world; they expect other payment later. So, think of me when you look at it. And use it well."
"Oh, I will!", Anne exclaimed. "Thank you so much! And,uh, Dr. Bane, one more thing?"
"Yes," Dr. Bane's asked hesitantly.
"I'm not a little girl; I'll be thirteen next month."
That night, Anne and her family ate shrimp at The Briny Bucket, an upscale fish house near the high rise hotels. As she left, she noted the cloyingly sweet aroma of her mother' s tanning lotion mixed with the pungent saltiness of the ocean breeze; she watched the plaintively squawking gulls circle before swooping down to peck at tossed rolls and paper plates encrusted with pizza sauce. As the first stars flickered in a cyanotic sky, she ran her fingertip over the the brown, almost featureless surface of a lone penny at the bottom of her pocket and thought fondly of her new geode.
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Anne asked the stone little questions, ones with answers that didn't really matter. What will I get for my next birthday? Who will be my new math teacher? Will Uncle Joe fly all the way from Minneapolis to visit us this Thanksgiving? Always, the stone answered correctly.
She showed the stone to her father but didn't tell him what it could do. He remarked that she'd gotten a good deal for $38, even if the crystals weren't real amythest but just convincing replicas.
"I've never seen a geode with this kind of shell," he muttered, frowning. "Their shells usually are bumpy, course rock. And this doesn't look like any metal I've seen before either. Maybe it's a new super-hard plastic. " Anne had winced when he tried, unsuccessfully, to scratch it with hs pocket knife. "I could take it to the guys at the lab. They have lasers, gas spectrophotometry, electron microscopy. They could chip off a piece so tiny you wouldn't even notice, put it through the tests, and tell you exactly what you've got here."
Anne declined the offer.
She slept with the geode on the nightstand beside her. Sometimes she dreamed of Dr. Bane, even more gaunt and ashen faced, huddled like a statue in his vacant store as the dust settled over him. "Use it well", he'd drone, "Use your gift well"; she'd feel the heat burning in those ember eyes. After such dreams, the geode seemed slightly warmer than room air and seemed to vibrate just at the threshhold of detection. Anne told herself that she was feeling vibrations from trucks and vans rumbling down the street, and that the warmth was caused by her own heated imagination; girls who owned foretune telling geodes were prone to wild fantasies.
Use it well. "Where will I be at age thirty?". The geode showed a handsome but life-hardened man arguing with a tired woman who held a bawling three year old. Papers bearing the word "custody" slammed on a mahagany desk, one signature line was left blank on a paper labeled "settlement". Divorce court, just where her parents might end up if they didn't stop shouting.
"What will my parents be doing tonight?", she asked the stone one fall afternoon, as she walked home from after-school band practice. The geode showed a ransacked house, clothes strewn across the floor, jewelry and big screen TV and stereos and expensive furniture missing; dark stains splattered the kitchen walls and floor. The image flickered, rematerialized into the picture of a gun and a clock reading 5:15.
"That's now!", Anne screamed inwardly and ran.
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"I'm sorry, you've got to keep out. There's nothing you can do," the policeman barked as Anne tried to push her way past the cops and screeching sirens into the house. "Rickster," the policeman shouted to a burly female, "Keep this kid company so she doesn't destroy the crime scene. It's her parents".
"At least four gunshots, that's what the neighbor heard when she called. Could be more bullets inside though, " Anne overheard as she stood rigidly in the lady cop's arms, still too overwhelmed to cry. "Looks like they cleaned out the place; maybe the owners put up a fight. Lady next door says that four guys ran out and jumped in a truck; she just says that they looked like thugs. But she does remember the driver of the van - says he had the whitest skin she's ever seen, looked craggy faced and too old for this kind of job, almost like a skeleton at the wheel."
"Probably her imagination. Panic makes you see things".
Anne clutched the geode and shivered in the lady cop's arms.
Later that night, she stole out of the police station to a corner pay phone and asked Directory Assistance for the phone number of Banes House of Magic.
"I'm sorry, the number you have requested is no longer in service", the tinny voice droned.
She called Madame Celeste, Reader and Advisor.
"I'm sorry to bother you," she panted, "You don't know me but I have to talk to Dr. Bane - Bane's House of Magic, just next door to you. I wouldn't bother you but it's an emergency."
"Oh, I'm sorry honey, but he's not there any more. It was the strangest thing - he just packed everything into a van and left in the middle of the night. No warning, no "store closing" signs, just vamoosed. I wouldn't even have known he was gone, that place always being so empty, but he woke me with his racket. All this clanking and door slamming when even the seagulls were asleep. Most of all, his special hen Lola squawking loud enough to wake the people in the Hilton penthouse; he left her behind, you know, so I guess I'll have to take her in. Honey, you should have called last night, he was still here."
Anna glared at the geode.
"Where's Dr. Bane?" she asked. The crystals, wan under the street lamps, did nothing. She rephrased the question "What will Dr. Bane be doing in fifteen minutes?"
The crystals, anemically colorless, retained their form.
"What will Dr. Bane be doing tomarrow? Where will I be tomarrow?"
The geode refused to answer. In the shadows cast by the yellow lights, the angular crystals seemed like the sides of a stony face and the dark spaces between them like the burning black eyes that she recalled too well.
"Damn you! Who needs you!", she sobbed, and hurled the geode at the ground. The once unscratchable shell and crystals splintered into a thousand shards; as Anne shook, each shard became smaller and smaller, mixing imperceptibly with the glass and metal dust that coated most streets, then dissolving altogether into the pavement.
"Oh, there you are!" the burly policewoman called. "It's not safe to wander around out here this late. Come inside; your uncle's due in around midnight."
Yo, STOP! Even if the copy's not quite right, it's still copyright.
