Pet Shop Of Horrors Fan Fiction ❯ Defying Gravity ❯ Fortune Favors the Foolish ( Chapter 1 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: Kita and Subu-chan 
Anime/Manga: Pet Shop Of Horrors Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Supernatural / Romance / Horror / Drama | Type: Songfic | Uploaded On: 02.05.2007 | Pages: 3 | Words: 4.3K | Visits: 1.8K | Status: Work In Progress
Anime/Manga: Pet Shop Of Horrors Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Supernatural / Romance / Horror / Drama | Type: Songfic | Uploaded On: 02.05.2007 | Pages: 3 | Words: 4.3K | Visits: 1.8K | Status: Work In Progress
Defying Gravity
Chapter One: Fortune Favors the Foolish
“-Something has changed within me
Something is not the same.
I’m through with playing by the rules
Of someone else’s game.
Too late for second guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It’s time to trust my instincts,
Close my eyes-and leap…”
“It’s time to try
Defying gravity
I think I’ll try
Defying gravity
And you can’t pull me down…”
(Excerpted from “Defying Gravity”
Wicked soundtrack, Decca Broadway records.)
The tent was dim, lit only by the last bit of sunlight shining through the cloth. “Welcome. Be welcome, lost one.” The voice was a woman’s, rich and as full of warmth as the tent was after the late February weather outside.
Leon didn’t know what he was doing here. A carnival of all places! Midway rides, freak shows and all. And, of course, the obligatory fortune-tellers here to bilk the yokels out of their money with a palm-reading or gaze into a crystal bowling ball.
“But I am not like those others, now am I? If I were, you would not have found your way into my tent, my skeptical one.”
Leon started. Had he said that aloud? This place reminded him too damned much of the pet shop with its still air and the sweet smell of some strange incense. “Who the hell are you?”
“They call me Madam Enigma.” Her voice took on the practiced air of a carnival barker. “ ‘Visit the mad, the marvelous Madam Enigma! Mad as a hatter, but never once have her prophecies proven wrong!’ True enough, as far as it goes, so that will do for a name.” She chuckled and lit a small lamp. She was beautiful, wrapped in layers of sea-blue silk, thin enough to blow away in the first stiff wind, and crowned with a halo of pure platinum hair. “Please, sit. Your need must be dire indeed to have driven you into my humble tent, my skeptic. What do you want to know?”
“You’re the fortune-teller. Why don’t you tell me?” Leon snapped, a little baffled by his strange reaction to the woman. Some part of him wanted to believe she could help him.
“Ah, but I need to hear it from your lips, Mr. Orcot. That’s the way an oracle works. I cannot answer the question until you ask it.”
“Fine, then! Where the hell is he?!”
“That is not the right question. I cannot answer anything but the right question from a true challenger of the unknown. Try again.”
“What do you mean?”
She offered him a dazzling smile. “You know the question you need to ask, but I cannot tell it to you. Ask again.”
“How can I find him?” Leon snapped, frustrated.
“Closer. Try it again.”
Leon wracked his brain, wondering why the hell he was doing this. He must be losing what little of his mind he had left.
She took pity on him. “It is not about the destination, but how you get there. It’s all about you in the end.”
“What-what do I have to do to find him?”
“Better. It’s all about your journey.” She leaned back in her chair and her voice deepened.
“Follow the moon in the midnight sky
To a place where no roads lead
And no voices but the wind cry,
You will find what you need.
Black walls and a mirror of the moon
Step through the looking glass
And into darkness fallen too soon.
Here death and rebirth come to pass.
Dragon and phoenix intertwined
Fallen-to rise again and seek the sky
A gift of passing-reborn, heart and mind
Ours is not to question, nor to wonder why
Long and longer sought-to find at last
The object of your quest
Future anew and shedding the past
Journey’s end, heart to rest.”
Leon shook himself out of the spell her voice had cast on him. “What the hell does that mean?”
Madam Enigma smiled wearily. “Prophecy is never clear for it shatters like a wave on the rocks of logic. That is why the oracles of old had priests to translate for them. As best I can tell you, my desperate seeker, follow the moonset to someplace uninhabited. You will be offered a choice there. The rest I cannot say. I do not truly understand my visions, only relay them for the brave who venture into my tent.”
“Great. The blind taking travel tips from the crazy. My life all over.”
The woman in the chair smiled at him, amusement making her violet eyes dance. “The crazy simply have different ways of looking at things. And you are struggling to overcome your blindness. You have been since the moment you stepped foot into his pet shop for the first time.”
Leon froze, arrested by what she had said. How did she…? “What the hell?”
Her smile held a touch of admonition. “How could I tell you a prophecy unless I know all about you, detective? It is part of what I am. I hold the histories of thousands in my head, many of whom will never brave my tent.” Enigma held out her hand. “May I see it? The drawing you hold so dear to your heart?”
Leon hesitated and drew out a battered square of paper from his breast pocket. Slender fingers plucked it from his hand and deftly unfolded it. “There is much love here, Mr. Orcot. The one who drew this cared very deeply about his subject matter.”
Leon chuckled sadly. “Yeah. When Chris gives you his heart, he does it unreservedly. He’ll learn better one of these days.”
“Ah, ah.” Enigma wagged a finger in reproach. “Do not let a jaded heart keep you blind. You will need to see where you will go. Learn to trust as your brother does and you will find your way.” She gently refolded the paper and held it out. “You will see him again.”
“Another prophecy?” Leon accepted the paper with a half-smile, tucking it back into his pocket.
“No. A wish. You have the power to make it reality, whereas I do not. Always remember that.” She gestured at the tent-flap. “Now. The moon has risen. I suggest you be ready to follow as it sets. A final gift waits for you outside, Leon Orcot. A gift for the gift of letting me see something so beautiful.” A finger rose to point at his breast pocket.
Leon looked askance at her. “You really are nuts, lady. It’s just a crayon drawing.”
“Learn not to be so blind. The beauty isn’t in the simple lines of wax. It’s in the heart of the artist. And his is truly a treasure.” She rose and came to his side, laying a hand over the drawing. “Your heart is a treasure too, my seeker. A bit tarnished and worse for the wear, but a treasure nonetheless for that.” Her smile was deep enough to drown in. “And they do say a bit of wear add character.”
Leon snorted. “My heart’s no treasure, lady. It’s not worth much, believe me.” He didn’t know why he didn’t up and leave the tent, but his feet stayed where they were.
Her sigh was exasperated. “Don’t doubt me, dear seeker.” Her hand was warm on his chest. “It has been abused and broken, but I can still see the beauty in it. So could he. Why do you think you lived when so many others who entered the pet shop did not? He is an excellent judge of character.”
Leon was frozen. His heart was hammering in his chest and he found it hard to swallow. What the hell? “He-he wants all humans dead, lady, and that includes me. Hell, I’m probably top on his list. Especially…” He cut himself off there, mortified by what was coming out of his mouth.
“Since you were forced to kill his father? It was a bitter pill for both of you to swallow, but he knows there was no other choice to be made. His head knows it even if his heart does not.”
Leon couldn’t move, though every fiber of his being wanted to run like hell away from this tent and the strange woman who held court here. He was trapped as surely as an insect frozen in amber, forced to listen to what she had to say, whether he wanted to hear it or not.
“As much as he will deny it, his heart has been broken too, and not just by the death of his father. His kind started out as human as yours, but they have forgotten that. But in his long exposure to you and your little brother, his heart started to remember what his race had forgot. Your cousin had the right of it when she told you that there was something false in his smile the day they came and took your brother home. Though he could not have laid name to the emotion, it was human sorrow that filled his heart and loneliness in the days that followed. He never knew loneliness before. Always, his pets were company enough for him. But no longer.”
“I-I don’t want to hear this!” To his horror, his voice was small, like a frightened child’s. Leon started to shake as she continued.
“Because it is the truth?”
“No!”
“Or because it will force you to admit things you never wanted to think about?”
“NO!” Leon thought he screamed then, but could never be sure, for in the next instant, the woman was seated across from him and the strange paralysis that had held him immobile was gone.
“Remember what I have told you, Leon Orcot. An oracle can speak only truth. Now, go, for you have a long way to go and only a short time to get there.”
Leon stumbled out of the tent into the chilly night air, gasping and feeling like he had been run over. He bent over and tried to catch his breath, shaking like a leaf. Finally his breathing quieted and the trip-hammer beating of his heart slowed. Something wasn’t right here.
The silence was the first thing he noticed. Where were the busy sounds of the carnival? He looked up and the bottom dropped out of his world-view again. Surrounding him were the remains of a long abandoned amusement park. The skeletal framework of a roller coaster loomed over him, black against the night sky. He turned, shaken, and found there was no tent behind him, only a broken fortune-telling machine. The animatronic gypsy hunched over a cracked crystal ball bore no resemblance to Madam Enigma. Leon started to shake when he noticed the white card in the ‘receive fortune here’ slot. The unblemished paper was in stark contrast to the chipped and faded paint of the machine.
With trembling fingers he removed the slip of paper. If the laugh that burst out of him was a little hysterical, he neither noticed nor cared. Printed in block letters were the words “A journey lies ahead.”
Leon was still laughing when the gleam of moonlight off of something that was not worn and broken caught his eye. Hesitantly, he stepped closer. The moonlight was reflecting off the mirror of a jeep parked in the shadow of a decaying booth. Leon dug his flashlight out of his small knapsack and flicked it on. The jeep was not new, but it was in good condition and dangling from the ignition were the keys. Leon laughed again when he noticed the keychain was a miniature Magic Eight Ball. This had to be the gift Madam Enigma had left.
His trust did not extend that far, so Leon checked out the jeep carefully. It had a full tank of gas and a spare can (also full) in the back. The tires were sound, as was the spare. There were two boxes in the back. One had four gallon jugs of water and the other was filled with MREs. There was even a small first aid kit under the driver’s seat. Leon laughed again. It was a harsh and lonely sound in the silence of the abandoned amusement park. “Everything someone needs to go chasing prophecies of hallucinations, on the trail of a guy who runs a pet shop full of man-eating animals. No, my life hasn’t gone completely off the deep end.”
There was a tinkle of laughter on the night wind. “Not yet, dear seeker, but soon. Go now. Time is short.”
Leon looked around for the source of her voice, but the park around him was silent and empty. Wondering if he had lost what little of his mind he had left, Leon climbed in and started the jeep. It rumbled smoothly to life and purred softly as he carefully picked his way out of the long-abandoned midway. When he had cleared the broken chain-link fence bearing weathered ‘Condemned’ signs, he sighted on the nearly full moon hanging in the endless sky. Taking that as his compass heading, he drove across the pitted and cracked parking lot and into the scrubland that surrounded the park.
The jeep jounced over the uneven ground, but Leon didn’t complain. He was damned tired of walking. His money had run out a while back, and he hated that. Following the last report of an animal attack had led him to the little town, and all but stranded him there. When it had turned out to be nothing but a Doberman with a bad attitude, he had wandered into the carnival with the intention of forgetting his troubles for a while in the chatter of crowds and the smells of cotton candy and funnel cakes. It was there he had more or less accidentally wandered into Madam Enigma’s tent.
The night wind was cold on his face as he drove and Leon sighed with weariness. How damned long had he been trying to track down D? Too long, that was for sure. Maybe he should give it up and go back home. He could call his uncle and beg him to float him a loan for a plane ticket. He was sure Chris would be thrilled to see him again.
Something swooped in the air overhead, startling him out of his self-pitying mood. Leon swerved and hit the brakes. The night air was alive with a startling amount of insects for so early in the year and a large group of bats were darting and diving amidst them. Leon laughed tiredly. No. He had come too damned far to give up now. He never gave up on anything, no matter how hopeless a cause it seemed.
“Eat well, you guys.” He called to the aerobatic flock overhead. “And if any of you see Count D, let him know I’m looking for him.” Then he had to laugh at himself again. Ever since that weird-ass dream of the pet shop as a huge ship sailing in the clouds, he had more and more often found himself talking to animals as if they were people who could understand every word. Chris had always insisted that he talked with the people in the pet shop. It wasn’t until the dream that he had seen the animals as human as Chris always had. It made him wonder just how much else he had missed.
One of the bats alighted on the hood of the jeep with a small thump, some sort of insect still in its mouth. Leon could feel the small dark eyes on him as the bat finished its meal and crab-walked up to the windshield. Leon was reminded unpleasantly of Norma, the purported vampire serial killer. She had vanished and the next day D had a new bat among his collection of animals.
Leon shook his head sharply, banishing the memory. “Look, batty, I don’t want to hurt you, so you might want to move. The hood’s not going to be a good place to be when I start driving.” He revved the engine, hoping that would spook the animal. It gave him a disdainful look, for all the world like Q-chan had always done. There was another strange thing, that weird bat-rabbit-whatever thing. It had turned out to be D’s long vanished grandfather, keeping an eye on his grandson in the form of a bizarre pet.
Leon smacked his forehead against the wheel. What the hell was wrong with him? He didn’t have time to wander down memory lane with Bats there. Somehow, he knew that he didn’t have very long to find whatever it was Madam Enigma said he needed to find. There was a growing urgency to the thought. He needed to go.
The bat studied him for a long moment before launching itself back into the air. Leon watched it rejoin the others for only a moment before taking his foot off the brake and reorienting on the slowly sinking moon. The sense of urgency did not fade as he drove, instead becoming such a driving force that he kept pressing harder on the accelerator. It was only after an especially hard jolt from the rutted ground that he noticed he was pushing ninety. Not a smart thing to do on furrowed, uneven (and not to mention, unpaved) ground. He slowed, but the sense of need nagging at the back of his skull became a scream and before long his foot was pressing the gas pedal hard.
Leon had participated in a few harrowing car chases in his time, up to and including the mad race to reach the ocean before D’s damned dragon egg hatched, but this one was putting all of them to shame. The jeep bucked and jolted as he raced over rougher and rougher terrain with a fine disregard for his own safety. Leon gritted his teeth as he hauled the wheel to the right just in time to avoid plowing into a Joshua tree. Wood scraped metal as he squeaked past. Leon yanked his foot off the accelerator and clung to the wheel, panting harshly as the jeep slowed. What the hell was he doing? He was going to fucking kill himself if he kept this up.
He got out of the jeep and took a few deep breaths to calm himself. It would do him no good to kill himself to reach wherever it was the nutty fortuneteller wanted him to go. The desperate urgency retreated before the logic he used, but came back in full force when he glanced up at the setting moon. Somehow he knew he had to reach wherever it was before midnight on the night of the full moon. Which was tomorrow, he noted wryly. Last minute notification, anyone?
When his heartbeat had slowed to something resembling normal, he gingerly climbed back into the jeep and oriented on the sinking moon. He kept one eye on the speed gauge as he drove, reining himself in every time it crept past sixty. The land around him started to change, more rocks poking up through the sandy soil of the scrubland. He had seen no signs of human habitation since he had left the long abandoned amusement park and that struck him as a little odd. Even places like this had people somewhere. It wasn’t normal. Leon had to laugh at himself. What the hell about this whole frigging thing had been normal? He was taking advice from a madwoman who called herself an oracle, rented space in abandoned amusement parks and gifted strangers with jeeps and demented directions disguised as prophecies. Yeah, real frigging normal!
The rocks gave way to boulders, which in turn gave way to tumbled foothills that the jeep labored through. Finally, he reached a point where the vehicle could go no further because the ways had narrowed and twisted to the point of insanity. Leon parked it between two large rocks and dug in the back. He unearthed a hiker’s knapsack and packed it with two jugs of water on the bottom, some food, the first aid kit and whatever else he thought would be useful. He stowed his bag and the remaining supplies in the back and covered them with a tarp that he found folded in the seat well. Best to keep them safe for when he came back this way. If he came back this way, he thought pessimistically.
He followed the setting moon until it disappeared behind the tumbled horizon. He stopped to rest for a few hours. The sun rising above the rocks woke him and he staggered to his feet. After a groggy meal of one of the MRE’s, he continued on, silently blessing his uncle for the camping trips he’d taken Leon on as a small boy. He used the sun to keep his bearing until it rose directly overhead. He dropped then and there for another couple of hours of much needed sleep. But the sense of urgency would not let him rest long and after a second quick meal, he continued into the foothills.
The moon came out before the sun had set and Leon noted with some satisfaction that he could still hold a compass heading the way his uncle had taught him. He used it as a guide into increasingly narrow and weathered passages. He had to backtrack twice to find another way, cursing the delay each time, but by sunset he had cleared the worst of the narrow arroyos and headed further into the foothills. A dried riverbed gave him a clear, if somewhat stony path. The banks rose higher and higher around him as the full moon cast his shadow ahead of him as it climbed toward the midnight hour.
Suddenly, he could go no further. The banks of the river had risen into towering ravine walls that narrowed suddenly. He jerked back with a startled curse as his foot splashed down into shockingly cold water. Leon used his flashlight to discover that the ravine ended here at the pool of water, black in the shadows of the walls. The source of the vanished river, he guessed sourly as he looked for a way out of the ravine. He glanced at his lighted watch face with a hiss of dismay. Shit! He would never make it to wherever he had to be if he had to backtrack out of this damned ravine.
The walls loomed blackly overhead, framing the full moon as it crept toward the center of the sky. Suddenly, the ravine lit up brightly as the moon’s pallid light reflected off the dark water. Leon hesitated as Madame Enigma’s voice echoed softly in his head. “-Black walls and a mirror of the moon. Step through the looking glass and into darkness fallen too soon…”
He glanced up at the towering walls. In the darkness, the dark stone was black as pitch. The moon glinted off the black water before him as Leon stepped to the edge of the pool. Was this place what he was supposed to find? How the hell could this help him find D? He never noticed when the moon reached the center of the sky, gleaming brightly in the midnight hour. The water before him shimmered softly, no longer reflecting him or the moon. It showed instead an enormous cavern, dimly lit by a soft reddish glow. “Step through the looking glass, huh?” He muttered. The skeptic in him was a gibbering ball of panic, unable to cope with these sudden changes in his reality. Leon shrugged fatalistically and stepped towards the water. The worst that could happen was he’d get a little wet.
The water rose to engulf him, and then wasn’t water at all, but air that smelled of dampness and stone and an alluring, metallic scent that he could not name, but that reminded him painfully of D’s strange, nameless incense. The dim red light was gone and he flicked on his flashlight, panning it around the cavern. The beam couldn’t find the far wall.
“Who’s there?”
Startled, Leon let out an undignified yelp and whirled, reaching for a gun that was no longer there. His flashlight’s beam jerked to a halt on the form of an old woman sitting on a shelf of stone next to a pool of dark water. She blinked up at him, a smile creasing her face. “Welcome, stranger.”
To Be Continued…
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Chapter One: Fortune Favors the Foolish
“-Something has changed within me
Something is not the same.
I’m through with playing by the rules
Of someone else’s game.
Too late for second guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It’s time to trust my instincts,
Close my eyes-and leap…”
“It’s time to try
Defying gravity
I think I’ll try
Defying gravity
And you can’t pull me down…”
(Excerpted from “Defying Gravity”
Wicked soundtrack, Decca Broadway records.)
The tent was dim, lit only by the last bit of sunlight shining through the cloth. “Welcome. Be welcome, lost one.” The voice was a woman’s, rich and as full of warmth as the tent was after the late February weather outside.
Leon didn’t know what he was doing here. A carnival of all places! Midway rides, freak shows and all. And, of course, the obligatory fortune-tellers here to bilk the yokels out of their money with a palm-reading or gaze into a crystal bowling ball.
“But I am not like those others, now am I? If I were, you would not have found your way into my tent, my skeptical one.”
Leon started. Had he said that aloud? This place reminded him too damned much of the pet shop with its still air and the sweet smell of some strange incense. “Who the hell are you?”
“They call me Madam Enigma.” Her voice took on the practiced air of a carnival barker. “ ‘Visit the mad, the marvelous Madam Enigma! Mad as a hatter, but never once have her prophecies proven wrong!’ True enough, as far as it goes, so that will do for a name.” She chuckled and lit a small lamp. She was beautiful, wrapped in layers of sea-blue silk, thin enough to blow away in the first stiff wind, and crowned with a halo of pure platinum hair. “Please, sit. Your need must be dire indeed to have driven you into my humble tent, my skeptic. What do you want to know?”
“You’re the fortune-teller. Why don’t you tell me?” Leon snapped, a little baffled by his strange reaction to the woman. Some part of him wanted to believe she could help him.
“Ah, but I need to hear it from your lips, Mr. Orcot. That’s the way an oracle works. I cannot answer the question until you ask it.”
“Fine, then! Where the hell is he?!”
“That is not the right question. I cannot answer anything but the right question from a true challenger of the unknown. Try again.”
“What do you mean?”
She offered him a dazzling smile. “You know the question you need to ask, but I cannot tell it to you. Ask again.”
“How can I find him?” Leon snapped, frustrated.
“Closer. Try it again.”
Leon wracked his brain, wondering why the hell he was doing this. He must be losing what little of his mind he had left.
She took pity on him. “It is not about the destination, but how you get there. It’s all about you in the end.”
“What-what do I have to do to find him?”
“Better. It’s all about your journey.” She leaned back in her chair and her voice deepened.
“Follow the moon in the midnight sky
To a place where no roads lead
And no voices but the wind cry,
You will find what you need.
Black walls and a mirror of the moon
Step through the looking glass
And into darkness fallen too soon.
Here death and rebirth come to pass.
Dragon and phoenix intertwined
Fallen-to rise again and seek the sky
A gift of passing-reborn, heart and mind
Ours is not to question, nor to wonder why
Long and longer sought-to find at last
The object of your quest
Future anew and shedding the past
Journey’s end, heart to rest.”
Leon shook himself out of the spell her voice had cast on him. “What the hell does that mean?”
Madam Enigma smiled wearily. “Prophecy is never clear for it shatters like a wave on the rocks of logic. That is why the oracles of old had priests to translate for them. As best I can tell you, my desperate seeker, follow the moonset to someplace uninhabited. You will be offered a choice there. The rest I cannot say. I do not truly understand my visions, only relay them for the brave who venture into my tent.”
“Great. The blind taking travel tips from the crazy. My life all over.”
The woman in the chair smiled at him, amusement making her violet eyes dance. “The crazy simply have different ways of looking at things. And you are struggling to overcome your blindness. You have been since the moment you stepped foot into his pet shop for the first time.”
Leon froze, arrested by what she had said. How did she…? “What the hell?”
Her smile held a touch of admonition. “How could I tell you a prophecy unless I know all about you, detective? It is part of what I am. I hold the histories of thousands in my head, many of whom will never brave my tent.” Enigma held out her hand. “May I see it? The drawing you hold so dear to your heart?”
Leon hesitated and drew out a battered square of paper from his breast pocket. Slender fingers plucked it from his hand and deftly unfolded it. “There is much love here, Mr. Orcot. The one who drew this cared very deeply about his subject matter.”
Leon chuckled sadly. “Yeah. When Chris gives you his heart, he does it unreservedly. He’ll learn better one of these days.”
“Ah, ah.” Enigma wagged a finger in reproach. “Do not let a jaded heart keep you blind. You will need to see where you will go. Learn to trust as your brother does and you will find your way.” She gently refolded the paper and held it out. “You will see him again.”
“Another prophecy?” Leon accepted the paper with a half-smile, tucking it back into his pocket.
“No. A wish. You have the power to make it reality, whereas I do not. Always remember that.” She gestured at the tent-flap. “Now. The moon has risen. I suggest you be ready to follow as it sets. A final gift waits for you outside, Leon Orcot. A gift for the gift of letting me see something so beautiful.” A finger rose to point at his breast pocket.
Leon looked askance at her. “You really are nuts, lady. It’s just a crayon drawing.”
“Learn not to be so blind. The beauty isn’t in the simple lines of wax. It’s in the heart of the artist. And his is truly a treasure.” She rose and came to his side, laying a hand over the drawing. “Your heart is a treasure too, my seeker. A bit tarnished and worse for the wear, but a treasure nonetheless for that.” Her smile was deep enough to drown in. “And they do say a bit of wear add character.”
Leon snorted. “My heart’s no treasure, lady. It’s not worth much, believe me.” He didn’t know why he didn’t up and leave the tent, but his feet stayed where they were.
Her sigh was exasperated. “Don’t doubt me, dear seeker.” Her hand was warm on his chest. “It has been abused and broken, but I can still see the beauty in it. So could he. Why do you think you lived when so many others who entered the pet shop did not? He is an excellent judge of character.”
Leon was frozen. His heart was hammering in his chest and he found it hard to swallow. What the hell? “He-he wants all humans dead, lady, and that includes me. Hell, I’m probably top on his list. Especially…” He cut himself off there, mortified by what was coming out of his mouth.
“Since you were forced to kill his father? It was a bitter pill for both of you to swallow, but he knows there was no other choice to be made. His head knows it even if his heart does not.”
Leon couldn’t move, though every fiber of his being wanted to run like hell away from this tent and the strange woman who held court here. He was trapped as surely as an insect frozen in amber, forced to listen to what she had to say, whether he wanted to hear it or not.
“As much as he will deny it, his heart has been broken too, and not just by the death of his father. His kind started out as human as yours, but they have forgotten that. But in his long exposure to you and your little brother, his heart started to remember what his race had forgot. Your cousin had the right of it when she told you that there was something false in his smile the day they came and took your brother home. Though he could not have laid name to the emotion, it was human sorrow that filled his heart and loneliness in the days that followed. He never knew loneliness before. Always, his pets were company enough for him. But no longer.”
“I-I don’t want to hear this!” To his horror, his voice was small, like a frightened child’s. Leon started to shake as she continued.
“Because it is the truth?”
“No!”
“Or because it will force you to admit things you never wanted to think about?”
“NO!” Leon thought he screamed then, but could never be sure, for in the next instant, the woman was seated across from him and the strange paralysis that had held him immobile was gone.
“Remember what I have told you, Leon Orcot. An oracle can speak only truth. Now, go, for you have a long way to go and only a short time to get there.”
Leon stumbled out of the tent into the chilly night air, gasping and feeling like he had been run over. He bent over and tried to catch his breath, shaking like a leaf. Finally his breathing quieted and the trip-hammer beating of his heart slowed. Something wasn’t right here.
The silence was the first thing he noticed. Where were the busy sounds of the carnival? He looked up and the bottom dropped out of his world-view again. Surrounding him were the remains of a long abandoned amusement park. The skeletal framework of a roller coaster loomed over him, black against the night sky. He turned, shaken, and found there was no tent behind him, only a broken fortune-telling machine. The animatronic gypsy hunched over a cracked crystal ball bore no resemblance to Madam Enigma. Leon started to shake when he noticed the white card in the ‘receive fortune here’ slot. The unblemished paper was in stark contrast to the chipped and faded paint of the machine.
With trembling fingers he removed the slip of paper. If the laugh that burst out of him was a little hysterical, he neither noticed nor cared. Printed in block letters were the words “A journey lies ahead.”
Leon was still laughing when the gleam of moonlight off of something that was not worn and broken caught his eye. Hesitantly, he stepped closer. The moonlight was reflecting off the mirror of a jeep parked in the shadow of a decaying booth. Leon dug his flashlight out of his small knapsack and flicked it on. The jeep was not new, but it was in good condition and dangling from the ignition were the keys. Leon laughed again when he noticed the keychain was a miniature Magic Eight Ball. This had to be the gift Madam Enigma had left.
His trust did not extend that far, so Leon checked out the jeep carefully. It had a full tank of gas and a spare can (also full) in the back. The tires were sound, as was the spare. There were two boxes in the back. One had four gallon jugs of water and the other was filled with MREs. There was even a small first aid kit under the driver’s seat. Leon laughed again. It was a harsh and lonely sound in the silence of the abandoned amusement park. “Everything someone needs to go chasing prophecies of hallucinations, on the trail of a guy who runs a pet shop full of man-eating animals. No, my life hasn’t gone completely off the deep end.”
There was a tinkle of laughter on the night wind. “Not yet, dear seeker, but soon. Go now. Time is short.”
Leon looked around for the source of her voice, but the park around him was silent and empty. Wondering if he had lost what little of his mind he had left, Leon climbed in and started the jeep. It rumbled smoothly to life and purred softly as he carefully picked his way out of the long-abandoned midway. When he had cleared the broken chain-link fence bearing weathered ‘Condemned’ signs, he sighted on the nearly full moon hanging in the endless sky. Taking that as his compass heading, he drove across the pitted and cracked parking lot and into the scrubland that surrounded the park.
The jeep jounced over the uneven ground, but Leon didn’t complain. He was damned tired of walking. His money had run out a while back, and he hated that. Following the last report of an animal attack had led him to the little town, and all but stranded him there. When it had turned out to be nothing but a Doberman with a bad attitude, he had wandered into the carnival with the intention of forgetting his troubles for a while in the chatter of crowds and the smells of cotton candy and funnel cakes. It was there he had more or less accidentally wandered into Madam Enigma’s tent.
The night wind was cold on his face as he drove and Leon sighed with weariness. How damned long had he been trying to track down D? Too long, that was for sure. Maybe he should give it up and go back home. He could call his uncle and beg him to float him a loan for a plane ticket. He was sure Chris would be thrilled to see him again.
Something swooped in the air overhead, startling him out of his self-pitying mood. Leon swerved and hit the brakes. The night air was alive with a startling amount of insects for so early in the year and a large group of bats were darting and diving amidst them. Leon laughed tiredly. No. He had come too damned far to give up now. He never gave up on anything, no matter how hopeless a cause it seemed.
“Eat well, you guys.” He called to the aerobatic flock overhead. “And if any of you see Count D, let him know I’m looking for him.” Then he had to laugh at himself again. Ever since that weird-ass dream of the pet shop as a huge ship sailing in the clouds, he had more and more often found himself talking to animals as if they were people who could understand every word. Chris had always insisted that he talked with the people in the pet shop. It wasn’t until the dream that he had seen the animals as human as Chris always had. It made him wonder just how much else he had missed.
One of the bats alighted on the hood of the jeep with a small thump, some sort of insect still in its mouth. Leon could feel the small dark eyes on him as the bat finished its meal and crab-walked up to the windshield. Leon was reminded unpleasantly of Norma, the purported vampire serial killer. She had vanished and the next day D had a new bat among his collection of animals.
Leon shook his head sharply, banishing the memory. “Look, batty, I don’t want to hurt you, so you might want to move. The hood’s not going to be a good place to be when I start driving.” He revved the engine, hoping that would spook the animal. It gave him a disdainful look, for all the world like Q-chan had always done. There was another strange thing, that weird bat-rabbit-whatever thing. It had turned out to be D’s long vanished grandfather, keeping an eye on his grandson in the form of a bizarre pet.
Leon smacked his forehead against the wheel. What the hell was wrong with him? He didn’t have time to wander down memory lane with Bats there. Somehow, he knew that he didn’t have very long to find whatever it was Madam Enigma said he needed to find. There was a growing urgency to the thought. He needed to go.
The bat studied him for a long moment before launching itself back into the air. Leon watched it rejoin the others for only a moment before taking his foot off the brake and reorienting on the slowly sinking moon. The sense of urgency did not fade as he drove, instead becoming such a driving force that he kept pressing harder on the accelerator. It was only after an especially hard jolt from the rutted ground that he noticed he was pushing ninety. Not a smart thing to do on furrowed, uneven (and not to mention, unpaved) ground. He slowed, but the sense of need nagging at the back of his skull became a scream and before long his foot was pressing the gas pedal hard.
Leon had participated in a few harrowing car chases in his time, up to and including the mad race to reach the ocean before D’s damned dragon egg hatched, but this one was putting all of them to shame. The jeep bucked and jolted as he raced over rougher and rougher terrain with a fine disregard for his own safety. Leon gritted his teeth as he hauled the wheel to the right just in time to avoid plowing into a Joshua tree. Wood scraped metal as he squeaked past. Leon yanked his foot off the accelerator and clung to the wheel, panting harshly as the jeep slowed. What the hell was he doing? He was going to fucking kill himself if he kept this up.
He got out of the jeep and took a few deep breaths to calm himself. It would do him no good to kill himself to reach wherever it was the nutty fortuneteller wanted him to go. The desperate urgency retreated before the logic he used, but came back in full force when he glanced up at the setting moon. Somehow he knew he had to reach wherever it was before midnight on the night of the full moon. Which was tomorrow, he noted wryly. Last minute notification, anyone?
When his heartbeat had slowed to something resembling normal, he gingerly climbed back into the jeep and oriented on the sinking moon. He kept one eye on the speed gauge as he drove, reining himself in every time it crept past sixty. The land around him started to change, more rocks poking up through the sandy soil of the scrubland. He had seen no signs of human habitation since he had left the long abandoned amusement park and that struck him as a little odd. Even places like this had people somewhere. It wasn’t normal. Leon had to laugh at himself. What the hell about this whole frigging thing had been normal? He was taking advice from a madwoman who called herself an oracle, rented space in abandoned amusement parks and gifted strangers with jeeps and demented directions disguised as prophecies. Yeah, real frigging normal!
The rocks gave way to boulders, which in turn gave way to tumbled foothills that the jeep labored through. Finally, he reached a point where the vehicle could go no further because the ways had narrowed and twisted to the point of insanity. Leon parked it between two large rocks and dug in the back. He unearthed a hiker’s knapsack and packed it with two jugs of water on the bottom, some food, the first aid kit and whatever else he thought would be useful. He stowed his bag and the remaining supplies in the back and covered them with a tarp that he found folded in the seat well. Best to keep them safe for when he came back this way. If he came back this way, he thought pessimistically.
He followed the setting moon until it disappeared behind the tumbled horizon. He stopped to rest for a few hours. The sun rising above the rocks woke him and he staggered to his feet. After a groggy meal of one of the MRE’s, he continued on, silently blessing his uncle for the camping trips he’d taken Leon on as a small boy. He used the sun to keep his bearing until it rose directly overhead. He dropped then and there for another couple of hours of much needed sleep. But the sense of urgency would not let him rest long and after a second quick meal, he continued into the foothills.
The moon came out before the sun had set and Leon noted with some satisfaction that he could still hold a compass heading the way his uncle had taught him. He used it as a guide into increasingly narrow and weathered passages. He had to backtrack twice to find another way, cursing the delay each time, but by sunset he had cleared the worst of the narrow arroyos and headed further into the foothills. A dried riverbed gave him a clear, if somewhat stony path. The banks rose higher and higher around him as the full moon cast his shadow ahead of him as it climbed toward the midnight hour.
Suddenly, he could go no further. The banks of the river had risen into towering ravine walls that narrowed suddenly. He jerked back with a startled curse as his foot splashed down into shockingly cold water. Leon used his flashlight to discover that the ravine ended here at the pool of water, black in the shadows of the walls. The source of the vanished river, he guessed sourly as he looked for a way out of the ravine. He glanced at his lighted watch face with a hiss of dismay. Shit! He would never make it to wherever he had to be if he had to backtrack out of this damned ravine.
The walls loomed blackly overhead, framing the full moon as it crept toward the center of the sky. Suddenly, the ravine lit up brightly as the moon’s pallid light reflected off the dark water. Leon hesitated as Madame Enigma’s voice echoed softly in his head. “-Black walls and a mirror of the moon. Step through the looking glass and into darkness fallen too soon…”
He glanced up at the towering walls. In the darkness, the dark stone was black as pitch. The moon glinted off the black water before him as Leon stepped to the edge of the pool. Was this place what he was supposed to find? How the hell could this help him find D? He never noticed when the moon reached the center of the sky, gleaming brightly in the midnight hour. The water before him shimmered softly, no longer reflecting him or the moon. It showed instead an enormous cavern, dimly lit by a soft reddish glow. “Step through the looking glass, huh?” He muttered. The skeptic in him was a gibbering ball of panic, unable to cope with these sudden changes in his reality. Leon shrugged fatalistically and stepped towards the water. The worst that could happen was he’d get a little wet.
The water rose to engulf him, and then wasn’t water at all, but air that smelled of dampness and stone and an alluring, metallic scent that he could not name, but that reminded him painfully of D’s strange, nameless incense. The dim red light was gone and he flicked on his flashlight, panning it around the cavern. The beam couldn’t find the far wall.
“Who’s there?”
Startled, Leon let out an undignified yelp and whirled, reaching for a gun that was no longer there. His flashlight’s beam jerked to a halt on the form of an old woman sitting on a shelf of stone next to a pool of dark water. She blinked up at him, a smile creasing her face. “Welcome, stranger.”
To Be Continued…
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