All Seeing Eye Read Online Free PDF Page A

silver,” a gypsy had said with dramatically arching eyebrows and hot breath fogging her crystal ball. I didn’t have a crystal ball. They were expensive, thirty bucks at least. I made do with a bowling ball. Laugh if you want. It worked. I’d found it in a garbage dump. It was chipped and cracked around the finger holes, but I simply turned that part down against the table and concealed it in the nest of threadbare velvet that cradled it. It wasn’t transparent, but the marbleized pattern was odd enough to catch the eye. Twilight blue with a glitter of silver swirling through it, it reminded me of the old days. Lying in a field of sweet-smelling clover and watching as a spray of comets crossed the night sky. I could hear the girls in the distance, laughing and squealing as they helped Mom bring in the laundry. Could feel the bread of my peanut butter sandwich give softly under my fingers as I raised it to my mouth for a bite. It was a good moment … yeah, good. And if I tried hard enough, I could live in that moment, just that one, for a while as I stared at the ball.
    For two years in the carnival, years that passed more quickly than the ones in Cane Lake had, I dealt the cards and waved a hand over the makeshift crystal ball just like that movie gypsy. At first, I didn’t have a tent of my own or a trailer. I would pick a spot on the carnival outskirts, lay out my strip of velvet, ball, and cards, and wait for the ladies to come. And it was always ladies. They’d take a look at my hand-lettered sign that said a dollar a reading, my hair so very earnestly slicked back, my robe that had once been a Halloween Dracula cape, and my fake gold hoop earring that fit the lobe I’d pierced myself, and melt into a maternal puddle. At sixteen, I’d looked younger, an Opie who’d lost his way, and the women couldn’t wait to throw their money at me. I could’ve said you’ll meet a tall dark alien who will carry you off to his mothership to be his egg-laying hive queen, and they wouldn’t have batted an eye. It was all in fun … for them. For me, it was survival.
    The carnival owner tried to run me off in those days, more times than I could count. He’d stomp after me, four hundred pounds of arm-waving fury. “Shoo, boy! Shoo!” he’d squeak in a voice oddly high and sweet for such a big man. “Shoo,” as if I were a stray tomcat spraying the place. It was safe to say that “Shoo” didn’t score too high on my list, damn sure not high enough to actually scare me off. A balled-up fist, a hard and heavy boot, that might’ve had me moving on. “Shoo”? Jesus. Thatwas kiss-my-scrawny-ass territory. When I saw him coming, shaking the ground like a cranky elephant, I usually had plenty of time to gather my stuff and disappear. Half an hour later, I’d pop back up somewhere else, behind a hot-dog stand or next to the freak show. And that’s where I met Abigail.
    “Why do you wear gloves all the time?”
    I paused in the absent shuffling of my cards. They weren’t tarot, just a normal deck, slick and yellowed from a thousand fingers. It didn’t matter. I could’ve played at tarot until the end of time and not seen a goddamn thing. Not from a factory-fresh deck of cards, anyway. It had taken a while to learn to shuffle with the gloves on, but it was time well spent. I could’ve spent the two-fifty on a new deck and handled them with my bare hands, but it wasn’t worth it. I could’ve touched the cards, but I couldn’t have handled the money or the occasional brush of a customer’s hand. Gloves were just safer all the way around. Now I looked up at the girl who wanted to know why. I’d been lurking and working the carnival for two weeks, and she was the first person to actually talk to me … other than those unbelievably fascinating “shoo, shoo” conversations.
    She was younger than me by four years at least. Eleven or twelve, probably. Dressed in a white unitard that was spangled from neck to ankle, she