by AnonYMous
Kacy led the way up the steps, with Dante straggling along behind her. The front door was already open, but it wasn’t easy to see in because there was a curtain made of strings of multicoloured beads hanging from the top of the doorway right to the floor.
‘Come on in,’ called out a croaky voice from inside. ‘It’s Kacy and Dante, isn’t it?’
Dante raised an eyebrow and whispered in his girlfriend’s ear, ‘How the fuck did she know that?’ Kacy looked at him to see whether he was serious, and shook her head when she realized he was.
‘I phoned and made an appointment, you dummy.’
‘Oh, yeah. Of course.’
The room they entered was very dark, and so narrow that Dante could almost have touched both sides at the same time if he’d stretched his arms out fully. There were candles intermittently spaced at eye level on shelves along the walls on either side. Their light came from an enchanting pink-coloured flame that barely flickered. As their eyes adjusted to the gloom they could see, sitting directly in front of them behind a dark wooden table at the far end of the room, the cloaked figure of the Mystic Lady. Her cloak was a dark purple colour and (as was so often the case with people in Santa Mondega) the hood was pulled up over her head, concealing her face.
‘Please be seated, my young friends,’ she croaked.
‘Thank you,’ said Kacy, sitting down on one of the two wooden chairs situated on their side of the table. Dante took the other, making an effort not to look too interested, in the hope that the old lady would be able to tell he wasn’t going to swallow any of the crap she was about to feed them.
‘You don’t really believe I’m going to be able to tell you anything, do you?’ the rasping voice asked him from somewhere beneath the hood.
‘I’m keeping an open mind.’
‘Good. You do that, son, and – who knows? – you might find out something you didn’t know about yourself, or about Kacy maybe.’
‘Yeah, that’d be nice.’
The woman slowly pulled back her hood to reveal an old, wrinkled face covered liberally in warts and boils. She focused her gaze upon Kacy and smiled, but it was only for a brief moment. The smile was instantly wiped from her face when her eyes fell upon the necklace the girl was wearing.
‘Where did you get that blue stone?’ she demanded. Any warmth had gone from her voice.
‘What?’
‘That necklace around your neck. Tell me, where did you find it?’
‘She didn’t find it,’ Dante butted in. ‘I gave it to her as a present … a few years ago.’
‘Horseshit!’
‘No, seriously.’
‘Don’t lie to me. I’m not stupid, boy. Don’t you be. Where did you get that stone?’
The Mystic Lady’s tone of voice indicated a severe lack of tolerance for lies. This played on Kacy’s mind as she considered whether or not to keep up the pretence that Dante had given her the necklace some years before. She decided there was no point in blatantly lying, but there was also no need to confess to the fact she had stolen it from the hotel room of a drunken slimeball who was now, in all likelihood, the late Mr Slimeball, Deceased.
‘A man in a hotel gave it to me yesterday,’ she said.
The old woman sat back in her chair and looked long and hard at Kacy, studying the girl as if trying to gauge how truthful she was being.
‘It doesn’t really matter where you got it from,’ she said at last. ‘Just get rid of it. That stone will bring you nothing but bad luck.’
‘How do you know that?’ Kacy asked, intrigued to learn what it was the Mystic Lady seemed to think she knew about the stone.
‘Well, tell me this: the man you say gave it to you, did it bring him luck?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Okay, let me put it another way, Kacy. Would you want to swap places with the previous owner of that stone?’
Kacy shook her head.
‘No.’
‘Dead, isn’t he?’
Although it sounded like a question, it also sounded as though the Mystic Lady already knew the answer to it, in the same way that a quiz-show host knows the answer to all the questions asked of contestants about themselves before the quiz gets under way.
‘Not when I last saw him,’ Kacy replied gamely.
‘Everyone who carries that stone gets killed at some time or another. Usually within a very short time of receiving it. In fact, the man from whom you acquired that stone is already dead.’
Much to his irritation, Dante found himself taking an interest in what the fortune teller was saying.
‘How do you know? Where’s your proof?’ he asked aggressively, and with a hint of a sneer.
He wasn’t happy that the Mystic Lady was frightening Kacy. She was just about the most fearless girl he’d ever known, but she believed stuff that she heard from fortune tellers, so this was liable to upset her.
‘Let’s look into my crystal ball, shall we? And I’ll tell you,’ the old woman said by way of reply. She pulled back a black silk cloth that had been covering a spherical object on the dark mahogany table. ‘Cross my palm with a twenty-dollar bill and I shall reveal your destiny.’
What happened to silver? Dante thought, but he reached into his pocket, pulled out a twenty, and threw it on to the table in the Mystic Lady’s general direction. She snapped it up immediately and concealed it somewhere about her person, much like a beggar on the street who’s been handed enough money to buy a bottle of his favourite liquor. Then she sat back, apparently deep in thought. Eventually, when she was quite ready, she began slowly to wave her hands back and forth above the crystal ball.
To the astonishment of both Dante and Kacy, a white cloud began to form just under the surface of the ball. After a few seconds of random hand waving from the Mystic Lady, the cloudiness began to subside, to be replaced by a thin mist. Within the mist Dante could just about make out the image of a man’s face. He leaned in closer to get a better look. It looked very much like the face of the man from whom they had stolen the blue stone.
‘My God, it’s that Jefe guy,’ he mumbled quietly to Kacy, as if he hoped the old woman wouldn’t hear.
‘Are you sure that’s his name?’ asked the Mystic Lady.
Kacy and Dante looked at each other, both of them concerned at the way the fortune teller had asked. Did she know this man by another name? The victim of Kacy’s thieving, it had turned out, had carried two wallets with him. One suggested his name was Jefe, which was the name he had used to check into the hotel, but the other wallet contained ID for a man named Marcus.
‘Actually, his name may have been Marcus,’ said Kacy apologetically, as if she knew what was coming next.
The Mystic Lady leaned down to her right and picked up something from the floor. Dante tensed, staying alert just in case she was reaching for a weapon of some kind. In fact, what she retrieved from the floor was a newspaper. She placed it on the desk in front of them. It was the Daily Scope, and printed on its front page in large letters was the headline ‘MARCUS THE WEASEL SLAIN’.
Dante and Kacy both scanned the article beneath the headline. There was a photograph of the man they had stolen the blue stone from. The photo was quite old, but it was definitely of him. It showed him grinning inanely and looking more than a little bleary-eyed, so it had probably been taken on a drunken evening – which in Marcus the Weasel’s case was every evening. There was not a great deal of information in the article about how exactly he had met his Maker, but there was enough to suggest that his end had been particularly unpleasant. Dante thought back to how he had watched the Elvis lookalike kicking the door of the hotel room in. Marcus the Weasel was dead, murdered at the hands of this Elvis guy. And this Elvis guy was a nasty piece of work who might come looking for him and Kacy.
The Mystic Lady covered the crystal ball with the black cloth once more. Then she pulled the twenty-dollar bill back out from wherever she had hidden it and placed it in Kacy’s hand.
‘
Take the money back and do yourselves a favour,’ she said quietly. ‘Get rid of that necklace before anyone finds out you ever had it. It has a powerful presence, and it will draw evil towards it wherever it goes. You’re not safe as long as you have it with you. In fact, you’re not really safe if you’ve ever had contact with it. Many, many souls have searched for that stone, and many have perished by it.’
‘What’s so bad about it?’ Kacy asked. There was a note of fear in her voice that Dante had never heard before.
‘There is nothing bad about the stone itself,’ the old woman went on. She sounded very tired now, and somehow disheartened. ‘But it will draw him to it. He will come for you, and he will stop at nothing until he has it.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know who he is, and I don’t want to know. If he thought I knew who he was, he would come for me, too.’
‘It’s not a guy who looks like Elvis, is it?’ asked Dante. This old hag was giving him the creeps.
The Mystic Lady’s face screwed up into a contorted frown. ‘What do you know of him?’ she hissed.
‘Well, we think he may have killed Marcus,’ whispered Kacy.
The old lady leaned forward over the table, keeping her voice low. ‘Don’t you two watch the news?’ she croaked. ‘Elvis is dead.’
‘No,’ laughed Dante. ‘This was just a guy who looked like Elvis.’
The fortune teller shook her head in a condescending manner. ‘Where do you two live?’ she inquired.
‘Why?’ Dante was a little defensive. Kacy, however, was happy to part with a little information.
‘We just moved into a motel yesterday.’
‘Were you in a place called Shamrock before?’
‘Yeah. How’d you know that?’ Dante asked. This Mystic Lady – this fortune teller – was really coming up with the goods, unlike so many of the others Kacy had dragged him to see in the past. The old woman leaned back in her chair again and flashed a toothy smile at him.
‘Because I watch the news and I listen to the radio,’ she said. ‘That’s where they found Elvis’s dead body this morning.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The man you spoke of, who looked like Elvis? Well, he’s dead. Sounds like he tracked you down, but so did someone else. Looks like Elvis was the big loser. His body was found in your old apartment block. Could’ve been you two just as easily.’
Dante wasn’t happy. In fact, he was starting to feel a little light-headed. This latest news had shocked him. Worse, it worried him. A lot. Someone had tracked down and killed Elvis, possibly because of the blue stone in the necklace he and Kacy had acquired. But there was also another possibility. The suitcase that Kacy had stolen from one of the other rooms just after she had robbed Marcus the Weasel. What if someone was looking for that? Getting rid of the stone was a good idea, but getting rid of the suitcase was not an option. It had contained one hundred thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills. Dante didn’t know which was the more sought after, the hundred grand or the precious blue stone. Either way, hanging around in Santa Mondega for much longer was not a good idea.
‘Fuck. Come on, Kacy, let’s get outta here. We can pawn that fucking stone before it’s too late.’
‘You got it, baby.’
The Mystic Lady had no need to look into her crystal ball to know that she would never see Dante or Kacy again. The forces of evil had a nasty habit of tracking down all those who had been in contact with the Eye of the Moon, and they would stop at nothing to retrieve it. These two kids would be lucky if they lived to the end of the day.
Twenty-Five
When Kyle and Peto had booked into the Santa Mondega International Hotel they had been highly impressed by the courtesy of the staff. The manager had insisted that a porter should carry their luggage up to their room for them, but even then, and despite the pleasant nature of both the manager and porter, Kyle had made sure he kept a tight grip on the black suitcase they had brought with them. He had assured the manager that it weighed less than a bag of feathers, and contained only a prayer book and a pair of sandals.
One thing that Kyle had stressed to Peto over and over again was the importance of not trusting anyone they met. So although they had both really wanted to trust the hotel staff, they had insisted that no one should touch the suitcase except them. Once the porter had left them in their room they had made a point of hiding it under the bed. As Kyle informed Peto, the last place anyone would look for something valuable was under the bed. Kyle clearly hadn’t watched enough television. If he had, he would have known that this was the worst place to hide anything valuable. Any chambermaid or porter looking to steal from the hotel’s guests would always look under the bed first.
Only now was Kyle beginning to understand fully why Father Taos had overstated his strictures about not trusting anyone, and the necessity for being extremely careful not to let the suitcase out of their sight. Kyle had followed the wise old monk’s lead and overstated the point to Peto. Now, however, and as much as he hated to admit it, on this occasion the novice wasn’t to blame. It had been Kyle’s idea to hide the suitcase under the bed. He had wrongly assumed that locking the door of their hotel room behind them when they set off for the Tapioca would be sufficient. With the result that there was now nothing under the bed. No suitcase, and more importantly, no hundred thousand dollars in used bills that had been inside it. They had been robbed, and they had no idea by whom.
‘Kyle, who would do such a thing?’ asked a visibly upset Peto, checking under the bed for the thousandth time, just in case the suitcase really was there and they had missed it by some freak of chance. Kyle had no idea either.
‘From what I’ve seen of the world outside Hubal, just about anyone could have done this. No one seems to have a conscience, or any idea of what is right and wrong. We are in serious trouble, Peto. This money was all we had to trade with in the outside world. Now we will have to become thieves like everyone else if we are to get the Eye of the Moon back.’
Peto could not believe what he was hearing. Giving up his pointless search, he threw himself down in a chair by the window. Kyle was advocating breaking the code by which they had lived their entire lives. And this was his first suggestion, too. He had come up with no other ideas. This was serious.
‘But that would go against the code,’ he said, horrified. ‘That would contradict everything we have been taught.’
‘Yes, it would,’ Kyle mused. ‘But that, my friend, is probably what happened to all the other monks who ever left Hubal to go on missions. It is why none of them are fit to return and live among us. I think we are now seeing the true sacrifice of being the ones chosen to find the Eye.’
‘There must be another way to get the Eye back without stealing. There must be!’ Peto insisted.
‘Do you really think anyone is going to help get it back to us for free, when they could sell it and get fifty thousand dollars from someone else?’ He ran a hand over his face, briefly rubbing his tired eyes. He went on, ‘No, Peto, we have no choice. We must put aside all we have been taught. We will have to break every one of our sacred vows if we are to get the stone back.’
‘Does that mean we should start drinking, smoking, swearing, gambling and sleeping with fast women?’ Peto asked.
‘You’ve been watching too much of that television, Peto. I don’t think we’ll need to break those particular vows. But lying and stealing, we may just have to commit crimes such as those,’ his brother monk replied.
Kyle was now sitting on the large double bed under which they had hidden the suitcase full of money. He had buried his head in his hands. Breaking the sacred laws of Hubal … this was not what he had intended when he had set out, although he had been aware it might possibly be a job requirement.
‘Well then, surely if we’re going to break one vow and be banished from Hubal for ever, we might as well break them all and be done with it?’ Peto reasoned. ‘Besides, I’ve already shot one scum— person in the face and killed him.
’
‘That doesn’t count,’ snapped Kyle. ‘That was an accident.’
For once, Kyle seemed not to be in control of his emotions. Peto had not seen him like this before. The older monk was clearly distraught at having lost all their money, and the thought of breaking even one of the vows he had followed all his life was making him feel even worse. Peto, on the other hand, was quickly coming to terms with the idea of breaking rules. If the truth be known he was actually relishing the opportunity. With that thought, he was immediately up on his feet.
‘Fuck it, Kyle, where’s that minibar?’ he asked defiantly.
‘Whoa! Steady on there, Peto,’ said Kyle, also jumping to his feet. ‘I said we might have to break some vows. You’ve already cursed, but let that be as far as it goes for now, hmmm? If you end up lying and stealing and being banished from Hubal because you were trying to reclaim the Eye of the Moon, then, and only then, can you think about breaking other vows, such as the one forbidding the drinking of alcohol.’
Peto looked crestfallen. He had seen all the drunk men in Sanchez’s bar and had rather fancied trying the whole experience out for himself. He knew in his heart that Kyle would never have let him touch the minibar, but just to be thinking of such a thing made him feel more alive, somehow. Saying ‘Fuck’ had been surprisingly liberating, too.
‘You’re right, Kyle, of course you are. Hear me out, though. If we’re going to get the Eye back from whatever slime— bandit has hold of it at the moment, wouldn’t it benefit us to have an idea of what it’s like to be them? You know, to get inside their heads?’
‘Sure it would, but getting drunk is not at all what I had in mind.’
‘So what do you have in mind?’
‘Let’s stick to our strengths.’ Kyle did at least look as though he was concocting a plan, much to Peto’s relief. ‘Hand-to-hand combat, whether it be mugging somebody or just fighting for money. That has to be our first plan.’
‘Do you seriously think we’ll get back our hundred thousand dollars by mugging someone?’
