Oracle of Doom

by D. J. MacHale

  “You talk about him like he’s real,” I said.

  Eugene had been staring at the dummy of Baz. He tore his gaze away to look at me.

  “Do I?” he said. “Silly. It’s just a machine. Then again, the stories seem real enough. Folks say that whatever magic Baz had somehow found its way into this machine.”

  “Do you believe that?” I asked.

  Eugene laughed at the idea. “Not really. But it is kind of fun to imagine, don’t you think?”

  “Not if the machine spits out a fortune that tells your best friend he’s going to die.”

  Eugene’s look turned dark. “Is that what happened?” he asked, suddenly concerned.

  “Yeah. I wanted to see this thing for myself. Not sure why. It’s not like I can ask Baz to step out of that box and tell me how to protect my friend.”

  “You sure about that?” he asked, staring at the ground thoughtfully.

  “Huh?”

  “Got a quarter? Maybe Baz can see into your future.”

  I looked back into the creepy eyes of the dummy. Did this thing really work? Did those dead eyes really see things? I reached into my pocket to grab a quarter but quickly pulled my hand back out, empty. What if Baz told me something about my future that I didn’t want to know? Besides, this was about Theo. And Lu’s cousin. Not me. At least that’s what I told myself. Was that being selfish? Or just plain chicken?

  “I’ll pass,” I said.

  Eugene shrugged and said, “Up to you.”

  “So those stories you heard,” I said. “Were there times when the fortune didn’t come true?”

  Eugene scratched at his chin, thinking back. “Can’t say I’m an authority,” he said. “But from all I’ve heard, if Baz saw it, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do to change it. Or so the legend goes.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to hear, and I guess Eugene saw it in my face.

  “I’m sorry, son,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. They’re just stories.”

  That didn’t make me feel any better. I knew the power of stories.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  “Let’s go. I’ll walk you out of here,” Eugene said. “Come on back another time, when the park is open.”

  He turned and headed for the exit. I followed right behind him.

  “You know you totally freaked me out before,” I said.

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “In the Hall of Mirrors. I thought you were a ghost or something.”

  Eugene stopped short and I nearly ran into him.

  “You went into the Hall of Mirrors?” he asked. “Today?”

  “Well…yeah! I knew somebody was following me, and I didn’t want to get thrown out before I saw the Baz machine.”

  “Son, the first time I laid eyes on you was when you were headed into the arcade. I didn’t go into the Hall of Mirrors.”

  “So it was another security guard,” I said.

  “I’m the only one on duty. You and I are alone in the park.”

  “But…I saw somebody,” I said, stunned.

  “Who knows?” Eugene said with a mischievous wink. “Like I said, lots of history in this park. Maybe some of it’s come around to pay a visit.”

  He turned away and continued for the exit.

  My head was swimming. No way I was imagining things. Someone had followed me into the Hall of Mirrors. I thought this was going to be a story about fate and fortune. Could it be I’d found myself in another ghost story?

  I turned around to get one last look at the fortune-telling machine…and my knees went weak. Maybe it was the angle or a trick of the light, but it sure looked real. I stood looking down the corridor formed by the old-fashioned arcade machines to the glass box that held the Oracle Baz.

  He was no longer staring into his crystal ball.

  He was looking square at me.

  “The Oracle Baz died in a fire two weeks after opening day,” I said. “Can you believe that? Two weeks, two deaths. Unbelievable.”

  “Yikes,” Lu said with dismay. “That’s like the most unamusing amusement park ever.”

  I closed the black leather-bound book with the story of the Oracle Baz and laid it down on the circulation desk in front of Everett. We had all come to meet with him in the Library. Lu, Theo, and me.

  It was time to deal with their disruptions.

  “Maybe the Magic Castle fire that killed him was the big disaster Baz had predicted during his show,” Lu said.

  “I don’t believe so, lass,” Everett said. “Read what happened just a few days after he made that prediction.” He opened the book and slid it across the desk toward Lu and Theo.

  Theo didn’t look at it. He hadn’t said a word since we got there. I couldn’t blame him. We were trying to figure out if he was going to die on his fourteenth birthday. That would tend to put anybody on edge, especially if your birthday was only a few days away.

  Lu eagerly grabbed the book. While she read silently, I kept my eyes on Theo.

  The guy was brilliant. His mind worked like a computer. Talking to him was like talking to Siri on an iPhone, except he actually came up with useful information and you didn’t have to repeat yourself twelve times before he understood the question. I was surprised that his normally logical mind was twisted up over a fortune that had come from a machine. Then again, I wasn’t the one who’d been warned about my imminent death. I probably shouldn’t judge.

  “No way,” Lu exclaimed, looking up from the book. “Is this true?”

  “The books don’t lie,” Everett said. “Besides, the event wasn’t exactly a well-kept secret.”

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “Playland opened on May the first, 1937,” she replied, referring to the book. “On May the sixth, the Hindenburg zeppelin exploded and burned in New Jersey. Thirty-five people died. One of the guys working the lines on the ground had been to Playland on opening day. He survived, just like Baz predicted.” She lowered the book and looked at us. “That’s just…strange.”

  I glanced at Theo.

  He looked sick.

  “Okay, so this Baz guy got a couple of things right,” I said. “But he couldn’t have been all that good, or he would have seen his own future and saved himself. And even if he really had some kind of psychic power, I don’t buy that it jumped out of his head and into a machine.”

  “You’re being thick, boy-o,” Everett said, sounding frustrated with me. When Everett was worked up, his Irish accent got stronger and his bald head turned red. I’d have been afraid he was going to have a heart attack, except he was already a ghost. “You read the book. That machine has been spitting out fortunes that have come true for decades. We can’t ignore that.”

  “But it’s crazy,” I argued. “It’s a machine.”

  “Aye,” Everett said. “It is crazy. Completely crazy. Same as all the other unfinished stories on these shelves. If everything that happened in this world was always neat and logical, there’d be no need for the Library. I should think you’d know that by now.”

  Theo kept his eyes on the floor and didn’t even tug at his ear, which was something he did when he was working through a problem.

  “What do you think, T?” I asked.

  Theo took a deep, thoughtful breath and said, “I can’t speak for Lu’s cousin because I don’t know what her fortune said, but I think I’m in real trouble.”

  “Seriously?” I shouted quickly. “You believe this fortune-telling stuff? That’s, like, so not you.”

  “On the contrary,” Theo said. “It’s exactly like me.”

  “I don’t get that,” Lu said.

  “I’m not sure I get it myself,” he said. “But there appears to be quite a bit of evidence that says it’s real. And if it is, what if the predictions can�
�t be changed? What if it’s all predestined?”

  “That’s just stupid,” Lu said dismissively. “The future hasn’t happened yet. Anything can be changed.”

  “But what if a prediction takes into account that somebody’s going to find out and try to change it? The very things you do differently could lead directly to causing the event that you’re trying to avoid.”

  “Well, that’s disturbing,” I said.

  “So what are you saying?” Lu asked in frustration. “You want to hide under your bed and not do anything to try and protect yourself?”

  “No, I’m saying it might not matter what I do,” Theo said, downhearted.

  “Well, I’m not gonna sit around and let fate take control of my life,” Lu shot back. “Or my cousin’s. Or yours, whether you like it or not.”

  Theo started tugging on his ear. The guy was genuinely freaked.

  We all turned to Everett, hoping he would offer some words of wisdom.

  “If Baz died under mysterious circumstances, chances are this is his story,” he said thoughtfully while tapping the book. “But there’s more to it than that. The disruption that took his life seems to have affected people ever since then, right up until now, with Theo and Lu’s cousin Jenny. The book describes hundreds of fortunes and predictions that came true. We can’t ignore that.”

  “I don’t care about all the others,” Lu said. “I want to keep Theo safe and find my cousin.”

  She grabbed the book and flipped to a page that Everett had marked. “All it says about Jenny is that she got a fortune from the Baz machine in September. It doesn’t say what it was or if it came true.”

  Everett took the book back from Lu and flipped through a few pages.

  “She’s one of a very long list of people who received fortunes,” he said. “Theo’s on that list too. Most of them don’t have any more details than that. But there are enough that do to make me believe we have to take it seriously.”

  “So the spirits who write these books don’t always write about everything they see?” I asked.

  “They do, but they aren’t all-knowing,” Everett replied. “If they were, there would be a lot fewer unfinished books on these shelves. We’re the ones who have to fill in the gaps, and there’s only one way to do that.”

  He snapped the book shut and dropped it onto the circulation desk. It hit hard, like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence.

  “We finish the story,” he said.

  Lu and I stared at the book as if it might magically flip open and spill its secrets.

  Theo looked at the floor. I think he was trying not to cry. Or puke.

  “Too bad we can’t talk to Baz,” Lu said. “He could look into his crystal ball and tell us what’s really going to happen.”

  I was suddenly feeling guilty about not putting a quarter into the Baz machine. Weenie.

  “Who says you can’t?” Everett said, as if it was the most obvious statement in the world. He reached out and slid the book toward us.

  Lu and I stared at it for a few seconds, not sure of what he meant.

  It dawned on me first.

  “We have to go into the story,” I said.

  “Aye,” Everett said with a sly smile.

  “But Baz died early on. The story goes right up to the present. It’s not like we can jump back into the beginning of the book, when he was still alive.”

  “And why not?” Everett asked.

  Lu and I exchanged confused looks.

  Everett reached under the counter and pulled out a scarlet bookmark, complete with a golden tassel.

  “Place this mark anywhere in the book,” he explained. “When you leave the Library, that’s the part of the story you’ll enter.”

  “You mean we can go back in time?” Lu asked, incredulous.

  “No,” Everett said. “You can go to any time in the story. The tales in these books exist in their own world. Their own reality. It’s not the same as actually going back in time.”

  “That’s not how it worked with Black Moon Rising,” I said. “That was all happening in the real world.”

  “Because that story was unfolding in the present,” Everett explained. “Baz’s story happened decades ago, like most of the stories on these shelves. The disruptions that happened in the spirits’ actual lifetimes keep them from resting in peace. That’s why their stories are here. I don’t believe Baz will rest in peace until the truth about his death is known. That’s where we come in.”

  “You think it was Baz’s spirit I saw in the Hall of Mirrors?” I asked.

  “Can’t say for sure,” Everett replied. “And we won’t know until the story is complete.”

  “But what about the present?” Theo asked in a soft voice. “My birthday hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Find that truth from the past,” Everett replied. “It might help us learn about what’s happening in the present.”

  The three of us stared at the closed book as if it would offer some advice to help us know how to do that. For the record, it didn’t.

  “There’s a whole lot about the Library we still don’t understand, isn’t there?” I said.

  Everett shrugged. I took it as a yes.

  I had hoped that my trip to Playland earlier that day would have given me some answers, but all it did was raise more questions. I wanted to solve this mystery and help my friends without jumping into another insane story, but I was kidding myself.

  I knew what we had to do.

  “Lu,” I said, “go to your aunt’s house. Maybe you can find the fortune card Jenny got from the machine. If we know exactly what her fortune was, it might help us figure out what happened to her.”

  “All right,” Lu said. “What about you guys?”

  I looked at Theo. He still looked sick.

  “We may not be able to change the past,” I said. “But we have to be able to control things that haven’t happened yet.”

  “That’s what I said!” Lu exclaimed.

  Theo gave me a hopeful look, but his worried eyes told me he wasn’t as sure about it as I was.

  “T and I are going to Playland,” I said. “In 1937.”

  “We are?” Theo said weakly.

  “Now you’re talking, lad!” Everett exclaimed with glee.

  He quickly took a fountain pen from beneath the counter, handed it to me, and opened the black book. I think he wanted to act fast, before I changed my mind. Glued inside the cover was a blank lined card.

  “First things first,” Everett said. “You need to check out the book.”

  I knew the routine. To enter the story, I had to sign out the book. It’s what I had done when we finished Black Moon Rising. But that story was happening in the present. This new story mostly took place almost a hundred years ago. It was strange enough to know that entering the world of these books would transport us to another place; the idea that it could also transport us to another time, another dimension, added a whole ’nother layer of weirdness to the festivities.

  A really cool layer of weirdness.

  I took the pen without hesitation and signed my name.

  Everett blew on the ink to dry it, then flipped through a few pages.

  “I’ll mark the book to a time before the fire. It’s hard to be exact, but it should give you enough time to find Baz and talk to him before…” His words trailed off.

  “Before he dies,” Theo said, completing the thought.

  “Finding out how the fire started will help complete this story,” I said. “But I want to get to Baz and have him take a look into the future.”

  “You mean my future,” Theo said.

  “And my cousin’s,” Lu added.

  Everett placed the red bookmark between the pages and slapped the book shut.

  “Good luck, lads,�
� he said.

  I stood and rounded the counter, headed for the door on the far side of the Library that would open into the story. Theo was right behind me, followed by Everett and Lu.

  I stopped in front of the ancient wooden door and stared at it. On the other side was another story, another mystery, another time.

  “Ready?” I said to Theo.

  He straightened his bow tie and stood tall. “I suppose so,” he said with false confidence.

  “Give my regards to the olden days,” Lu said.

  I grabbed the doorknob and hesitated. We were about to leave this reality and step into another. There was no way to know what we would find on the other side, and to be honest, I couldn’t wait.

  I heard music coming from beyond the door. It was faint, but unmistakable.

  “Carousel music,” Theo said.

  I couldn’t help smiling. This was really going to happen.

  “It’s Playland,” I said. “Let’s go play.”

  I yanked open the door, and the two of us stepped through the portal into another dimension.

  We stepped through the door into a workshop that was cluttered with tools and machine parts. The strong smell of grease and oil burned my nose hairs while the cheerfully wheezy sound of calliope music filled the room.

  “Convenient how the Library sends us to out-of-the-way places,” I said. “This must be where the maintenance guys work.”

  “Looks like it,” Theo replied. “I don’t know what we’d do if we stepped out into a crowd.”

  “Hey, who are you?” someone yelled.

  Oops.

  We spun to see a little kid sitting in the corner behind a workbench, loaded down with carnival snacks. He had cotton candy, a box of popcorn, a couple of hot dogs, and a bag of peanuts. I wasn’t sure if I should be jealous or disgusted.

  “How’d you get in here?” the kid asked accusingly. “Only park workers are allowed.”