The Devil You Know

by Trish Doller

  And suddenly, what started out as woolly has taken a turn toward the believable, and I’m not sure what to think. I watch as she turns over the fourth card—a castle turret on a small rocky island with Neptune (or maybe Poseidon) in the foreground, zapping the turret with his trident. A piece of turret has broken away, poised to fall into the raging ocean.

  “The Tower suggests that a big change is coming,” Joan says. “It will be difficult and painful, but when you come out on the other side, you will be stronger and better for it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says. “The air around you feels heavy, like just before a big storm, and I can’t pinpoint if the change is emotional or physical, but I do get a very strong sense that your foundation will be shaken. You must go through it. You can’t go backward. You can’t go home.”

  I’m barely breathing and my eyes are fixed on her fingers, on the cards, and we both know I’ve stepped across the border into the realm of belief. There are only two cards left, and I want to know what this universal spread has in store for me.

  The next card depicts a man in a white tunic with a red toga. At his feet are a cup and a sword and some other things I can’t identify, but right now I’m more interested in what it means.

  “Typically,” Joan says, “the Magician is a good sign. It means that you have all the tools to get what you want—provided you know what you want—but I’m troubled by this position in the spread.”

  “Why?”

  “Here, the Magician represents the forces working against you,” Joan says. “And I get the sense that someone—a man, a boy, definitely male—isn’t quite what he seems. He is deception and trickery disguised as charm and friendliness, and he may not have your best interests at heart.” She returns her hand to the High Priestess. “Trust your instincts where he is concerned.”

  Noah comes to mind, and I suffer a private bout of shame for even thinking of him like that. He told me about the fight that got him sent to Maine, even when he didn’t want to talk about it. I’ve met his dog. I’ve seen his library cards. He’s not deception and trickery, he’s just an ordinary guy with a bumpy history, so I file those doubts away in the same skeptical place I did her predictions about my musical abilities. I trust my inner High Priestess. “What’s next?”

  She reveals the final card—a man wrestling a lion.

  “Strength,” Joan says. “This is the outcome card. You need to have courage, to believe in yourself, in order to get what you want. Believe in yourself and look inside when you feel your courage failing and you will succeed.”

  It feels as if we’ve doubled back to generic, and now I find myself unsure of whether what I’ve just experienced is real or ridiculous. I stand. She stands. I’m about to thank her for her time when Joan takes my hand as if to shake it.

  “I know you’re skeptical, but—” A sharp breath steals her words away and her eyes go closed behind her glasses for a beat. Then two. When they open, they’re wide blue and startled. She blinks at me. “Oh.” She blinks again. “Oh my.” Joan pulls her hand back, rubbing her thumb against her first two fingers as if she’s been shocked.

  “What just happened?” The hair on the back of my neck prickles, even though I didn’t feel anything other than the touch of her fingers on my hand.

  “I’m not sure.” Her voice is barely a whisper and she sounds as confused as I am. In a tiny corner of my heart, I hope it’s my mom, somehow, here with us. Sending a message.

  “Sometimes, once in a while, I’ll get a flash,” Joan says. “A vision. Whether it’s a memory or a premonition, I’m never sure, but when I touched your hand just now I saw a tattoo. A flaming Sacred Heart tattoo. I also saw a gun, Cadie. A handgun. Do you know someone with a tattoo like that? Does this mean anything to you?”

  Noah comes to mind again, but I’ve seen his tattoos. He doesn’t have a Sacred Heart. He doesn’t have a heart at all.

  He doesn’t have a heart at all?

  Why would I think that, using those particular words? I’m unsettled and shaky, and I don’t like that I’m reading so much—too much—into this when it was just supposed to be fun.

  “No.” I shake my head as I back away, toward the door. “But thanks. I should, um—thank you.”

  “It’s a message, Cadie, a warning,” Joan says, as I reach for the handle of the front door, and her words reel me back. A message? “Don’t give him your heart. He will break you.”

  “Who?” I turn to look at her, but Joan shakes her head.

  “I don’t know.”

  This vision of my future, this warning, is frightening. I don’t want this. I want ridiculous predictions of fame by way of the guitar I haven’t touched in years. I want to go back to being skeptical because this reality is that I should be afraid because he—whoever he is—doesn’t just want to break my heart, he wants to break me.

  “So, how’d it go?” Matt scoots over to make room between him and Noah on the bench out front, but I don’t sit. I pace, trying to untangle the knots my insides have become. “Are you going to be famous? Marry a man named Matt MacNeal? Please tell me she gave you the winning Super Lotto numbers.”

  “You okay?” The sweet note of Noah’s concern bumps up against the psychic’s warning, and I can’t look at him when I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. She told me to trust my instincts and then said someone is going to break me. Someone with a tattoo and a gun. “Cadie, you look freaked out. What the hell happened in there?”

  “She touched my hand and saw something …” Giving voice to the words makes me feel silly, especially since there’s a line of worry in the space between Noah’s furrowed brows, and Matt’s usually sunny smile slides off his face. I sit down on the bench between them. “I guess like a premonition or something. I don’t know. It’s stupid.”

  “What did she see?” Matt asks.

  Now that I’m out in the cool shade with the breeze kissing my skin, the whole encounter seems melodramatic and unreal. The unsettled feeling begins to break loose, and the further I get from Joan’s words, the less meaning they hold. Telling them would just be embarrassing.

  “She said I was going to marry Jason Kendrick, which would freak anyone out.” As I fake-laugh, Noah looks at me as if he knows I’m lying, but doesn’t call me out on it. I stretch my arms around both their shoulders. “So what’s next? Are you guys going to have your futures read?”

  “Nah.” Noah shakes his head. “I don’t believe in letting the lines on my hand or a deck of cards dictate how I live my life.”

  “Exactly,” Matt agrees. “We make our own futures. And mine … is going to be outstanding.”

  Chapter 10

  We’re aimlessly meandering the back roads around Cassadaga, wasting gas and killing time until midnight, when we come across the Our Lady of the Lakes Summer Festival. Carnival music and the shrieks of those brave enough to try the carny rides stretch out to the highway. The colored lights of the skeletal-looking rides are muted in the daylight, but they’re still a siren’s song for three people in need of something to do.

  “We should go.” Matt, reading my mind, pokes his face between the front seats. “Elephant ears. Tilt-a-Whirl. Corn dogs. Dude, look”—he taps Noah’s shoulder and points in the direction of a giant steel wheel—“Ring of Fire.”

  Noah does a vigorous head-bob, a smile breaking across his face. “We should go.”

  Parked cars spill out of the regular church lot into an adjoining dirt field. Clearly a popular festival. Noah finds a space at the back in the shade of some trees. Perfect for Molly, dozing on the backseat floor after an hour of nonstop fetch back at our campsite in the park. How Noah’s not suffering a sore arm after all that throwing is beyond me. We leave the dog a bowl of bottled water—he says she’ll be okay—and buy our admissions to the carnival.

  “You guys are really planning to go on the rides?” I ask, as a man stamps the back of my hand with glow-in-the-dark ink. “I mean, why wou
ld you trust anything that collapses to fit in a truck? They’re like portable death traps.”

  “Exactly what makes them so much fun,” Matt says. “And you haven’t really lived until you’ve experienced Ring of Fire.”

  “On the other hand, I haven’t really died, either.”

  Noah laughs. “We’ve both ridden it and lived to tell the tale.”

  “Now it’s your turn,” Matt says.

  The rides midway is at the opposite end of a gauntlet of food stands that taunt us with the scent of Italian sausage, deep-fried foods, and a sweet note of powdered sugar that reminds me of my mom.

  Every spring, usually in April, High Springs holds Pioneer Days. There’s a midway of homemade food and crafts tents, pony rides, a Wild West-style shootout between cowboy reenactors, an old-timey tractor show, and historical Native American displays. It’s not fancy and might be considered slightly cheesy, but most everyone in High Springs turns out and it’s just small-town nice.

  When I was about six—right around the time I developed an obsession for the Little House on the Prairie books—Mom sewed me a blue calico dress and matching sunbonnet that I wore to Pioneer Days. Jason Kendrick was chasing me through the park on Saturday afternoon when I fell and tore a hole in the dress. After she wiped my tears and convinced me a calico patch would be even more Laura Ingalls than the original, Mom introduced me to funnel cakes. Eventually I outgrew the dress and moved past the Little House books, but every year my mom and I would share a funnel cake at Pioneer Days.

  “Would you do it for some cotton candy? Fried pickles?” Noah asks.

  “Seriously?” I give him a side-eye, but I’m smiling. “You think you can bribe me with food?”

  “Yep.”

  “Funnel cake,” I say. “Or we have no deal.”

  “Funnel cake, it is.”

  Ring of Fire, as it turns out, has a roller coaster train attached to a track on the inside of the giant steel wheel. As the track spins with a metallic rattling roar, it sends the train upside down at the top of the ring. I’ve been on upside-down rides before at Busch Gardens over in Tampa, but as the three of us buckle into our seats, I’m a little nervous. Riders were screaming as we waited in line—some in terror, some with delight—and the top of the train is enclosed in a protective steel cage that is anything but reassuring.

  The ride starts out with the train swinging forward and backward as it gains momentum—each time climbing a little higher up the ring until we’re nearly upside down. I can see people walking the midway. Hear game callers attempting to lure festival goers into trying their hands at balloon darts and ring toss. But as the train moves faster, I lose sight of the midway. My hair goes crazy in the wind. We loop forward. Loop backward. I hear someone screaming—and I think it might be me—and across from me Noah and Matt are laughing.

  “Well?” Matt asks, as the train swings back to a stop at the end of the ride. “What do you think?”

  “It was terrifying and awesome,” I say. “I think I’m a carny ride convert.”

  “I knew it.” He and Noah high-five as if they didn’t expect any other answer. “More?”

  “Yes.”

  We ride a crazy contraption more terrifying than Ring of Fire called the Zipper. It’s a fast, oblong Ferris wheel with cage cars that rotate a three-sixty all by themselves. With every spin I feel as if I’m going to fall out, but have no idea which way I’m facing. We hit up the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Himalaya, and a bunch of other spinning rides. Noah makes good on our funnel cake deal and we eat corn dogs, too, arguing ketchup versus mustard (ketchup). We ride the swinging pirate ship that looks tame but threatens a corn dog reappearance, and then make our way to the games midway.

  After I lose a buck trying to pop balloons with darts and waste another dollar at the ring-the-bottle booth, we stop at the rabbit-shooting gallery. The back wall of the booth is lined with cubbies filled with plush animals ranging from palm-size frogs to giant clown fish that look just like Nemo. A sign along the front promises THE MORE YOU HIT, THE BIGGER THE PRIZE. The target is a row of seven metal rabbits. Knock down four rabbits and you get an unnaturally green frog. Five wins a penguin wearing a purple scarf. The prize for six rabbits is a brown plush owl with a floral-print belly. And seven downed rabbits wins the fish.

  “God, my brother would lose his mind over that Nemo.”

  I give the game operator a five-dollar bill and pick up one of the BB rifles chained to the front of the booth. I’ve handled a BB gun before. Just about every boy I know owns one, and in middle school we’d have shooting contests in the Kendricks’ backyard, trying to hit soda cans off their back fence. Once, the boys started shooting at one another and Duane took a round shot to his backside. He was too embarrassed to go to the hospital, so my uncle Eddie removed the BB with a paring knife and tweezers.

  I’m not a very good shot. I hit four out of the seven, and the game operator gives me one of the frogs. It has a pink ribbon tied around the neck. It’s cute.

  “Let me try.” Noah offers up his own five-dollar bill and chooses one of the BB guns from the end of the counter.

  Matt adds another fiver. “I’ll try, too.”

  They’re very serious about the game, each positioning himself at the counter, one eye lined up along the top of the rifle and the other eye squinted shut. They squeeze off their first shots very slowly and deliberately. Plink. Plink. Two rabbits down. A little crowd gathers behind us to watch.

  Another plink, plink. Another two rabbits down.

  Matt and Noah shoot neck-and-neck through three, four, five, six. Down to the last rabbit. Noah takes his final shot first.

  He misses.

  The game operator gives him one of the medium-size owls. It reminds me of the owls on Mom’s old apron, and I immediately love it. Noah offers it to me with an apology in his eyes, as if winning a giant fish is actually important.

  “I can try again,” he says, but even as the words are coming out of his mouth, Matt hits his seventh rabbit with one last plink. A small cheer goes up behind him. A bit of clapping.

  “I’ll take the fish,” Matt says. The game operator hands over the prize, and Matt presents it to me with a flourish and a bow. “For Daniel Boone.”

  The plush Nemo is not quite as big as my brother, but I can picture the thing taking up half his toddler bed, because he’s definitely going to want to sleep with it.

  “He’s going to love this so much,” I say. “Thank you.”

  I want to tell Noah I love the owl, too. That I’m going to keep it for myself as a souvenir of today. Of him. But his expression has morphed from apologetic to annoyed, and maybe a little jealous that Matt made the winning shot. A thank-you from me now would feel tacked on. Too late. Instead I catch his hand in mine. “Come ride the Ferris wheel with me?”

  “Don’t you mean you, Matt, and the big-ass fish?”

  “No.” My fingertips touch the back of his neck, and I gently pull his face toward mine. My lips against his are a whisper. A hint. A promise. “Just me.”

  Leaving Matt to look after the big-ass fish, we walk toward the rides midway, where the colored lights on the Ferris wheel are just starting to come alive in the fading day. The sun hasn’t set yet, but if we’re lucky, we’ll catch it at the top.

  We are at the top when the sun sets, but we miss it completely.

  The growl of the Cougar’s engine seems alive and predatory in the stillness that follows us from our campsite to the cemetery on the outskirts of town. Tonight feels so much darker than last, and the world is buzzy around the edges from the beers we drank in the cemetery parking lot while we waited for midnight. We follow the beam of Matt’s flashlight between the headstones.

  The Devil’s Chair is built into a low brick wall that surrounds a private burial plot consisting of two graves. One of the headstones has toppled over while the other is missing entirely, and the chair sits facing the graves. According to information Matt gleaned from the Internet, the chair is a mourning
bench built by a man who wanted a place to sit while visiting his wife’s grave. A symbol of love, not evil. But in the dark, the bench lit only by the shine of a big summer moon, I half expect to see the devil waiting there for us.

  “What time is it?” I fall back to clutch Noah’s hand as Matt points the flashlight beam at his watch. I’m not usually scared of things that go bump in the night, but Joan’s warning creeps out from the corner of my brain where I’ve kept it tucked away all afternoon. What if there’s someone out here, lurking in the woods, waiting for urban-myth chasers like us? Thinking about the gun in Joan’s premonition makes me shiver, and Noah wraps his arm around my shoulder.

  “We’ve got a couple of minutes,” Matt says. He places an unopened can of beer on the armrest of the big brick chair, an offering for the mythical devil who is supposed to drink it without opening the can—or, more realistically, for the person who will come along for the free beer after we leave. “Who’s going to sit?”

  “Count me out,” I say.

  “Aw, come on, Cadie.” Noah catches me up against him and pulls me down with him onto the chair. Straddling his lap. His hand steals beneath the back of my shirt, and his mouth grazes my neck, making me shiver for a whole different reason. “I won’t let the devil get you.”

  “You guys …” Matt sounds irritated.

  “How do I know you’re not the devil?” I whisper to Noah, my lips touching his. I can feel his smile against my mouth, even in the dark.

  “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” he whispers in reply as his fingers tiptoe up my back.

  Matt counts down the seconds. “… Three … two … one … midnight.”

  Noah kisses me at that moment, holding me so close I can feel how much he wants me. His face is rough with stubble under my palms, and his tongue warm and alive in my mouth. I sink so quickly when I’m around him, turning into an aching, hungry creature more frightening than any devil could be. And it isn’t until the sound of a revving engine splits the stillness around us that I realize we’re alone. Several of the buttons on my shirt are open, and Matt is gone.