This Isn't What It Looks Like

by Pseudonymous Bosch

  Wish me luck! And don’t forget to dine at Medieval Days! “Eat, Drink, and Be Medieval!”

  Your official court taster,

  —Glob

  11:35 AM

  EMERGENCY POST—PLEASE READ! HELP NEEDED!

  I know this sounds like a prank but right now I’m hiding in a cave and scared for my life. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. If nobody ever hears from me again, somebody please tell my little sister I lied, she wasn’t really born with a tail. Daniel-not-Danielle, you can have all my vintage action figures AND my Guinness World Record–breaking snack cake wrapper collection. I know you think this blog is bogus, but I would seriously consider keeping it up if I were you. You could even expand to movie and game reviews. Hello banner ads! That could be some serious bank.

  Alright, I better catch you up while I still have some power left. On the other side of the riverbed there wasn’t really a trail but you could follow all the crushed leaves and muddy footprints and stuff. I walk for about five minutes and it’s like I’m not getting any closer. At first I figured it was a bbq for people who work at Ren-Faire, which seemed cool. You know, like, insider stuff. But now it’s seeming kind of far for Ren-Faire people. Is it just people camping? Like tramps or outlaws? I keep going though ’cause I feel like I’m on one of those nature expedition shows and anyway it’s something to blog about, right?

  Suddenly, the smoky smell gets really strong and I hear all this chanting. Not like at a ball game, more like monk-sounding. You know, like in Latin but probably way older? So I get to this place where the trees have been cut. There’s a big fire in the middle with lots of huge logs burning. A dozen or so people are standing around in a circle. They’re all wearing these long cloaks and my first thought is, oh, OK, they’re from Ren-Faire after all and they’re practicing to be monks for a show later.

  Something tells me not to go up to them yet though. I look around expecting to see a table full of barbecue fixings, cole slaw, and whatever. But there’s no food at all. And what’s really weird is when I look closer at the fire, I see it’s not a bbq at all. There’s no meat, no grill. Just this big glowing ball. The ball is glass I think, with, like, a white fire inside. It’s so bright it’s hard to look at, like the sun.

  The chanting changes and suddenly I can understand what they’re saying. Just the word SECRET over and over. Like if they say it enough times that glowing ball was going to shoot into the sky or something. Then this woman, who looks like the leader, she holds up this big goblet and drinks out of it. She’s in a cloak like everybody else but underneath she’s wearing some kind of white sparkly dress and she’s really pale and maybe the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen, but she never smiles. Seriously, it’s like her face never moves. She’s kind of scary but she is definitely H-O-T. I better stop looking at her, I think, or she’s going to notice and like turn me into a statue or something. Ha ha. She passes around the goblet and everybody drinks out of it and I notice another weird thing. They’re all wearing these white gloves.

  OK, now, this is the part you’re really, really not going to believe, but I swear on my snack cake wrapper collection it’s true. After the goblet goes all the way around the circle, the leader lady holds it up in the air and… just leaves it there. In the air. Floating. Then guess what happens! The goblet tips and this white liquid that looks like milk pours out for a second and then disappears in the air. Just vanishes. Gone. I swear there was a ghost drinking from the goblet. Either that or they were the greatest magicians of all time but who was the magic for? There wasn’t any audience.

  The whole scene is just total spooksville and I finally start backing away. I guess I make a noise or something because that’s when they see me. It’s hard to describe their expressions, but it was like I was a monster and about to steal their baby.

  Somebody goes, “Hey, you, what are you doing there?” And somebody else is all “Get him!” or something like that.

  So I start running as fast as I can. I think I hear footsteps following me, but I’m too scared to look back. I’m going so hard my chest hurts and I can’t breathe. I look for a place to hide. Right off the trail there’s this big boulder shaped kind of like a hamburger with a bite out of it. Underneath where the bite is, there’s this hole just big enough to fit through. So I squeeze in. (I know, my stomach isn’t so small, yeah yeah, ha ha, so what.) It turns out there’s a cave. Like with a dirt floor and stone walls. A cave cave. And that’s where I am now. Some people have been here before because there are soda bottles and a corn chip bag. I’m starving but the bag’s empty, I looked, plus it’s not my favorite brand anyway. (I won’t name it though, just in case they want to sponsor me someday. Ha ha.) And now—oh wait, this thing is beeping, I better post before it runs out of juice!

  Cass couldn’t get used to seeing so many jester hats.

  There were red ones and green ones, velvet ones and felt ones. Some were oversize with long pointed ends stretching out like antlers. Some were small and economical, not much more substantial than skullcaps. Some had brass bells, others silver.

  And yet, as wildly varied as the hats were, they all bore a teasing resemblance to a certain hat that was hovering on the edge of her memory. The three pointed ends flapping and flopping this way and that—she’d seen a hat flap and flop in just that way. The bells jingling and jangling at the wearers’ every step—she’d heard bells jingle and jangle with just that tone and timbre. She was more and more convinced that she must have found the Jester at some point during her journey—why else would the bells on the hats ring so many bells in her head?—but where? When? What did he say?

  Things only got worse when they got to the camera obscura—a small round, windowless structure that stood on a rise near the center of the faire. Their guide, Opal—or Lady Fool, as she insisted upon being called—was wearing not only a jester hat but also a diamond-patterned harlequin outfit not unlike one the Jester might have worn. (Although, truth to tell, Cass couldn’t imagine the Jester’s outfit being decorated with rhinestones.) As Opal led their group into the dark interior, her hat-bells taunting Cass with their jolly jingles, Cass suddenly remembered hearing the Jester’s bells jingling in a similar room. A dungeon, that was it! The royal dungeon. So she was right. She had met the Jester. At least once.

  Or was her mind playing tricks on her?

  The camera obscura was about the same size as the dungeon cell in Cass’s memory, but much more crowded—there were about three classrooms’ worth of kids—and here one wall was illuminated with an exact image of the world outside. Opal stood in front of the wall, holding a stack of cue cards.

  “You are now inside a camera—a big camera,” she read, her nasally New York accent in full effect. “In fact, this was the first kind of camera ever invented.”

  Cass blinked. As she looked at the image on the wall, she had the sense that she was hanging from her feet, looking at the world upside down. The ground was the sky, and the sky the ground. Costumed faire-goers in wizard capes and fairy wings walked around on the dirt sky, apparently weightless.

  “Is that picture upside down? Or am I just dizzy or something?” she whispered to her friends.

  Yo-Yoji grinned mischievously. “What are you talking about? Looks right-side up to me.”

  “That’s not funny,” whispered Max-Ernest, who, although a month had passed, still half-expected Cass to fall back into a coma any second. “What if she really was dizzy? It could be a sign that something was seriously wrong. I think it’s supposed to be like that, Cass….”

  “Oh,” said Cass, only somewhat relieved.

  She hadn’t wanted to tell her friends, for fear they would make her go home, or worse, go to the hospital, but she really was not feeling like herself. It wasn’t just the jester hats. All morning, ever since she’d woken up from the dream about the green eye, she’d had the sensation that she was in two places at once. Or maybe that she was between two places. It was hard to pinpoint the sensation exactly.

  “You see th
at little hole—?” Opal pointed to a quarter-sized hole in the wall opposite her. Light streamed out of it in a cone shape, as if it were the lens of a movie projector. “Light travels in a straight line. So when light rays pass through a small hole like that one, the rays cross, flipping an image upside down.”

  “I bet you could make one of these yourself,” said Yo-Yoji. “It might be helpful in a stakeout.”*

  “Silence! We will not tolerate any more noise!” said Mrs. Johnson, who was standing on the side of the room, flanked by Amber and Veronica, her ladies-in-waiting. “Pray continue, Lady Fool.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” said Opal. “Such rudeness in your royal presence momentarily shocked me into silence.”

  The secretary bowed and continued reading. “In the Renaissance and after, artists—even many very famous ones—used camera obscuras in order to paint more naturalistically. They traced the image it projected….”*

  Somebody gasped dramatically in the darkness. “They traced it? So you’re saying all those famous artists cheated!” she cried out.

  It was Amber. She didn’t seem outraged so much as gleeful at the thought.

  In fact, this was what Max-Ernest had been thinking. But hearing Amber say it made him wonder if it might not be wrong.

  What is the cheating? Pietro’s words rang in his head. There is no cheating in magic, only in poker.

  A few feet away, Benjamin Blake coughed and started mumbling. “… yellow… cheating… pencil… orange… oven…”

  “What’s that, Benjamin? Did you have something to say to your schoolmates?” asked Opal.

  He mumbled again, and the crowd of students tittered.

  Max-Ernest started pushing his way through to Benjamin. Ever since the night Cass woke up from her coma, Benjamin had been trying to talk to Max-Ernest as well as to Cass and Yo-Yoji, but they all had given him what is known as the cold shoulder. For obvious reasons. As far as Max-Ernest could tell, however, the blow to the head from Yo-Yoji’s guitar had “cured” Benjamin. He was no longer the suave and insouciant dandy; he was his old, inarticulate, artistic, synesthetic self.

  Hopefully, this meant he was no longer under the Midnight Sun’s spell.

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this for you,” Max-Ernest whispered. “You owe me.”

  Then he started translating for the room at large:* “Ben says the artists didn’t cheat. A camera obscura is just a tool. It’s like a writer using a computer instead of a pencil. Or a cook using an oven… I guess as opposed to a campfire—?”

  Mrs. Johnson wasn’t buying it. “Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I… we are with our lady-in-waiting. Cheating is cheating,” she said huffily.

  She sounded rather as if she were about to march out of the camera obscura in protest. Instead, she walked in front of the illuminated wall. Upside-down images of the outside world flitted across her, making the tiara on her head sparkle and the black pendant around her neck gleam.

  With so much else to see, nobody seemed to notice that the pendant was floating ever so slightly in the air.

  “Next thing you know, they’ll be defending forgery!” she declared, patting down her pendant. “Now students, I… I mean, we want you to start exiting quietly, and single file, not like a bunch of heathens.”

  The small room erupted in noise, all the students trying to leave at once. On his way out, Ben tugged on Max-Ernest’s sleeve.

  “Thank me later,” said Max-Ernest, pushing away from him. “Can’t talk right now.”

  “What’s that around Mrs. Johnson’s neck?” asked Cass when Max-Ernest rejoined her and Yo-Yoji. With all the clamor around them, she could speak almost normally without being overheard.

  “Yeah. Why does it look like it’s floating?” asked Yo-Yoji.

  “Because it is,” said Max-Ernest. “It’s a lodestone. A naturally occurring magnet.”

  Cass scratched her head. “I knew that, but how did I know that…?”

  “Mrs. Johnson is obsessed with magnets now. You should have heard her talking about them when I went to give her the Tuning Fork.”

  Cass took the Double Monocle out of her pocket and surreptitiously looked at the lodestone pendant through it. Although there were at least half a dozen arms and shoulders in the way, the monocle gave her a clear view. As she stared at the black stone, it glowed blue and appeared to pulsate. Cass felt a tug on the monocle—the pull of the lodestone—and a matching tug on her memory.

  “I’ve seen that stone before,” said Cass, amazed to see another object from her journey into the past appear in the present. “It looked different, bigger, rougher, but it’s the same stone.”

  The sense of being in two places at once intensified. Suddenly, she couldn’t bear it a second longer. “I’m feeling totally… claustrophobic. I have to get out of here right now.”

  Before her friends could stop her, she started pushing through the crowd and rushed out of the room.

  Excited whispers followed in her wake:

  “That’s that girl that was in the coma!”

  “Do you think she’s OK?”

  “Maybe she’s having a relapse!”

  “She’s going to be fine,” said Max-Ernest angrily. He then started pushing his way out after her.

  Yo-Yoji followed. “Yo, guys, wait up. You know, you might actually need me sometime!”

  They caught up with Cass in front of a dusty carnival tent. A sign hung on a chain:

  “I’m going in here,” said Cass.

  “Then we’re going in, too,” said Yo-Yoji. “Pietro said we should keep you in sight.”

  “I’ll be fast.”

  “I thought you were feeling claustrophobic,” said Max-Ernest. “That’s the kind of condition that gets worse over time. It doesn’t just vanish—”

  Ignoring her friends, Cass pushed the heavy curtains aside and entered the tent. She wasn’t sure why, but she simply had to go inside. It was almost as if she’d been hypnotized and instructed to enter precisely this tent at precisely this time.

  “Hello, Cassandra.”

  It was the Seer. Clara. Sitting at her tree-stump table in front of a deck of tarot cards. As soon as Cass saw her, Cass remembered every detail of her appearance. The long straggly hair. The skin so pale it was translucent. The eyes of unblinking blue.

  “Hello, Cassandra,” Cass echoed, recalling that hers was one of the names by which the Seer was known.

  She’d never been so happy to see someone she barely knew. At last her memories were coming back! Of course, it was odd that the Seer should be here at the Renaissance Faire five hundred years after Cass had last seen her. But Cass felt a renewed sense of confidence; she was certain that the Seer’s appearance—and everything else—would now be explained.

  “It is good to see you again,” said the Seer. “Sit. I will read your cards.” She gestured toward the waiting stool.

  Her ears tingling with anticipation, Cass obeyed.

  As before, the Seer passed a hand over her tarot deck and a card flipped over as if by its own volition. A trick all the more astonishing now, in the present, in the real world.

  “Ah. The Ace of Wands returns. But this time, right-side up.” The Seer looked quizzically at Cass. “You have come to return something, then?”

  “No, not really… like what?”

  “Did I not once tell you that something must be returned to its rightful owner?”

  Cass struggled to recall their conversation. “Yeah, but… I don’t think I ever figured out what it was.”

  “Oh no? I should think it would be obvious. Do you not have something with you that is mine?”

  Cass hesitated, perplexed. Then…

  “Oh, you mean the monocle!”

  “The Double Monocle, yes. For years it has been out of my hands and away from my eye.”

  Fumbling, Cass brought the monocle out of her pocket and handed it to the Seer. Cass couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret; the monocle had been her primary link to the past. But
if giving up the monocle was the price of restoring her memory, she would gladly pay.

  The Seer put the monocle up to her right eye and peered out at Cass. Then the Seer looked beyond Cass, seemingly to some distant time or place invisible to the naked eye. She appeared to be testing the focus as one would with binoculars or a zoom lens.

  “Ahh. Much better. Thank you,” she said, lowering the monocle.

  “You’re welcome, but I thought you meant return something that I already took,” said Cass, sorting through her still-disjointed memories. “When you read my cards before, I didn’t even have the monocle yet… right? How could I return it?”

  A hint of a smile crossed the Seer’s lips. “Yes, the cards work in mysterious ways, don’t they?”

  She passed her hand over another card. It flipped over in the air, then settled back down like an autumn leaf.

  “Did you ever find your jester?”

  “Yeah, I think so…. At least, I’m pretty sure we were in a dungeon together.”

  The Seer nodded. “He may need finding again. Look, this time it is he who is upside down—”

  She pointed to the latest card to turn faceup. It was the Jester, the card that so closely resembled Cass’s Jester, the Jester. But he was facing Cass instead of the card reader—upside down in tarot terms.

  Cass frowned. “You’re not saying I’m supposed to go back in time again, are you?”

  The Seer shook her head. “I wouldn’t advise it. You have spent too much time out of your time already. It has changed you. I could see right away.”

  “Changed me? How?” asked Cass, alarmed.

  “Are you not seeing things yourself now?”

  “Like what? What things?”

  “Things you didn’t see before.”

  “No, I mean… why? Should I be… seeing things?”

  “Only if there are things to see.”