The Nightmare Game (7 page)

“Hello, ya wan’ ya fortune told. My name’s
Adelle,” she said, motioning to a small table with a fabric tablecloth and two
café chairs. “Please, have a seat. What form of divination would ya like
today?”

I sat down. A tiny lamp illuminated the table and
a small, laminated rectangular piece of paper lay upon it. I picked up the
paper; on one side was printed the selection of teas that they offered and the
other side their list of fortune-telling methods and prices. “I don’t know,” I
said, my voice sounding as befuddled as I felt. “I don’t know, it’s been years
since I’ve had this done. Having my palm read seems a little long-range to me.
I might not be around long enough for that.”

“Ya concerns are more immediate then?”

“Yeah, my concerns are real immediate. What about
Tarot cards? I’m more familiar with those than anything else.” Having had a
roommate in college that read Tarot cards incessantly, I knew just enough about
them to be able to pick up whether she was completely bullshitting me or not.

“Always a good choice,” she said in a tone that
sounded as if I had deep wisdom of which I was unaware. I felt a little played.
“Now, I take it ya don’ wan’ a year spread.”

“No, nothing over three months,” I replied.

“Now, do ya have any preference for a particular
deck?”

“No, I’ll leave that decision up to you.”

She got up, walked over to a shelf and picked up a
wooden box, bringing it to the table and sitting back down. Opening the box,
she pulled out a deck, unwrapped it from the silk scarf in which it was stored
and went through the cards, pulling one out. “Ah, here ya are, here’s the card
to describe ya. You’re the Queen of Rods.” She pulled it out, set it to one
side and began to shuffle the rest of the deck. She handed it to me, giving me
directions as to how to shuffle the cards, cut them and reassemble the deck. I
then handed it back to her.

Deftly, she dealt the cards upon the table in a
spread with which I was unfamiliar. “I don’ go so much by what the books say
the cards are supposed ta mean,” she explained. “I’ve kinda got my own way of
seein’ them. An old witch woman told my mam when I was born that I got the
sight, so I interpret ‘em my own way. It jus’ works better for me. I find my
readin’s are better that way, more accurate. Now I’m doin’ ya readin’ for three
months inta the future, but I like ta do some past readin’ first. It helps me
make sense o’ things.”

She hummed to herself, studying them. “Okay, now.
Let’s see what they have to say.” She turned over the first card. “This card
represents ya past, but not ya immediate past. Ya alone a lot, I see. Alone,
but not lonesome. This is nice, it is a comfortable card. And this one,” she turned
over the second card, “this one represents the more immediate past. Ah, I see
the loneliness settin’ in. Ya haven’t been happy for awhile now, have ya?”

“No, I haven’t been,” I said, hating to admit it
to a stranger.

She turned over the next card and said, “Ah,” in a
tone that implied a mild revelation. “It’s not ya own loneliness and
unhappiness to been dealin’ with at all.”

“No,” I disagreed, a little disappointed. I guess
maybe she wasn’t going to be that much help after all. “It has been mine. I’ve been
dealing with it for a couple of months now. Everybody I know is doing better
than I am right now. They’re all getting pretty sick of me these days and they
all keep telling me to snap out of it.”

“They’re wrong. This ain’t been ya personal
unhappiness ya been dealin’ with, it belongs to someone else.” She turned over
another card. “Ya got a man in ya life that’s got real misery. He been in great
sorrow for a long, long time.” She checked out my left hand and finding no
wedding ring, continued, “It mus’ be ya boyfriend for the bond here is very
strong.”

I let out a hollow laugh. “I don’t have a
boyfriend. Haven’t had one in years, I’m afraid the cards are wrong.”

She looked up at me and knitted her brows
together, “No, no they’re not. They’re never wrong for me.”

“Could it be a friend?” I offered. “Or maybe
something’s wrong with my brother-in-law?”

 “No. No friend, no relative. Ya have a man in ya
life, it’s a love bond and a strong one. He’s in great trouble, trouble that’s
been around a long time.”

“Could it be someone I haven’t met yet?”

“No, ya know this man now.”

The blank look on my face convinced her I had no
idea what she was talking about. She looked confused herself as she turned over
another card. “This is a bit confusin’. He’s younger than ya are, but yet he’s
older than ya are. Does that make any sense to ya?” I shook my head no. “Well,
anyway, he’s a very handsome man, very handsome.” My stare was still blank when
she looked up at me for confirmation. She turned over the next card, “I’m seein’
a journey in ya life.”

“I guess I did journey here. I’m a tourist, but
that’s not unusual in the French Quarter.”

“Ya not a tourist, ya only think ya are. Ya on a
journey, a great journey. There’s somethin’ ya need to do, to accomplish, but
it’s not here in the city. Ya journey, it begins here, but it’s not here.”
Turning over another card, she continued, “It’s connected with ya young man. He
needs ya to help him.”

A man in my life, a journey connected with him,
was I thinking too literally? She couldn’t possibly talking about the man of my
dreams, the man in the portrait, could she? It didn’t occur to me because
despite the portrait, despite my intense longings for him, he was only a dream
lover, a fantasy. It couldn’t be the same guy anyway, since the portrait I saw
looked really old and the man in it must be long dead by now. Was he a ghost?
That couldn’t be. Ghosts didn’t exist.

“Ya stayin’ with friends here, some very
interestin’ people I see. Important friends.”

“Actually, my friend couldn’t come, so I’m here
alone.”

Again, she looked at me with complete disbelief.
“Ya here alone?” she echoed me.

“Yes, in an apartment I’m renting. But I’m kind of
scared to stay there now, especially by myself. I was thinking about moving to
a hotel or maybe even just leaving altogether and going home, but these people,
these two weird people, a woman and a man, keep warning me to stay put, that
I’ll die if I don’t.” I was giving her too much information, I knew, but I
couldn’t help myself. It just spilled out. “They’re the ones that are scaring
me and then there’s this other woman at the real estate company that freaked me
out this afternoon and these people told me that she, or at least I think it
was she, tried to kill me. And the man and woman just keep disappearing into
thin air. Do you think they could they be ghosts? I mean is this why I’m really
here? I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared and I
don’t know what to do.”

After I got through blurting all this out, I
realized how bizarre and ridiculous it sounded out loud. She looked at me
closely, studying me intently, probably thinking I was crazy.

“Well, let’s see if the cards say anything,” she
said as if everything I had just blurted out was nothing out of the ordinary to
her and she turned over another card. “Ya not here alone, despite what ya say.
The people that ya stayin’ with, they tryin’ ta help ya. Listen to them. Heed
what they say.”

Funny, those were the same words the dream man had
used. I asked her, “Will I be able go home? I think I’ve been caught up in
something I don’t want to be and I just want to go home now. But these people
keep telling me that I can’t.”

She turned over a few more cards. “Ya been warned
wisely. Ya surrounded by danger, the only safety and protection is where ya at
right now. Don’ leave, listen ta these people. The cards mention an amulet to
guard ya from somethin’ truly evil.”

“It’s this,” I said, pointing to the necklace.

“That’s beautiful. I noticed it earlier, never
seen nothin’ like it before. If that’s the amulet, ya got ta keep it on.”

Her expression began to look worried as she
continued turning over cards. “Wait. Not all the people aroun’ ya are lookin’
to ta help ya. There’s a woman. She’s bad, mighty bad. She’s dark an’ powerful
an’ she means ya great harm. She’s the evil the others are tryin’ to protect ya
from,” she continued reading, “But they’re weak, tiny, compared ta her. She got
powers, strong powers.”

“Have I’ve met her already?”

“Yeah, ya have.” As she continued reading, her
eyes showed disbelief. “Oh, this is bad. She don’ jus’ want to plague ya, she
wants to kill ya.”

“Is she one of the ones that don’t want me to
leave?”

“No, she wants ya to go. Leavin’ gets ya away from
all protection, gets ya away from ya journey.”

“What exactly is my journey?”

“Not a good one,” she said, turning over all the
cards but the last two. “Ya in a lot of danger, it’s everywhere, all aroun’ ya,
everyplace ya turn. The dark woman, she’s a vile one, she’s the cause of it
all. I see lots of tricks, lots o’ tricks, lots o’ darkness.” She looked
nervous as she turned over the next to the last card, “Ya surrounded by evil.
Potent evil.”

“How does it end?” I urged her on, although her
apprehension was growing. She was becoming visibly distressed.

Before she could turn over the last card she
jumped up suddenly and walked anxiously over to the door. “I feel it, it’s
comin’. Ya must leave. Now.” She walked quickly over to the door, opening it.

“What’s coming? How does this end?” I implored
her. “What must I do?”

“Get out! Leave before it finds me, before it gets
here!”

I grabbed my purse, trembling, and walked over to
her. “But I haven’t even paid you yet.”

“Leave!” she screamed, horrified, as she forced me
out of the door, slammed it shut behind me and locked it.

From the sidewalk, I stared at the tea room’s
closed door in shock. What I thought might be a vehicle for some advice to help
guide me through the mire in which I’d landed turned out instead to be merely
one more source of alarm. Even more frightened and confused than I was before
I’d entered the shop, I began to meander the streets, heading nowhere, neither
looking nor caring where I was going. I walked in a daze with nothing on my
mind except the unreality of my circumstances and the bizarre, outlandish
situation that had sought me out. I was consumed by the possibility that it
might be true, that I really was under attack and that my death would most
likely be sooner and more grizzly than I’d ever imagined. I didn’t realize that
I’d been walking around in circles until I roused myself from this morbid
preoccupation and found I’d taken a longer than necessary route to Jackson
Square, for I had found my way to the Vieux Carré on autopilot. Crossing the
pedestrian walkway portion of Chartres, I walked between the impressive St.
Louis Cathedral and the gated park, heading toward the French Market. My wits
now returned to me quickly, as if I had just awakened from a fever dream. What
silliness, I thought, to put such credence into the words of two odd strangers
and a fortune teller. For the moment it was convenient for me to discount any
events that I could not explain.

For the first time today, I was aware enough of
the real world to be able to take in some of the beauty that I’d come to the
city to see. Life, in the Quarter, at least, seemed to have returned to normal,
the devastation of Hurricane Katrina half a decade ago no longer visible to the
naked eye. The sidewalk artists were out once again en masse with their city
and bayou scenes, their portraits and caricatures. Very little seemed to have
changed here, at least publicly, since I last visited, except that some of the
art was a little bit more contemporary. At the far end of the Jackson Square
fence, I turned left and crossed to the other side of St. Anne. At the light, I
crossed Decatur Street, with its traffic of cars sharing the road with colorful
horse-drawn carriages slowly going about their tours. I stepped up the steps
and found solace in the shade of the awning of the Café du Monde. I’d had my
heart set on washing down a plate full of powder sugar-dusted beignets with a
cup of New Orleans coffee and chicory for so very long.

No tables were empty but at least I was the only
one in line. For this time of day, it was busy, much busier than I remembered
from those family day trips so long ago. Soon, I spied a couple leaving a table
near the street with a good view of the square and I hustled over to it just as
they walked away. I suppose I should have waited for it to be cleared before
being seated, for the dirty dishes they left behind undid what very little
appetite I had. I needed to sit down, though, because my exercise in denial was
beginning to wear off and the gravity of my current situation was reasserting
itself. I needed a place out of the crowd to be able to stop and sit and think
for a while and even though it wasn’t cleared, this table afforded me a perfect
place to try to sort out today’s upsetting and bewildering events. It felt good
to get off my feet and I realized that this was the first chance I’d had to
reflect on anything since I got off the airplane. There’d been too many bizarre
occurrences since I’d arrived. The ride on the plane now seemed ages ago: it
was so hard to believe now that it had only been a few hours earlier. I needed
to examine my own thoughts and instincts. I needed to try to figure out this
insanity. In a few minutes a waitress came over after taking orders from
several other customers, cleared off the table without really looking at me and
wiped up the powered sugar from the tabletop.

“So you know what you want?”

 I looked at the menu printed on the side of the
restaurant napkin holder. “An order of beignets and a café au lait, please.” My
voice came out sounding a lot more strained than I’d intended.

“Be right back,” she said efficiently. Plates and
cups on her tray, she hurried toward the kitchen.

From my seat facing Jackson Square I looked over
at the Vieux Carre, listening to the lazy hooves of its horse-drawn carriages
and for a moment got a rest from my fears as I remembered how much I loved New
Orleans and how much I had missed her. I was thankful that the French Quarter
had escaped the brunt of the destruction that had taken other parts of the
city, for it was good for my soul to be around such an old section of a city in
a country that had spared so little of its history in favor of bland newness. I
was grateful that some sections of New Orleans had returned to normalcy, even
though I knew that the city as a whole, sadly, might never be the same again.
If I ever made it through this nightmare, I vowed never to go so long again
before coming back to visit. It bathed my spirit to see something normal and
beautiful after the ordeal I had just been through. I took a few deep breaths
and tried to gather my thoughts.

 The scenery helped me put my uneasiness aside for
a moment, allowing me to analyze this insane scenario rationally, from all
angles. The events happening my life at the moment were incredibly unreal.
Unreal? Hell, why mince words? This whole mess was a freaking nightmare, wasn’t
it, reaching out to grab me, trying to pull me into itself. Fear tried to take
hold, but I managed to calm myself. Whatever it was, I couldn’t afford think of
it in such extreme terms. I couldn’t give it the “nightmare” label. I knew I’d
just freak out if I did and I had to keep some kind of control in a situation
in which I seemed to have absolutely no control whatsoever. There simply had to
be a rational explanation for it all, there just had to be. I couldn’t take
anything that had happened today on face value; the implications were just too
terrifying.

Besides, things like this just didn’t happen in
real life. There just had to be another answer, one that made sense. None of
this madness could be real. It went against all reason. People just didn’t go
on vacation and find themselves in the middle of some outlandish occult game,
did they? Of course not. But it seemed to be happening to me, didn’t it?
Nothing since my arrival in the Big Easy had made any sense, especially not the
episode at the realtor’s office. The amazing disappearing people were none too
normal, either. Who were those two anyway, the leaflet guy and the woman at the
apartment? What did he say her name was, Virginia? The way they disappeared so
quickly, could they have been ghosts? I’d heard that New Orleans had its fair
share of ghosts, but I’d never heard of ghosts being quite so solid or quite so
verbal. There had to be a logical explanation.

Were those two merely illusionists using nothing
more exotic than misdirection and magician’s tricks to pull some sort of scam?
That didn’t make any sense, though, since scam artists stole things from you,
they didn’t give you unsolicited jewelry and then disappear. I touched the
necklace. It was real. I didn’t know much about jewelry, but this was no
dime-store trinket, that was for sure. And what about the occurrence at the tea
room, was that real, too? It must have been because I’d never heard of a
fortune teller chasing off a customer like that, let alone before getting paid.
All three people were scared away by something of which I wasn’t aware,
something that was off my radar. Had they really been frightened or was that
also just an act? Maybe the whole lot of them were connected, sucking me into
some type of elaborate scam. But what would they have to gain? Maybe the
necklace was hot and my only purpose was to get it out of the city; but the
leaflet guy warned me not to leave the city, so that couldn’t possibly be it.
Maybe I was supposed to get the necklace out of the apartment so that someone
else could rob me of it later. That made more sense, in which case I should go
straight to the police. However, that didn’t explain the card reader. Even if
her prediction turned out to be a load of hooey, the fear that provoked her to
kick me out of the tea room was very real. Besides, she didn’t know who I was;
she hadn’t approached me, I had approached her. Even with that glitch, though,
the logic that the fortune-teller and the others were con artists sounded much
more sensible.

Despite having come to a somewhat reasonable
conclusion, I still wasn’t satisfied. The whole damn thing continued to dog me.
My erstwhile explanation did not ring true in my gut. No matter how hard I
tried to convince myself into thinking that my world was normal and I was just
being upset by a gang of con artists, it didn’t feel right. I couldn’t shake
off or explain the hallucinations that I’d had in the realtor’s office; they
had been just too incredibly concrete. Maybe I’d been drugged. Unless I’d been
hit by a dart from a hidden sniper’s blowgun in that office, a thought so
unlikely that it made me laugh to think about it, I didn’t see how I could have
been. I didn’t eat or drink anything there. And as intense as the
hallucinations had been, I’d never heard of any drug that could have worn off
so completely, been so immediately, when faced with the simple distraction of
an uninvited visitor, Troy, in this case, entering the room. A horrible new
thought entered my brain. I was assuming the drug had worn off. Maybe it
hadn’t. I shuddered at the thought that maybe none of this was real. What if I
wasn’t sitting here at all and I was still in Rochere’s office? What if
everything since I had entered that office was all part of the same
hallucination? Maybe Troy, the apartment, the woman Virginia, the necklace, the
guy with the leaflets, the fortuneteller, all of them, were still a part of the
same hallucination. Maybe I’d been drugged and was still hallucinating. In
actuality, that was the most probable rationale. None of this was real. It just
couldn’t be.

The waitress came back with my order and I paid
her. She glanced at me and for the first time she smiled.

“Wow, that is a great necklace. Where’d you get
it?”

“Here in the city.” I said, not knowing what else
to say.

“What shop?”

“Somebody gave it to me.”

“Nice somebody,” she said. “I wish I had a
somebody like that,”

 
Oh, no you don’t
,
I thought as she walked off.

So she had noticed the necklace. That was
interesting. Was she a part of my massive hallucination as well? If I was still
hallucinating and if this was all an illusion, then I didn’t have anything to
worry about. I’d just ride it out and eventually whatever drug was in my system
would wear off and then I would call Carolyne to come get me and take me home
if I couldn’t manage under my own steam. The other possibility was that it was
a con game and if it turned out to be a scam, I’d just call the police. There
now, both of these possible scenarios had a solution.

Automatically, I poured sugar into my coffee and
stirred it. Then I picked it up, took a large gulp, quickly grabbed a napkin
and spit it out. That was scalding hot, that was real, my mouth was in real
pain. No dream or hallucination that I’d ever had, not even the one in
Rochere’s office when I was being choked, hurt that sharply. Only reality was
so acute. Okay, so now this was either real or a con game. That was one option
down.

The third and last possibility terrified me so
much that I didn’t even want to think about it. What if this wasn’t a snow job,
what if it was all real? This hunk of jewelry around my neck was the only real
proof that any of these events had actually happened. As I absentmindedly
fingered the necklace while I thought, I could have sworn that I felt it move slightly
beneath my touch, much like a sleeping dog responding to a caress without
actually waking, almost as if to let me know that I was on the right track now.

I was still hoping for the scam artist
explanation, something I thought I’d never hear myself say, but I knew I would
have to have a plan for this third theory as well. I couldn’t stop obsessing
about it until I did. I sat back and reassessed the situation, trying to size
up whatever it was that I was up against and what to do about it, but instead my
thoughts just hit a wall. I had no idea; I couldn’t figure it out. Who was I
kidding? I couldn’t figure it out because I was up against a Great Unknown. If
this actually were for real, I knew I couldn’t deal with it. Heck, I could
barely think about it now without almost going into a panic attack. I didn’t
know what they expected of me, these mysterious people, since they kept
disappearing before I could even ask, but I did know who and what I was, and
rather well, in fact. Whatever they expected me to do was completely outside
the realm of my experiences and skills that I didn’t see how I could possibly
be up to anything these disappearing people required. I was no international
spy or action hero by any stretch of the imagination. These days, I was sit-at-home
Sally; I held an unimportant little position at a desk in a small
administrative office. Nothing that had ever happened in my entire life had
ever prepared me in any way, shape or form for what it seemed these people
needed me to do. Boy, oh, boy, had they ever picked the wrong gal for this job.
Why hadn’t they chosen a CIA operative on leave or somebody like that, someone
with some kind of specialized training? But they hadn’t. They had chosen me.
Why? If I were to believe what I’d been told, I had no other option than to
play this demented game, whatever it was, to the end if I wanted to stay alive.
But how? Playing the devil’s advocate for a moment, I assumed that my first
step, if this situation were truly real, would be simply to toss aside all rationalizations,
all expectations of what normal was supposed to be, to take this situation, no
matter how bizarre, as fact. That was something I was loathe to do. I felt
crazy just entertaining this thought, let alone taking it seriously. On the
other hand, I’d been trying to rationalize away everything that had happened
but it would not go away, no matter how hard I rationalized. The sensation that
these odd events were real kept nagging at me regardless of where my thoughts
went. I couldn’t shake it. So, just in case, no matter how crazy it sounded, I
needed to try to come to grips with this new “reality” and figure out the logic
of whatever it was with which I was dealing. It was nuts, I knew, but what
would it hurt just to think about it for a few minutes?